The Other Side of Enlightenment

Mainstream social scientists are divided on Hassan and his fellow cult-busters, with many sociologists of religion believing that what they do is nothing more than stoke hysteria, reminiscent of the witch hunts of the colonial era. They say the word “cult” is itself loaded and derogatory, instead preferring the term “new religious movement.” These scholars say anti-cultists like Hassan focus nearly exclusively on religious groups that are either new—like the Unification Church and the Church of Scientology—or relatively new to America, like the Hare Krishnas. “You can make any group look pretty bad,” says Anson Shupe, who teaches at Indiana-Purdue University Fort Wayne. “You take a woman who wears a uniform, becomes celibate, shaves her head, changes her name, and marries the dead leader of a cult. And she is, according to them, in need of an intervention. Well, that’s a nun.”

When Shupe and David Bromley of Virginia Commonwealth University coedited a mostly critical book on anti-cultists, they wanted to include a chapter from someone on the other side of the debate. The academics turned to Hassan because they consider him to be perhaps the best in his business—and yet they remain critical of his approach. They don’t believe there’s any such thing as brainwashing, and are also skeptical of the concept of mind control, which they say could be used to explain everything from the effects of television commercials to the methods used to train soldiers or even Mary Kay saleswomen. And then there’s the whole notion of interventions as a form of therapy. “You get people who are caught up in trying to change themselves, become a new person or build a new world,” Bromley says. “And they lose touch with who they are. It isn’t to say some groups don’t take advantage of that process. But I don’t think it’s necessarily the case that they want someone like Hassan to come in with predetermined answers to their life problems.”

Shupe often calls Hassan a “professional ex-Moonie,” questioning the livelihood he has built around his past. “Way down deep, it’s like he’s been wrestling with a demon about his own involvement in the Moonies,” he says. “Okay, so he made a mistake. So does that mean the rest of us are to endure this quest he has to liberate minds when what this really is, to play Dr. Freud, is his way of expiating his own earlier mistakes? Is he a cynical opportunist? No. But it is easy for someone to create a moral crusade when it also happens to be how they make their living.”

Hassan fiercely denies these accusations. He points out he’s an active member of Temple Beth Zion in Brookline, a synagogue with a distinctively New Age flair, and himself practices both yoga and meditation. He insists that mind control exists—and cites prominent psychiatrists and psychologists who agree with him. He also dismisses the suggestion that he’s some sort of trauma victim who now sees a cult lurking behind every tree. He says he has turned down many intervention requests, including one from the parents of a gay child and another from the parents of a student who had decided to drop out of Harvard Business School. “My job is to empower people to think for themselves,” he says. “People have a right to follow a different drummer. My issue is whether they are being lied to, manipulated, and exploited when they make their choices.”

As overwhelming as Hassan’s sense of self and unswerving confidence can be at times, both are tempered by a surprising ability to admit his missteps. Earlier in his career, he acknowledges, he was too quick to label some groups as cults. He also recently reduced his rates, which had soared during the dot-com era. He currently charges $2,500 a day for home visits and interventions and says he does a lot of pro bono work. (Charles Laquidara declined to reveal how big a check he wrote to Hassan, saying only that it was equivalent to the “yearly wages of an average blue-collar worker.”) Still, Hassan doesn’t appear to be getting rich. He and his wife, Misia Landau, live with their son in a rented three-bedroom on a quiet street in Newton.