Did anyone else watch Four Corners on Monday night? We were treated to an inside look at Michael, aka Wayne Bent, a self-proclaimed Messiah.

On the program he claimed to be the Son of God himself, though on his website [which you may have to access using the Wayback machine, but you may get directed there automatically, via Google], he modified this a little and claimed he wasn’t the only incarnation.

It is hard to understand how people were taken in by him.

Mr Bent has even duped his own son into giving him his wife.

Strange days indeed.

Wow! That really is Bent.

I caught the end of it, it looked fascinating so I recorded the repeat the next night which I haven’t watched as yet. Hearing Bent describe himself as divinity and humanity simply made my blood boil at how dishonouring to God it was.

The other thing that struck me was his poor son, how haunted and unhappy he looked. A man it seems who didn’t look like his conscience was sitting really well with him.

Benjamin Nathan Pakula - 14 August 2008 05:27 PM

Wow! That really is Bent.

Bent ? How about ‘totally twisted’ ?

It’s now available online :

4 Corners on iView :

You can now watch Monday’s 4 Corners"The End of the World Cult” on the ABC’s internet television website iView. The program will be available online for two weeks. For use with high speed internet connections only.

4 corners

The show is also available on other sites. The ABC re released a doco done by someone else. I found it the other day after looking up the cult name on the 4corners site and googling it..

As for how he did it. Same well worn paths as many other cult leaders I’d suspect. First he convinces people that he is truly a man of god. The following bolsters his schism. Then he increases his hold. Note how he devalues education. How the followers openly admit that he does their thinking for them. He divides the world into “Us” & “Them”. The location makes this effective. I’d imagine that the kids especially really consider the world outside to be insubstantial. Even the young bloke with the models of the planets demonstrated this. His exercise minimised the Earth. The group they belong to become “almost everyone” with the bad ones mostly being the heretics who leave and the people in the church they schismed from.
That just leaves his elevated status.
All along these guys are following a man of god. Now they are rmoved from the world and they don’t think independently. he tells them he is Messiah. Who else is there to believe? They study yhe bible and he tells them how to do that.
The pain he caused those men whose wives he slept with, including his son’s, was apparent. But they looked to him for consolation.
The kids are just sitting ducks for his lechery and manipulation.

I ended up incredibly angry at his schemes.
He openly used embedded commands and powerful presuppositions. Hypnotic techniques that don’t require trances. Thing is, the followers looked entranced most of the time.
That becomes, I guess, more likely once he has also issued pain to them. Going into an airheaded blissful state of adoration would have to be better than facing the evil and pain he has caused.

What a bastard!

I, too, was angry and disturbed by the doco.

Owen - I have to agree that most of the followers - esp the two female “witnesses” looked zonked out of their brains. But I would have thought that a cult leader would need to be charismatic and attractive to succeed.  “Michael” just struck me as an unimpressive weed. Would I think differently if I met him in person, or does his attraction only work on some kinds of people?  If so, what kinds?

Does their rather creepy habit of staring meaningfully into each others eyes have hypnotic overtones?

I’m just puzzled as to how it all works.

To answer the question, find someone you like and just stare into their eyes. The rest of the world tends to drift away.
That’s a pretty good definition of trance. Lovers are, as they say “entranced” and for good reason.

As for his being an unattractive weed… I suspect his control over the group was built incrementally. I doubt there has been a huge influx into the group since their schism from the Addies.

I remember a doco on the Orange people in the 1980s and the absolute adulation they had for their guru, the Bagwan (however it is spelt anyway). He would say the lamest remark and his followers would explode with laughter rather like the two young girls with “Michael” on 4C.  The Bagwan also was very glassy eyed and his followers seemed quite similar to me.

In so far as Wayne Bent’s ordinary looks, think of Jim Jones. He looked like a CIA agent with his sunglasses, sallow skin and polyester leisure suits. Yet he had a weird sexual hold over many women and men in that cult. There is something in their personality that makes up for looking like a malnourished office clerk.

Hmmm. . . .

I remember reading an account some years ago of George Joseph Smith - the Brides in the Bath murderer.

It was said that he had little or no effect on men - to most men he was completely unmemorable.  Women, however, either found him hypnotically attractive or felt a deep suspicion and unease in his company.

Smith was able to meet, woo, marry, defraud and murder his victims in a very short space of time - sometimes as little as a week.

A similar psychology perhaps?

From what I saw of the documentary, Bent displays two of the three of the abuses that a cult leader may display:
1) Gradual accretion of power and meglomania. They seek to totally control the lives of their followers and their claims about their spiritual status gradually increase - until their words are the same as God’s. Isolating your followers from the outside world is a typical characteristic in this process.
2) Sexual abuse. They use their position of power to sexually abuse their followers. Some of them, like Bent and Muhammad (Sura 33:37-38) justify their actions (in Muhammad’s case, taking his adopted son Zaid’s wife for himself) on the grounds that God told me to do it.
3) Financial corruption. Think of the Moonies or the Orange people. The leader lives in luxury, often while their followers live in near poverty. This appears to be the only abuse that Bent hasn’t committed.