To celebrate book launch month, we started a little “takeaway” series two weeks ago. First, Derek led us through “Science and Sensibility,” in which he shared some really good practices for science literacy, along with examples of how conspirituality maximizes social stress and struggling medical systems to exploit wellness consumers.
Last week, Julian addressed the aching questions asked by those in love with the positive gifts of contemplative practice, but who now see the cognitive fallacies and naive psychology at play in many spiritual communities.
This week, Matthew sets pseudoscience and spiritual bypassing into the social context of cultic relationships, reviewing some of the tortured dynamics we monitored during COVID, laying out a few cult-resistant hygiene rules, some pointers on avoiding stigmatization, and asking tough questions about where the whole cult discourse thing is going in this parasocial era.
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Hey everyone, welcome to Conspiratuality where we investigate the intersection of conspiracy
theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian extremism.
I'm Derek Barris.
I'm Matthew Remsky.
I'm Julian Walker.
You can stay up to date with us on all of our social media channels, predominantly Instagram at ConspiritualityPod.
And of course, you can get access to all of our episodes ad-free on Patreon on patreon.com slash conspirituality.
And I also want to say that this Monday, June 26th at 7pm, I am going to be in conversation with my old good friend, Mike Hall at Powell's Books, where he is going to talk to me about our book, which is now on sale.
As of this week, Powell's is my favorite bookstore in the country.
So when I reached out to them about doing an event, I was extremely happy they agreed to do it.
And so that again, that's this Monday, June 26th, 7pm.
In Portland.
Thank you.
In downtown Portland, I should be clear, because there are a number of pals.
I will not be at the airport.
I will be in downtown Portland.
Thank you, Matthew.
Awesome.
You'll get the only one that's your favorite.
I like the Hawthorne one as well, although they did file our book in the diet nutrition section, which I'm trying to get them to take it out of.
It's a conspiracy against us that has just started.
So listen, as a quick reminder, you can follow us on Patreon or Apple subscriptions to get access to all of our premium bonus episodes.
But on Patreon, you also get all of our new Thursday episodes and Saturday briefs ad free.
And you might also choose to upgrade there for access to live streams and behind the scenes videos.
My Monday bonus this week is titled Devouring Dragons, and it tells the overlapping stories of an exiled homophobic cult leader, a Chinese con man billionaire, and a MAGA mastermind, all of whom are at war with the CCP.
Conspiratuality 159.
Cults and cultures.
To celebrate book launch month, we started this little takeaway series three weeks back
First up, Derek led us through science and sensibility, in which he shared some really good practices for science literacy, along with examples of how conspirituality maximizes social stress and struggling medical systems to exploit wellness consumers.
Last week, I addressed the aching questions asked by those in love with the positive gifts of contemplative practice, but who now see the cognitive fallacies and naive psychology at play in many spiritual communities.
This week we finish up with Matthew setting the pseudoscience and spiritual bypassing into the social context of cultic relationships, reviewing some of the tortured dynamics we monitored during COVID, laying out a few cult-resistant hygiene rules, some pointers on avoiding stigmatization, and finally asking some tough questions about where the whole cult discourse thing is going in this parasocial era.
So guys, this is the third and final takeaway episode during our book release month.
Really good discussion so far on your two beats.
Derek, I really enjoyed you looking at the joy and trouble of scientific discourse.
And also cognitive biases and then Julian, you took the baton, you ran deeper into the territory of spiritual bypassing and the broken philosophies that we see in a lot of spiritual seeking.
Really enjoyable and by the feedback we've gotten especially on Patreon, it seems that these encapsulation episodes are landing so that's nice.
The thing I've noticed and I felt this listening to you both over the last couple of weeks It's been a theme since we began this project that between your two beats, like I'm also often taking a yes and role and then angling the conversation towards culture and how people relate to each other.
I also tend to data mine all of our subjects for political valence.
And, you know, so in a discussion of, like, whether it matters whether a person believes in some form of spiritual magic, you guys will make strong arguments about where things go astray, where a claim shows its weakness, where a belief leads to some sort of distortion.
And, like, you're always right from a scientific point of view, and you bring answers that are scientifically persuasive.
And then I'm often in the position of saying, sometimes I feel there's something else going on Because, you know, while it's always true that the religious beliefs of conspirituality are laced with these cognitive errors and, you know, its influencers are making a mockery of the scientific method, there's also this, like, very weird
churning, you know, kind of mess of social relations that are making things both more, I don't know, charged, but also sometimes more difficult to understand.
And I just kind of get lost in that material.
And so that makes my position often into this, like, wait a minute.
Let's see what else is going on here or what social needs are being fulfilled by believing in magic.
Let's talk about how those social needs can be fulfilled in other ways sometimes.
So I take this kind of generative stance towards those issues and maybe at times it turns into an apologist stance But, I try to look for positive things because I see that there's a methodological issue that seeps over from these issues of science and philosophical problems into the discussion of how we understand and talk about the sociology of these groups and cults.
I bring this emphasis on social relations versus beliefs and practices to the cursed side of the equation, which is where like the most toxic sociology is embedded.
Cults thrive on pseudoscience, conspiracy theories, weird beliefs, and spiritual bypassing.
And you guys, we all together, we really focus on those, and you pinpointed them in the previous two.
But these things are not really unique to cults, because what makes a cult a cult is its social machine of disorganized attachment, of the oscillation that the leader takes followers through between terror and love.
And, you know, after a while, it's something that becomes recognizable.
It's not weird.
It's not fringe.
Also, it's not easily debunked with, like, facts and evidence.
That last statement is, like, illustrates your particular angle on all of this, right?
Which is that I would say it's true that these things can be debunked with facts and evidence, but it may not have the social Yeah, I think.
or the it may not result in the redemptive forward movement that I think is much more of a priority for you.
Yeah, yeah, I think and I think that's like a communications question about like, what is the value of
debunking?
Yeah.
And yeah, so my approach, and I think this is happening more and more, is that I focus, you know, less on the weirdness of a particular cult, or what it gets wrong about reality, or the false claims that it makes, and more on how it feels to be caught up in it, and what people do to each other in it, and how we can demystify it against the backdrop of similar domestic and political abuses.
For example, it's stupid that L. Ron Hubbard told people to confess their shameful thoughts while holding Coke cans.
But what's deeper, and I think prior to the cans, is that Hubbard and the auditors have dominated the recruit in a particular way.
They've initiated a power dynamic that can't simply be turned off by debunking the cans.
And if what's keeping the person in the Church of Scientology is this webbing of trauma bonds, like explaining why the Coke cans are stupid can actually deepen the person's dependence on the people that are handing them the Coke cans.
So that's a little bit about my orientation, but my plan today is to cover some basic reporting
on how cultic dynamics have been a focus in our podcast.
And then I'll try to lay out some cult-resistant hygiene rules.
But by the end, I'll also come back around, we'll be talking about this back and forth,
to some broader questions about, you know, what is cult discourse and how is it used?
Has it taken a wrong turn somehow?
How should we talk about cultic dynamics in this cult-mad era,
especially as the streaming services are filled with cult documentaries?
And how do we understand cultic dynamics while not increasing the social stigma of being recruited into them?
To lay a foundation for this episode, I think it's important to give a synopsis of what What you've endured, in a sense, Matthew.
You were recruited into the American neo-Buddhist monk Michael Roach's cult in 1996.
Yeah.
You were drawn in by his charisma and related to another white guy seeming to cut through the hypocrisies and disassociations of modern life, which is exactly what you wanted to do yourself, as you write about in the book.
Yeah, it was very compelling.
The guy liked Neil Young.
That's all it takes.
Well, it was a big thing.
I don't know.
Sometimes it is.
It's weird things.
You don't know what hooks you, right?
You served as his transcriber, his editor, but you became disenchanted with his supposed traditional take on Tibetan Buddhism.
In the book, I like how it's written.
We frame it as, branding a strange cocktail of tantric worship and prosperity gospel hopium.
So, basically it's like this.
The dude was interested in money and clout, which I believe he's more honest about these days in some ways.
I mean, doesn't he now relate the Diamond Cutter Sutra as to why he should own a bunch of diamonds?
Well, that's been part of his shtick for a long time.
He took part of his own personal story about working in the New York City diamond business back in the 90s.
And he spun it into a kind of tantric myth about pursuing the indestructible state of emptiness, which is represented in Indo-Tibetan Buddhism as, you know, a diamond, as the Vajra.
But yeah, I mean, that's a good summary.
And it was really interesting that when we fired up our podcast three years ago, one of The first stories I did was about how Roach was actually selling a course about how to use Buddhist meditation to eradicate the virus.
So I was like, oh yeah, he's still on his bullshit, which is kind of interesting and predictable.
I don't know about you guys, but I can't actually think of somebody who's been in a cult leadership position who's actually changed very much.
Like, usually they escalate.
And then, okay, then the other part of my story, though, Derek, was that I transitioned out of Roach's organization into a cult based on A Course in Miracles, and then that set me on a collision course with the content of Mother Marianne Williamson, who also taught followers a meditation at the beginning of COVID that she said would strengthen people's immune system against the virus.
Well, not eradicate, but strengthen.
Yeah, so she was a distinction there.
Exactly.
Well, she's she's a little bit more following the science there, I suppose.
Right.
But Julian, like you come from a similar place.
I don't know how Derek avoided it, but you have a story we've written about in the book.
Do you want to summarize your own sort of, you know, story about getting into Anna Forrest's group a little bit too deeply?
Yeah, hearing you and Derek kind of summarizing your experience, I was struck by the similarity of, you know, being, really being on the lookout for a leader that I could trust, that I could put my faith in, who could guide me into the mysteries and initiate me, who was very critical of mainstream culture, right?
Who had some kind of revolutionary Shakti going on with them.
You know, and so when I found Anna Forrest, I was 23 years old.
I see her as a very sincere person who is wanting to transform the world and perhaps hashtag save the children, but more on that in a minute.
You know, and she's this world renowned yoga teacher at that point already.
She described herself as the alpha dog of her tightly knit group.
So there was already like a, Almost a self-conscious recognition of like, this is an authoritarian setup, and I am the one who has access to the stigmatized knowledge, and it cannot be questioned, right?
She had her own gruesome backstory of abuse and addiction.
That she would recount in every sharing circle.
And that was my first experience of her.
I went to a sharing circle on like the summer solstice or something, right?
Every workshop, it would always start with like, this is her backstory.
But, you know, she saw something in me.
She gave me a job.
She affirmed my gifts.
But then she also had this kind of boundaryless meddling in my personal relationships.
And as part of the dynamic at that studio, there was this idea that People who were drawn there were kind of magnetized because we had dark, repressed memories of horrific trauma in our families.
And so I, too, went on that journey of becoming convinced that that must be the case for me, too.
Any objection, of course, would be evidence that I was in resistance or, you know, not ready to face the truth yet and become my kind of warrior self.
Amazing.
Now, I mean, this gave you some insight when it became clear that QAnon was resurrecting the satanic panic.
Like, so was that close to the surface for you or was it like remembering something distant?
Yeah, it's been such an interesting process.
I'm sure it's been the same for you too.
Sort of each, there are cycles of coming back around and remembering and revisiting and thinking about Oh, oh, okay.
I see how the things I'm studying now and learning about and going through in my life relate back to that period.
And so certainly QAnon was, was part of that, that recognition that, oh, wow, there, There seems to be this archetypal theme of the repressed, the hidden, the secret, trauma and horrific abuse that
Humans are susceptible to being sucked into in terms of we're going to be part of this heroic narrative of exposing and healing and, you know, coming out on the other side.
And having something to pin all of our existential dread and human suffering and dissatisfaction with life on, I think is very appealing.
And then feeling like, oh, now we can mobilize and unify against whatever that thing is now that we've identified.
And you know, with Anna Forrest, what I found over time was realizing that her gruesome backstory came, it appears, largely from hypnotherapy, from the same kind of recovered memory sort of model that we can look at people like Teal Swan to talk about, or we can go back into the satanic panic that prefigures Teal Swan to see, you know, the same dynamics.
And then fast forward to 2020, wouldn't you know it?
A whole bunch more yoga people are invested in this kind of idea from an even more fantastical angle.
Those are some personal angles that we brought to the landscape.
After, well I guess right prior, in the years prior to starting up, I had been doing some journalism on cults and I think that was formative as well.
It was part of my own understanding and coming back from what I'd been through.
And, you know, I'll also note that this is pretty common in the cult literature that most researchers and theorists have some kind of first-hand experience.
They're survivors in some way.
So, you know, in the lead-up to our first episodes, I was doing investigative journalism on things like organizations like Ashtanka Yoga and, you know, the legacy of its founder, Batabi Joyce.
Joyce spent 40 years sexually assaulting women and some men.
in his yoga classes under the guise of adjusting their postures, and that meant that his students invented 40 years of rationalizations about his healing powers to cover up for what was totally obvious.
And so that became a book in 2019, and then I went on to investigate Shivananda yoga, Shambhala Buddhism, and all of these cases I found these deep, predictable patterns that played out over generations with all of the classic markers of charismatic leadership, Transcendent ideology, all of the prophets driven to the top, closed loops resistance to outside influence, and then also a paralyzing and isolating sense of not being able to leave.
And so that was a real sort of education in cult literature 101.
This spate of articles that I did, it tumbled out during the Me Too era, and that was when a lot of other investigations came out.
One of them involved the influential Kundalini Yoga group, and this is the favorite type of yoga for Kelly Brogan and Russell Brand.
And it featured ex-members coming forward with stories of sexual abuse by the leader, Yogi Bhajan, who died in 2004, and how he encouraged his followers to have children and then ship them off to residential schools in India and basically neglect them.
And that news cycle began with the publication of a memoir from one of Yogi Bhajan's personal secretaries, which is really a euphemism for indentured female servant expected to be sexually available at all times.
And then here's where my cult research world intersected with our podcast, because it was through a response to that memoir by Pamela Dyson that I had the pleasure of running across Kelly Brogan for the first time.
Because she basically wrote an article about how Dyson's book was a big victim complex generator and that she wasn't gonna pull down her own content in which she monetized Kundalini Yoga because she teaches it in her psychiatric recovery courses where she proposes that people stop their meds cold turkey and also squirt coffee into their assholes.
My favorite part of her article was that it didn't even link to Pamela Dyson's book.
It linked to her own book, which is called Heal Yourself or Own Yourself or Your Own Ownership Solidarity book.
I don't know what it's called.
But it linked to her book like a dozen times and I thought, oh my gosh, who is this person?
This is incredibly cold.
And then, March 11th, this is one of the first people we note, right?
Brogan comes out with this video where she says, the COVID restrictions foreshadow the Holocaust.
And I thought, oh, OK, so the cult world I know is intersecting with whatever this is.
Can we just say how early that is, too?
Well, it was, I think it's the day of or the day after the WHO declares a pandemic.
It's like she had the speech canned and ready to go.
Ready to go.
So Brogan, same with Eisenstein.
I mean, there's several of them where it's like a tail swan, actually the same, where like in the same week that the pandemic becomes a thing, they're ready to go with a spiritual interpretation of what it means and how to, how to combat it, how to not fall for the bullshit or something.
Yeah, I think we've noted before like that's the real plandemic is like, you know, people people taking their old dumb content and like just hoisting it on to a an emerging disaster that nobody understands anything about.
Okay, so there's Brogan's Kundalini influence and of course later.
Katie Griggs, aka Guru Jagat, the late Guru Jagat, would use conspirituality themes to enliven her content and also change the channel on the abuse history that was now ripping her community apart.
You know, and she does things like she hosts David Icke on YouTube.
Then, in the summer of 2020, we have the Save the Children Pastel Q campaign that ramps up, and we're already kind of keyed into the satanic panic undertones of QAnon, but this was a clear escalation.
And this kind of pointed us back into Teal Swan territory, where we did 10 bonus episodes and left parts of our souls there.
Yeah, I mean with Teal Swan, we definitely have this, she's almost like the missing link, you know, anthropological connection between the earlier Satanic Panic of the late 80s, early 90s, and what is to come with Pizzagate and QAnon.
But we'll come back to her in a bit.
And then beneath all of this, we also know that Jay-Z Knight, also known as Ramtha, who started her cult in Yelm, Washington in the 1980s, was the first prominent New Age charismatic to endorse QAnon before the pandemic started in February of 2020.
And that's not something to minimize because one of the things that happens with these groups
is that they already have really efficient infrastructure for reaching out.
They're already recruiting new members to themselves.
And if that kind of, it's kind of like adding a new medication
to the IV line or something like that.
It's like QAnon is now going out over the transom into their recruitment efforts.
And you know, these groups become vectors for the material.
Later on, we learn that the emergence of the Queen of Canada, Romana Digilo, is getting a lot of attention.
She has a few dozen like super anxious and very sad followers who are waiting on her
hand and foot as she travels around the country in RVs trying to assert her royal QAnon inspired
rule and you know tell her followers to not pay their taxes or their mortgage because
she's forgiven it.
She's really really confident and you know her followers pay the price you know in fines
and foreclosures and all kinds of horrible things.
Then there's Michael Protzman's negative 48 group which has been hanging out intermittently
in Dealey Plaza and in Dallas for months at a time waiting for the return of the deceased
JFK Jr.
So, I think that's a really good example of how she's been able to get her way.
So there's a lot of very culty stories that come out of that reporting with followers leaving families, trashing their lives to just basically stand on the street in Dallas and, you know, listen to Prossman do numerology while they max out their credit cards at the Holiday Inn.
To gather around the X that marks the spot of the assassination and to look up at the windows anticipating that Michael Jackson, Prince, you know, etc.
might be gazing down at them.
Yeah.
These are all cults and cult-like environments we've covered on our beat, but I'll add we've also seen a lot of cult-like behavior in our space.
The basic heuristic I have around this topic is this.
If you're following someone and you take everything they say as gospel and reject any criticism of them, I think that's cult-like behavior.
And I don't believe most people who follow influencers are like this, but the most vocal fans tend to be, such as, for example, something we're seeing a lot of right now.
RFK Jr.
has an amazing track record on environmentalism.
Why are you criticizing him on thimerosal?
And this is the problem with the binaries of social media that we encounter all the time.
It's totally possible to be on board with someone for some things and not others.
And it always troubles me that since someone teaches a good asana class, some fans of theirs then translate that as them being experts on child sex trafficking rings.
and that's all just really bizarre.
♪ One early observation we made was that
the old school brick and mortar cults with mainly white boomer leaders,
or their Gen X inheritors, were ideally situated to suck up
conspirituality content and put it into rotation.
Like, it's a real boon for my old leader Michael Roach to be able to apply his thing to a new crisis.
If the leader of the other group I was in after that, Charles Anderson of Endeavor Academy, had been alive, he definitely would have said that he was Q.
100%.
Because cults need constant content upgrades and conspirituality offers like a rich smorgasbord.
That right there, that upgrade idea, that plays into a question of intent that I've long had and put forward in this podcast.
I wonder if people really believe some of the bullshit that they're spouting.
It's really hard to tell.
Attention capture is a real thing.
I'm thinking of Russell Brand, and I think I was having a conversation in my work Slack So when an influencer starts gaining traction or when a presidential candidate starts gaining traction, it becomes this like weird feedback loop where they might even be indoctrinating themselves into a belief system that they didn't expect to be involved with.
But that power of positive feedback just it seems so seductive.
Well said.
I would also add that this question of what cult leaders actually intend to do is really difficult to answer, but it also feels crucial because if they know they're bullshitting, the Feeling of betrayal is front and center and also may be easier to deal with in some ways.
But if they are high on their supply, it can be a little bit more human, a little bit more, I don't know, vulnerable, because the follower simply got seduced by the leader's enthusiasm.
It was like, you know, almost a...
There's a social contagion there.
It's different from just being lied to.
Yeah, I mean, and we're also talking about how possibly the influencer, the leader, gets seduced by that feeling of the positive feedback loop and also by the grandiosity that the part of I think the feedback loop plugs into a kind of narcissistic grandiosity where they become more and more important and more and more heroic the deeper they go into.
And so if the next revelation might otherwise seem, you know, really implausible,
that gets sort of factored out against, well, but look at how good this feels
and look at how much feedback I'm getting.
And I continue to feel more and more important.
Now I have a mission.
So they're, they're, they're like, they're, they're two sides of the same coin in terms of getting hooked by that.
I think so much of what happened during the pandemic was about these influencers riding those algorithmic waves
and the ones best positioned to really exploit the crisis, as we said, already understood
that the adaptive fluidity of their messaging was more important than any specific beliefs
or facts or evidence.
The paranoid mind can never really settle by definition, on one explanation or solution for anxiety
and seething resentment because it doesn't go away.
Influencers who could hit the right themes with just the right balance between in-group soothing
and then being the anointed one who's delivering magical thinking or prophecy
were able to combine terrorizing their followers about the danger they were in with offering solutions
and they thrived.
I think their profiles and bank balances probably grew exponentially the more they could flow with that strange collaborative word salad Evident in, say, the October 2020 Line in the Sand online conference.
Oh, yeah.
And so many like it where, you know, now you're in this collaborative scene with a lot of other people who are doing Contrarian content.
And what do you do?
You just nod along with all of it as if it somehow hangs together in a way that makes sense.
Yeah, it's such a parody of friendship too, right?
And collaboration.
So also this is happening at the same time that COVID shutdowns accelerate this change that we're going to have to reckon with going forward, which is in an almost exclusively digital age, The cultic dynamics that we can find, we find them everywhere, but they also seem to be nowhere.
You know, ashrams and retreat centers are expensive to run, especially compared to the cost incurred by, you know, infiltrating your home through the internet.
When I reported out the abuse stories within Shivananda Yoga, their yoga centers, which are huge money draws, that's how they make most of their income, they really suffered sharply falling attendance.
And that was before they had to cancel events because of the pandemic.
So, cramming everyone online all at the same time was a real blow to the brick-and-mortar cult model, but it also raised the pressure on the influencer class to be more culty, to recruit harder, to perfect their messaging and charisma.
And I think it wasn't hard for us to start to see connections between the more firmly pre-digital cults and those that were now born and sustained online.
But there are some key differences.
First of all, without physical presence, leaders just don't have the same kind of control over followers.
Food, daily schedule, sleep, sex partners.
The digital cult leader is competing with all of the other open desktop windows and phone notifications.
Like, it's hard to run a cult through the same portal that people are using to do their banking, as well as to consume Netflix, MMA bouts, and porn, right?
And that means that the recruitment to subscription model has to be prioritized over retention.
It's numbers now, more than devotion.
Leaders are operating on larger scales, but more diffuse scales, and they're mainly jockeying for money more than physical presence or, you know, labor or sex.
The main hook of the digital cult leader, I believe, is a distillation of the primary psychology of cults that has just been with us from time out of mind, which is the oscillation between fear-mongering and love-bombing.
At the same time, the digital cult leader can lean into ambiguity even more than in real life.
True.
I think the real life cult leader has more control over a person, but someone who only appears in your feed when you want to tap in, that leaves space for all sorts of assumptions.
on the part of the adherent.
Talk about that a lot in terms of how people, when I comment or any of us comment on social media posts,
they read it in their own voice, not in the voice of the person.
And that also leaves a lot of room for ambiguity.
So, I'm not sure what's more dangerous, but I feel like living rent-free in someone's phone
can create these parasocial bonds in ways that being with that person
cannot actually achieve.
And I have no idea what the downstream psychological and social damage of that is.
I have also long speculated what a cult in VR looks like, and now with ProVision coming out, only a certain class is going to be able to afford that at first, but I do think that is something we have to look at, and I don't even think we've started to grapple with these ideas as a society yet.
Yeah, I totally agree.
I think we're totally in the dark on the near future of cultism in the tech world.
Yeah, with VR and AI.
Yeah, and good point, Derek.
I mean, what you're describing is like an amplification of transference dynamics, right?
Where because there's such a limited and specific way of interacting without all of the other stuff that would happen in the real world, it heightens that sense of whatever is being projected.
It seems like the cult dynamic really is different online as well, in that it's decentralized.
You know, even with QAnon, instead of a literal compound organized around a parasitic leader like some of the ones you've been describing, Matthew, with strict rules imposed upon devotees, This new iteration leverages online influence to dictate the reality constructs and belongingness needs, the purpose and articles of faith of the adherents' imaginarium.
So we're even more in this sort of abstraction.
And like earlier forms of fundamentalist extremism, You then have this artificial inflating of the stakes until connection to reality and goodness and, you know, reasonable relationships almost withers completely away, as some of the people we've interviewed have talked about.
The examples that we focused on, there's just a few that will detail here of how the digital cultic showed itself throughout our project.
I think a key one is with Mickey Willis, who Who publishes Plandemic on May 4th of 2020.
It provokes panic, terror, outrage.
I don't know how many views it actually gets.
He says it's like 7 billion now or whatever, but it was a lot of people.
Millions and millions of views.
But then two days later, he issues this famous selfie video, which is hypnotic, but also menacing.
And he offers emotional oversharing.
Intrusive eye contact, he's really got that down.
He offers this kind of like premise of caregiving, like, I'll be with you until we both die, and this soft apocalypticism that, you know, we're all in this together until the very end.
So, Plandemic provokes hypervigilance, but then the sermon soothes.
It quasi-explains why he's done it and what it means for his quote-unquote community, and it positions Willis as a spiritual guide.
And this is a rhythm and a kind of contrast that's very confusing and can therefore create a bond in which viewers run to comfort to the person who actually terrified them.
And it's a feedback loop that's really difficult to disrupt with facts or discussion.
You know, it's like when somebody is watching Mickey Willis give that sermon, you can't go, hey, do you know that he interviewed Judy Mikovits and she's full of shit?
Like, it doesn't...
You can't interrupt it that way, because the social bonding is probably more intense than the ideas.
Can I just comment here, Matthew, that that description you just gave is almost the definitional description of disorganized attachment per that literature, right?
Exactly, yeah.
And I think that's at the core of these dynamics.
I think that's why Alexandra Stein's book, of all of the cult resources that I use, is probably the most robust and flexible in addressing itself to these different landscapes.
It's the sort of core relational principle that is similar between, you know, what you get at Rajneeshpuram and what you get between people leaderless in QAnon.
So, and what you get in the next example I was going to bring up was Kelly Brogan and Sayerji back when they were married because they delivered this kind of same invitation into disorganized attachment
with the release of a bunch of videos about how they were bringing everybody into their fold.
They had one film called Community is Immunity.
And I think in that one, Brogan led a meditation in which, you know, you were supposed to visualize yourself
as a little child who was soiled and bloodied at the side of the road, as if your consciousness
had been trafficked by the deep state.
But, of course, you know, if you sat and, you know, watched their glowing faces from their living room in Miami, that you would be comforted.
That would be your immunity to be in community with them.
Very, very bizarre and creepy stuff.
Then, of course, we have Christiane Northrup, who publishes hundreds of Great Awakening videos on Facebook.
The Cabal is evil, but listen to me play my harp.
And, you know, these are all, there are aspects of these stories that I think they really expose some of the ways in which cult theory and how it came together in the pre-digital age is gonna have to update itself.
You know, it's not controversial, for example, to now discuss the closed-systemed aspects of QAnon, but what are we supposed to say about a cult with either no leader at all, or a leader who's actually a LARPing shitposter who has no real interest in anything other than online spectacle and maybe monetizing the traffic on 8kun, right?
Like, we can study Jonestown and Heaven's Gate all we want, But the insights that we gather from those stories will have hard limits in relation to these new and diffuse models of cultic organization.
The transition to this QAnon phenomenon, I think, has had a huge impact on how multiple fields are thinking about cults, political movements, undue influence, and studying that now.
I think it's become difficult to talk about this without sort of falling prey to what seem like cliches or just using tech jargon or half-baked neuroscience references about the evolutionary precursors of our dilemma.
But the social media amplification of the worst impulses of human beings It seems to me, if you'll excuse me going into a poetic metaphor here, it's emerging as that rough beast slouching toward Bethlehem, you know, from the WB Yeats poem, The Second Coming.
In this metaphor, the beast is a manifestation of collective rage, tribalism, cognitive vulnerability, but it's animated by a yearning for hidden truth and lost power.
I think that QAnon had the spectacular, chaotic run that it did because it didn't need a leader.
Because the conditions were just right for a series of improvised and largely meaningless cryptic but stupid fucking posts that started on 4chan to magnetize paranoid and fantastical interpretations.
Which then gamified the minds of these lonely and lost people and stimulated wave after wave then of opportunism and radicalization.
I feel like it's kind of like this experiment which only required that the algorithmic wheel gets set in motion.
And once it's spinning, like really without a plan, ironically, They're trusting the plan.
Without any facts or evidence, without a leader or a temple, it could get its hooks into all the soft spots where conspirituality enters the veins just through the detritus of what's available on the internet already.
And, you know, here are some hashtags for you to start cobbling together whatever your choose-your-own-adventure kind of mad landscape is going to be.
So in this case, I think Q is the blank slate cult leader, per what you were saying before, Derek.
Upon which each person or each enclave now under the sway of a particular baker who's interpreting the Q drops can project their own needs while, of course, doing their own research.
So there's a personal empowerment in there and selling and selling their own merch.
Oh, of course.
Of course.
So, the scripture is cryptic, the praxis is online research, the piety is trusting a plan that is never explicit and ever morphing, the revelations are announced by independent influencers quickly figuring out how to monetize all of this.
I guess it's the same ingredients but combined in different ways in this new intersection of culture and technology, right?
Well, Matthew, you've talked before about, for example, early in the podcast, Stephen Hassan's model didn't necessarily work for digital spaces.
And I feel like...
In terms of evolutionary biology, we talk about what happens as human societies go from smaller units to actual city-states in the Harappan civilization, and then to globalism.
And there's different opportunities for exploitation all those ways, in all of those different manifestations of human culture.
And now we are just at an intersection of a new one, and so some of the aspects of this old model are going to work because humans are just still humans.
But The ways that they're able to manipulate people are new, and I think that the cults that emerge from that are going to reflect that.
Yeah, well said.
I agree.
All right, so that's the landscape that we covered, a little bit about our background.
We've also, you know, as we've progressed, we've come up with some responses to all of this.
You know, responses that we talk about when We think about people and how they get sucked in, how, you know, a friend or a family member is getting pilled.
You know, we've talked about what does it feel like.
And, you know, I'll give some simple sort of summary statements.
From the top, I think being recruited in These circumstances can feel a lot like being a teenager and falling in love with someone who turns out to be a real narcissist.
You are suddenly enmeshed in a highly charged, immersive, engulfing, and preoccupying set of concerns, relational concerns.
All other concerns fade away.
You know, there's as much agitation about meeting the person or the group as there is in parting.
And, you know, it's very rare in this kind of like naive state for the object of love or attention to be seen as a normal person with needs that mirror your own.
Or that with needs that might even be overbearing or inappropriate.
So there's an idealization process that people go through when they're falling in love with a group that might not be looking out for their needs.
And quickly and perhaps imperceptibly, a person can begin to reorganize their entire reality around the needs and now the demands of the new partner, meaning the new group as well or the new group leader.
And before long you realize, or you don't, that other relationships have fallen away.
Before long you realize, or you don't, that you're trying to get other people to validate your experience or even love the person as much as you do.
And that kind of means that you've become a recruiter.
So, we've talked about those experiences, like what it feels like.
We've talked about the red flags.
So, I've given a few.
What are your red flags, guys?
Like, Derek, you avoided this stuff, but I know you watched this happen to a lot of friends because you were in yoga for how many years?
I did.
Before I get into that though, there's as much agitation about meeting as there is imparting.
Gen Z listeners, there used to be this technology called an answering machine.
And it was a cassette tape where someone would call and leave a message, and that just invoked that message in high school, running home to hope that your sweetheart would have left that message, and if they didn't, the pain of no blinking green light when you got home.
OK, back to reality.
That's pretty real, though, man.
That was a big that was kind of a confession, Derek.
I want to hear more about that some other time.
Maybe maybe.
Yeah, but that yearning is the sensation.
And when you were going through that, that is what it invoked in me.
That feeling of like that lack of satisfaction, that lack of dopamine, of seeing the blinking light when you get home as compared to the blinking light.
And then you click it and then it's someone else calling.
Right.
There's so many manifestations of that.
Yeah, that that.
But that sensation is the same.
That's the point I think you were driving at.
That romanticized feeling is the same.
That feeling of someone else wanting to be in your presence or hear your voice.
Right.
You know, we kind of lose that with text messages, although I don't like talking on the phone either at this point.
But, again, in terms, if we're going to extrapolate from that and kind of do this crossover between Romanticize and the cult worship, agreeing with anyone 100% of the time is really dangerous.
All sorts of manipulation are possible when you only agree with someone.
Specific to my beat covering health and science, the idea that anyone has a one-size-fits-all cure is really problematic as well.
So if you're listening to Joe Dispenza tell you how he's helped Disabled people walk again, which he has.
Or cure themselves of cancer because he's taught them meditation or the power of his thoughts, which he has said before.
I would say just run the fuck away.
Yeah, which he has said he's done, indeed.
Indeed.
Yes, yes.
Yeah, and riffing off of what both of you said, Matthew, I heard the words highly charged, immersive, engulfing, preoccupying.
The word I was waiting for was intoxicating.
Yeah.
Right.
Because we're talking about entering a kind of altered state.
And this is archetypal parting is such sweet sorrow.
Wilt thou leave me so unsatisfied?
The churning, the awful churning in the belly.
Of the sweet butter of romantic love right this is this is everyone talks about this as a core kind of human drive and experience of the combined anxiety and elation of falling in love and I think cults really really do exploit that.
I would add here Inner circle knowledge that is based on revelation or intuition and cannot be questioned critically, that to me is always a huge red flag.
The primal importance of some kind of in-group mission, which is based on what to me sound like totalitarian spiritual assertions, like keep an eye out for those, and a rejection of the outside world and its inhabitants as being impure.
I think there's also often the devaluing of healthy emotions, boundaries, and relationships.
All of these become sort of these contested sites where the ideology of the cult and the demands get to be asserted.
And this is how you're being conditioned out of your unenlightened sort of attitudes about your emotions, your boundaries, your relationships.
Any notion that the leader is actually divine, has access to special transcendent truths that no one else knows, that the group will fundamentally change the nature of reality itself, ushering in a new age of perfection, light, and love, a new paradigm, when the prophecy finally comes to pass.
But also like, you know, obsessions over food, medical practices, sexuality and hierarchies around how to be spiritually aligned and transformed.
These are all the red flags for me.
Yeah, it's a good collection.
OK, so lots of red flags waving.
At the end of my 2019 book, I put in a series of eight best practices that I gathered up from the literature, the interviews that I did, and personal experience.
So here's the listicle for this episode.
You know, eight things that I think are kind of important for recognizing cultic dynamics around you or when you're near to them.
The first thing is You know, people who get recruited into these environments are situationally vulnerable.
They're not gullible people.
They're not stupid people.
They are in positions in their lives in which they need something because something has gone wrong.
It's a divorce, they've lost a parent, they've been diagnosed with cancer, they are a long way from home, their social networks are frayed.
So, if you can recognize that a friend of yours is situationally vulnerable as they get close to a group that seems charismatic to you, that's really good, that's really helpful, and maybe you can help with that vulnerability.
The second thing is, it's really good to begin to recognize the charge of transference and idealization.
That if you can understand and feel the first moments in which you start to look at a person, a leader, a charismatic leader as being larger than life, and to really interrogate what feelings that brings up for you, and how kind of strange they are, and how magnetic they are, that's really good.
The third thing, we've mentioned the feelings of disorganized attachment and how they're generated, so that's a good thing to recognize.
Fourthly, we should also, I think, really look at the premise of and the value of trance states.
Because there are lots of cultic environments in which the group dynamic is actually concretized and validated and really strengthened by things like group meditation or yoga practice or prayers or doing things at certain times together that creates a kind of like social contagion within the group of peak experience and that can feel like wonderful if You are dancing.
It can also feel like, but I guess the proof really is in the pudding that if the trance state allows you to become more functional and individuated in your regular life, that's great.
If it devalues or if it degrades your capacity to actually act as an individual afterwards, if it's exhausting to you and it makes you a little bit more compliant with whatever the group is asking you to do, then you've got to take a second look.
Yeah, if it leans more into repetitive experiences of group mind without any real, like, tools or purpose or, you know, good inquiry going on, I think that's also a big problem.
Yeah.
The other thing that we can do is to look out for jargon and loaded language.
This is Really the realm of listening carefully to the language of a particular group or you know even if they're online or if it's an MLM or something like that and to try to figure out whether or not there are keywords being used in ways that seem sort of
Both undefined, but extremely powerful.
You know, words that are used that seem to have capital letters at the start of them that nobody's really questioning.
So, any kind of feeling that you get around a specialized language that creates an in-group or a priesthood that can understand it, whereas outsiders cannot, that would be something to look forward to or look out for.
Are you able to fact-check the leader and the group's messaging?
So the story that I tell here is Michael Roach seemed to be really competent in Tibetan languages, in Tibetan language.
He seemed to be really competent in Sanskrit.
I didn't have the chops to be able to evaluate that.
And it was basically on my assumption that he had good fluency in medieval Tibetan that I believed that he was teaching accurately out of those books.
There was nobody in the room to dispute him.
It took years for me to find outside criticism of his teaching and of his translations and of his interpretations to realize that, oh, he was pretending to a kind of authority.
And that's a hard one.
There's a kind of aura or halo of mastery that charismatic leaders can generate around them that is really resistant to the basic question of, can you provide a citation for that?
You know, the claims come fast and furious, and I think you have to be able to recognize them.
Oh, this person is saying something that should be evidenced.
And then the last two things that I would say that I gathered together for this book would be when you're in the midst of figuring out your relationship to a group that has some of these qualities, it's really important to recognize that it's easy to become defensive in relation to what the group is actually doing.
You know, you have been going to meetings or group meditation sessions.
You've been, you know, starting to tithe.
You have started to try to recruit your friends and neighbors.
And then something is told to you.
It's revealed that there might be some corruption in the group.
There's a very instinctive response that I call the bad apple argument that is a really strong defense that people who are kind of in the recruitment zone tend to wield.
And the argument goes like, well, you know, the leader is, you know, is corrupt in certain ways, but the group itself is fine.
The environment is not all bad.
And there's some truth to that, but generally how it shakes out is that group members will feel that, you know, if the leader is removed or if they're sanctioned in some way, that somehow everything will improve.
But the problem is, is that the group has emerged in a kind of immersive You know, networked dynamic that will bear the behaviors of the leader until it just disperses.
Like, that's one of the things that followers have to do, is they have to adopt the relational strategies of leaders.
So, the last thing is another kind of defensive argument that is good to look out for, which is the notion of I got mine-ism.
And this would be the attitude that a person involved in a group that is harming other people might develop, whereby they say, oh, I don't know about so-and-so's experience.
I'm not sure about, you know, how this person is saying that they were abused or assaulted by the leader.
I find the teachings to be really helpful.
And that ends up putting you, if that's the position that you're in,
or if this is the message that you're hearing from a friend who's enmeshed in a group like this,
it puts the person in a position of supporting and apologizing and making excuses for a toxic dynamic
that should otherwise be fully looked at, fully examined.
♪ We can say that a number of cultic dynamics are real,
they're identifiable, they're predictable.
We know that they hijack altruism and they exploit vulnerable people, stealing time, attention, emotional labor, physical labor, money, of course, and often sex.
We know that the profile of the charismatic leader is very much summed up by what Daniel Shaw describes in his book about traumatized narcissism.
He writes really memorably about this.
Julian, do you want to read that?
A myth in his own mind is so well defended against his developmental trauma, so skillful a disavower of the dependency and inadequacy that is so shameful to him, that he creates a delusional world in which he is a superior being in need of nothing he cannot provide for himself.
To remain persuaded of his own perfection, he uses significant others whom he can subjugate.
These spouses, siblings, children, or followers of the inflated narcissist strive anxiously to be what the narcissist wants them to be.
For fear of being banished from his exalted presence, he's compelled to use those who depend on him to serve as hosts for his own disavowed and projected dependency, which for him signifies profound inadequacy and is laden with shame and humiliation.
to the extent that he succeeds in keeping an adequacy and dependency external, he can sustain
in his internal world his delusions of shame-free self-sufficient superiority. So yeah, that's from
traumatic narcissism, relational systems of subjugation. So we have profiles of group dynamics,
we have descriptions of leaders, and yet when it comes to cults, like Tolstoy says in the first
line of Anna Karenina, all happy families are alike.
Each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
Yeah, and the same is true of the cultic experience.
Which is quite variable in terms of how much a given person is harmed, whether there are benefits to membership, and how the extraction and recovery process is also quite individual.
And that complicates seeing the matter clearly.
It also complicates the way in which we speak about those who are affected by cults.
It affects, you know, the capacity for curiosity and empathy.
It, you know, might invite judgment or scorn if we don't have a lot of nuance.
So, one question, and this is the section now where I want to describe a little bit about how I feel
my own orientation towards cult discourse is changing.
And...
And, you know, I want to discuss with you how this is all going.
There's this general question from the top, which is about defining the contours and boundaries of a cult.
And that's not easy.
So in my book, for instance, about institutional abuse in Ashtanga, this is a global yoga organization.
And you know, people would ask me, they're either like offended or they're incredulous.
They'll say, like, so are you saying that all of Ashtanga Yoga is a cult?
And I would say, no, it's too globalized.
It's too diverse.
It's too multicultural.
It's multilingual.
You can't really define it reductively.
There's no bubble around it.
There's no membership cards.
But This is an organization that does have cultic dynamics in it.
It has hotspots, places where power accumulates in the hands of a few people, and members close to that power suffer abuse.
That's a really important point, and it's something I've seen even early in our chatter going around about our book.
For example, there's no way that yoga can originate in eugenics, and that's not what we actually said, but people only read headlines before making assumptions.
It takes a while, as you can probably tell by the length of this podcast in general, to unpack ideas.
And we live in a headline-only culture.
So expressing that modern American-oriented physical yoga has traces of eugenics in its history that stretches back to Europe and India, or that Ashtanga Yoga can be exploited by cultic dynamics, and that those legacies persist in some of the mindsets that some teachers or practitioners parrot, It becomes too many steps for people to follow.
Yeah, right.
In one sense, it's okay.
You don't need to follow every trail to its end.
But that becomes dangerous if you walk that trail without realizing that what we're pointing out or what others have pointed out is exactly what's happening to you.
I find that in figuring out how to be very specific, this phrase hotspots has become a metaphor that I found useful.
So imagine a large organization that you might think of as being culty, so Ashtanga Yoga, Shambhala Buddhism.
The doTERRA MLM, does that rate?
Maybe.
Osho's Rajneesh Puram from the Wild Wild West movie, if you saw that.
Then NXIVM, many more people familiar with that now, which obviously had an inner core, but then also concentric rings of less and less involved people out to tens of thousands of recreational participants.
Many of whom likely had no clue of the rape and exploitation that was going on at the top, and they might have benefited from some of the self-help stuff, or at least they said they did.
And, you know, hopefully they didn't put too much money into Keith Raniere's pockets.
Or, you know, in another example, you can consider the circles of protection that are surrounding and enabling R. Kelly for all of those years, including that widest ring of institutional racism that isolated his victims even further.
So it's not that everyone was involved equally or equally aware.
Not everyone is equally culpable.
So the metaphor is this.
Think of the organization as a geography instead of a collection of card-carrying members.
That it's an ecosystem with diverse zones of health or illness.
Like, this came to me when I was thinking about a map of the state of California during fire season.
And I thought, oh, well, what if this is like a group?
Because, you know, during fire season, the map is dotted with fire zones.
And in cult terms, I would say the hotspots are where the leader or his lieutenants exercise greater power, where they enforce more forms of social control.
And this destroys whole parts of California, and it spreads smoke and ash far and wide.
But not everywhere is on fire.
And there are always green patches in the state of California.
And while the fires are raging, we're not going to notice the green patches.
But here's the thing.
Those green patches will hold the biodiversity and, you know, the capacity of the state to regenerate its flora and fauna.
And so if anything will restore the group from the cult after the cult crashes, it could be or it could include those who were hanging out in the green spaces.
And all of this means that like if you don't treat the subject sensitively, You're going to ignore or overwrite or sensationalize, you know, pretty nuanced stories.
And the people who are coming out of groups like this are already hurting.
They're already vulnerable.
They're prone to years of social isolation and distrust as they reorient themselves.
And this is what we saw in the dreadful presentation of Teal Swan's group in that Hulu documentary, for example.
Yeah, we said we'd come back around to her.
You know, just very briefly for anyone not familiar, Teal Swan's model good looks, her confident charisma, her eloquent syncretic intelligence, she's always like referring to different psychological theories and scientific concepts, made her a powerful force on YouTube starting in 2011.
And despite this kind of new age bootleg trauma psychology, her origin story is pure satanic panic, right?
Because the satanic panic comes out of a much more Christian and even Catholic kind of animus.
Yeah.
But it's still pure satanic panic.
As I said before, she's like this living anthropological missing link between the early 90s And 2017, and then what comes afterwards.
And the lineage comes directly from having done therapy with Barbara Snow, who was one of the central repressed memories, satanic ritual abuse kind of therapists during that period in the late 80s, early 90s.
I feel like Teal then used her recovered memory story as a kind of storytelling device that would become a template for how to launch your career as an influencer with the kind of special knowledge and gifts that come from that kind of unspeakable trauma.
But then you have this gold rush on cult documentary filmmaking that, you know, in a way we've contributed to.
And we've covered at length how the deep end, which you just mentioned Matthew, kind of pooped in the pool.
How, I feel like this really started a set of conversations you and I were having behind the scenes about your misgivings or your kind of revised perceptions of cult studies.
Yeah, I mean it was really disheartening to watch basically a music video be made out of this sensationalized take on Swan's group for the film to mystify her rather than demystify her.
And then on top of it, to find out that it's, like, full of dodgy editing and that the film team had gotten the access they got by, like, sort of pseudo-therapeutically fraternizing with the group.
So, I don't know.
It was another step along the road of me realizing that it's really easy for the cult documentary to be an exercise in othering.
I think that I had the same feelings about watching Wild Wild Country when the producers gave the microphone for hours on end to two of the leaders who really didn't have much to add to the story except, you know, their own justifications and they didn't really concentrate on survivor narratives at all.
So, yeah, I am really like, it's very, very rare for me to feel like, oh, here's a production company and a director who's actually done the work that it takes to not turn the documentation process into another form of trauma for the people who have already been through this thing by turning it into some sort of spectacle.
Because, you know, when it comes down to it, the whole framing that we use in cult studies, the very language of cultic itself is shaming, it can be polarizing, it's often over-determined.
You know, once you use the term, you might poison the conversation with, you know, false equivalencies.
And, you know, this is why there's a whole faction of religious studies scholars who are very concerned.
They have trouble with the cult literature.
They point out the stigmatization of cultic discourse and how it scuttles research access to members of the group under consideration.
So, you know, on the other hand, team cult gets a little bit ruffled when religious studies as a discipline tends to favor the more anodyne term new religious movement.
So, you know, if we fast forward a few years to look at how that might play out, I can imagine like a scholar, you know, writing a book about QAnon being a new religious movement.
And, you know, from a behavioral or structural standpoint, they would be able to make that argument fairly.
And you're able to imagine that because people have done that in the past.
Yes, they have, right.
Yeah, they'd be able to describe how QAnon offers an origin myth, scriptures, a liturgy, places of worship, administered by a priestly class, and then an ongoing relationship with existential contemplation.
And if this is your academic approach, You can then forge research relationships with insiders and that can lead to years of publications and conferences and awards and stuff like that.
And that religious studies framework is very generous.
But what bothers me is that it can gloss over the qualities of relationship at play.
So, on one hand, you can really exploit the strangeness of cults.
On another hand, you can bypass what cults are actually doing.
You know, in the New Religious Movements framework, you can really ignore the deception, the mystification.
You can assume that there's cooperation between group members.
You can assume that things are consensual.
You might downplay the coercive aspects.
So, proponents of the new religious movement framework can really sidestep a lot of issues, saying that they're simply documenting religious groups in their own terms, like anthropologists would do, and that the nuances of social psychology are beyond their scope.
So, it's an approach that can be compromised by also the social incentive to not alienate the community that's providing this primary material for the scholar's career.
Well, rest assured, it's not easy for experts to define either.
This section reminds me of the book, The Bonobo and the Atheist, which was written by the primatologist Franz de Waal, and he talks about attending a forum at the American Academy of Religion.
Someone in the room suggested that they start off by defining religion, and everyone in the room started fighting to such a degree that half the people walked out.
These were all religious experts, but they couldn't come to actually defining what that term means.
Yeah, that tracks.
I wonder what would have happened if they said, let's define atheism first, and then we can kind of work backwards from that.
Yeah, well, I mean, it might not have solved the problem, because I think they're in a discipline now where a lot of the discourses around religion isn't just about beliefs, but cultural practices, community structures.
I just want to say, too, what you were just describing about that approach of saying, well, is it a cult or is it a new religious movement?
The new religious movement frame that you were describing tends to be morally relativist.
It tends to say, well, you know, who are we to say this is this is as as valid as any other religious movement.
It just happens to be new in our time.
And so it's kind of maybe a bias to call it a cult.
And we're not going to really look at why.
Yes.
And new religions are always stigmatized.
This this this happens eternally.
Right.
Yeah, I guess just to come back from that turn, I think part of what we're saying is that it can be as difficult to define religion as it is to define cult.
Next thing I want to say is that the impact of cult analysis on the people who really need it is kind of interesting.
And there's a double edge to it.
I think it can be an effective relief tool.
For people who are acutely enmeshed in toxic social conditions, like I think, you know, people who are, you know, in the midst of having questions about the group they're in can really benefit from reading Steve Hassan's books.
I also think that that framework can be time-bound or developmental.
That it can be helpful for certain people at early stages of negotiating their relationship to a charismatic leader.
But also later on, I've seen it become a blunt object that is kind of limited in explanatory power and psychological nuance.
It can sometimes obstruct the deeper questions of, how did I get there?
And what was it really like for me?
And another thing that I've noticed is that on the activism side, identifying as a cult survivor and using the literature as I do, and as many of my colleagues do, can give a kind of clarity about the severity of the groups, but then there's a problem that can come up when it becomes a source of professional authenticity, that backstory.
Because it can give a person a sense of moral immunity and intellectual overconfidence in their ability to recognize cultic patterns everywhere, while not thoroughly distinguishing them from their own memories or their own biases.
And ironically, this is what cults themselves do.
So, being in a cult is kind of like being in a very punitive schooling system.
And once you get out, you have to deal with that training that encouraged you to think and act in a reactive, defensive, black and white way.
It's a carceral logic that I think is sometimes internalized as a false method of safety.
And I would say that these questions are more important today, maybe more important than ever, because now we are flooded with, like, non-stop streaming series about every abusive group situation that, you know, culture vultures can find.
And cult stories, as we see with Teal Swan and other stories like that, are really easy to sensationalize and commodify.
And I think just that part alone is a clue into the crudeness of the framework.
Tidy answers to complex problems are lucrative, but not only for media platforms.
Most of the recent cult media productions feature talking head experts who inevitably recite the same theories in relation to any group they're paid to comment on.
And this has started to happen to me.
I started to get a little bit, you know, weirded out by the fact that in any given month, I started to field dozens of emails from journalists and documentarians looking for, like, expert quotes on groups that I'd never heard of.
And I always turn them down because I would say that It took years of interviewing people in Ashtanga Yoga or Shambhala Buddhism to give me a clear answer as to how much those organizations ticked the boxes.
You know, but the bottom line is for the journalist who's still new to this stuff, the term cult at this point cues a series of incurious questions that I think they can often believe will be answered by overgeneralized answers.
And for the anti-cult activists, there are too many opportunities to parrot those answers for social clout.
Okay, so homestretch, two broad points.
I want to say that Derek and Julian, connecting back to your two episodes and some of the themes that we explored at the top, when we're busy debunking pseudoscience in wellness, I think it's good for us, and we've spent a lot of time on this, I think we've done a good job with it, to pay close attention to what, let's say, the acupuncturist is offering that the evidence-based practitioner may not be offering.
Because if that practitioner is building their renown, their social capital through listening, empathy, meaning, if they're offering better financial terms, those benefits can really play on weaknesses in the evidence-based for-profit fabric.
We do well to understand why people choose practices and discourses that may not ultimately work.
And I'm bringing this up because there's a symmetry between debunking pseudoscience and critiquing cults.
When it comes to the latter, there can be like a really rational and clear, maybe even dismissive set of arguments about why they are dysfunctional.
We can describe the mechanisms in very clinical ways, and that can make us feel like we understand what went wrong in the social microcosm, but That's always only part of the problem, and it's usually argued from outside of the subject's experience.
Because it doesn't generally address the concrete benefits that cults can provide because the society doesn't.
So, pseudoscience debunkers and cult analysts should be careful not to confuse the value of their critiques with the idea that they are answering underlying social problems.
They're just not in general.
Secondly, One of the things that naive cult discourse does is that it convinces readers and viewers that there's a substantial difference between NXIVM and corporate capitalism, or between Ashtanga Yoga and the Catholic Church.
But the truth is that when you scratch the surface, the old human failings are seen everywhere, differentiated really only by scale and intensity.
And on that note, I hope that we can all begin to see more clearly that just as the true crime genre pays implicit homage to the police and carceral states, the cult expose genre does a similar form of labor in the laundering of late capitalism.
With a yoga abuse story, for example, a cult, if that's the way you frame it, can be set apart.
It can be quarantined in India.
It can be exotified.
It can be seen as a part of a different, creepier religion that would never impact a white, liberal, educated, middle-class person.
The guru can be the othered, disposable monster that we'll never understand, and for whose death we are glad.
But all markers of cultural distance disappear when we get a perpetrator like Larry Nassar and the survivors are white girls from the suburbs.
And when it comes to NXIVM, what we're calling a cult is really only an intensification of basic capitalistic exploitation.
All Ranieri really did was to optimize the MLM programming he started with by creating higher and higher stakes.
So we have to, in my opinion, abandon the idea that there's something mysterious about cults.
And I think when the cult doc industry tells us that they are mysterious, and they do it by turning leaders into monsters and followers into dupes, it might distract us from basic exploitations that have become so common that they're invisible.
So there's a bait and switch.
The worse that Keith Raniere is, the more normal and safe somebody like Elon Musk becomes.
Oh no.
Yeah.
Maybe I'll just sum up with this, that there's a t-shirt that I would want to sell that I think expresses the fact that cultic dynamics are not unique and they are embedded within a social matrix.
The cult is a macrocosm of domestic power abuse, and it's a microcosm of capitalistic power abuse.
It's really strong and insightful stuff, Matthew.
Thank you.
As we come out of that sort of more theoretical, but also, I think, incredibly relatable angle that you just took, how might you sum up what we've talked about so far for listeners who are still wondering how to stay safe?
Well, I would say be aware of situational vulnerability to recap.
Recognize the feelings of disorganized attachment.
I mean, my one book recommendation actually is Alex Stein's Love and Terror and Brainwashing.
Also, like, I think people should develop a political analysis that connects cults to more socially acceptable forms of exploitation.
And then it becomes not so surprising that, you know, your startup is doing what it's doing.
It becomes not so surprising that the MLM is doing what it's doing.
So that's powerful when we demystify not only the cult's impact on the individual, but also its place and function within our broader society.
Very importantly, do not shame people who have been caught up.
Like, in any way whatsoever.
The organization itself has already played upon their shame and their vulnerability.
Your job is to do the opposite.
And I guess that leads to the last thing, which is the main thing that a cult cannot provide is friendship and listening.
But you can provide those things for the person who's sliding into that strange form of being in a group and yet being so isolated.
I would just say, like, the last word would be normal, equal, relaxed friendship is the opposite of the cultic.
Thank you everyone for listening to another episode of Conspiratuality.
