According to the "Mind Control Cult" people (who rescue people from them), a Cult is an organisation that has a rigidly enforced code of behaviour and belief. Some teachings are mandatory, others are forbidden. Your reading list gets shortened. Contact with people "outside the faith" is discouraged, and the psycho-symbolism of rituals are substituted for meaningful personal experience. Individuality is discouraged. Conformity to the head man's views is paramount as is belief in his claims to divinity. Maybe this kind of "mind control cult" is just how a new religious movement looks to outsiders. Matthew 10:35-6 and Luke 14:26 indicate that "mind control cults" can mature into respectable instruments of mass social control.

Strangely, the main method of the "we'll rescue your daughter" bunch is the same as their "opposition". They merely convert someone from one repressive belief system to their own, through the "break down, build up" strategy of elite schools, military boot camp, university fraternities and other organisations requiring fanaticism. (Only fanatics will honour, support and obey their organisation when their own intelligence and conscience tells them otherwise.)

Really extreme mind control is achieved through another strategy. The method is to induce huge trauma in the subject, something so terrifying, horrifying or otherwise so intolerable that the mind doesn't tolerate it, and divides. The old persona gets to be an aspect which doesn't know about the trauma and a new persona is born, which is warped in whatever way necessary to handle the trauma. In this way several (comfortably, 3 and some say up to 7) separate personalities can be created. Hypnotic links to keywords, places and other triggers can be set up to be associated with the trauma so that personalities can be switched at the controller's will. Of course, the subject should be ideally be very young when the traumas start, but the process can still work for a while with an adult.

Nazi Germany developed some really perverse, extreme forms of "mind control", or more accurately soul destruction. Experts in these wonderful ways were acquired by America along with Werner Von Braun, who got the USA to the moon. If you want to find out what the mind control guys and their descendants do for Uncle Sam, search Google for: Noam Chomsky Nicaragua Contras. Noam Chomsky is a professor at MIT, and is, miraculously, still alive.

Swami Anand Subhuti's take on the "Cult" issue: ::LINK::