ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with the role played by countermovement experts in the Cult Awareness Network's (CAN) activities and how they promoted the mind control ideology. To call it a "raging debate" would be to overstate it. These persons were indispensable to the public ratification of the CAN's social movement economy. By the mid-1990s the entire brainwashing/mind control/programming model for making sense of why persons join and stay in new religious movements (NRMs) had been abandoned by mainstream sociologists, psychologists and anthropologists. To understand how scientific respectability is still being championed for the mind control model, one needs to know about a debate in social science. The anticult movement's (ACM) experts too broadly applied the "mind control" ideology to the NRMs. Much of the mind control model is premised on a conspiritorial theme: There exist dangerous cultic groups, with nefarious destructive goals, using anti-social means to wreck human lives.
