Are you a martial artist or a cult member?

Are you a martial artist or a cult member? Many people get caught , mainly because their ignorance , in the web of martial cults. What is a martial cult? How can someone know that he is in the martial cult? Concerted efforts at influence and control lie is at the core of cultic groups, programs, and relationships. Many members, former members, and supporters of cults are not fully aware of the extent to which members may have been manipulated, exploited, even abused. The following list of social-structural, social-psychological, and interpersonal behavioral patterns commonly found in cultic environments may be helpful in assessing a particular group.

1.    The group displays excessively zealous and unquestioning commitment to its leader or a founder (whether he is alive or dead) regards his system, theories  and practices as the absolute and only truth, as law.

2.    Pyramidal structure

3.    Questioning, doubt, and dissent are discouraged or even punished.

4.    Avoidance of critical thinking and/or maintaining logically impossible beliefs and/or beliefs that are inconsistent with other beliefs held by the group.

5.    Avoidance of and/or denial of any facts that might contradict the group's belief system..

6.    Mind-altering practices (such as meditation, chanting ect ) are used in excess and serve to suppress doubts about the group and its teachings.

7.    The group is elitist, claiming a special, exalted status for itself, its leader(s) and members (for example, the founder had hundreds of fights and never lost or performed a feats of superhuman strength and skill such as breaking the revolver with two fingers, it is the only original system superior to others, system contain some secret teachings and techniques unknown to others ).

8.     The group has a polarized us-versus-them mentality, which may cause conflict with the wider martial society.

9.    The coaches are preoccupied with making money. They require regular seminars or other gatherings in which they sell “secret”, “advanced” knowledge and they have special programs for “one on one” teaching where members can learn faster and learn most secret and advanced things

10. The most loyal members feel there can be no other martial style worth practicing and there is nothing they can learn from any other source.

11. Control of members' actions and thinking through repeated indoctrination and/or threats. The teachings of the group are repeatedly drilled into the members, but the indoctrination usually occurs around Special Knowledge. Legends and completely non rational stories are repeated until members start to believe in them as real. Threats goes in a direction where members are told that they will lose time and opportunity to learn the only style worth practicing.

12. Minimizing contact of members with those outside the group by discouraging or forbidding them to participate in seminars of other arts or visit and practice other styles

13.  Those who do not keep in step with group policies are shunned and/or expelled.

14. There are records, books, news articles, or television programs that document the mischiefs of group/leader.

15. Followers feel they can never be "good enough".

16. Grandmaster is always right.

17. Grandmaster is the exclusive means of knowing "truth" or receiving validation, no other process of discovery is really acceptable or credible

18. Whenever the group/leader, founder or the style  is criticized or questioned it is characterized as "persecution".

19. Anything the group/leader or founder does can be justified no matter how harsh or harmful. For example Yip Man’s followers do not care about his gambling and drug addiction nor the fact that he abandoned his family and escaped by himself from communists.He also showed more to people who had more money. 

20. Infantilization  of members , simplified thinking

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