"The great European charlatans of the 16th and 17th centuries mastered the art of cultmaking. They lived, as we do now in a time of transformation: Organized religion was on the wane, science on the rise. people were desparate to rally around a new cause or faith. The charlatans had begun peddling health elixirs and alchemic shortcuts to wealth. Moving quickly from town to town, they originally focused on small groups, until by accident, theythey stumbled on a truth of human nature: The larger the group they gathered around themselves, the easier it was to deceive.

The charlatan would station himself on a high wooden platform, ( hence the term "mountebank"), and crowds would swarm around him. In a group setting people are more emotional, less able to reason. Had the charlatan spoken to them individually, they might have found him ridiculous, but lost lost in a croed they get caught up in a communal mode of rapt attention. It became impossible for them to find the distance to become skeptical. Any deficiencies in the charlatan' ideas were hidden by the zeal of the mass. Passion and enthusiasm swept through the crowd like a contagion, and they reacted violently to anyone who dared spread a seed of doubt. Both conciously studying this dynamic over decades of experiment and spontaneously adapting to these situations as they happened, the charlatans perfected the science of attracting and holding a crowd, and molding the crowd into followers and the followers into a cult."

...the five basic steps of cultmaking that the charlatans perfected over the years:

1. Keep it vague, keep it simple"

2. Emphasize the visual and sensual over the intellectual"

3. "Borrow the forms of organized religion to structure the group"

4. "Disguise your source of income"

5. "Set up an US-vs-Them dynamic"

excerpt from; "The 48 Laws of Power" Robert Greene As a 20th century charlatan, hubbard appears to have had a good grasp of the art of his nefarious ancestors.

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Randy10
"Evil prevails when good men fail to act"

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