LAS VEGAS, NV—A prominent team of researchers at Baywatch University in Santa Barbara, California, composed of sociologists, philosophers, psychologists and theologians, has spent the last several years interviewing thousands of people - both happy and unhappy - in an attempt to discover what really helps people to find the happiness that we all are searching for. They released the results of their research at the recent International Conference on Happiness, held in Las Vegas, Nevada.
The conference theme was "Be Happy! Or Else!" The search for happiness is an important part of our human existence. That search is often frustrating, however, leading instead to unhappiness when we search in the wrong way or in the wrong places: thus the importance of the Baywatch findings.
What surprised most conference-goers - and, as they admitted, the researchers themselves - was what appeared to be the most certain source of happiness among those they interviewed. It was not anything that most people assume might bring happiness: love, money, power, free time, family, or anything similar. No, the most consistently happy people, and with the highest degree of happiness, were members of cults. Not just any cults, of course. Those in political cults were usually among the most UNhappy people, since that kind of cult is usually fighting for some kind of political power which is always beyond their reach, leading to constant despair and frustration. It is rather the members of religious cults who seem to have found the key to happiness.
The team was able to interview members of several hundred religious cults in the United States and Canada, ranging in size from those with only fifty to a hundred members, to larger cults with over a thousand members and at more than one location.
What is it, you may be asking, that makes cult members so happy? One member of the Angels on Earth group, at their compound in the sand hills of Nebraska, put it this way: "Since becoming an Angel, I don't have any worries! Everything is taken care of - I don't have to do any thinking or planning. I just do what the Archangel [their leader] tells me to do, and I can sleep peacefully every night."
The cults where the members were happiest seemed to be those that removed the causes of unhappiness by doing all the problem-solving, planning, and thinking for their members. The only unhappy members were those that became even partly unwilling to accept without question what the cult leaders told them.
"Every detail, every little action every day, I know how to do it, I know how God wants me to act: which foot should go first when I get out of bed, how many glasses of water He wants me to drink - it's wonderful!" commented Amy Marschall, 32, of the Right Path cult in Manitoba.
Most such cults also provide happiness by outlining what the members can expect in the future, both in this life and in the hereafter. The more a cult can promise, the happier its members become. Members of the Nameless Cult (a title given by the research team because the cult refuses to accept any name) are happy because they, too, are nameless.
One member (cited in the research as "Nameless 7") commented: "It's so wonderful to have abandoned my name and my former identity! It's what the Buddha was preaching: losing your self in the All. But we are doing it right here in Pasadena!" Happiness, of course, like anything desirable, comes at a price. Most of these happy cult members have given up their former lives, their homes, their friends. Their lives are devoted entirely to living in their cult. But they claim that they are, indeed, happy. Most are always smiling. In the Happy Elect cult in El Centro, California, it is actually required that members always wear a smile. Except when sleeping.