- Hey everyone and welcome to Fig 1.

Today we're gonna talk about cults specifically,

why they seem to thrive here in America,

and for those of us not in cults, why are we

so obsessed with them?

If you flip through any streaming platform lately,

you've probably seen that there's an endless supply

of cult documentaries and podcasts.

And as these stories become more mainstream,

people are asking what actually is a cult?

We're gonna talk about SoulCycle.

This group sounds like a cult, but is it really?

I've consumed a lot of this media over the years,

and so many of their storylines follow the same

true crime formula.

There's usually drugs, abuse,

and always some charismatic but corrupt leader.

But I always have one thought while I'm watching.

How could anyone fall for this?

The scam seems so obvious,

but what if I told you that this misses something

fundamental about cults and why people join them?

- Nobody joins a cult. They join a good thing.

- Professor Omi Saha has never been in a cult,

but they've been studying their rise in our popular

culture for years.

It'd be easy to think that we're consuming all this cult

media because it's so salacious

that some algorithm keeps telling TV studios to make more

and more, but pal thinks it's something else

and they predict that cults are gonna become much more

popular, not on Netflix, but in real life.

- Thanks so much. I'm really delighted to be here

and to talk to you about our cult obsession

and the ways in which it's radically changing society.

So here's my first question to you.

How do we go from

this to this?

- What would it take you to join a cult?

Because for me, I don't,

I don't think it would be very much.

I went to Catholic school and I was in a frat

in college. So you know

- That TikTok video actually garnered thousands of responses

of people who identified the most unbelievably mundane,

sometimes as small as snacks, object

or thing that would get them to join a cult.

Many of them actually said, really, if you think about it,

I'm already in a cult that we will in

about 60 years move from cults

as an object of terror

and social repression to a place

where thousands are willing to ow what it would take

for them to join a cult

and tens of millions of people tune in to watch

and learn about cults is remarkable.

And part of

what I am particularly interested in in my research

and in my teaching is trying to understand, of course,

why we're fascinated by cults.

What's driving this obsession that we seem to have

and why it is we're so uninterested in being talked out

of our obsession with cults.

The question of what we are missing in our daily lives

that cults offer us

so thoroughly is actually the matter of longing

for I think tens of millions of Americans.

People join cults for all sorts of reasons,

some profoundly familiar to us to find belonging

and meaning more consummate than they could imagine

elsewhere, to have structure, to know God,

to simply be taken out of their normal everyday lives.

The truth is that when we agree

to live within the strict confines of what we think of

as the normative, it's almost unbearable for us

to see people living beyond our psychic means doing things

that we didn't know it was possible to do, acting in ways

that we were sure would be catastrophic.

Part of why we watch cults is

to see the ways in which people act out desires

that we ourselves cannot fully feel

or enact in our own lives.

So to understand this phenomenon, I think we need

to think about where we started, what a cult is,

what a cult has become, and how we've changed along the way.

So let's start as a good English professor always should

with definitions.

What is a cult? Well,

if you ask the Oxford English dictionary, it will tell you

that a cult is a particular form

or system of religious worship

or veneration, especially as expressed in a ceremony

or ritual directed towards a specified figure or object.

It comes from the same first Latin

and then French roots for care, labor,

cultivation, and culture.

But when we use the word cult in our everyday lexicon,

that is clearly not what we mean.

A system of veneration for someone like say Jesus

or the Punta is not

what we mean when we think we're gonna tune in

for 12 episodes and do a deep dive.

What we mean are UFO believers

and Doomsday Messiahs, sex communes

and yoga scandals.

Our sense of cult is not just a word from a dictionary,

but it is in fact an entire narrative structure

that describes a group

or community that makes us realize what the limits

of social approval are

and what is exactly outside those limits.

We might think of cults usefully in relation to

what they're often not.

That is religion.

Religion, again, quite blandly according

to the Stanford encyclopedia philosophy, is a taxon

or a taxonomy for a set of social practices,

of which the paradigmatic examples are what we think of

as the world religions, Judaism, Christianity, Islam,

Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism.

It's a way that we give names to socially recognized

and accepted practices and beliefs.

That is religion is a matter of the story we tell about it,

that when we say we understand

that your rituals are oriented to a thing that you see

as God, we are saying that we have a social appreciation for

what you do.

When we say your rituals are directed towards a conman

or an absent fantasy, we also produce a social understanding

of what that is, and cults are an effect of

that social understanding.

Cults are not a thing so much as a narrative, a story

that is unleashed sometimes unwittingly.

The minute we hear the word, when we hear the word,

we think immediately one, some spectacular, remarkable,

seemingly too good to be true thing.

Usually with a charismatic leader

who imagines themselves a messiah

or a truths sayer, people join this group.

They are drawn in for reasons that may be sort of familiar,

but are pulled more intensely than we can

imagine for ourselves.

When they enter this community, something happens to them,

they're fundamentally transformed,

maybe even rendered unrecognizable.

They will claim to have found God, to experience bliss,

to be saved, to be radically transformed

For those people on the outside,

they're changed in other far less

celebratory ways.

Then we believe that in a cult there has

to be a moment at which our social recognition of

what it is not, and the internal social recognition of

what it is comes into a kind of conflict

that is people are gonna have to choose, is this a thing

that is worth believing in or not?

And this crisis, there will be the advent

of the true believer

and then there will be people who leave sometimes

of their own accord, sometimes by force thereafter.

Usually there's an additional conflict in which the

cult is brought down.

There's some spectacular scandal.

That's the part we're most attuned to

because if you've watched any of the dozens of documentaries

or listen to the podcast, you know

that they almost all begin at the end.

They all start at the moment.

That is the object lesson against believing

or wanting too much.

It has to be the mass suicide, the disrobing of the Messiah

and the revelation that they're a con man.

Followers who are so grief stricken

but are renouncing their faith.

The story of the cult has to start at the end so we know

how we're supposed to feel about

everything that comes after.

So every good seemingly miraculous thing, everything

that seems so impossible in our safe lives

that we might be drawn to

otherwise we can only then see through the prism

of the catastrophe to come.

This suggests that the job of these narratives is

to inoculate us against the power of these extreme beliefs,

but I think actually something else is happening.

We have to think about cults, their emergence, their rise,

and their transformation, not just as a matter of narrative

or a matter of semantics,

but also as a matter of history and culture.

Our common conception

of cult really has a particular historical birth.

It is of the countercultural movement.

The 1960s

and seventies saw this boom of radical alternatives

of thinking and living.

Some of them came in socially recognized ways

through say political protests, the free speech movement,

protests for gay

and lesbian rights, women's rights protests,

anti-war protests.

You also had these cultural movements like Woodstock

and the rise of free love.

This moment was a moment at which we saw this shift

in what a generation of largely young, white,

educated Americans thought it was possible to do

and believe This countercultural moment

bears with it, an anxiety that we have to really understand

to understand cults that is of the Cold War.

But when we talk about cults

and what we fear, one of the things

that we think about is this fear

that people are transformed in such a radical way

that the only way to understand this transformation is

through brainwashing.

The term brainwashing actually is coined in 1950

by a Gonzo journalist

and frankly a CIA asset who describes techniques

of thought control employed by the Chinese Communist Party,

but it doesn't become a feature of our public discourse.

Until the 1962 film,

the Manchurian candidate in which you have POWs

who are returned seemingly the same

and yet have been programmed

by their communist handlers to be sleeper agents,

this fear that you might return soldiers

who in their body look the same,

but their minds have been somehow captured is not

also just a matter of television.

Because from the 19 three on the CIA was desperately

studying techniques of mind control

and persuasion as a way to understand what happens

during war, but also to understand how

to build a more docile and accepting public.

This project starts in 1953 actually

with the Korean War arm disagreement in which 21 American

POWs refused to be repatriated.

This caused an enormous crisis.

What is it that happened to these soldiers that caused them

to not wanna come back to America to want

to stay in communist North Korea?

The CIA uses this as a moment to start

what will become a two decade long project called MK Ultra,

studying techniques of what they call brain warfare

at stake In those CIA experiments in the Venturi candidate

and in a kind of public consternation around people

who join cults was about the

future of America.

The rise of communes

and anti-establishment politics actually proved

how close the communist threat was, that it was right there

to invade vulnerable minds, not just any vulnerable minds.

The best minds of the time.

Brainwashing suggests that the only way that people come

to believe impossible things, for example, that the purpose

of life is not entering into the capitalist workforce,

marrying into a heterosexual dyad,

buying a home in private property

and reproducing 2.1 children

who will perfectly reproduce your life

that people would opt out of this vision ever

is hard to imagine, but especially in this moment

of post-war American prosperity.

Here you had America announcing itself in the world

as this new global presence.

We have the rise of an American middle class,

a growing educated populace through the GI Bill.

You have the greatest vision of

what we might call the American dream, seemingly open

to more and more people.

This is the moment at which an American vision

of capitalism should be at its absolute ascendance.

And at that very moment you have again, bright, young,

white, educated people

saying, I prefer not to.

How to not just understand that phenomenon

but rescue these young people and their minds

and the future they represent from a communist threat

becomes actually the matter of

how we understand cults to begin with.

There's maybe no more vivid example

of this than the 1974 case of Patty Hurst, granddaughter

of the publishing magnet, William Randall Hurst,

who was kidnapped from her Berkeley, California apartment

by members of the Symbo Liberation Army,

which was a militant far left group.

As shocking as it was to have

this young Eres kidnapped,

what really captured an American audience were the images

caught on CCTV of her armed

with a automatic weapon wearing a beret

robbing a bank.

It was just terrifying for people to see what seemed

to be this unthinkable transformation

of one of the scions of American capitalism

at Hearst's trial for bank robbery.

Her family's enormous resources were brought

to bear on her defense,

and many mental health experts were brought in

to explain how her mind had been transformed

by her capture by this cult.

No one was more compelling than Margaret Singer, a uc,

Berkeley socio linguist who

actually testified at trial.

Though this would be stricken from the record later,

that if Patty Hearst could be brainwashed

and made to commit crimes

by her captors than anyone's child was at risk

of being made into a low iq,

low affect zombie, that is the threat

that cults represent isn't contained

to any individual group.

It is the possibility

that anyone's bright young child might be

radically transformed, lost.

So there's a pitched battle for the minds

of cult devotees that pins itself to this fantasy

that prior to joining this group,

they were a person whose mind and desire

and will were entirely their own

and entirely socially recognized by everyone around them.

There's this fantasy that the people who joined prior

to being brainwashed were the successful

normal Americans.

And so the project of returning them

to themselves takes on this enormous cultural cachet

and it produces an enormous anxiety

about what happens to people when they go into these groups

and who they might be when they come out.

The reason I point this out is

because it is essential that we start to pull at the threads

of that cult narrative that unfurls so unthinkingly to us

to understand what about it hasn't actually been

compelling enough.

If the purpose of that story is to tell us that cults,

that is groups that disrupt our social equilibrium promise,

what should be outside of the norms that

cults are a thing to be repudiated,

that whatever they offer will never be balanced out

by their cost.

It is very clear that that kind

of social inoculation isn't happening,

and one place in which we might see it's failure is in this

story, the idea that prior to joining people are happy,

successful, and fully themselves.

As we know, not only are most people who join cults,

not necessarily happy and successful

and fully themselves, I dare say none

of us are always happy, successful,

and fully in charge of ourselves.

When we prioritize this fantasy

of a perfect prior moment, we suggest

that leaving a cult should be the thing

that everybody wants.

That what a cult offers is the fantasy.

What if I were to suggest instead, the idea

of this normal satisfying life on the outside is the fantasy

that what drives the cultural zeitgeist

around cults is the recognition that life on the

outside our everyday lives, the choices

that we make in order to survive, to earn a wage to be safe

and secure in the world does not lead to satisfaction

that people go to groups seeking

what is missing in their lives

and when they find it, they're often loathed

to return to the other side.

So we might then have to ask a different question,

not just why do people join cults,

but why should people leave them?

Not to say there aren't good reasons.

Plenty of material harm happens in insular communities

that get called cults.

There's all kinds of exploitation that's possible.

There's real violence.

I'm not here to romanticize the actual bad things

that happen in these groups that often get called cults.

I am here to point out that when we ask people

to leave communities that meet fundamental needs,

if we do not have a way to meet those needs outside,

in fact, if those needs are fundamentally incompatible

with our lives outside, it's a losing battle.

It's a losing battle that's not just about whether

or not someone chooses to leave that cult.

It's a losing battle of our own desire not to be

ever more invested in what a cult might offer,

even if we ourselves weren't going to join.

So this is one way that we might think about this shift in

how we feel about cults.

The ways in which the preeminence

of cults in our cultural imagination now continues

to show us, of course, the tragedy and the hardship

and the scandal and the violence,

but also shows us remarkable forms of belonging

and acceptance and salvation.

Spending all that time with the positives,

the people's true

and fully felt experiences of transformation

and love is compelling.

And in being compelled, we are being changed.

Let's think about why. Here's the truth.

We are not in 1950s America.

This is not the heyday of American prosperity

and hope for the future.

If you ask my students, if you ask a generation

of young people coming of age who are bright

and college educated,

they do not feel themselves the inheritor

of some great American prosperity.

They're beset by climate change crisis

by the absolute decimation of the possibility

of a middle class debt commiseration

a real fear that there is no future for them.

They comfort themselves in a kind of dark humor, a real love

and romance of orcas that capsize yachts

and claims that what we should be doing is eating the rich.

This dark humor is a sign of a fundamental lack

of hope about the future.

These young people who are the best

and the brightest don't even have the promise of the future

of America that was offered

to the countercultural generation to look forward to so

that they might even more deeply invest in the alternate

possibilities offered by cult, even

as they're only on their streaming devices,

can't really come as that much of a surprise to us.

So we are in a moment at which we

as a society are more primed

to think about radical alternatives,

to think about opting out,

to think about giving up on the safety of our everyday lives

and trading it in for something else.

And no moment more clearly showed us this

than the 2020 pandemic lockdown.

It was during this period that many people like me

fell down cult rabbit holes when everyday life

was so disrupted.

That time was no longer on the 60 minute hour,

but maybe was on the Netflix 55 minute episode.

We were looking for all kinds of structure.

We were looking for escape, and we found it.

There was an absolute cottage industry that continues

to boom to this day worth several billion dollars

of documentaries and podcasts

and narratives around cults.

And as we watched, having been removed from our daily lives,

our normal social interactions, so many of the things

that make us who we are, we began

to see the world and its possibilities differently.

I certainly did. I found myself watching, for example, wild,

wild country, a documentary about a yoga guru who goes

and builds a commune in Oregon.

And I found myself absolutely encaptured

by the possibility of communal life forms

of relationships and sociality

and giving up the norm that I would

otherwise step so far away from.

I suddenly began to think made a lot

of sense and I wasn't alone.

I was a part of an enormous cultural shift

in which cults began to be the currency

of our everyday lives.

So it's not as though I was simply watching

and sitting by myself.

I was watching often in concert with other people, timing it

so we would stream at the same time

as though we could be in the same room.

And as we watched, we would talk about

how these seemingly strange ideas didn't seem so strange.

We started to collectively imagine whether we could live

and believe in other ways.

What seemed at first, like escapism began to be a world,

we began to inhabit a world together.

A world in which the thing

that gets called a cult isn't the thing to fear,

but maybe the thing

that opens a door we thought was locked a door, if we walked

through we would be happier and more fulfilled from.

So this shift towards an absolute

immersion in the narrative

of cults in which in the carefully kind

of deliciously paced slowness of six

to 12 episodes, we got to see

so much hear so much

and feel as though we were almost there.

Our own conceptions of the possible began to shift.

Now cults don't emerge out of nowhere

and cult media borrows deeply from the playbook

of true crime.

On the one hand, this idea that you can watch

and become the kind of perfect detective,

you can solve the crime and never be the victim.

Cult documentaries also suggest you can be fully immersed.

Know the secret, feel the transformation

and some of the joy, but not yourself be changed.

The other thing that cult documentaries lean heavily on is

high production values, the world of prestige tv,

which brought serial killers and mobsters

and hateful tycoons into our lives.

Then succession and Dexter

and the Sopranos radically shifted

what it was good culture to love.

Who would've known that?

Talking about how sympathetic a serial killer was

or learning to love a mobster, would the stuff

that you wanted to talk

to your coworkers about at the water cooler, and not just

because you were interested, but

because it was a sign of being a particular kind of person.

Prestige TV primes an audience

that imagines itself very smart, real consumers

of beautiful objects.

And so when cult documentaries borrow from that glossiness,

they do a similar work of inviting us to admit

that what would

otherwise be unthinkable to feel positive about

or identify with can actually be a sign of

how smart we are, how cultured we are.

This shift has meant

that we are no longer who we used to be.

There is no going back

to a moment at which the word cult singularly produces a

kind of social repression.

There is no going back

to a moment at which the word cult is a duck in cover sign.

Cults are at the very least now a recognition

of what is missing in our everyday lives.

They may still be warnings against seeking out too much.

They may still be warnings against the overreaches

of individual power,

but they are no longer the thing from which we can

claim to avert our eyes

by installing them on our streaming devices in our ears,

on our phones, we've installed them in our psyches.

We've become radically transformed in the landscape of

what it's possible to want

and the ends to which we might go to get it.

So I'll ask you,

are you sure you don't wanna join a cult

- Below me?

Thank you so much for that. That was fantastic.

It really challenged a lot

of my views on on cults in the media.

I, as someone

who also dug into cult documentaries at the same time you

did, especially with wild, wild country,

I've thought about this topic a lot too and

and especially around Wawa country,

but there's other ones like Keep Sweet about Warren.

Jeffs, one of the biggest things I sort of see in common

with these cults is that they're all American

is am I just seeing American cult media?

'cause that's where I live and that's what Netflix feeds me

or our cults sort of a particularly American phenomenon.

- That's a great question. I believe

that they're an American phenomenon singularly

American, perhaps not.

But there are really good

and important reasons why cults flourish in America.

One of the reasons is

because of America's twinned relationship to capitalism.

The Birth of America as a settler colonial state is twinned

to the rise of modern capitalism, which means

that an American psyche

and an American state is formed around a set of ideals.

You know, the life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

These are the things that make an American,

what they suggest is

that every American is this individual hyper contained

subject in control

of themselves whose single job it really is to make money

and to give money to the next generation, right?

This is the the American dream.

It's it, it's a unromantic vision of it,

but that fixation on the individual

and private property is I think a particularly

American fixation.

There are countries that have moved in that model,

but almost every other has

a more complicated origin story.

America is a kind of extraordinary example

of the nation state.

And so when you have 250 years

of this as the kind of culture of what you ha what you have

to do and who you have to be, it's not that surprising

that you make room for these radical alternatives.

The other thing that this does is fixation on individualism

and private property is it has kept America.

I think in large part they're not true in all communities.

It's kept America from establishing

what anthropologists would call high social cohesion.

What that basically means is what keeps you in the world.

Americans report higher rates of loneliness

and feelings of isolation than any other country on Earth.

And I think that comes from the fact that

there has never really been a commitment to the production

of a kind of social, a social,

a socially cohesive body.

You have friends, you have neighborhoods, you have families,

but where in many other countries

and cultures, high social cohesion is

what holds you in place.

You have commitments to people that you don't know.

You have a sense of an identity that is larger than you.

And inextricable American individualism is like go be you.

Being you is lonely. Being you is hard sometimes.

And so I think that this really does prime a particular kind

of hunger and the kind of desperation that then communities

that will offer high social cohesion speak to.

You know, it's telling to me that the other place

that we've recently seen a rise in cults,

the two other places are Japan

and Korea, also two recently hyper industrialized countries

that are seeing,

and you know, academics are studying this, a degradation

of social cohesion.

What used to be strong community structures are falling

apart, families are becoming more nuclear, and you have more

and more people who feel

as though they might just fall out of the world.

And that feeling of I could fall out of the world, I think

is for many people ontologically terrifying.

I mean it should be. And so if you have a way

to keep yourself

so firmly in the world, why wouldn't you take it?

- That's interesting. And I guess in,

in thinking about maybe the, in looking at the cult media

that I've consumed

and the bad actors, let's say,

whether they were well intentioned

or forthright at all, it also just sort of pairs with,

I don't know, this like snake oil salesmen opportunity

that is prevalent in American, you know,

history and everything.

Can you sort of elaborate on how you've been able

to tease out the difference between, let's say

a salacious voyeurism of cult media

and a genuine interest in what those cults

or what cults in general have to offer?

You know, 'cause to me sometimes it feels like, you know,

we may have just everybody maybe consumed wild,

wild country Netflix execs were like, Hey,

this is going great, let's just,

let's green light 10 more cult documentaries.

And then we were fed that. And then it becomes this like

loop, you know, where Netflix is sort of driving culture.

Like can you, do you know whether that's the case or not or

and how you separate whether we're genuinely consuming these

with an interest or is it the like sex

and violence leads and cells? You know,

- You have identified,

I think the perfect parallel of these structures.

Part of what I'm really invested in is one de pathologizing

how we think of cults.

Not because I want to romanticize them, but

because I think we need to think about

how people act towards their own desires.

So that for me has meant disaggregating

what a purported leader does and says

and believes from the effect of being

with other believers.

For a believer that is, there are

messiahs and gurus

and leaders who probably have very good intentions,

but we have as least as many examples of people

who understand that they can run a con, right?

These are, these are a common story we have about cults.

Just because they think they're running a con doesn't mean

their effect is a con.

Their believers do feel loved and saved.

People write to me every day

to tell me their stories about having been in groups,

having left them sometimes with enormous grief

because they recognize

that they're walking away from an experience so profound

and fulfilling and they know

that they're not gonna find it again.

What happens to believers is something really different

than what a cult leader wants or thinks.

And so much of our historical interest has

been on the cult leader.

Let's talk about Charles Manson

or Jim Jones, Marshall Applewhite,

that we can only then imagine their followers as Es

as sheeple.

They're there just blindly following this charismatic person

with inordinate power.

I think that that is a misreading,

I think people act towards their own desires.

Sometimes those desires are ugly.

Sometimes those desires are deeply uncomfortable

and disruptive, but people do what they need

and they find enormous meaning.

Similarly, when we watch cult documentaries,

I think we can avow that there is a economic

impulse now to produce cult media.

It just now, like every week there's a new docuseries

that drops, they're gonna start having to invent cults,

I think, to keep feeding this machine.

But what that media ends up representing,

I think does actually often awaken things in the

audience that are real.

It strikes at

places at which maybe we didn't even

know we were vulnerable.

Because I think we've all had that experience

of watching something arms tightly crossed over

us Sure.

That we're shielding ourselves from that strange, weird,

bad thing.

And there's something that you're like, oh, I feel moved.

Oh, that's me. That could have been me. Could that be me?

That experience is real and transformative

and I want to take it seriously.

We would be wrong to just think

that we're passive dupes consuming the culture

we're being fed.

I think actually we're savvier than the media gives us

credit for and people are acting towards desire again

in difficult ways.

- Yeah, interesting. You, it's interesting

that you mentioned getting emails from folks

who have been part of those communities or, or still are.

Can you talk a little bit about like, the prevalence

of cults today and what that looks like?

'cause I think, so still

after this talk, the image that I have in my head is still,

you know, Jonestown, Waco, you know, those kinds of things.

So I'm, I'm hoping to have maybe a different image of it.

- I don't know if, if cults are more prevalent or not.

Every so often someone will ask me how many cults exist

and I, I, I don't know how we would even begin to, to count,

but I do think that

we ha we're in a moment where people see

that radical alternatives are possible again.

And I think the part of the reason that people reach out

to me is because I have a

rather unique cult perspective as people

who are in this field go almost to a person.

And I think of Margaret Singer, my now

posthumous Berkeley colleague as a kind of interesting

ancestor, though we, you know, to this project,

her entire life's work was about,

and she was very committed to this idea

that she was gonna free people from the shackles

of having been programmed and brainwashed by a cult.

And I think that when people hear me say

that I believe that people are

experience extraordinary, transformative things

and that they're moved and that the choice to leave

or stay is not an easy one,

and that they're not crazy or dupes

or in need of repair,

people feel able to then talk about

all the things they seek and where they go seeking them.

So I have lots of people write to me

and say, I was in this group that everyone called a cult.

I left. It was very hard.

And sometimes I'll say, thankfully I've discovered yoga.

So, and you know, it, I, again,

I don't wanna be in the business of diagnosing a cult

or a cultic attachment,

but it is striking to me how often people go from one

insular, highly accepting community to another.

- Can you, you, you gave us a good definition

of cults in the very beginning of your talk,

and I'm just sort of curious to know, like

as the term has become more popularized

and it's blurring in a new direction from what we know

before, can you talk about some of the differences

between or among, let's say a religion

and a populous political movement

and a, a cult, like what are the sociological differences,

but also like, does the government label them differently?

You know,

- Yes.

You know, this is my now ongoing tagline in my work

that there is a single arbiter of religion in America.

And in some ways that becomes the arbiter of a cult, right?

Something that is pushed out of the definition

of religion is often accused of being a cult.

And that arbiter, do you know who it is?

- No. - Who decides what makes a cult in America?

- No, - It's the IRS. Okay.

The Internal Revenue Service is the single organization

that gets to legally determine whether something

as a religion, because churches seek tax exempt

status through the IRS.

So there is this, there is an arbiter

that doesn't really help us understand cults in the world.

And the term is used pretty willy-nilly.

You know, I think a lot of people want

to know if the thing they're looking at is a cult.

And when they ask me that, I usually say two things.

One, if you're asking the question,

you've identified something that has triggered this story

that you have about what a cult is.

So let's try and figure out what

that thing is that started that story.

Is it the charismatic leader?

Is it the followers who seem just absolutely besotted?

Is it the, my inability to have any understanding

of the reality that they inhabit?

Those are often for us keywords of a cult.

For me, it is less important to identify

this or that as a cult than to say

that in groups that take on this name,

there are often lots of dynamics that emerged.

And the one that we really need to keep our eye

to is not the promise of prosperity

or salvation, but material harm.

That is, it's more important to identify when groups,

by virtue of being insular and driven towards a single goal

or following the instructions

of a single charismatic figure.

When those groups make for things like exploitation

and violence, then we need to think about the problem.

If it just makes you feel funny, I am not convinced that

that is enough for us to somehow start

to pathologize.

This is what I mean when I want to,

to move away from the pathology of the cult, is when we are

so quick to say, that's a cult.

It must be bad.

We assume that bad just means not normal.

I think we need to think about bad as being material harm,

as being real risks to people,

not just a risk to what I think someone else should do, or b

- Yeah, yeah.

When I think there's a podcast, and I forget the name of it,

but there's a podcast that talks about like,

is blank a cult?

And it looks at stuff through, you know,

is my Starbucks subscription a cult?

Or is SoulCycle a cult?

Does do those conversations in like the popular media

to you sort of cheapen what it means

to like actually look at what a cult is

and the alternative lifestyle it can, it can offer.

- Well, you know, Amanda Montel has this excellent book

called Cultish in which she identifies

how there's a particular kinda language to

what we call cults, a way of talking about belonging,

but also talking about disbelief.

And her objects include things like SoulCycle, right?

Like how you get people to be hyper invested.

I think this is still part of a long history of trying

to show all the things that are wrong with these groups

that disrupt our social equilibrium.

So when people ask, is that a cult?

Often they're asking,

why can't I live the way I want?

That's a really important question for us

to, to reckon with.

Often the identification

of a cult is this realization that we make all

of these decisions to keep ourselves safe

within normal life.

And when you see someone acting so far outside that

one, I think you wonder why not me?

And two, and this is a, a, a real, I think,

psychological effect.

You want them to suffer, you want something bad to happen.

This is the part of the satisfaction of cult documentaries.

They start with the bad thing. Someone's going to suffer.

You should regret

ever believing you could have it all.

You should regret that moment at which you had this kind

of excess of possibility.

I think we see it in the political arena around things like

what gets called the cult of MAGA

and opponents who desperately want

to see not just the end of a particular kind

of political ascendancy,

but they want to see the broken followers

who say, I was wrong, I was brainwashed.

Take me back.

That perspective is going to produce, I think,

impossible futures.

I see no real future in which

one anyone gets that satisfaction,

but two, where that satisfaction leads to anything good.

I don't think we move to a, a state, let's say,

of higher social cohesion, where fewer people feel that

as though they might fall out of the world if

what we need first to return

to this world is people crawling on their hands

and knees on broken glass

- Pmi.

There's a Discovery channel show called the Garden Cult

or Commune where it sort of looks at people who join.

And I guess maybe it's up to the audience whether,

whether this is a cult or commune.

Can you sort of talk about that

and like, that seems like a very new show

and sort of what that says about our place in,

in the like cult zeitgeist right now?

- Absolutely. You know, it's always nice as an academic

to have the real world supply the validation to a theory.

So for a long time I've been theorizing

that we have been radically changed by our cult obsession

and lo and behold, last year, here comes the Garden cult

or commune on TV proving my point.

So it's remarkable because it is a documentary,

but it's not a cult documentary in the Netflix form,

it's actually a cult documentary Meets Survivor.

It's a reality TV show in which the Garden,

which is an established off grid community, invited

through TikTok people to come and try it out

and themselves be tried out by the community.

And so the series follows six people who travel

to I think rural Tennessee

and see if they wanna join this community.

At the end of the two week trial,

there is a tribal council like in Survivor

and they're kind of invited to stay

or cast out if they don't leave before.

And the question is posed to the contestants whether

or not it's a cult or commune.

Now unsurprisingly, the people who stay, who want

to stay say it's a commune.

The people who leave,

whether they feel they can't live off grid

or there are too many rules

or too few rules, say it's a cult.

What's really interesting to me is the idea that we've moved

to reality TV

and to the game show that there is this

way in which one we assume a kind of fluency with

what a cult is, how to identify it,

but also that people have watched so much cult media

that they think they can kind of game the system.

And I will say, not to spoil it for, for viewers,

I hope you go and watch it.

What actually unfolds is so much more complicated.

It really becomes a kind of microcosm

of society in unexpected ways.

And I found it incredibly moving though I will admit,

I was chilled by the idea that there'll be a season two,

that there's something that's really shifted in our story

about cults, about what we might do, whether

or not we leave our houses to go try them out.

That I think proves that the landscape

beneath our feet has drastically changed.

- Do you see it as a, as like a warning sign that that,

you know, as you referenced earlier in your talk, sort

of the disaffected nature of young college kids

and trending towards, you know, more and more loneliness

and isolation in the United States.

Like are we gonna see an uptick in these alternative

communities, let's say?

- I, I would guess that we will see them.

I mean, I very routinely get emails

and phone calls from journalists

who are investigating a thing that they want to know.

One, is it a cult? And will I tell them whether

or not it is a cult?

And two, whether

or not this is a part of a broader systemic move.

I think it is. I think that part of

what post pandemic life,

the hyper partisanship,

the growing fascism have wrought is people

now saying, I don't like living this way.

And people willing to risk those lives

to find something else.

It's also worth pointing out how many of these visions are

prepper communes

or kind of tech utopia style communal living.

So you have on the one hand the promise

of some catastrophic end

that some people are particularly well equipped to survive.

Or the technocratic vision that a small group

of people will build a better world as the rest of it burns.

Neither of those seems to me, the solution I think

of those is a systematic way

to think about things like disaffection and loneliness

and absolute pessimism.

So I'm not going to endorse them as as the solution,

but I do think it's not a coincidence.

And I think that people are compelled

and we will see more people willing to step out of the norm

as the norm continues

to narrow in its ability to give us what we need.

- Yeah. Oh man, those feel like such a

shitty 21st century response to like

counterculture free love movements.

You know?

- You know, I have hope though.

I will say I teach, I teach this cults class

and I've had thousands of students

and one of the things they do at the end of the class,

which you may know, is they work in these intentional

communities all semester and then they design one at the end

and they're terrifyingly good.

They're terrifying in how well they're able to identify

unmet needs in their own lives.

And to imagine truly compelling solutions.

There are actually terrifying versions of,

but I will say that what I am constantly reminded of

as you know, they present them, is

that our students have a remarkable capacity

to eshoo standard given truths and to build better paths.

And I think frankly, my students are kinder

and more compassionate

and more committed to one another than I've ever seen.

So I think there is actually a kind

of lived alternative formed in this generation of,

of young thinkers.

I think that they're not gonna necessarily all follow the

tech utopia or garden model,

and I hope that they actually enact more

radical and egalitarian visions

that they might find livable

and a place where they can thrive.