Teenage members of a Vampire cult murdered the parents of one of its members. Self-proclaimed lead vampire received the death sentence. While recent cult tragedies have received a great deal of media coverage, many facts regarding cults are rarely divulged to the general public. An estimated 5,000 economic, political, and religious groups operate in the United States alone at any given time, with 2.5 million members. Over the last ten years, cults have used tactics of coercive mind control to negatively impact an estimated 20 million victims in the last ten years.
Worldwide figures are even greater.
Entire societies, numbed by coercive psychological influence, are more likely to allow large-scale tragedies. Perhaps the most devastating example is the Holocaust. Cult mind control is totalitarian, and as such is anathema to democracy. Mind control works by bypassing rationality and eliminating free will. Without free will, all other basic human freedoms, such as freedom of expression, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, become utterly meaningless.