Cults

A cult is a broad term representing a wide variety of concepts:

  1. A religion someone regards as unorthodox or spurious.
  2. Great devotion to a person, idea, object, movement, or work.
  3. A small group who identify heavily with the above.
  4. A formal system of religious beliefs and rituals.

Like the concepts of power or hacking, we intuitively know it when we see it, but have a hard time defining it.

In short, a cult is most easily defined as “group gaslighting“, and has the following elements:

  1. A charismatic leader who first embodies the group’s values, then the group trends to following their personality as the values phase out
  2. Extreme viewpoints relative to the surrounding culture’s norms
  3. A strict, formal group hierarchy that severely enforces those viewpoints
  4. The group violates members’ rights and boundaries while also redefining the members’ thoughts and feelings

Undue Influence

Undue influence is a legal term where an entity takes advantage of their position of power over another entity:

Any person, however, only becomes a victim of undue influence when several simultaneous conditions happen:

  1. They trust a person with influencing skills as an authority figure farther than that person’s legitimate authority.
  2. That authority figure has a story that doesn’t reflect or accommodate reality.
  3. That person decides to trust the authority figure’s story over their understanding.

Power

Most large groups use the power of influence in some capacity, but cults use that influence and trust toward very unhealthy purposes:

  • The leadership are selfish and direct most contributed resources toward their interests.
  • A leader is delusional toward believing they must follow directives that transcend mankind’s judgment.
  • A leader is delusional to believing they are simply operating toward the common interests of humanity.

Most cults start with at least a few of several distinct experiences:

  1. A deluge of affection and kindness by existing members to the new member (“love bombing”).
  2. Grandiose promises of avoiding pain or never having to die.
  3. Promises of special power unattainable otherwise, typically through becoming part of an elite society or ruling class.

To gain the necessary influence and maintain it, cult leaders are a very specific type of personality:

  • Openness to Experience
    • High-enough Openness to express ideas in a new way, or revisit old ideas and share them with a new approach.
    • High-enough Intelligence to craft believable lies.
  • Conscientiousness
    • High-enough Orderliness to maintain a set of rules that everyone abides by, but not so high that they defer to another external authority.
  • Extraversion must be high enough to encourage and inspire people to follow them.
  • Agreeableness
    • Low-enough Compassion to not care how others may feel.
    • Extremely high Politeness, which lends itself to them being charismatic.
  • Neuroticism doesn’t really matter, but they have to reframe their emotional reactions as still having some form of authority (e.g., a prophet, righteous anger).
  • Further, Cluster B personalities are always capable of running a cult from their single-minded pursuit of power.
  • Generally, they will seem like one of the nicest and relatable people ever, but will be very influential to bring others to their way of thinking.

Recruitment Experience

A cult proponent must be suggestible and malleable enough that they’ll believe a consistent pattern of indoctrination from a single source across months and years.

Only a specific group of personalities will ever choose to join a cult:

  • Openness to Experience
    • Low-enough Openness to simply trust someone else for information.
    • High-enough Openness to adopt new trends foreign to their lifestyle.
    • Low-enough Intelligence to not ask questions that would make the leadership demonstrate they don’t understand everything.
  • Conscientiousness doesn’t really matter, though the cult will need to be much more consistent and complex with their rules proportional to that person’s conscientiousness.
  • Extraversion doesn’t matter much, though introverts may be more susceptible from less social feedback from outside sources.
  • Agreeableness
    • High-enough compassion to feel compelled to respond to shame.
    • High-enough politeness to desire honoring the group’s standards.
  • Neuroticism
    • High-enough withdrawal to let their feelings define their decisions.
    • High-enough volatility that a cult leader can routinely exploit their feelings.

However, long-term cults will adopt a few other types of people:

Usually, joining a cult requires a large personal sacrifice.

  • This sacrifice ensures the member has found meaning for the rest of their interactions with the group, since their efforts will validate that the sacrifice was worth it.
  • Further sacrifices compound onto the first sacrifice, meaning they develop more of a sense of meaning as they continue to give over everything to the group.
  • Eventually, they’ve sacrificed all sense of self, identity, ownership, or agency, and are so deeply entrenched into their efforts that the slightest hope of any redemption can keep them going.

Advancing

Incrementally, the members are then introduced to further sacrifices to release control to the group, one small step at a time (BITE Model):

  1. Behavior control – their physical reality:
  2. Information control – how they understand reality:
    • The group will typically give clear answers to more controversial matters, then work inward to otherwise non-negotiable or taboo beliefs.
  3. Thought control – how they think:
    • Their values will be subtly shifted to conform with the group’s shared standards.
  4. Emotional control – how they feel:

By the end, the person has been transformed into a perfect extension of the leader’s desires:

  • Complete compliance to the group’s cause, which is open to change if it’s driven by a charismatic personality more than a value system.
  • Tremendous hatred of everything that obstructs the group’s cause, sometimes to the point of violence.
  • Trusting the group more than themselves for just about everything, with all conversations involving the group or group activities.
  • Any time they experience a conflict with an outside source, they defer or deflect to their group’s authority.

Behavior control involves changing habits, and is the most obvious for the public to notice:

  • Instilling dependency and obedience, with permission required for all major decisions.
  • Rewards and punishments modify positive and negative behaviors.
  • Rigid rules:
    • How, where, and who that person can live with, associate with, or isolates from.
    • How, where, and who that person can have sex, wear clothing, choose hairstyle, eat/drink.
    • Manage, manipulate, or restrict their sleep, leisure, entertainment, or vacation time.
  • Financially exploit them, manipulate them, or require them to be dependent.
  • Punishing disobedience with beating, torture, burning, cutting, rape, or tattoo/branding.
  • Threatening harm to family or friends or separating families.
  • Forcing rape or for them to rape, encouraging corporal punishment, imprisonment, or murder.

Information control involves a lot of image distortion:

  • Deliberately, systematically lying to the person, often consistently across all members.
    • Only leadership is permitted to decide who needs to know what, and when.
  • Minimizing access to non-approved sources of information:
    • Extensive use of propaganda to advance an agenda, including snippets of outside information given with extensive context.
    • The group is publicly encouraged to shame and discredit outside information sources.
    • To accommodate the growing conflicts, sharing myths together that clarify why they’re experiencing conflicts and that they’re the hero of that conflict.
  • Using an Outside vs. Inside doctrine:
    • The mindset is that nobody can understand the group’s ideas unless they’re in the group.
    • Ensures information is not freely and equally accessible.
    • Uses different levels of information control within the group.
  • Encourages spying among members:
    • Uses a partnering system to monitor and control members’ knowledge.
    • Any deviant thoughts, feelings, and actions are reported to leadership.
  • Uses confession unethically:
    • The leadership use any information about transgressions to disrupt and dissolve identity boundaries.
    • Forgiveness and exoneration are withheld until they perform a significantly burdensome sacrifice to repay it.

Thought control is a philosophical redirection that conforms a mind to a predetermined value system:

  • Members are required to internalize the group’s doctrine as absolute truth.
    • This doctrine is subject to a black-and-white dichotomy, with no room for exceptions.
    • Only “good” or “proper” thoughts are permitted, which forbids any criticism of the leader, doctrine, or policy.
    • Rejection of rational analysis, critical thinking, and constructive criticism.
    • Alternative belief systems are illegitimate, evil, or not useful, which may include other cults or reality itself.
  • Through repetition, manipulate memories to falsely insert past events that hadn’t happened.
  • The member is required to adopt a new name and identity.
  • Copious amounts of jargon and cliché statements that obstruct access to understanding.
  • Hypnosis that alters mental states, undermine conscious thought, and can even make members regress in age:
    • Denial, rationalization, justification, or wishful thinking
    • Chanting, mantras, and meditation
    • Praying, speaking in tongues, singing, or humming

Emotional control manipulates and narrows the range of feelings applied to experiences:

  • Declaring some feelings as inherently wrong.
    • Teaching emotion-stopping techniques to block specific unpleasant feelings like homesickness, anger, and doubt.
  • Direct the person’s feelings to them believing problems are always their fault, and never the leader’s or group’s fault.
  • Promoting feelings of guilt or unworthiness:
    • Identifying with inadequacy
    • Not living up to their potential
    • Insufficient or deficient family
    • A condemned past, including guilt imposed by history/society
    • Unwise affiliations
  • Instilled fear of many things:
    • Thinking independently
    • Others’ disapproval
    • The outside world without the group
    • Rejection, leaving, or being shunned by the group
    • Enemies and what they could do
    • Losing salvation
    • Advancing various phobias that promote staying within the group
  • Anger at everyone who does leave the group for being weak, undisciplined, not spiritual, brainwashed by family/counselor/opponent, or seduced by greed.
    • This can often mix disgust (at the perceived evils) and pity (for their perceived destitute state).
    • At the farthest end, they’ll act on their thoughts of destroying the outside group and feel themselves to be “merciful” for performing the action.
  • Extreme mood swings, with love bombing and praise one moment and utter condemnation the next.

In a larger cult, the classes of leader/follower are explicitly enforced with formalized titles and a rigid hierarchy. Any disputes are never addressed among peers, and always involve the leadership making a directed decision.

Power Expressed

Most small groups can sit latent for decades without becoming a cult.

  • They still exist, but only represent as risks of becoming a cult until a charismatic personality arises to take advantage of the situation.

Some of these groups are patently obvious to anyone on the outside:

Generally, the public only notices cults when they violate basic human rights:

  • People give up their property or inheritance to the group they’re swearing allegiance toward.
  • A person shuns their family and friends while believing it’s a loving act, or leaves their family entirely.
  • Belief in corporal punishment without examining its basis.
  • Desire to trust “God’s will” to the point of letting a person die.
  • Principled disregard for human universals to the point of severe, permanent damage.
  • Adolescents coerced toward sexual acts, permanently changing their gender, or sold as slaves/prostitutes.
  • Threatening people who may report child molestation or domestic violence.
  • Engagement in questionable arrangements with others.
  • Severely inappropriate behavior to advance the cult’s cause.

Once a cult has fully indoctrinated members, they will decide to perform acts of violence on their own:

  • Killing people who didn’t deserve it, sometimes while making it a public spectacle.
  • Operating a vehicle (e.g., auto, plane) to crash into buildings or crowds of people.
  • Using weapons (e.g., guns, bombs) to attack a public place (e.g., school, convention center).

Permitted

Some cults are vilified, but many cults can be endorsed by strong authority figures.

  • Cult leadership can often curate a public image of generosity or kindness, even when most of the contributions don’t serve anyone but the leadership.
  • Cults are frequently part of the mechanism behind many defective social systems.
  • A cult may have tax-exempt or charitable government status.
  • Most government intelligence agencies and militaries borrow from cult practices, if not outright being cults themselves.
  • Many secret societies also borrow from cult practice.
  • The leaders of relatively unrelated large-scale organizations may be informally (but distinctly) all members of the same cult.
  • Many advertising-based organizations (e.g., marketing firms) employ cult tactics to generate leads.

In fact, while it’s taboo to say in many parts of the world, many governments themselves (frequently with their media propaganda) are cults altogether.

Amusingly, in a free society, each political party creates its own cult, then tends to call the other party a cult.

Aftermath

Often, cult membership creates very severe effects upon a participant:

Generally, they’ll veer hard into the polar opposite extreme value system:

  • The “opposite” is defined by the mode of thought the follower takes:
    • A hyper-religious cult follower will leave and become an atheist or pantheist.
    • An extremely liberal activist may become highly conservative or apolitical.
  • The only way they’ll ever find a healthy balance is by becoming equally entrenched in several groups until they start seeing they need to change their tactic.

The most powerful influencers to bring down those cults are typically the people who have integrated their shadow self.

  • They must acknowledge they were partly responsible for submitting their will to another person.
  • They also must acknowledge they were a victim of that leader exploiting their trust.

Application

While cults are sometimes obvious, there’s a spectrum of cult-like behavior based on how much that group violates its members’ boundaries with their consent. On one end, it’s a well-marketed product that implies a greater sense of meaning than what it really is, and goes all the way to a top-down authoritarian society that advances genocide.

All addictions are cults of 1+ people centered on that substance.

Gaslighting is a person trying to create a cult with a 1-person following.

The more addicted and isolated away from the rest of humanity, the more cult-like that group becomes. This has no limit, and can (but doesn’t always) apply to most parts of society:

  • Geek subcultures
  • Hobby and political clubs
  • Church groups
  • Indigenous tribal societies
  • Small towns
  • Large corporations
  • Social media

Calling something a cult isn’t very relevant because most things in life have their cult subculture. Instead, look at who calls it a cult.

Because of the range of our personalities, even a country-sized cult only has some adherents, with the rest only honoring the culture for their advantages. Even “mass formation psychosis” can only get 60-70% of the people all at once.

To take extreme ownership of your life, with your thoughts, is essentially grabbing control of yourself and making a “cult” of your personality, for yourself alone.