Book Review: Educated: A Memoir by Tara Westover

In 2019, I wrote a review of a book by Amber Scorah titled Leaving the Witness about a woman growing up as a member of a cult-like religion. People in that group were taught to avoid talking to anyone or looking at any source of information that might call into question its belief system. As with most cults, people who broke the rules or questioned orthodoxy were completely shunned by family and friends.

My interest was how people routinely convince themselves of the most outrageous beliefs - ones that could easily be seen as preposterous even if thought about briefly - and hang on to them for dear life in order to avoid an almost unbearable feeling of groundlessness (also called existential groundlessness or anomie). The roots of this are from the biological effects of an evolutionary process called kin selection. In my review I said I thought the author had written the most elegant descriptions of that experience I’d ever read.

Well, Ms. Scorah has met her match in Tara Westover. Furthermore, Westover’s book talks about what happens in a case in which the “cult” consists ONLY of the members of someone’s family of origin. They were ostensibly Mormons, but the vast majority of practitioners of that religion did not subscribe to many of the clearly bizarre ideas of this particular family, especially those of the author’s father.

Westover writes that he may have had bipolar disorder. Of course I have no way of knowing for sure, but the consistency of her descriptions of him argues against this. In true bipolar, the person thinks normally when not in a manic or depressed state, which is usually most of the time. Some of the father’s strange ideas did not seem to be delusions per se but were based on conspiracy theories that are now widely believed. Included were dramatic ideas about the “Illuminati” and an anti-Semitic tirade called the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

Other of his beliefs were even more far out: the public schools were all agents of Satin, so none of the seven children in the family attended public schools. All doctors were all part of this conspiracy, so no one was taken to a hospital. 

Mother always went along with whatever ideas were expressed by the Father, but when alone with the author, she would sometimes seem to indicate that indeed she knew better.

One of the biggest issues for the author was her relationship with her older brother Shawn, who was sometimes hyper-involved with her but at other times physically abusive to her. If she mentioned this to her parents, they did not seem to believe her, so she quickly learned to keep it to herself –sometimes even by telling herself that maybe she had dreamed it or that she was crazy so what had clearly happened was a figment of her imagination.

Strangely, Westover was able to get into BYU despite a paucity of education by studying for the college entrance exams, through books and other recommended sources from people she knew at her church. Most of this reading presumably would have been highly disapproved of by her father. It took her two tries at the test to get the requisite score, but she somehow kept at it. Her father has always said he thought that women should just get married and run a household, but as I will mention later, some of his behavior was inconsistent with that idea.

Once she got to BYU, a Mormon school, almost none of the students had the same belief system she did. They could hardly believe she had never even been to high school. She did not share anything about her unique family experiences. She frequently told herself she was not qualified to be there. Nonetheless, she was able to persist with the encouragement of some of her advisors who saw how bright she was. And she was bright enough to eventually get into highly competitive and prestigious graduate programs at Cambridge University in England, and at Harvard!

She frequently returned home and usually fell back into old family patterns, but something pushed her leave again and again to continue with her “satanic” education.

At school, the feelings and thoughts produced by her sense of groundlessness almost tore her apart, despite her ongoing successes. The way she experienced groundlessness was brilliantly described in a variety of amazing (and rather horrifying) ways throughout the book. Examples: she writes, “It was not that I had done something wrong, but I existed in the wrong way. There was something impure in the fact of my being.” 

When she started to experience her clique at Cambridge as a sort of family, she felt damned by those feelings: “No natural sister prefers a stranger to a brother…and what sort of daughter prefers a stranger to her own father? That feeling became a physical part of me.” Later she had the thought, “It seemed like I made a thousand mistakes, driven a thousand knives into the heart of my own family.”

The blow that stopped her from making frequent return home visits was after, in private e-mails, her mother admitted she should have protected her daughter from Shawn. And then her older sister admitted to her that she had been through many of the same things with Shawn that the author had. Even Shawn’s ex-girlfriend confirmed how he was. Surely now her Dad would believe her. Except in his presence, her mother and her sister started lying again, denying that they had said anything of the sort!

So how was the author able to break through the powerful effects of family dynamics and achieve her educational accomplishments? Again, I have no way of knowing for sure, so I'll speculate based on the available descriptions as well as my psychotherapy experience with other families. I could of course be completely wrong..

I suspect that her parents, despite any insistence otherwise, were both secretly highly conflicted about education, family roles, and religion, so she was getting a mixed message. The author does not tell us anything about her grandparents that might clue us in to where this confusion came from originally, but some of the parents' behavior seemed to scream it out. 

Some examples: as mentioned, father preached about traditional gender roles, and his only other daughter followed them. But somehow, when he had been injured and couldn’t run his business as before, he allowed his wife to develop her own business selling alternative medicines that brought in more money than he’d ever made, and he was supportive of her doing this. Also, when Tara started singing in local shows as a teen, he would always come to hear her sing, and appeared to be as proud as punch.

Mother, while not overtly telling the author to get educated, would often subtly push her into getting on with it – as long as Dad was not around. 

But the mind-blowing fact that seems most in line with my speculation is this: of seven siblings in the author’s family, three kids left the “homestead” and four stayed. The three who left got Ph.D.’s, while the four who stayed didn’t even have high school diplomas! The possible acting out of the ambivalence of this family thusly described in one sentence.

Book Review: Leaving the Witness by Amber Scorah

One of the review quotes on the cover of this amazingly written, disturbing, enthralling, absolutely brilliant work (I could barely put it down) was “part Orwellian groupthink expose.” Although it is also a tragedy and a suspenseful account of preaching in a Communist country that forbid foreigners from doing just that, for purposes of this blog, I will focus on the groupthink part. I am currently in the midst of editing a book on groupthink in science, and clearly my model of self destructive behavior sees it as a sacrifice to one’s kin group rather than as a selfish act (Selfish self-destructiveness? Only if all such people had the IQ of a kumquat).

The book tells the story of growing up in a cult, in which people were strongly discouraged from talking to anyone or looking at any source of information that might call into question its belief system. Going to college was forbidden. People went to meetings several times a week where the idea that Armageddon was about to happen at any minute was constantly presented, along with the idea that only the true believers would be saved. 

People who broke the rules or questioned orthodoxy were “disfellowshipped.” This meant that they were completely shunned by all family and friends, although they were allowed to sit in the back of the meeting halls, unacknowledged, to be further indoctrinated with the propaganda in hope that eventually they would be accepted back into the fold— after a couple of years of this treatment.

Scorah recounts going to China to surreptitiously preach the cult’s gospel. Once there, she found that there were many fewer group members around than she had been used to, and she credits that fact with how she came to be exposed to other ways of understanding the universe. This in turn led her to start questioning the group’s theology and its claim to have a monopoly on the one true religion. She had to have an above-ground job, and took one working on a podcast about China. One listener began writing to her and helped her to see how badly she had been indoctrinated.

As she started to engage in critical thinking, her entire family then acted as if she did not exist (with one major exception — her sister. Might the sister now be serving in the role of switchboard?). There has been no contact with them.

But was this the whole story? I think not. One has to ask the question: why would the author be the one person who was able to start questioning the groupthink—even with the realistic fear of being exiled hanging over her head— when the vast majority of her fellow preachers in China did not fall into this trap? Although it’s impossible to prove on the basis of what is written about a family in a book, the author’s description of her family certainly leads one to suspect the usual culprit in such scenarios: family dynamics and shared intrapsychic conflict with ambivalence.

In fact, her family was not monolithic in its beliefs in the cult, although they professed to be. Neither of her parents went to meetings more than yearly, and would not explain to the maternal grandmother— who was not born into the cult—why that was. Scorah’s father was an alcoholic and her parents eventually divorced, both huge no-no’s in the cult.  The grandmother also seemed to take great joy in providing the “benefits” of the cult to the author when Scorah was growing up. 

Together this all sounds like there was strong ambivalence about the cult’s beliefs within the family, with her parents acting it out. They may have given up their daughter—who received very little attention from them according to her own descriptions—to the grandmother as a gift, in order so that she could make up for grandma's failure to properly indoctrinate the mother.

Furthermore, grandma’s favorite child, the mother’s brother – I repeat, grandma’s favorite child—left the fold and then proved the folly in doing so by getting into drugs. The family predicted that he would eventually end up in jail, and of course this is exactly what came to pass! This sound exactly like the dynamics I write about in describing the role of the black sheep.

So perhaps (and I really think it’s nearly certain) the author had picked up on the family ambivalence over the cult and its rules. This may have been why she had been attracted to preaching in a far away, forbidding place all along, where she would no long be subject to constant drumming in her ear about the group’s orthodoxy.

Another interesting aspect of groupthink that the author writes about - with the most elegant descriptions of it that I’ve ever read -  is existential groundlessness. This is the tremendously aversive feeling one gets when one breaks the rules or questions the mythology of one’s kin group or social group:

“But if I didn’t believe, my life would be over. I was paralyzed, because there was no answer to this problem. The stakes are too high to do anything.” (p. 171).

“This world was the only one I had ever been a part of, and I didn’t know who I was without it.” (p. 200).

“Nothing was as I had thought it was. And there was nowhere to go back to; I couldn’t, because it was a dream, it was all a story, all of my life was made up, and I had awoken to this concrete.”

That last quote illustrates yet something else about groupthink in the modern world: willful blindness. Throughout the book Scorah strongly implies that until her awakening she truly believed, without question or doubt, every nonsensical myth that was taught to her by her cult. But later in the book she implies that this was not really the complete truth. For example, on p. 231, she lets on that a part of her knew the gig: “We policed ourselves to sustain our nirvana. We shared a willful blindness disguised as innocence and purity…but it takes a great deal of mental effort to hide from what one sees, whether that effort is subconscious or purposeful…That once I decided to believe, I believed, no matter what doubts came…I had been in ‘the truth’ because I was afraid of the truth.”