The Myth of Choice_ Personal Responsibility in a World of Limits - Kent Greenfield [48]
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Given the way we are socialized to obey by our parents and schools, and seeing the many costs we must bear when we disobey, it is no surprise that the urge to play by the rules is so strong. Indeed, the tendency is so strong that we often obey even to our detriment.
In October 2009, self-help guru James Arthur Ray hosted an event in Sedona, Arizona, which he entitled “spiritual warrior” training. In his early 50s, tan, and ruggedly handsome, Ray has quite a following. He describes himself as a “catalyst for personal transformation.”12 He has appeared on Oprah and Larry King, and his book Harmonic Wealth: The Secret of Attracting the Life You Want is a best seller. He stars in countless self-help seminars around the country, speaking to thousands of people who pay to hear his motivational message of self-empowerment. The business magazine Inc. named Ray’s company one of the nation’s fastest growing, with revenues approaching $10 million.
For the Spiritual Warrior event, fifty or so participants paid almost $10,000 to spend five days learning from Ray. The culmination of the training was a “vision quest” in which the “warriors” were to stay alone in the desert without water or food for thirty-six hours, followed by a return to camp for a two-hour “purge” in a sweat lodge. The sweat lodge, about 24 feet wide and 4 1/2 feet tall, was “a makeshift structure covered with blankets and plastic and heated with fiery rocks” vaguely modeled after similar structures used in some Native American religious ceremonies.13
There was space—just barely—for the fifty “warriors” to squeeze in around a fire pit, kept hot by fresh coals brought in by Ray’s assistants over the two hours. Ray sat beside the tent flap, keeping it sealed.
What happened next is a perfect case study of the power of authority.
About halfway through the ceremony, some of the participants started to become ill from heat and dehydration. Ray urged them to press on. The heat grew more and more oppressive. A man named James Shore, a forty-year-old from Milwaukee, tried to lift up one of the walls of the lodge to allow fresh air to circulate, but Ray chastised him, saying he was being “sacrilegious.” Some people vomited. Ray explained that vomiting was good for them, and that it was part of the purging process. Others started to pass out. James Shore dragged out a woman who had fallen unconscious, but he returned. As people became more distressed, Ray repeatedly told participants, “You are not going to die. You might think you are, but you’re not going to die.”14
A few people struggled out, but most stayed. “There were people throwing up everywhere,” said one participant. Ray hovered by the door, intimidating people if they tried to leave. “Play full on” was his catch-phrase. “You have to go through this barrier.” One man pushed his way out of the lodge, thinking he was having a heart attack and was about to die. According to reports, Ray did not summon medical help and instead commented that “it’s a good day to die.”15
At the end of the two-hour ordeal, several of the participants were indeed near death. One of them was James Shore. Another was a thirty-eight-year-old woman from New York named Kirby Brown. Both died later that evening. A third, Liz Neuman of Minnesota, forty-eight, was taken to a hospital, where she fell into a coma and died a few days later. In all, almost half of the participants ended up in the hospital, suffering from injuries as severe as scorched lungs and organ failure.
What happened? Why did people stay in the lodge, risking their health and even their lives? Any one of them could have left at any time—just as Milgram’s teachers could have done. Ray “highly encouraged” them to stay, but he did not exert physical force. The police report simply explains: “Participants thought highly of James Ray and didn