Manos Disciple Re: Manos Complainant — “She’s the only one who’s going to be hurt.”

On October 30th, IYNAUS announced the opening of an independent investigation into allegations of sexual misconduct made against Manouso Manos. “The independent investigation will not be limited to Ann West’s complaint. It will include other allegations covering the time period from January 1, 1992 to the present.” West’s complaint was dismissed in September, but many members felt the investigation was compromised by conflicts of interest.

IYNAUS has not suspended Manos pending the outcome of the investigation of multiple allegations, nor for making what was most likely a deceptive statement to the Ethics Committee that initially cleared him. He continues to teach.

One staunch supporter — a seemingly popular middle-aged male yoga teacher  — went to a Manos event over the past weekend, and then took to Facebook to harass and smear the complainants:

It’s rare to see two paragraphs express the black-and-white psychological splitting traits of Yogaland so acutely.

Paragraph #1 asserts that the charismatic teacher is all-good, using typically grandiose claims. (It’s never enough to say “You know there’s something about him I just like.”)

Cue paragraph #2, which must paint his detractors as contemptible.

Then — out of shame? Conviction? — the pious ejaculation of the Lord’s name seems to sweep everything away with a non-dual Cheshire grin.

It’s a familiar formula:

1. “[Idealization of strongman.]”
2. “I hate libtards!”
3. “In Jesus’ name!”

The sycophantic, victim-blaming misogyny in this post isn’t new either. Iyengar himself and many others going all the back to 1990 suggested that students were accusing Manos of sexual assault because they were jealous of his skill, or didn’t like or understand his teaching brilliance.

What was new to me was DARVO flip of calling critics of Manos “Carrie Nations”.

Being Canadian, I had to look Carrie Nation up. She was a flamboyant temperance activist from Kansas jailed multiple times in the early 1900s for smashing up saloons with a hatchet after singing hymns to drinkers. She accompanied herself on a squeezebox.

The poster is saying that the assault complainants are comically uptight, hyper-religious rubes who want to deny people’s freedom for the purposes of self-promotion.

Projection much?

It’s notable that Nation was a suffragist, and opened a battered women’s shelter.

In the comment thread, the poster doubles down on the misogyny. Accusers are “shriveled biddies” on a “Witch Hunt”. One commenter wonders about comparing Manos to Kavanaugh.

The poster replies: “unlike the Supreme Court thing, the claims made by this new accuser can be shot to pieces and already have been. She’s the only one who’s going to be hurt.”

The poster’s vague implication of inside knowledge — going so far as to 1) falsely suggest that there’s already been a determination and to 2) predict the complainant’s downfall — is an intimidation tactic. It also rhymes with the in-group’s currency: supposed insider knowledge of Manos’s true character. Because the poster is certain about Manos, he must be certain about those who register complaints against him.

The complainant (whoever she is) is not going to be hurt. She has been hurt already, not only by whatever happened, but by the process of starting to speak about it. The poster invites followers to participate in his mockery on social media. He’s not tolerating objections. I saw the post because I was tagged by a colleague. When I clicked through, my colleague’s comment had been deleted.

The fact that we don’t know the name of the woman the poster is referring to means that the mockery is generalized to anybody who would bring a complaint. The message of the post is: anyone who complaints will be mocked.

Pay close attention to the sentence “She’s the only one who’s going to be hurt.”

Four things about this:

1. One can almost hear the bloodlust in it.
2. It’s false. Manos is under siege, if not by IYNAUS then certainly in the court of people who identify with Iyengar practice.
3. The poster’s aspirational value is that Manos remains not only an expert in the “innermost workings of the hatha yoga of India”, but also invulnerable, a key feature of the “traumatized narcissist”, as described by Daniel Shaw.(1)
4. The poster’s own vulnerability to an accusation against the object of his devotion is disowned. Both the poster and Manos must emerge from this unscathed. The complaints must therefore be erased, and the complainants punished.

About #4: the identification of the poster with Manos points to a structural dynamic at play that’s well-described in the cult literature. Researchers Lalich and Landau write that “Leaders and members alike are locked into what I call a ‘bounded reality’— that is, a self-sealing social system in which every aspect and every activity reconfirms the validity of the system. There is no place for disconfirming information or other ways of thinking or being.”(2)

Thus: the brilliance of Manos’s workshop performance confirms the humiliation of his complainants. It erases the fact-checked feature article that broke the story — and almost the community — in 1991.

The workshop didn’t deepen the paradox of a man who may have two different faces. It was proof, to the poster, that only one face — the face that smiles on him — can exist.

I don’t know the poster. His social media persona shows pride in rebellious Boomerhood, a surfer, a political cynic, a free spirit. Using cult analysis here to describe a set of behaviours does is not intended to, and cannot, label him as a cult member. This isn’t about him.

What matters is how common these dynamics can be, how they can constellate in one if not other areas of individual lives. One can be an independent free thinker in countless ways, but an abusive shill where it really counts: where one’s private devotion intersects with one’s professional legitimacy.

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(1) “This narcissist in real life, a myth in his own mind, is so well defended against his developmental trauma, so skillful a disavower of the dependency and inadequacy that is so shameful to him, that he creates a delusional world in which he is a superior being in need of nothing he cannot provide for himself. To remain persuaded of his own perfection, he uses significant others whom he can subjugate. These spouses, siblings, children, or followers of the inflated narcissist strive anxiously to be what the narcissist wants them to be, for fear of being banished from his exalted presence. He is compelled to use those who depend on him to serve as hosts for his own disavowed and projected dependency, which for him signifies profound inadequacy and is laden with shame and humiliation. To the extent that he succeeds in keeping inadequacy and dependency external, he can sustain in his internal world his delusions of shame-free, self-sufficient superiority.” — Shaw, Daniel. Traumatic Narcissism: Relational systems of subjugation. New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2014. loc. 565

(2) Lalich, Janja, and Madeleine Landau. Tobias. Take Back Your Life: Recovering from Cults and Abusive Relationships. Bay Tree Pub. 2006.Loc. 651-689.