If you're going to wreak some serious harm on the world one of the more important things you'll need to do is control people. However, this is not easy to do because people are built with all kinds of safeguards against such control. So a would-be controller-of-others, needs to find various ways around these trouble spots.

If you're planning to use this control for evil (and that goal seems inevitable to all those who despise free will in others) one of the biggest problems is that the human mind tends to reason.

Why is this a problem? As maximal leader, your goal is to install a false mental model in the heads of your followers, one which doesn't correspond to reality, but rather is intended to suit your ultimate goals. Naturally, since you are installing an untruth in their head, you need to keep them from realizing this. Too much thought will cause them to notice areas where your preferred mental model runs into contradictions, or fails to mesh with the reality they can access through their five senses. Morever, some annoying good-hearted soul will come along and attempt to free them from your clutches.

So the best thing to do is to break down their reliance on this rational thought, which, if left unchecked, can bring them "home" to reality -- NOT the place you want them to be, mentally.

So I'm not suprised to read comments like this from those getting involved with Magik, Gnosticism, or various New Age / Eastern philosophies:

Correct me if I’m wrong, but one of the common threads I keep seeing among the advocates of ritual magic/k is that part of the point of rituals is to bypass your rational mind. Besides rituals, people tend to throw into this same category a variety of other experiences, such as: drugs, trance, drumming, etc. But the thing I’m finding is that one of the best ways to really move past total rationalism in everyday ordinary states of consciousness if through a radical devotion to questioning.

Righto! I've met such people, and I feel great sorrow for them. Somehow, they've been told that "questioning" on it's own is a virtue, but also somehow seem to have been instilled with the belief that there are no such thing as "answers".

It's as if someone were told that "thirst" was a virtue, but also told there was no such thing as water! What good is a thirst for something which does not exist? How can you "evolve" to a "higher" level if you simultaneously deny the concept of "up"?

They wish to ask question after question, and are left understanding (correctly, I might add) that all we start with are unprovable assumptions. But they part where they get lost is by missing this: there is an external reality we can test our assumptions against, to choose those which are "truer" (e.g. correlate more closely with our experiences) and reject those beliefs which cause us or others short- or long-term harm.

This is why the same movements also try to instill in people the belief that our external reality itself is simply an illusion: reason + experience = truth. You have to cut off both those annoying sources of disconfirming data, so the twin foundations of common sense and connection with the external world are both attacked.

The result I have experienced is a person who can't focus on any topic long enough to think it through, but uses, instead, one of the many mechanisms they have installed in their head to keep from coming to uncomfortable conclusions: either they question the source of the data (reality), or they question the means by which the argument threatens to convince them (rationality). They cannot focus. As it says in the bible, they are always "learning", but never able to acknowledge the truth. [1]

If you wonder if there's a purpose behind all this, it's easy to see what it would be: control. So it's not surprising that many have documented how profoundly authoritarian/totalitarian these movements tend to be, especially when you look into those which profess a grand "plan" for the world. They often have visions which make Nazi Germany look like child's play.

As indeed it was, in a sense.