A Comparison of the Financial Demands of the Said Cults and of More Conventional Courses

A Comparison of the Financial Demands of the Said “Cults” and of More Conventional Courses

CICNS (February 2012)

One of the principal arguments retained against the movements arbitrarily qualified as cult-like is their supposedly deviant relationship to money, manifested by an exorbitant financial demand for taking part in their courses.

In its latest Guide, “Savoir déceler les dérives sectaires dans la formation professionnelle” (“Knowing how to detect dérives sectaires in professional training”), the MIVILUDES asserts:

“Fraud: this offence is one of the property offences most commonly pursued in the framework of proceedings concerning movements of a cult character (…).

The growing pressure of ever more exorbitant financial demands induced by the cost of training courses; this indicator can be assessed by: - a progression of costs in a chain of training courses flowing from one another - a division of the cost between company and “beneficiary” - a lack of visibility in the determination of the prices of training courses in a catalogue of services, notably between basic and contingent training.”

The major media, taking their sources exclusively from the MIVILUDES, are not to be outdone in suggesting that the courses or services offered by the “cults” are a means of extorting funds. Le Figaro, for example, explains that: “The cults have well understood the profits to be drawn from our cult of better living, from our loss of bearings and from our anguish about death”. Following a police raid on a well-being centre suspected of dérives sectaires, the journalistic account in the Dauphiné specifies: “The director of this centre, established since 2007 at Nyons, offered paying courses (between 500 and 600 € a week per person) for people lacking self-confidence”. The association of ideas is subliminal: fragile people lacking confidence in themselves, victims since the police intervened, were therefore swindled out of 500 € for a course that was not worth it.

Without claiming to be a complete inquiry, we made a rapid survey of a few services offered by bodies selected at random in our search, whose services are generally placed in the MIVILUDES’s “cult” column, and compared their price with approved services (see the detail in the Excel file for download).

A day’s “well-being” or “new spirituality” course from bodies saddled with the qualifier “cult-like”, or at the very least considered “at risk”, is commonly offered in the associative milieu at a price varying between 50 and 120 € (the sample average being 86 €). Days of the same nature offered by companies or firms show somewhat higher prices, between 110 and 300 € (average: 183 €).

Staying within offerings centred on the acquisition of knowledge and life skills, one finds bodies approved by the State, such as the firms and associations dispensing the “licence points recovery courses” (average 117 € per day for the points-licence courses). The MIVILUDES’s own course on dérives sectaires is offered at 150 € for the day. In its newsletter no. 150 of June 2011, CICNS had reported a one-day training by the MIVILUDES at 250 €, announced on the INAVEM site. This was then quickly withdrawn from the net.

We then reach an altogether different financial dimension with professional training courses, still in the domains of “knowledge and life skills”. A State body such as the AFPA offers training in this domain (organising one’s time, developing effective communication, etc.) whose average price stands at around 230 €. Private training bodies, still in the same domain, present days at an average price of 600 €.

The financial demand on our sample is therefore six times higher when a course is offered by a professional training body receiving, moreover, financing from the State, the Region and companies (by way of levies paid to collecting bodies approved by the State) than when a course of a similar category is offered by groups and associations designated as liable to dérives sectaires. Even incomplete, this rapid survey ought to give pause.

The MIVILUDES, accustomed to falsifying reality, is probably aware of this gap, which makes non-institutional groups appear little interested in financial profit in comparison with approved institutes. Moreover, the question of a possible fraud is linked to the value accorded to a service by reference to its price and to the quality of the service produced. That value certainly cannot be assessed a priori and negatively simply by qualifying the targeted body as cult-like, when one knows the vagueness and arbitrariness covered by the notion of “dérive sectaire”. A satisfaction survey would be necessary, as well as a precise evaluation of the training’s content. But it is quite obvious that the objective is broader: to prevent by every possible means the spiritual, educational and therapeutic minorities from having a place in the city. In the latest MIVILUDES guide (ibid.), supposed to help purge professional training of the “cancer of the cults” - in the expression of Laurent Wauquiez in his function as Secretary of State for Employment – the MIVILUDES warns purchasers of training of the dangers they run: crimes against the human species, illicit drug trafficking, incitement to suicide, mental manipulation, etc. This rhetoric, so stupidly alarmist that it becomes grotesque, is an incitement to hatred, and to learn more it costs 150 € a day (the cost of a training service by the MIVILUDES).