By JENERALI ULIMWENGU

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After the harrowing reports from the Kenyan coast about mass murder, I went on a search for some understanding of what had happened — again — and why it happens with such frightening frequency.

Why would people (assumed to be thinking human beings) get themselves into a state of mind that renders them so susceptible to do things that are unthinkable to the ordinary mind? And why does it recur so often, and why do we never learn?

On the web, I encountered a man named Ian Haworth, an Englishman who had a few tussles with cults and tried to do something about them. Apparently, Haworth came under the influence of a cult and experienced some of the nefarious doings of such orders before coming out and taking measures to counteract them.

Having emigrated to Canada from his native England, he formed an organisation to deal with what he saw as the scourge of cults and the impact they have on susceptible minds.

Read: Chilling cults that terrified the world

He founded an organisation he called the Cult Information Centre (CIC) and another, Council on Mind Abuse (Coma) and he has written books about cults and their insidious mind-control tactics.

I recommend people to listen to what Haworth has to say, as someone who has been there and back, and who is able to give first-hand testimonies of what he was able to learn.

One thing is for sure, and that is that the commanders (or whatever they call themselves) know that their traffic is harmful and cannot stand scrutiny. They will thus use coercion to make sure that once ensnared, the captives remain trapped.

That is why in many dramas, like this one on the Kenyan coast, the leader does not participate in what he extolls his congregation to do. In court, Paul Mackenzie looked well-fed while his flock were bones-in-skins.

In other instances, if a standoff develops it ends in a shootout wherein the “messiah” perishes in a ball of fire rather than be taken into custody to stand trial and perhaps face economic ruin and social stigma.

There is a whole catalogue of how this end.

What may be at the causational root of this apparent madness could turn out, depending on the circumstances, to be very easy to fathom: Like, for instance, the world is full of idiots, people who, though they will not harm a fly, will not understand that what they are being told is dangerous for them.

This might be that if they give all their gold to the “messiah” they will become rich, or that the “consecrated water” they are sold for a fortune heals 50 ailments.

Read: Ugandan ‘starvation’ cult followers deported from Ethiopia

It is expensive idiocy, which must be placed only a notch lower than dangerous foolishness.

This is my sense: If we lose our money, property and valuable objects through foolish beliefs and a failure to see that we are being conned by our purported saviours, that is stupid, foolish, idiotic, or whatever else you will.

But if through your stupidity or foolishness causes the deaths of people like we saw in Kenya, that is dangerous idiocy; it is criminal stupidity.

Unfortunately, stupidity has not been criminalised in our legal system, though I almost believe that those who are responsible for enforcing foolishness to the extent that it can cause — directly or indirectly — what we witnessed on the Kenyan coast, should be held criminally liable.

Read: The rise of Kenya's Christian cults

Who are these I am talking about? They are as many as they are varied.

The first to come to mind is the education system which, according to Prophet Robert Nesta Marley, has been graduating “thieves and murderers...” who are busy “building church and university... deceiving the people continually…” (Babylon System)

After that come our politicians, administrators and law enforcement agencies. It is hardly credible that such people flew under the radar all the time till those children were buried.

Mackenzie’s activities were known because he proclaimed his “powers” openly. But, because he was acting within a society rife with idiocy, corruption and nonchalance, he was left free to peddle his dangerous mental poison.

In a central role, we all abet these malefactors. The brain-numbing ideologies and beliefs we are being fed should be easy to discern and to call out.

But, because we have allowed ourselves to sink into non-thinking and into extreme forms of intellectual lethargy – never daring to question anything we are told by those with power over us – when they tell us to go to hell, literally, we ask how to get there.

I have often wondered why our law enforcement agencies are all over the place chasing youngsters lighting up their “spliffs” and not apprehending these “messiahs” claiming to make poor people rich and dead ones alive.

These latter are the real criminals, because what they do is market fallacies that can be easily recognised as such, while the claim that marijuana destroys the brain has been contradicted by science.

If there is a real potent drug that should be banned, pursued and punished by our authorities, it is the drug offered by people such as we saw on the coast of Kenya — and they are all around us — who sell fantastical stories which help keep our people in mental slavery.

Stop those.