Jealous leaders, fearful of losing their power, are generally incompetent. They often realize the danger of having their people build lateral support, because they have difficulty controlling it. A common method of destroying lateral support is to teach people that they chould not listen to "critics." Surprisingly, words like "critic, critics, criticize," etc., do not appear anywhere in the King James Version, and therefor, there is no Biblical definition of these words. Therefor, I'll give my own definition of a critic: "a person who criticizes frequently, whose first response to any situation is to criticize without hearing all the facts."If you have lateral support, and these people are helping you, and suddenly they all start urging you to get out of a certain organization, they are not critics. The Bible does warn against "scorners," and a person who goes around ridiculing others should not be part of your lateral support. But a person who goes around helping people, who believes that you are in an abusive situation, is not a critic.