So, You Want to Join a Cult - Part IXa - The Ethics of Deprogramming

I'll argue that cults are generally bad things and people shouldn't get involved in them, but is it justified to forcibly remove cult members from the a cult?

Not usually. 

Of course, those cults that involve adult men with multiple teenage girls as their "wives", or if there is definite physical abuse going on, there should be intervention. But most cults are pretty boring. 

During my involvement with The Way International my parents considered "deprogramming" me in order to "free" me from my supposed mental imprisonment. They went so far as to consult with a deprogrammer, who actually talked them out of the attempt, pointing out that failure would mean that I'd likely never want to have anything to do with them ever again. They chose not to risk it. Mom and Dad never spoke of it, but many years later one of my sisters spilled the beans. At the time there was a lot of media focus on cults in the wake of the forced mass suicide at The People's Temple in Guyana. Parents whose children were in cults assumed that all cults were potentially going to end up like Jim Jones' followers. The cults that attracted the most attention also tended to have beliefs or practices (or both) that were far enough outside the mainstream as to appear "weird". The assumption was that the only reason that anyone would get involved in a cult was that they were brainwashed. Mind control was the only way to explain it. If you didn't think about it too deeply. 

Family members often point to how their loved ones "changed" after getting involved with a cult, not only their beliefs, but their behaviors and loyalties. But is that so unusual when new recruits to a cult are more likely to be young and actually looking to change their lives? Many people who have had family members join the military, especially those who have seen combat, could attest to the changes in the outlook of their loved ones. People change their political orientation all the time. A new cult member typically is looking for some meaning in their life and a cult often provides that meaning. Is it any wonder that they are often exceedingly gung-ho about their new life's focus? 

What about when the honeymoon period of cult involvement has ended and the cult member begins to experience some of the abusive treatment? Surely that's brainwashing? Not so fast! We can compare someone who stays in a harmful cult to someone who stays with an abusive spouse, sure that she loves the man who beats her every day, or is afraid that she won't be able to survive on her own. Or someone who hates their job but won't look for a new one. Justified or not, logical or not, people continue in harmful situations either because they fear that the alternative is worse, or have made the calculation that the perceived benefits outweighs the downside. I personally have done both - I stayed in a marriage that was mentally abusive because I was afraid that I'd lose my children and afraid to be perceived as a failure, rather than get out; I continued in a job that was terrible on many, many levels because I judged that the financial benefits outweighed the negatives that I had to endure. 

People join cults because they make a decision to get involved in something that they believe gives them what they want...whatever that may be. People stay involved in cults because they make a decision that staying in is the better alternative to getting out. Are they making the "right" decision? Who knows? Unless one knows all the variables in another's life, how can you decide what is best for that person? Spoiler alert: you can't. 

So what about deprogramming? You don't hear too much about deprogramming these days, or cults for that matter. But back in the eighties there were a lot of people making big money from the families of young people involved in cults. I know of several people who were the target of deprogrammers, some succumbed and left their cult, some escaped the deprogrammers and went back. What did deprogrammers actually do? Their first step was kidnapping the target of the deprogramming. Kidnapping! Often violently. The head deprogrammer would hire muscle to abduct the target who then be locked away from the world, often in an isolated farm house of hotel room. The abductee didn't usually even know what city they were in. They were allowed no contact with their fellow cult members, were not allowed to leave and sometimes were physically restrained. In one case that I know about personally, he had his shoes and socks taken away! In extreme cases they were sleep deprived and physically restrained. Various methods of persuasion were employed - the cult's beliefs were questioned or mocked, accusations made about the cult leader, and in one case that I am familiar with, the abductee's fiancée, who was also a cult member, was accused of cheating on him! The methods used by deprogrammers appear closer to what would be consider brainwashing than what the cults actually engaged in. 

If cults, in particular the one I was involved in, had brainwashed their members, it would stand to reason that it would be difficult for someone to leave. Yet during my own involvement I saw people freely walk away, new people, as well as those who had been in for decades. My own cousin, who got me involved, walked away within a year, presumably because she decided that it wasn't providing anything that she wanted or needed that she wasn't getting anywhere else.

Finally, in the United States we have the right of free association, as well as the right to the religion of our choice. No one has the right to forcibly convert (or de-convert) someone else...even if they think the other's beliefs are harmful...or weird.

Start from the Beginning: Part I

Review article on Brainwashing: Part IX - Brainwashing

So, You Want to Join a Cult - Part IX - Brainwashing

Recently, a family member referred to my time in The Way as "blindly following". Many anti-cult crusaders have referred to cult members as "brainwashed". 

"Brainwashing" is a term that gets brought up a lot when it comes to cults. Although there is room for disagreement about whether those of us in The Way, or any other cults for that matter, were brainwashed or not, let me define the term as I understand it. 

Brainwashing is not a scientific term, and actually has no widely accepted meaning. But the way I understand it, it would involve the forcible conversion of an individual from one set of beliefs to another set that they would not have changed to without physical, chemical or mental coercion. Brainwashing could involve torture, it could involve sensory or sleep deprivation, it could involve threats to family members. None of this, not even a hint of it, was present during my time in The Way. On the contrary, conversion to The Way's point of view was slow and methodical and involved eyes-wide-open decisions at every step. Which does not negate the abuse inflicted upon Way members, nor it's cultishness. 

One of the counter arguments against brainwashing in The Way is the ease with which people were able to leave The Way at all stages. The person who introduced me to The Way was my cousin, who ended her involvement several months after completing the PFAL class. Why did she leave when I didn't? I can't really say. In conversations with my parents after the fact she claimed that I was brainwashed, but could not account for her own resistance to the supposed mind control. Perhaps she wasn't as eager for answers as I was, perhaps she didn't have the need to stand out from the crowd as I did, maybe she was uncomfortable with speaking in tongues or just didn't like the people. The person who got her involved left New York as part of the WOW program shortly after my cousin and I got involved. The point is, nobody stopped her from leaving nor was she subject to any pressure to remain. Over the years I saw many people walk away for various reasons, and other remain for their own reasons. I'll be getting to the reasons why people stay later in this series. 

The Jonestown Massacre at The People's Temple in Guyana in November 1978 was a turning point. It was the point at which family members of people who were involved in alternative religious movements began regularly using the epithet "cult". It was the point where the assumption was, not just that someone's kids had converted, but that they were involved in something dangerous. It was the point where people were considering forcibly removing their loved ones. People calling themselves "deprogrammers" sprung up, promising, for a fee, to extract cult members and convert them back to their old beliefs. In general these deprogrammers used tactics that looked suspiciously like the brainwashing that they were ostensibly saving cultists from. I was aware of several Way members who stayed with The Way after deprogramming attempts. They described being abducted, restrained, isolated, and being subjected to sleep deprivation. 

My own parents, according to what a sibling told me years later, consulted with a deprogrammer. Fortunately this man was honest enough to tell them that if it didn't work, I would likely be estranged from them for the rest of my life and they abandoned the plan. To my parents' credit, they made an effort to understand and accept me from that point on. They visited me in Sidney Nebraska when I was a WOW there in 1980, and regularly came out to Nebraska after I was married, even attending a few Way meetings. Even though the perceived familial opposition had softened, now there was the cultural opposition, and in many ways, actual persecution that accompanied the anti-cult scare that followed the events in Guyana. 

So, if not brainwashing, what caused people to completely change their belief systems and loyalty, often leaving their own lives completely behind? I think what made my parents think I was "blinded" or "brainwashed" was their perception that I had somehow "changed". 

There's nothing like the enthusiasm of the newly converted. Whether it's religion or politics or the newly sober, it's the new recruit who is loud and in your face about it. And I definitely was in everyone's face about it. It started out during the three-week introductory class. I'd come home excited about some new thing I had learned and want to talk about it. To be clear, this wasn't some doctrine spun about billion year-old space aliens storing souls in a volcano, or Jesus appearing to the native Americans, this was stuff that you could trace directly to a Bible verse or two. Of course I was excited, this is what I had been searching for: answers! In response to the obvious discomfort that my parents had with what I was sharing, my mode became less excited and more arrogant that I had The Truth and they didn't. I suppose I had changed.

What my parents didn't know was that in addition to my search for spiritual truth, I was also kind of drifting. I had no real goals, was doing poorly in school (due mainly to lack of ambition) and was drinking a lot. I wasn't taking any hard drugs, but it's likely that I would have gone that path if not for The Way. Being involved in The Way gave me a sense of direction that came of being intimately involved in something greater than myself. I had a mission, I had purpose that I didn't have before. Making "moving the Word", i.e. proselytizing, my priority seemed weird to my family, and evidence of an unwelcome and unhealthy "change", but I don't want to see that alternate history where I didn't have that set of goals. 

After a year I moved into a series of "Way Homes" with other Way people, and a year later left the state as part of the missionary-like WOW program. I had planned on entering the Way's leadership program, The Way Corps, but was unable to put together the tuition. A lot of people, including my family thought that my wanting to cut ties and move to another state as a WOW was prima facie evidence that I was in a cult. The truth was that only a small percentage of Way members at any given time were part of any of their programs, and some never were involved beyond the twice-a-week "Twig" meetings. The heavy involvement was mostly people in their late teens or early twenties. People with children at home, or retirees, or men and women with professional careers tended to live "normal lives", indistinguishable from non-Way people. In my early days I saw few attempts at controlling the daily lives of Way members by the leadership, and there was no concerted effort to keep people from leaving.

Why does anyone stay in an uncomfortable, or even dangerous, situation? Why do people stay in crappy jobs or women with abusive husbands? I had decided, at least early in that ten-year period, that an accurate "true" teaching of the Bible was worth something. Right or wrong, I thought that The Way taught the Bible correctly, and I didn't know of any church which taught it any better. Certainly not the church of my youth, my return thereto being the subject of many family prayers. The abuses and attempts at control didn't come all at once, like the proverbial frog in the pot of boiling water, and it was a while before they came for me. For me, I was balancing the pros and the cons every day. For me the cons outweighed the pros. 

Rather than following along blindly, or being pitifully brainwashed, I made decisions every step of the way. Were some of these decisions based on false information? Absolutely. The Way's founder wasn't the great Biblical researcher that he made himself out to be. Were some of them based on wishful thinking. Also absolutely. Are "cult" members unique in making decisions that turn out to be bad, or get involved with and stay in bad situations? No. 

Don't assume that us ex-cultists are somehow different from the rest of you.

Start from the Beginning: Part I

Workin' Man - Part IX - Paper Pushin', Number Crunchin' Son of a Bitch

Well, I get up at seven, yeah

And I go to work at nine
I got no time for livin'
Yes, I'm workin' all the time

It seems to me
I could live my life
A lot better than I think I am
I guess that's why they call me
They call me the workin' man

'Cause I get home at five o'clock
And I take myself out an ice cold beer
Always seem to be wondering'
Why there's nothin' goin' down here

I guess that's why they call me
They call me the workin' man

"Workin' Man" - Words & Music by Lee & Lifeson

[There's a lot of math in this one. It's just for illustrative purposes. You can skip right over it and not lose any of the thread of the narrative] 

Looking at this period of my employment, it's clear that some kind of tutorial on how to handle money should have been part of the selection process when contracting distributors. Distributors, like carriers, were independent contractors. We didn't pay them for their time, they earned a profit on the difference between the cost of the papers and what customers paid them. Generally when contracting a new one, we got them a list of carriers and customers and left them to it. This just about guaranteed that the papers were delivered, but that's about it. 

In addition to the whole issue of cash flow that was covered in the previous installment, there was the fact that home delivered papers cost the distributor a different price than the "single copy" papers, i.e. those that were sold from vending machines. This became a problem once we had converted a distributorship to office billing. One particular distributor in Falls City was one of the few who understood the cash flow situation and had no problem making the transition to office billing. (i.e. he wasn't spending money that wasn't his) But this distributor, like many other who were now receiving a "profit check" every two weeks, viewed it as a "paycheck" and didn't understand when it varied according to the number of papers they ordered. In a typical distributorship the distributor received income from, not only the profit check, but from the cash in the form of quarters that they removed from the vending racks. There was a period of time when the number of subscriptions were dropping, but the number of papers sold in the vending machines was increasing. This caused the amount of the profit check to decrease, since in addition to the credit for what a customer paid for the paper, and the charge for the home delivery papers, there was also the charge for the papers going in to the racks. Of course this was balanced by an increased amount of money in cash, but it was hard to get them to understand. More math:

Let's say we have, like we did in Part VIII, 2000 papers in a city. 1500 of them are subscriptions and 500 are sold from racks. The subscriptions are billed at $1.00 each, and cost the customer $2.00 for $1.00/week in profit. The papers in the racks are billed at an average of $1.50/week, for a weekly profit of $1.25. In this example:

Net profit from subscriptions: $1,500

Charge for single copy: $750

Profit check: $750

Cash from racks: $1,375

Total profit: $2,125

But let's say the total numbers stay the same, but the ratio changes, say 1,250 subscriptions and 750 single copy

Net profit from subscriptions: $1,250

Charge for single copy: $1,125

Profit check: $125

Cash from racks: $2,062.50

Total profit: $2,187.50

The net profit has increased by $62.50, but since the check has decreased by the same amount, the illusion is that the distributor is making less money. My Falls City distributor was in a similar situation, and since he wasn't keeping track of the money he was collecting from racks, he thought he was making less money for the same amount of papers. It took a lot to convince him that he was actually ahead, but math is hard for some people. 

[The numbers I am quoting are for illustration purposes, I have no clear memory of what the World-Herald was charging for papers back then, or what the profit per paper was]

So I was dropped into this culture of lack of understanding of simple math, let alone the economics of profit/loss and cash flow. It was bad enough when I was auditing a distributor who had been contracted for a number of years, but in some cases there was a succession of distributors, one after the other, often starting out in the financial hole because the previous distributor had failed to transfer over future payments and the sales rep hadn't caught it. It was a mess of unbelievable proportions. It didn't help that some of the sales reps, ostensibly representing the company, sympathized with the distributors and undermined me as I showed up to do audits. One of the worst was in Grand Island.

Grand Island was divided into two distributorships, and both of them saw a parade of distributors presiding over the chaos. The district also included Hastings, also divided into two distributorships. One of my more memorable meetings was with a distributor who was delinquent in her payments. When showing up for audits I always dressed in a suit and tie to impress upon them the seriousness of my visit, even though the usual dress code was a bit looser, more like business casual. (I also dressed this way for court, a coworker once called them my "ass-kicking clothes") Whenever I arrived at an audit, usually for a distributor whom I had never met, I always introduced myself as "Tom Joyce, World-Herald Collections". Jackie, the sales rep for this area, who would end up quitting shortly after this audit, had apparently been coaching the distributor. My introduction was met with the response of "You're not nobody, you're just a paper pushin', number crunchin' son of a bitch". It didn't get any better from there on in.

The district that included Grand Island had been part of the western Nebraska Zone, number 7, but had been moved to Zone 5, the southeastern Nebraska region, where Michelle, my old manager was still in charge. This district was such a mess, that after Jackie quit, management decided that I would be sent in to clean it up before they would hire a new sales rep. I had done this for another district not long before and they apparently thought that I was the guy to fix all the issues. Of the Grand Island and Hastings distributorships, three of the four were open, i.e. substitutes were delivering the papers to the carriers while I paid the carriers, collected from the vending machines and tried to get things in order before we hired new distributors. Before I took over the distributorships had been converted to office billing, but I had not been involved in the conversion. In theory all the advanced payments had been transferred to the corporate office, but we found out much later that only around 75% of the customers were actually being billed, and of that 75% around a third were in arrears. This problem was hidden for quite a while. The cash that had been transferred from the previous distributor to the company run "office distributorship" was large enough that the bi-weekly statement showed a credit balance for over a month, maybe two. Since that cash transfer only represented a portion of the customers who were receiving papers, and since the statement billed the office account for the full amount of papers delivered, pretty soon the office account, which I was responsible for, started showing a balance due. Each week I collected quarters from the racks and deposited the funds, but it wasn't enough to balance out the fact that half the customers weren't paying for the papers. 

When I realized what was happening I tried to fix the problem. Many of the carriers couldn't produce route lists with names and addresses of customers. I suggested dropping the number of papers to match customers that we could verify and rebilling anyone who called to complain, but this idea was rejected. We had carriers hand deliver bills to all customers who we didn't have on our lists, and received only a trickle of payments. One of the things that I suspected was that the recently quit sales rep had artificially inflated sales number in order to earn a bonus. I'd seen this before. Before the days of office billing it was hard to verify whether a new customer was real or not. It was pretty clear by this juncture that a large percentage of papers were being delivered to people who didn't want them, or at least didn't want to pay for them. Again I explained to Michelle, the manager in charge of the Region, (Zones had been renamed Regions) the situation. She explained it to upper management, but we were still prevented from decreasing the number of papers.

The price paid by a subscriber for a paper doesn't come close to paying for the cost of producing that paper. Advertising is what paid the bills. But high circulation numbers served to justify higher advertising costs. The Audit Bureau of Circulation was an outside entity that confirmed circulation numbers so that the advertising sales reps wouldn't be tempted to inflate them. But if papers were being delivered and there was no evidence that they weren't being paid for, they counted toward your circulation numbers. Patrick D, the State Circulation Manager at the time, simply was unwilling to take a huge hit to the sales figures.

During all of this I was shielded somewhat from what was being discussed among the big dogs of Circulation. I informed Michelle of the problems, and I assumed that she was educating Patrick D about why it wasn't going to get better. I don't know if she was doing a poor job of communicating or Patrick just didn't want to hear it, but we both were summoned to Omaha for a meeting one afternoon. In the course of the conversation it became clear that Patrick thought that Michelle and I were mismanaging the district, or even possibly stealing money. He was adamant that the "missing" money was due to some malfeasance on the part of one or both of us. I tried to explain it was only missing on paper - that the balance due was there, and would only get larger because we were delivering more papers than we were getting paid for. He was not interested in anything I had to say, and made it clear that both mine and Michelle's jobs were on the line. I couldn't believe it, I couldn't believe that he would think that we would steal from the company and I couldn't believe that he couldn't understand simple math.

Here's where I shot myself in the foot. Not long before I had been out collecting quarters from the vending racks. I had around $300 in a bank bag - I don't recall why I put the bag on top of my car, but I did - and drove off, losing it.  Already Patrick had been making noises about the shortfall in the distributorship, and I was afraid to admit that I lost $300, so I didn't say anything, figuring that with all the other losses, it would go unnoticed. And it did, up to that point. (By this time the  shortfall on paper was several thousand dollars) Scared that Patrick would somehow find out about the lost bank bag, I took $300 of my own money, bought a money order and deposited it, claiming that I had "found" a money order that I misplaced and forgot to deposit. I didn't think Patrick would believe the true story. Well, he didn't believe the fake story either, and saw it as evidence that I was up to something shady. I was called into his office and confronted with the fact that the date on the money order was a few days old, refuting my story. I chose not to try and defend myself. Amazingly, I was not fired, but I was demoted back to my old job, which had just come back open - southeast Nebraska, District 55.

Start with Part I

Workin' Man - Part VII - Da Boss

Well, I get up at seven, yeah

And I go to work at nine
I got no time for livin'
Yes, I'm workin' all the time

It seems to me
I could live my life
A lot better than I think I am
I guess that's why they call me
They call me the workin' man

'Cause I get home at five o'clock
And I take myself out an ice cold beer
Always seem to be wondering'
Why there's nothin' goin' down here

I guess that's why they call me
They call me the workin' man

"Workin' Man" - Words & Music by Lee & Lifeson

Getting promoted to Night Manager, a full time, salaried position, enabled me to work just one job. I was able to give up my job at the Omaha World-Herald, leaving an unburnt bridge behind me (which would come in handy later on) At the time, Food 4 Less operated three stores in Lincoln: N 48th & O Sts, S 48th St & Pioneers Blvd and one on Havelock Ave (now a Russ's Market). Shortly before this promotion the owners decided that my store would stay open 24 hours a day. My shift would be 9:00pm - 7:00am, even if we finished stocking the truck earlier; now I had regular hours and a regular paycheck. 

Newly promoted from the ranks, I still thought like a stocker, even though I was responsible not only for getting displays built and the shelves stocked, but since we were open now, for customer service as well. Learning to think like someone who was in charge of the whole store was a mindset that would take time. Scheduling was my biggest headache. We had recently started receiving deliveries from two different warehouses, one which delivered on three days and the other on two different days. The warehouse that delivered on two days brought their load in the late morning, so I needed at least one person to come in and unload those trucks that would be stocked that night - fortunately we had such a large back room that leaving all those pallets in the back was no issue. The nights with no deliveries needed a small crew as well, to run back stock and to face the aisles. I now also had to schedule a cashier every night as well. 

One of the things that I was learning about being a manager, even though it would be many years before I was able to articulate it, is that it's not a manager's job to do things, but to get things done. In other words, you can accomplish more as a manager by leveraging your staff's abilities and getting the most out of them by training them to be effective at their jobs, than you can by simply adding your own labor to the mix. Many managers believe that a "good" manager is one who works alongside the crew, demonstrating that they're one of them. While there are morale-boosting benefits to doing this, it's only part of the job. For example if I'm "working hard" stocking the soup aisle, I have no idea what's going on in the rest of the store. Is the new stocker properly trained? Are there lines up front which require opening up a second cash register? Is there shoplifting going on? Is there broken glass on the floor in the baby food aisle that needs to be swept up? All these things can get missed if the person in charge is concentrating on a small part of the job. 

The store was situated on O Street, the main East-West arterial in Lincoln. Part of the parking lot was oriented so that you could sit in your car and watch the traffic go by, and keep an eye out for your friends as the drove by. We frequently had to go out into the lot and ask people to leave. For these discussions I often took two of my biggest and scariest looking stockers with me in order to emphasize the point! Although the part of town wasn't known as being especially rough, we still used to get trouble makers. Usually getting the entire stock crew lined up behind me dissuaded anyone from causing trouble. There was one night where things escalated before I could get backup and I was beaten up and had to go to the emergency room to get checked out. Around then I started taking Tae Kwon Do lessons after work with Von, one of my stockers. 

At some point I received a promotion to the position of "third man" and worked some shifts during the day. I still ran the stock crew two nights a week, but worked first and second shifts the other three work days. In those days there were fewer departments and therefore fewer managers. There was a store manager, assistant store manager and meat and produce department managers. There was no bakery, deli or floral department. Cashiers were overseen and scheduled by the store manager. There was no customer service counter or back office. The manager in charge of each shift counted out drawers and tallied up the cash and checks at the end of the shift (hardly anyone paid with credit cards). The  "third man" was kind of a fill-in, "gopher", position, responsible for ordering and filling the milk, keeping displays filled and covering for other managers on their days off, as well as working the second shift on occasion. Every Wednesday I substituted for Leonard, the Produce Manager. (it was during one of these Wednesdays that I discovered KZUM radio. I was working in the back room trimming lettuce and stumbled across Eli Rhoades' Jazz Fusion show). 

About halfway through my four-year stint at Food 4 Less I was given a raise and transferred to the store at 48th and Pioneers. The Night Manager at that store was apparently doing a bad job, so I became the Night Manager. That store had not yet switched over to being open 24 hours, so I assumed that I'd be working a similar shift to the one when I first became Night Manager at 48th & O. I assumed incorrectly. I was expected to cover not only the overnight stocking shift, but the second shift, starting at 4:00PM! Of course this schedule motivated me to get the truck stocked as quickly as possible, since any hours past midnight were essentially working for free. At first this was difficult to achieve. I inherited an unnecessarily large crew, many who had restrictions that made scheduling difficult. Two high school kids who couldn't work past midnight and would just leave at 12:00 with their aisles half done; a professional bowler who was only available on Tuesdays when he wasn't bowling; other people who had been promised no weekend shifts; friends of the owner's son...it went on and on. Most of the crew were lazy and slow. My solution was to be a hard-ass.

By "being a hard-ass" I mean strict enforcement of the rules. I got rid of the slackers by writing up and firing people for no-call/no-shows, lateness, insubordination, and anything else I could think of to cull the herd. Little by little the ones who didn't want to do the job either were fired or quit and I was left with a core of people who wanted to be there and were great stockers. Around this time the store was switched to being open 24 hours and I started coming in at 9:00PM instead of 4:00PM; the pressure to get done by midnight went away. One of my top people was Lonnie, who was literally a rocket scientist with several advanced degrees. He was fast and accurate - I could depend on him to get a lot done each night. Lee was a student from New Hampshire who had worked for me at my previous store. Lee's nickname was "Complete Bastard", after one of the characters on MYV's The Young Ones. There was Rudy, who at least once a night would run down an aisle and slide on his belly the rest of the way when he was done stocking an aisle. On paper we didn't have enough people to get the job done, but every one of them was head and shoulders above the average stocker. 

Then, as now, holidays were extra busy. One Thanksgiving Eve, when I was still starting at 4:00PM the lines stretched from the check stands to the back of the store. I'll never forget Ron, the Assistant Store Manager at the time, waving goodbye as he walked out in the midst of the chaos, leaving me to handle it. I swore that if I was ever in that position I'd never do that to anyone. 

A situation that I didn't have to deal with at my other store was the friends of the son of the company owner. Jeff was about my age (I was under 30 at the time) and was a partier, as were his friends. On several occasions they would come in late at night and ask me to cash checks for them. Of course, if Jeff was there I'd have to do it, but his buddies would act like the store was their personal bank. I always refused and would predictably get showered with abuse. After I complained to the owner, it stopped. 

Just because I had a great crew doesn't mean that we didn't occasionally get bad ones. We hired a guy named Tom who turned out to be one of the worst stockers I ever managed. After a few weeks Lonnie decided that he couldn't bear calling this guy the same name as me, so he renamed him "Erl". ("a" left out on purpose) Where he came up with that name I'll never know, but it stuck. One of the things we did when running backstock was to put excess stock on the top of the warehouse shelving. Usually one stocker would stand up top while another would toss cases up to him. Erl frequently would toss boxes straight up only to have them fall back down and hit him in the face. Erl didn't last long. Another substandard stocker, Steve, decided that all of his problems were due to discrimination. I had to talk to him a number of times about working faster and he was catching flack from his coworkers who had to pick up the slack. One day he just didn't show up and we never saw him again. The next thing I knew we were being investigated by the Lincoln Human Rights Commission. Steve was a Native American. It may be hard to believe, but I had no idea that he was Native. Growing up I encountered a lot of different ethnic groups, but rarely Native Americans. So the idea that I was discriminating against him because he was Native American struck me as ridiculous. After the investigation started he stopped in one night to harangue me, calling me a "White Bastard". My crew started calling me "W.B." after that. We ended up being cleared of any wrongdoing. I'll never forget the answer that Lonnie gave the investigator when asked if I had ever demonstrated any prejudice in my dealing: "Nope, Tom just dislikes assholes". 

One notable adventure involved mice. One night while taking a break at the front of the store we noticed a parade of mice marching along the back aisle! Now most people don't realize that any business that sells food is going to have some rodents, but this was an invasion! The store manager started paying a bounty to anyone who could catch a mouse. A few of the stockers made quite a few bucks. 

Even though this wasn't what you'd call a rough neighborhood, we still had people coming in and causing trouble, usually teenagers. I never called the police on them, but chased them out and occasionally "escorted" them out physically. One such teenage boy returned with his father, who turned out to be a police officer. The father threatened and attempted to intimidate me, until one of the meat cutters, a huge man, walked out of the cutting room holding a large knife. That was the end of that.

As I mentioned in previous installments I had a violent streak in my younger days. One afternoon a belligerent customer shoved me during an argument. I grabbed him by the front of the shirt and threw him out (no punching involved). I didn't hear anything the next day, or the day after that, and assumed that nothing would come of it. It was an inventory weekend and on Monday morning I finished up the counting and filled in on a checkstand for an hour, something I normally did since the morning checker didn't come in until 7:00. When I went upstairs to collect my jacket I was fired. When I asked why he waited all weekend to fire me, Lyle, the store manager, told me that he didn't have anyone else to run inventory and he needed me to check in the morning!

Since I hadn't burned any bridges after leaving the Omaha World-Herald I went straight to their office and asked for a job. Shannon, the office manager hired me on the spot for a part-time job. I then called Bud Trotter, who ran the floor cleaning service that cleaned and waxed Food 4 Less' floors. He also hired me on the spot. I was back to working two part-time jobs, but due to keeping good relations with a previous job, I was able to start work right away, with no intervening unemployment.

Start with Part I

Go to: Part VIII

Workin' Man - Part VIII - What? Am I Delivering Papers Again?

Well, I get up at seven, yeah

And I go to work at nine
I got no time for livin'
Yes, I'm workin' all the time

It seems to me
I could live my life
A lot better than I think I am
I guess that's why they call me
They call me the workin' man

'Cause I get home at five o'clock
And I take myself out an ice cold beer
Always seem to be wondering'
Why there's nothin' goin' down here

I guess that's why they call me
They call me the workin' man

"Workin' Man" - Words & Music by Lee & Lifeson

Fired! Since I hadn't burned any bridges after leaving the Omaha World-Herald, I went straight to their office and asked for a job. Shannon, the office manager, hired me on the spot for a part-time job. I then called Bud Trotter, who ran the floor cleaning service that cleaned and waxed Food 4 Less' floors. He also hired me on the spot. I was back to working two part-time jobs, but due to keeping good relations with a previous job, I was able to start work right away, with no intervening unemployment.

The newspaper job was much as it had been a few years before. At the floor cleaning company I travelled around the city cleaning bathrooms and floors of the many businesses that Trotter had contracts with. Most of the guys I worked with were former convicts. One was the nephew of Charlie Starkweather. I think my boss was afraid of them. At one point he gave me a raise and told me that I was the crew supervisor, but asked me not to tell anyone that I was, since it would upset them. We cleaned a variety of places: a school room, a gym, a car dealership, a venue that could be rented out for weddings and other parties, and my old store that I had been fired from. After a few months I applied for a full-time salaried position at The Omaha World-Herald, Sales Representative for several counties in southeast Nebraska. 

The Omaha World-Herald's staff was divided into several divisions: Editorial, which included reporters and editors; Production, the people who put together the physical paper; Advertising, salesmen who sold ads in the paper - which paid most of the bills; Administrative - Personnel, Payroll and Accounting; and finally Circulation, the people who brought the newspaper to your door, the paper carriers, bundle haulers, truck drivers and the like. I was part of Circulation. 

Circulation was divided into two main divisions, Metro and State. Metro covered the city of Omaha and it's suburbs, including Bellevue. State was divided into four Zones. Zone 4 was eastern Nebraska north of the Platte River as far west as Valentine; Zone 5 was eastern Nebraska south of the Platte River as far west as York; Zone 7 was the rest of Nebraska; Zone 6 was Western Iowa. (No Zones 1-3? I have no idea why not) Each Zone also included border counties in adjacent states. Each Zone was overseen by a Zone Manager and was subdivided into districts run by a Sales Representative who coordinated paper carriers and "single copy" (store sales and vending machines, aka "racks"). Some areas, usually the small towns, received service every day, often by teenage paper carriers. The larger towns were coordinated by a distributor who handled many of the same duties as a sales rep within their town. Rural areas received home delivery only on Sunday, delivered by a "motor route carrier", with Monday through Saturday papers sent by mail. Papers were delivered to the carriers by way of a complex web of drivers that were contracted by the Transportation Department, and who were not overseen by the sales rep. 

When I first started as a sales rep I was responsible for Lancaster, Otoe, Nemaha and Johnson Counties; not long afterward Lancaster was absorbed into the office that ran the city of Lincoln, and Pawnee and Richardson Counties were added to my district. As a sales rep I didn't have an office, but worked out of my home and my car. Day to day, it wasn't a very difficult job, the carriers mostly worked without any supervision. Most customers paid their carriers directly. Carriers would order the total number of papers that they needed and were billed for them by the World-Herald. What was left over was the carrier's profit. 

Sales Reps were pretty much on their own with minimal supervision by the Zone Manager. The only things that your manager or the State Circulation Manager monitored was collections and sales. We would get a report every other week listing the status of each carrier's bill. If they were in arrears we were expected to send out a letter reminding them that their bill was overdue. If nonpayment went on for too long we were expected to visit the carrier and collect in person. This was hardly ever a problem. I had one restaurant owner in Brownville who had a rack out front. He liked to pay once a month and once threatened to thrown the rack in the Missouri River if I sent him another letter! The other thing that was monitored was sales. This was back in the pre-internet days when people were actually reading physical newspapers. We were expected to at least maintain our circulation numbers, but ideally increase them year over year. We would receive bonuses for increases of 1%, 2% or maintaining previous year's numbers. Every few months corporate would sponsor sales contests where carriers would receive cash or prizes for getting new customers. On occasion all the sales reps in a Zone would converge on a town and escort carriers door-to-door to solicit news sales. We could also contract telemarketers to increase sales as well. 

If things were running smoothly, you hardly had anything to do, and your work weeks were quite a bit less than 40 hours. On the flip side, if carriers quit and you had to deliver routes yourself as well as hunt for a replacement, you might be working in excess of 60 hour weeks. One thing that I have always been good at was organization and time management, so I made sure that all my carriers were trained to handle problems themselves, including minor issues like a vending rack that didn't work or a shortage of papers. 

I don't know if this was normal for businesses during this time period, but even though there was a "personnel" department, it wasn't like the Human Resources Departments that you see today. Personnel basically just made sure all the paperwork was filled out. There wasn't any annual performance reviews either. Pay increases were totally at the discretion of your manager. When I was first hired, my manager liked me, so I received decent increases. When she accepted a promotion as a Training Manager I applied for the open Zone Manager position. Not only did I not get the promotion, but I found out about it when I ran into another sales rep at the airport - management had no intention of informing me. Dave, the recipient of the promotion, had started around the same time as I did. As with the lack of any kind of HR involvement in the review process, the manager had complete discretion regarding who was promoted. In this case both Dave and Jim, the State Circulation Manager, had similar backgrounds as high school football players and later, coaches. People tend to believe that people who are just like them are the most qualified. They obviously believe that they themselves are qualified, so people like them must also be the best candidates for promotion. Getting passed over for promotion might have gone over more easily if I had actually been interviewed for the position, but I made the best of it. The problem was that Dave was a terrible manager.

I don't know if  Dave had been the kind of coach who yelled at his players, or if it was just his personality, but he was rude and abusive. He made unreasonable demands and was a master of gaslighting well before I knew what gaslighting was. He was quite a contrast with Mary, our previous manager. By all accounts the sales reps in our zone were all doing our jobs competently, and Mary just got a promotion, so her methods must have been acceptable, but like a lot of newly promoted managers, Dave acted like things needed to be fixed. He had the "new sheriff in town" attitude. It got bad enough that several of us went over his head to complain to Jim, his immediate supervisor. Rather than taking us seriously, all of us were branded as complainers. The good news was that before long Dave was transferred to a different zone. Michelle, the new manager was much easier to work with, but we all had targets on our backs. 

As the new year began I approached Michelle, our new manager, about a pay increase, which up until that time had been awarded automatically every January. I was told that raises were given for performance, not seniority. Without a performance review, it was complete surprise that there was a problem with me performance. Obviously the result of speaking up about a bad manager had resulted in me being tarred as a "bad" employee. I was able to negotiate a re-evaluation of my performance in three months. During that time I did absolutely nothing different, but received a raise anyway. This was to be a pattern for my thirteen years with The Omaha World-Herald: alternating between being a star performer and getting in big trouble (sometimes my own fault, sometimes a victim of circumstance)

After I had been a sales rep for a few years, the State Circulation Manager created a new position - Special Projects Coordinator. It was an ill-defined position that boiled down to executing any bright idea the State Manager came up with. The first idea was to turn Sunday-only delivery areas into seven-day delivery areas. Most rural areas only received home delivery on Sunday, with Monday - Saturday papers arriving in the mail. The reason that this was the case was that it cost too much to pay someone to deliver papers over routes that were sometimes over 100 miles long and took hours to deliver...every day. Carriers made their money on the difference between what they were charged for the papers and what the customers paid them. On a small in-town route there wasn't much expense involved in delivering papers, but on these large motor routes where there were often miles between customers, the World-Herald added on what was called a "rate adjustment" to make the route financially viable for the carrier. Turning these Sunday Only routes into Seven Day routes would have meant a huge increase in  the rate adjustment. Without getting too deep into the math, the profit on a Sunday paper was quite a bit higher than for a daily paper, so the rate adjustment would have to be increased by a factor of 10 or 15 at least, not merely six. This was clearly financially unsupportable. Add this to the reality that most, if not all, the Sunday motor carriers worked a regular job during the week and would be unavailable Monday - Saturday. This would mean replacing them with someone willing to deliver newspapers every day. If they could be found. After working on this for a couple of months we were able to do this on only one route, and the initiative was abandoned. 

My next assignment as Special Projects Coordinator was to fill in as Acting Collections Manager after the previous manager retired. The OWH was in the process of converting customers from paying the carriers to them being billed centrally from the corporate office. This would mean that instead of paying a bill every two weeks, carriers would receive a biweekly check for their profits. (They would still be collecting cash from their vending machines and any stores they delivered to). This meant that I would have to audit carriers and distributors to get a list of all their customers, as well as how far they had paid in advance. We would then enter the customers' information in the Circulation database. If they had paid in advance, as most did, the distributor would turn that money over to the corporate office. Future billings and payments would be handled centrally. The problem was that most distributors were spending the money instead of setting it aside to cover future bills.  Let me illustrate with some math:

A city of 24,000 might have around 7,000 households, and possibly 2,000 subscriptions. Back then a seven-day subscription was $2.00. So, at the beginning of a 13-week billing period the distributor would have collected $52,000. I don't recall what we charged the distributor per subscription, but let's say that it was $1.00. That means that every week the distributor owed the World-Herald $2,000. Let's say the carriers  made 50¢ per subscription, that another $1,000 a week. So at the end of 13 weeks the distributor will have paid out $39,000 and have a profit of $13,000, $1,000 a week. 

A smart distributor would put that $52K in the bank where it would earn interest and draw from the account to pay the World-Herald and his carriers. But what was happening was that the $52,000 in the bank was very tempting. Time and time again distributors were using that $52,000 (only $13,000 of which was ultimately his if they were still in the job through the entire 13 weeks) and spending it. I was aware of a couple of people who bought vehicles with that money. They would then scramble around to pay their bills and their carriers. They were constantly in cash flow crisis mode. But it really became a problem when a distributor quit mid-billing period. Let's illustrate with more math:

A distributor quits after week eight of the billing period. Theoretically he should have $20,000 in the bank which represented 2,000 customers who had paid their $2.00/week in advance. This money should have been turned over to the new distributor because it wasn't his! Time after time distributors quit without turning over the advance payments, leaving the new distributors immediately in the hole. A similar issue occurred when we were converting a distributorship over to office billing. An audit would determine how much advance payments a distributor was holding, and they would be billed for that money. If they were properly managing their cash flow there was no problem. The customers would be billed when their subscription expired and the distributor would receive a check for their profit every week. In many cases, they weren't properly managing their cash flow and would abruptly quit when they were billed for thousands of dollars that they had already spent. 

My job for about a year was to go around auditing distributors and carriers on large routes in order to facilitate the conversion to central office billing. As part of this process I was tasked with taking those who owed us money to court. Sometimes it was small claims, sometimes it was district court. The World-Herald did not send a lawyer in with me, although their legal department helped draft papers. 

This was at the same time the most interesting and the most frustrating part of my time with the paper. 

Start with Part I

Go to: Part IX

Managers Part IX - What Does a Manager Do?

So what does a manager do? To most people, a manager is just a higher-paid, busier version of the people he or she manages, who also bosses people around. Just what is a manager supposed to manage? According to Bill Oncken Jr., whose book Managing Management Time is one of the most detailed, practical management guide that I have ever seen, a manager is someone who, in contrast to someone who does things, is someone gets things done.  How does a manager get things done? Allowing for the fact that some people with the title "manager" don't supervise anyone, but oversee processes, managers get things done by way of other people. How the professional manager utilizes others to get things done consists largely in how his or her time is spent.

There are broadly three categories of time: boss-imposed, system-imposed, and self-imposed. As we progress, you'll see that time can also be divided in other ways, some that overlap with the three categories listed here. Boss-imposed time is pretty easy to explain. It's the time you spend doing things that your immediate supervisor tells you to do. System-imposed time is time that you spend dealing with the administrative tasks: paperwork, tracking, answering emails. The amount of system-imposed time varies from industry to industry and flourishes when there active factions within a company all vying for control and influence. Self-imposed time is a little harder to pin down. It's not playing hooky from work and going fishing or playing golf, it's not deciding to spend your work day with your feet up on the desk. What it is, is time that you spend conducting your business as you see fit, free from the constraints of the system or the orders of your boss. It's the time you spend planning, the time you spend coaching your subordinates and anticipating and solving problems that haven't occurred yet. In a perfect world, your boss- and system-imposed time will be minimized and your self-imposed time will be maximized. But how do you do that? We'll look at the boss and the system in a later post, but first let's look at a group of people who aren't really part of the three categories of time: subordinates.

In theory, there is no such thing as subordinate-imposed time. In any organizational chart that you're likely to see the big boss is on top, medium and little bosses are under him, front line supervisors are father down and the workers are on the bottom. There is no organizational chart in the world where the subordinates in theory, can tell the boss what to do, or make demands on his time. The fertilizer flows downhill! So, if you are allowing your subordinates to determine how your time is to be spent, then you are exercising some self-imposed time by willingly upending that org chart. (This is not to say that lower-level managers and workers are without worth, later on we'll talk about how to manage your manager). You are letting yourself be managed, reversing the roles and eating up your self-imposed time.

More detail on this in a later article, but the key to eliminating subordinate-imposed time is to delegate. Let me point out that delegating and assigning are two different things. Assigning is when I give you a task, perhaps even tell you how and when to do it. Delegating is when I give you responsibility and authority for a certain aspect of your job and hold you accountable for getting it done. Certainly training and coaching is involved, but someone to whom responsibility is delegated does not wait to be told what to do, or how or when to do it. Someone who receives assignments, goes from one duty to the next, and is at a loss when the list of jobs runs out. Time for a break! (or to go ask the boss what to do).

At one time in my life I managed a retail store. When I left for the day, I entrusted the operation of the store to an "evening supervisor". Once I had fully trained this person and clearly communicated my expectations, I allowed him to manage his time as he saw fit, as long as the standards that I had set had been met. My immediate supervisor however, insisted that I provide my evening supervisor with a list of things to do every night. Not only that, but I had to let him inspect this list at any time to prove that I had created it, complete with check-marks indicating that my supervisor had completed the list. And I couldn't just hand out a generic list every night - no - it had to be a brand-new, fresh list every night. My boss-imposed time increased and forced me to burden my subordinate with some boss-imposed time as well. Even worse, I was assigning tasks to someone whom I should have been delegating responsibility to and communicating a lack of trust and confidence in his abilities. In addition, my supervisor, by assigning me the task of creating this to-do list, was communicating a lack of trust and confidence in my ability to successfully delegate. 

Nobody won.

But there is a way to minimize, or even eliminate, subordinate-imposed time...

Start with Part I

Managers Part VIII - Ethical Leadership

This is a pretty short lesson. If you want to be an ethical manager, treat people the way you want to be treated, the good ol' Golden Rule. Treat people with respect, tell the truth, don't abuse them.

Here are a few examples and illustrations:

Sometimes as a manger you need to fire people. I have fired people and I've been fired. More than a few times for each. Once you decide to fire someone, just do it. Don't make them work their whole shift, or have them train their replacement. If their performance is so bad that they need to go, then get them out! Many years ago I was fired from a job that I'd held for a few years. I deserved to be fired, there was no question about it, so I was quite surprised that I was still employed the day after the incident which occasioned my termination. In fact I worked the whole weekend, ran a full store inventory and took over the checkstand at 6:00 AM on Monday so my overnight checker could leave. At 7:00 AM, when the morning checker arrived I was informed that I was terminated. When I asked my manager why he waited all weekend before firing me, he told me that he didn't have anyone who could work the weekend and needed someone to do the inventory!

For a positive example, for a few years I was an assistant manager. It was a retail grocery store, and like many retail stores, the busiest times were during the holidays. This sometimes caused problems, since people would attempt to take off for a week just when it was busiest, or you would have entire departments asking off at the same time. If you wanted to keep the place running you couldn't give people off during the holidays other than their regular days off. Some store managers would take off themselves, leaving the place in the hands of less senior supervisors, but our store manager would always schedule himself to work the holidays and the busy weekends - as an example to everyone else.

Employees also see how you treat other people, like your customers. Many companies make a habit of lying to their customers; employees see this and assume that if you're lying to one group of people, you're just a liar in general. Some companies make a habit of lying to their employees, assuming they are too stupid to realize it. The store that I was working in a decade ago was going to close. It was losing almost a million dollars a year; it was an understandable business decision. But when the corporate leadership was asked directly about it they lied, assuring me and others that the store was not going to close. When the truth inadvertently leaked out, they continued to lie, even sending a corporate manager in to convince the store personnel that the store was not closing, and sending him back to lie again when I told my former employees the truth after I had been fired. Several managers from the store quit after this, not able to trust the company that had put so much effort into lying to them. The same amount of effort, focussed on telling the truth, would have helped ensure the loyalty of the affected employees, rather than causing them to become jaded by the lies. 

Being dishonest, treating employees badly, cheating, all may seem the best business decision short-term, but will always come back to bite you in the long-term.

Start with Part I

Go to: Part IX

Managers Part VII - Empowerment vs. Micromanaging

Don't let the Either/Or title mislead you, it's not all one or all the other, empowerment and micromanaging are two ends of continuum; a manager can be somewhat micromanaging, or empower her employees to some extent, or a manager can be empowering in some aspects of the job and micromanaging in others. Whether either end of the spectrum is consider good or bad depends on who is making the judgement. A manager who subscribes to "Theory X", the belief that employees are inherently lazy and unambitious will naturally result in micromanaging, even if that perception is inaccurate. Managers who lean toward "Theory Y", the position wherein employees are responsible and industrious probably tend delegate and empower more. 

Employees who believe that they know their jobs and how to do them efficiently and accurately, will desire to be supervised by empowering managers while those who, for one reason or another, do not want to take responsibility will prefer micromanaging: "just tell me what to do". What's good or bad management depends on a number of factors: the level or training, experience and ability of employees; the ambition and work ethic of those employees; the balance that the manager employs while supervising his employees; the complexity of the tasks that are expected of the employees; the amount of "free" time that the manager has to micromanage and many more.

One of the greatest myths about management is that managers should working side by side with their employees, showing them that they "aren't afraid to get their hands dirty". But a manager who spends all of her time doing the same work as her employees is the ultimate in the micromanager, because she is doing the work herself. This type of manager won't be doing any empowering of employees, because she is right there with them...all the time, they don't learn to think or act on their own, because they're never on their own.

Start with Part I

Go to: Part VIII

An Agnostic's Look at The Bible - Part XVI - Agreeing to Disagree...Or Not

One of the problems in looking to the Bible as a rulebook on how to live life is that it's not arranged in any easy-to-access order. There's no index, it's not arranged by subject matter and there seems to be a lot of areas that simply aren't covered. The true believers will tell you that's because it's not supposed to be accessible to the disbelievers, but that if you have the Holy Spirit within you, understanding will flow naturally.

How convenient. 

Of course, I'm one of those disbelievers, and this series is about how I, an agnostic, look at the Bible. I don't believe that it was dictated, or even inspired, by God, or any other permutation of the idea that it's "The Truth". I'm just looking at it like I'd look at any other piece of literature. Viewed in that light, it's confusing. 

One of the sources of confusion is the dichotomy between the "Old Testament", aka The Hebrew or Jewish scriptures, and the "New Testament", aka the Gospels and the Epistles. The Old Testament is without question written for the Jewish people. The New Testament is more universal in who it's intended for. The Old Testament describes God in starkly different terms than does most of the New Testament. Most Christians ignore this difference, pretending that it's not there. Although there is a subset of Christian theology called dispensationalism which explains the difference by theorizing that God has different "dispensations", or administrations, where the rules of the game change. It's obvious that the institution of the Law of Moses changed the ground rules that existed before, and that Jesus' life, death and resurrection represented a further change. The Book of Revelation is without question a different milieu than the world as we know it, ending with a still different new Heaven and Earth. Dispensationalists can be thanked (or blamed) for the popular belief in "the rapture". An early Christian movement, founded by Marcion, believed that the differences were so great that the Old Testament God was a different God than the God of Jesus. So it comes down to either explaining away the differences in a pretzel-like manner, or just ignoring them. 

Another dichotomy in the New Testament is between the Gospels and the Epistles of Paul. Jesus was primarily concerned with action, while Paul was mainly concerned with belief. Even though each of the four Gospels has a different emphasis, and even contradict each other, Jesus isn't telling people to simply believe, he's always talking about how one should behave oneself. Paul on the other hand, while he does touch on a few things to do and not do, it's all in the head - it's believing in Jesus, believing that he was raised from the dead and so on. 

The epistles of Paul are not an instruction manual on how to be a Christian, they're mostly in the form of letters addressing specific problems that various church communities were having. There's not a lot of internal inconsistency within the Pauline letters, but there's no definitive listing of doctrine and practice. The Catholic/Orthodox traditions tell their people to not worry about it, the leaders will tell you how to act and think. The Protestant traditions do that too, while maintaining the illusion that their people can see what the Bible teaches for themselves...as long as it agrees with what the leaders say it means. For any doctrinal position it's typical to jump from section to section and book to book putting together a supposedly coherent position, because you won't find it clearly delineated in any one place. 

What about the Ten Commandments? Isn't that a list telling us how to act? Yes and no. Yes, in that it's a list in the Bible. No - for several reasons. If we're taking the dispensationalist position that the Old Testament was for the Jews and not written to The Church, why would we pay it any attention? If we are supposed to heed the "Ten Commandments", why not the other hundreds of commandments? Like the ones involving dietary and grooming rules. Or the ones that allow slavery or that a woman marry her rapist. Quite a quandary. But what most people do not realize that no matter what position you take, there are two contradictory versions of the Ten Commandments (or Ten Words) in the Book of Exodus:

https://contradictionsinthebible.com/2-ten-commandments/

Ten Commandments (Ex 20:1-17)
1. I am Yahweh your god; you shall not have other gods before my face!

2. You shall not make for yourself a statue or an image.

3. You shall not swear falsely by the name Yahweh, your god

4. Remember the Sabbath day.

5. Honor your father and your mother.

6. You shall not murder.

7. You shall not commit adultery.

8. You shall not steal.

9. You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.

10. You shall not covet you neighbor’s house.

 

Ten Commandments (Ex 34:14-26)
1. You shall not bow down to another god; for Yahweh is a jealous god!

2. You shall not make molten gods for yourself.

3. You shall observe the festival of Unleavened bread.

4. You shall redeem every first born of your sons!

5. You shall observe the Sabbath.

6. You shall make a festival of Weeks.

7. Three times a year every male shall appear before Yahweh, god of Israel.

8. You shall not offer the blood of my sacrifice on leavened bread.

9. You shall bring the firstfruits of your land to the house of Yahweh your god.

10. You shall not cook a kid in its mother’s milk.

So, which version do you want to follow? Or post in your classrooms? 

In addition to the fact that there are two distinct and clearly contradictory versions of The Ten Commandments right there in the text of the Bible, the way that the first, more popular version, is interpreted varies depending on the church tradition or denomination, there are eight distinct traditions or versions which divide the seven verses in Exodus differently.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ten_Commandments

• Septuagint
• Reformed Protestantism
• Ashburnham Pentateuch
• Talmud
• Samaritan Pentateuch
• Augustine
• Roman Catholicism
• Lutherans

Almost all (7 of 8) agree that the first commandment is "You Shall Have No Other Gods Before Me", one makes it the second, counting the prologue "I am the Lord your God" as the first

Some (4 of 8) count "You Shall Not Have False Idols"  or "Thou Shalt Not Make Unto Thee a Graven Image" as the second commandment, two other combine this with the first and call it the first

The next few have 4 of 8 agreeing, while the other 4 are one step behind:

"You Shall Not Take the Name of the Lord in Vain" is third/second commandment

"Remember the Sabbath Day to Keep it Holy" is the fourth/third commandment

"Honor Thy Father and Mother" is the fifth/fourth commandment

"Thou Shalt Not Kill" is the sixth/fifth, although one version counts it as the eighth commandment

"Thou Shalt Not Commit Adultery" is the seventh/sixth commandment, although since one source reverses this and the previous command, it is 3 for seventh and 5 for sixth

"Thou Shalt Not Steal" is eighth/seventh commandment

"Thou Shalt Not Bear False Witness (Lie?) Against Thy Neighbor" is ninth/eighth

"Thou Shalt Not Covet Thy Neighbor's House" is 7 for the tenth commandment (some combined with the following) and 1 for the ninth

"Thou Shalt Not Covet Thy Neighbor's Wife" 5 of 8 combine it with the previous for tenth commandment and three call it the ninth

"Thou Shalt Not Covet Thy Neighbor's Stuff" - all call but one it the tenth combined with either one or two of the previous. 

The one exception adds "You Shall Set Up These Stones, Which I Command You Today, on Mount Argarizem" and combines all the "covets" as the ninth commandment

(4 of 8 combine all 3 "covets" into #10, 3 combine 2 of them in various ways)

Even though there are actually fourteen commandments, (if you count every one that at least one tradition considers a separate commandment), the Bible, just before the listing, specifically calls them ten commandments (or words, sayings, or matters), but does not clearly delineate where one "commandment" ends and another begins. Maybe whoever wrote it thought it would be obvious, or that it was unimportant. Here they are separated out and listed in order:

1. I am the Lord your God
2. You Shall Have No Other Gods Before Me
3. You Shall Not Have False Idols
4. You Shall Not Take the Name of the Lord in Vain
5. Remember the Sabbath Day to Keep it Holy
6. Honor Thy Father and Mother
7. Thou Shalt Not Kill
8. Thou Shalt Not Commit Adultery
9. Thou Shalt Not Steal
10. Thou Shalt Not Bear False Witness (Lie?) Against Thy Neighbor
11. Thou Shalt Not Covet Thy Neighbor's House
12. Thou Shalt Not Covet Thy Neighbor's Wife
13. Thou Shalt Not Covet Thy Neighbor's Stuff
14. You Shall Set Up These Stones, Which I Command You Today, on Mount Argarizem

Periodically there are legal disputes about posting the Ten Commandments in courthouses and in government buildings. The rationale being that the commandments are all basic moral/ethical stuff and no one should have any problem with them, even if they did originate in a religious book. There are some problems with that position. Some of them are hard core religious and not just "do unto others..." stuff.

The first three to five, depending on how you're counting, address who you should be worshipping, when you should do it, and how you should talk about the god who is the object of this worship. For anyone who worships a god different from the god of the bible, this is not something that they they would want to do and it certainly shouldn't be displayed in a government setting. If you think that the whole world, or at least the whole country, consists entirely of Christians and Jews (and depending on how you view Allah, Muslims), then you might have no problem with this. But that's not the reality - there's a large number of people who worship or honor different gods (or no gods at all) - in addition there's that pesky First Amendment.

The "covet" prohibitions are also problematic. Most people would agree in theory that these are things that you shouldn't do, but when you get down to it they are prohibitions against thought not actions. So once again, this comes down to strictly religious rules, not anything that could or should be encoded into secular law.

Honoring your parents (unless your parents are evil bastards), no stealing, lying, killing or cheating on your spouse...I'll give you those. The Five Commandments sounds okay.

Start at The Beginning: Part I

So, You Want to Join a Cult - Part VIII

So far I have addressed  briefly how the perception that something "makes sense" influences people to get involved in cults and touched upon how participants are made to feel that they are involved in something greater than themselves. Now we're going to look at how outside pressure, perceived as persecution, serves to cement someone's decision to remain in a cult. 

Throughout most of 1978 few people had heard of the term cult, especially as it applied to Christian groups. Certainly there were fringe groups, notably the Unification Church, colloquially known as "The Moonies", and the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKON), which most of us knew as "The Hare Krishnas", but it wasn't until the mass murder-suicide at The People's Temple outpost in Guyana in November 1978 that there was an awareness of "cults", that not only were they different, but that they were dangerous. A cottage industry of "cult experts" sprung up, with numerous books about cults, as well as those billing themselves as "deprogrammers", who, for a fee, would un-brainwash a loved one and "free" them from the cult. More on that later, but first my own experience with pushback from my own family. 

As I related in a previous post, I was raised Catholic. The neighborhood where I grew up was predominantly Catholic, and Catholicism was, even for the non-religious, part of the background noise of life. All through high school all of my friends were Catholic, and if I knew any Protestants, I can't remember any of them. (I did date a girl for a few years who had a Catholic father and a Jewish mother, but other than that...). Catholicism was assumed. So, when I began to move beyond casual attendance at Bible studies and toward replacing my Catholicism with membership in The Way, my parents began to get concerned. Not, I emphasize, because they thought I was in a cult, that term had yet to become popularized to describe fringe religious movements, but because I was involved in something not-Catholic. 

When you're excited about something new, whether it's a new love in your life, a fun hobby, that alternative band that no one has ever heard of, or really anything that's new and fresh and exciting in your life, you want to share it with others, you want to talk about it. You're excited about it. And I was without a doubt excited about what I was learning in the PFAL class. Understand that at this stage I wasn't considering leaving the Catholic Church, but was pretty psyched about seeing details of the Bible that I hadn't known about before. Most Catholics don't bother overmuch with the theological details and couldn't care less about the minutiae of the nature of Christ or what happens to you after you die, or how apostolic succession works. I certainly never thought about it, but once I was presented with these details I was won over. 

After the initial few sessions of PFAL that hammered home the premise that the Bible was the Word of God and inerrant, the second week of class started throwing out information that was new. I'd come home from class bubbling with enthusiasm about what I was learning. My mom, more often than not, would be in the living room watching television or reading a book and I'd be excited about telling her what I was learning "Did you know...?" I'd gush about some obscure bit of Biblical lore that had been presented that night. Mom's reaction was disappointing at best. Rather than sharing in my excitement, or at least exhibiting polite interest, her reaction was one of barely disguised discomfort at what I was saying. This may not seem like much, but I had always been able to talk to my mother, and was closer to her than to my dad, who seemed to have more in common with my younger, more sports-oriented brother. Tight lipped indifference from mom was as bad, in my mind, as overt condemnation. Of course, this parental disapproval was hardly persecution. But The Way played on this, pointing out verses where Jesus said that true followers would have to leave their old lives behind, leaving their parents and siblings for the gospel and portraying disapproval by family as proof that we were on a godly path. 

I moved into my second "Way year" in the Autumn of 1978 (Way years went from August to August, I took the PFAL class in Way Year 1977-78) I started to become more active in Way activities. A few months previously I stopped attending church, seeing enough of a disconnect between what I was being taught in The Way and the positions of the Catholic Church. This caused a confrontation with my father, who, when he deigned to express his opinion, did not leave any room for doubt about his position. Where my mother would express her disagreement with uncomfortable silences my father was more volcanic in his disagreement and let me know in no uncertain terms what he thought. He did not approve. 

Even though I became aware at the 1978 Rock of Ages that The Way was The Way International, and not just some local Bible study groups, it was still possible at that time to be involved only peripherally. The local Twig Fellowship that had met at Tom & Joe's apartment in our Rosedale neighborhood had dissolved. Tom had left to serve as a WOW and Joe had moved to a Way Home (several Way roommates dedicated to running fellowships and classes, similar to the WOW program with fewer rules) in the Queens Village neighborhood. While at the Rock of Ages I stayed in a hotel room with two guys, John Lalor and Joe Meehan, who had been WOW Ambassadors the previous year and were returning to their home neighborhood. Joe, John and I, as well as a handful of other Rosedale "believers" would occasionally drive up to Queens Village or to Bayside to attend Way fellowships, but mainly we would meet in a public park or mall (we all lived with our parents) and "witness".  

During this time I was still living a "normal" life. I was attending college, going out to see local bands on weekends, dating, and drinking too much at times. We managed to convince a few people to take the PFAL class including my girlfriend Lori, my childhood friend Joe, and a couple of musicians - Mike and Billy. I was living in some respects in two worlds. I still had my old friends, my old bad habits, was attending college, living at home. My friends thought I was weird, my parents disapproved...mildly, but I was, on the side, engaged in an enterprise that I viewed as important: speaking what I believed was "The Word of God" and bringing others into that knowledge. It was, in many ways, the perfect balance.

Of course it really wasn't and it couldn't last. 

Four months into this phase of life 918 people died at a remote settlement near Georgetown, Guyana and things were never the same. 

Start from the Beginning: Part I

Go to: Part IX

Managers Part VI - Referent Power (Character-Based Influence)

The final source of influence that we will look at is referent, or character-based power, the power or influence that derives from "personal characteristics that people value or admire". This can easily be confused with rewards-based influence, since both character-based and rewards-based managers are generally viewed as "good" managers by non-managers. To be sure, there is some overlap, character-based managers can and do use rewards and even punishment as part of their approach to management. But the difference is that while a rewards and/or punishment-based manager uses rewards and punishment in order to get people to do what they want them to do, a character-based manager uses rewards to recognize positive behavior. They use punishment, not as a threat, but as a response to breaking established guidelines. There can even be some overlap with the concept of expert authority - a character-based manager is often respected in part because she knows what she is talking about!

So what are some of the characteristics or values that employees respect in a manager? One major way that a manager gains the respect of his employees is by "having their back. Most managers have bosses themselves, often at the corporate or "home office" level. In most businesses there are also customers. Managers stand in between the customers, who can be extremely demanding and often view the people that they do business with as servants; and upper management, who generally are focused on bottom-line profits. The fastest way for a manager to lose the respect of her employees is to stand idly by while a customer or a member of upper management treats an employee badly. Several years ago I worked for a man who in many ways was very difficult to work for. He was abrasive and a micromanager. But when push came to shove, he would stand by me if I was in trouble. In one memorable incident I had been falsely accused of making a racist comment by a member of our loss prevention team. The company's vice president was in the process of chastising me for it when my boss intervened, making it clear that what I was being accused of was false; he berated the vice president until he backed off and aplogized. There were numerous other examples, but despite any other rough spots in this manager's approach, I viewed him as one of the best managers that I had ever worked for due to the way that he always supported me.

Another characteristic that employees value is being treated with respect by their manager. A quick way to lose the respect of employees is to treat them as if they are children, or stupid. A good manager in this context will explain to employees why they are doing things, and bring them into the decision-making loop. When this is the standard, employees will often be more understanding in the rare instances when a manager asks them to do something quickly without explanation.

Does the manager make an effort to teach and coach? To mentor employees and give them opportunities to grow? While many employees may not articulate this, a manager who is always thinking how to advance the careers of his subordinates will be one who is respected and considered a "good" manager. Many "bad" managers will think only of the immediate needs of the company - if we promote this person, who will fry the chicken? Who will cover this sales territory? Who will fix the vital piece of equipment? A character-based manager will realize that taking care of the employee and her needs will in the long run serve the company better than focusing on the immediate.

Part of being a manager is representing the company and implementing company policies, even unpopular policies. A punishment-based manager will threaten his employees into compliance; a rewards-based manager will bribe his employees; a character-based manager will explain the pros and cons and convince his employees.

Start with Part I

Go to: Part VII

So, You Want to Join a Cult - Part VII

I discussed in Part VI the "It made sense to me" aspect of joining a cult. Even almost 20 years after leaving The Way, I don't define a cult by their beliefs. Some people look at the science fiction aspects of Scientology, or the ahistorical Mormon records of what they say went on in North America, or Muhammad's ascent to heaven on a horse that Muslims believe and laugh at the silliness of it all. They seldom examine their own beliefs in a man being raised from the dead, a virgin birth, a talking donkey and walls being brought down by trumpets and see how ridiculous they might seem to an outsider. Any religious belief is going to look bizarre to someone from outside that religion. For this reason I don't look at non-mainstream beliefs, in and of themselves, as evidence of cultishness, but at the actions of those in the alleged cult. 

One of the ways that a cult draws people in is for whatever their teachings are to make some kind of sense, at least the things that new people are being exposed to. A second method is to cultivate a sense of community, a sense of belonging, that you are engaged in something greater than yourself. 

I completed the Power for Abundant Living (PFAL) class on March 31, 1978. During the class I became aware that the Bible study at Tom and Joe's apartment was not the only one in the area, but was still unaware of the extent of The Way, or even that The Way was an organization. From April through July of 1978 I attended Bible studies, "twigs" in Way parlance, sporadically. However, in August of that year I ended up going to rural Ohio to attend the "Rock of Ages" annual festival. 

In 1969, fresh from expanding his reach by recording his PFAL class and co-opting groups of "Jesus People" hippies on both coasts, Way founder Victor Paul (VP) Wierwille formed what he called "The Way Corps", ostensibly a leadership training program. After a false start, what eventually became the First Way Corps group was assembled in August of 1970 for a two year stint at Wierwille's farm, grandiosely dubbed "International Headquarters". Around this time, a group of PFAL graduates, led by Donnie Fugit, a charismatic evangelistic type, participated in what later became the Word Over the World (WOW) Ambassador program. Up until this point expansion was more or less organic. People who had taken the PFAL class told their friends and family, and if enough were interested, then "International Headquarters" would mail out some cassette tapes (or videotapes if the potential group was large enough). Young "believers" often recruited for PFAL classes at their college campuses and several colleges became Way hotspots. The pilot WOW program would take this beyond "witnessing" in one's everyday life to a targeted missionary-like program where the primary purpose of the "WOWs" would be to "witness" and run PFAL classes. 

Previous to this, The Way had been conducting "summer schools", where interested people could come to attend workshops and classes. At the end of the summer, usually in early August, before the "kids" had to return to school, there would be a weekend music festival send-off. In August 1971, at this music festival, called "The Return of the Rock of Ages", (a reference to Jesus Christ as the rock of all ages) Wierwille announced the formation of the Word Over the World Ambassador program and invited anyone interested to come back in a month or so in order to receive their assignments. The first wave of WOWs would spread out from Ohio In October and return the following August. After tis, the Way "ministry year" would begin and end in August at the "Rock of Ages". Every August, at subsequent "Rock of Ages" festivals, a new group of WOW Ambassadors would be sent out, the previous year's group would be welcomed "home" and a new batch of Way Corps would start their training. Each year there would be more WOWs commissioned, there would be more Way Corps starting their training, and more attendees at "The Rock" until until in 1978, my first year, there were around 20,000 people from all over the world. 

When I first agreed to attend The Rock in 1978, I had no idea what I was getting into. I just thought a road trip would be a cool thing to do. (I'm a sucker for road trips) I was living with my parents and was between jobs, so a week in Ohio didn't really interfere with anything. I was recruited to drive a Way woman and her three children from New York to Ohio. She and her husband (who was already in Ohio for something called The Advanced Class) and kids were going to be WOWs that year. Joe (of Joe and Tom, whose apartment I originally attended Bible studies at) would be providing a hotel room for me to stay in during the week. We left New York in the late morning and after driving all day and into the night, arrived at a huge parking lot in the midst of Ohio farmland. I slept in the car. When I woke in the morning I was surrounded by thousands of Way people, greeting each other with variations of "God bless you". There were people pitching tents, families in RVs and believers driving in every day from area hotels. People were polite, people cared for each other, there was a distinct lack of chaos, trash was picked up, food was abundant and it was like it was one, big, happy family. While tiny compared to the half-a-million-strong Woodstock almost a decade earlier, you got the feeling that this group would be just as loving, just as organized, if there was half a million people. 

The six days that I spent there got me one giant step toward getting entangled in a cult.  

Start from the Beginning: Part I

Go to Part VIII