Stephen Mather examines cults as religions that outgrew their origins, like early Christianity evolving into Protestantism, while others collapse when rules fail—Christian Science’s decline from harmful medical practices or Jehovah’s Witnesses’ shift from apocalyptic prophecies to ideological battles. He explores "cults of personality" (e.g., Kim Kardashian) and "proto-cults" like Nexium, where power dynamics distort intent, and warns unchecked authority may breed abuse, citing Washington vs. Aurelius. Abusive relationships mirror cult tactics—love bombing, isolation, and information control—through disorganized attachment, per Stein’s Terror, Love and Brainwashing, yet lack full indoctrination. Ex-members and soldiers face identity crises when external narratives collapse, proving autonomy and storytelling are key to breaking cycles of guilt or dependency. [Automatically generated summary]
And we're back with Truth Unrestricted, the podcast that would have a better name if they weren't all taken.
I'm Spencer, your host.
I'm just here inserting my voice to introduce the second part of my conversation with Stephen Mather, organizational psychologist, former Jehovah's Witness, current host of the podcast Cult Hackers and All-Around Intelligent Person.
Without further ado, please enjoy my conversation with Stephen Mather.
So, I have a couple of questions.
Little minor questions, really.
I'm sure they'll be very quick to answer.
First one is one that gets asked all the time among everyone who just casually talks about cults, which is, what is the difference between a cult and a religion?
Is this something that we can even answer?
Yeah, I think for me, the answer is they're just different categories.
So, cults can be religious cults, but all religions are not necessarily cults.
So, that's the way I would answer that.
I happen to be an atheist.
I don't have any belief in God.
So, I have no skin in the game of trying to defend religion.
But I think it's probably a mistake to call everything a cult.
I do worry a little bit about the fact that in society recently, we seem to anything we don't like, any belief system that we don't like, or any theory we don't like.
We just call it a cult, you know.
And I don't think that's really cults of right wing or cult exactists.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Right.
Yeah.
I think we have to be careful with that.
So, yeah, they're different categories of thing.
That's the way I would describe them.
So, to you, they're just two bubbles on the big Venn diagram of life that have some crossover.
Correct.
Great way of describing it.
Is it possible that just kind of follow me down the, I promise this rabbit hole is short.
Is it possible that every religion started as a cult, but the rules that the religion was instituting upon its followers happened to be in some way either useful for them or made them more productive in some way?
And therefore, it had some additional properties that were that allowed it to stay, to not get just wrapped up in whatever selfish thing the leadership of that first time wanted.
Is that a possibility, or is it something that we think is probably not in any way true?
Again, it very much depends on your definition of the word cult.
So, if you listen to historians talk about early Christianity, for instance, they might talk about the Jesus cult in the very early days.
They're not using that as a pejorative term, though.
They're using it as a descriptor of a small, probably quite fanatical group of individuals.
It's possible their definition of cult was different than ours, right?
I think so.
And this is where it can get a bit tricky.
I think there is an assumption that religion, if it's going to survive, it has to adapt to society as it changes to some degree.
Otherwise, it will cults.
They lead quite a butterfly existence in some respects, in that they, you know, they're always on the edge, aren't they?
Cults, my old group, I do believe it's a destructive cult or high control group, but that's got around eight and a half million adherents.
That's one of the bigger cults, but most cults are pretty small.
So, they're always teetering on the edge of just fizzling out in many respects, especially if they're basically tied to an individual leader.
So, they lead a very fragile existence in some respects.
So if they're going to get the numbers that they need to survive, I think there is an assumption anyway that they'll need to become a little more attractive to a large number of people for whatever reason.
So that tends towards slightly less extremes in behavior.
But I'm not sure.
I'm not a religious scholar.
So I'm not sure if that is always what happens.
If you look at Protestantism in the main, the churches that, you know, are in my town or city or whatever are nothing like a cult that I've been describing here.
You can go if you want.
You don't have to.
You can go get married there and that's it.
So possibly though, that was different 400 years ago, you know.
Yeah.
I mean, when I'm looking at this, like if I look at, let's say we have two cults and one of them encourages all of its members to laze about in the sun, get a good 10 as much as possible.
I mean, they have a strange set of rules, maybe, but I mean, I'm exaggerating these rules for effect.
And they, it's, it's mostly about just, you know, eat whatever fruit is available, don't bother to hunt anything, you know, versus another cult that's maybe right next door that tells its members that they should work really hard, they should, they should work no less than 10 hours a day, they should work to build houses for their neighbors and that sort of thing.
And then it might seem at first that people would prefer to be in the cult that lays around in the sun, but one might easily bet good money on the fact that the cult that encourages members to work really hard and help each other out is probably going to last longer than, I don't know, what do you give the, what do you give a sunbathing cult, like maybe two years tops before they starve?
You know, so when I look at this situation, it think in my amateur anthropological state that I have, you could have a situation where you could have a cult that instills a number of rules upon the members of a community and that those rules through maybe it's accident or maybe it's whatever just happen to lead to a very good outcome for the members of that community.
And so they continue to follow the rules that have been given to them and that that might be something that leads to a religious state, a religion kind of being an institution that lasts indefinitely generation after generation, whereas a cult often sort of, I mean, it's its need to control gives it this limited perspective that it's much more difficult to control people the way a cult needs to control everyone.
And if you institute rules that in the end aren't very good or prosperous for the people, you're probably not going to last very long.
Is that a distinction based on these rules, maybe?
Possibly.
I mean, let's use a case study sort of example.
So we interviewed recently a lady that was a member of Christian Science.
That's a group formed in the early 1800s.
And it grew massively, you know, and it was, as I guess said, it was the kind of Scientology of its day in a way.
There was quite a lot of stars and people, celebrities that joined.
And it was kind of, yeah, it was a bit of a big thing at the time.
So clearly it was doing something right in that it attracted people.
It was an imaginative solution to the answers to, you know, life and so on.
And it had its own doctrines.
But ultimately, some of its practices or its teachings meant that lots of these members were encouraged not to have medical care of any sort, really.
So they would obviously get sick and then have to make a decision about whether they had treatment or not.
Some of them died.
And, you know, our guests described it as Jones time in Jonestown in slow motion, which I thought was a really profound way of putting it.
Now it's just dying.
You know, there are a few old people who are still surviving the group, but this is a cult that's dying.
This is a group that's just withering on the bone.
It's no longer relevant.
People, people aren't attracted to the brand, if you like.
And the people that are in it are dying.
Plus, they were never encouraged to proselytize.
So they didn't actually go out and try and find new people.
It was all through people being born in.
So if you were to design a cult like that, you could say it has a certain shelf life.
And after that, it will die.
And I would suggest most cults will have something like that, that eventually, no matter how good they are at controlling people, it has a certain shelf life for whatever reason.
The message is no longer resonating.
You know, Jehovah's Witnesses around the, again, the 1800s, there was a melee of so-called Bible scholars looking at the Bible, trying to work out obscure time prophecies based on the books of Ezekiel and Daniel, even the Great Pyramid of Giza, to try and calculate the years from this happening to when Jesus would return in heavenly power.
Jehovah's Witnesses came out of that milieu, you know, the Millerites and Jehovah's Witnesses, Adventists and so on.
These groups came out of that.
But that's no longer the burning question on people's lips.
People now are much more interested in, you know, the battle between wokeness and far-right, you know, extremism and the battle that's going on there for ideas.
And that's where people are attracted to.
So I think that the world, you know, it changes, ideas change, the things that attract people change.
If the organization isn't able to change with the world and with what's going on, plus they do things that make too many people leave, then ultimately they're going to die.
So cults do die and new ones take their place, unfortunately.
Yeah, because of a human urge to control when this is.
And to a human desire to have easy answers to difficult questions.
You know, this is the thing that I think I find most frustrating about a lot of the cultish ways of thinking that we have at times is they are easy answers to difficult questions.
Why do good people die?
Why do good people suffer?
Why can't we all get along?
And what, you know, what's the best way to organize ourselves?
These are difficult questions that require all of our intelligence and research to really understand.
And it's difficult.
But if somebody can come along and say, hey, I've got an easy answer to that, it's here.
That's, you know, it's so, it's so attractive to people to want to go to these easy answers.
And they are easy answers, you know.
So go to these cults and it's all because of Adamic sin or the vibrations in this thing, or it's because we don't have the right view of sex or it's because we don't.
So these are all very simplified, pared down answers that don't really, ever, really give us anything of value.
But they sound like, oh, great, maybe somebody has got the answer to these questions.
I think there's always that desire until as a species, we can grow up from that and say, right, it's difficult.
Let's have difficult conversations and try to find answers that have evidence with them.
Then people are always going to be susceptible to the fraud and the con merchant, really.
That's just my view.
Well, I think that leads to a prediction too, though, right?
That we might even be able to test in that the world itself is becoming more complicated and perhaps even just generally busier, more hectic.
And that, you know, if you are correct in what you hypothesize here, that might frighteningly predict that we might even see a greater propensity for humans in our society to become members of cults, to seek those easy answers.
And that's, I mean, I can't tell you whether that's going to be true or not, but I think that that prediction is easily made from your guess, and that we might even be seeing some of that.
I mean, we see a lot of different behavior.
I worry.
Yeah, I worry that that is the case.
Right.
What is a cult of personality?
And how is this different than what might be called a brick and mortar cult or like a regular cult?
I mean, we were told, I remember the cult of personality being said about famous people back in the 80s.
And it's almost about worshiping an image.
And I could easily see Kim Kardashian having a cult of personality right now, given just how fervent her fans are.
Although, as you point out, it's not something that she, you know, if you asked her why she formed a cult, she would tell her security to escort you off the premises because she's obviously not trying to make a cult.
But we see this cult of personality, and the phrase has bandied around quite a lot in the last few decades.
And I'm not sure that we have the right view of it, if that makes sense.
What are your thoughts?
How is this fit together?
So, so I guess as I've gone on with this conversation, Spencer, I've become much less careful in my banding around my own ideas here.
So I can't back this up.
But my way of seeing the difference between the two is that a cult of personality is where you are completely enamored by the individual.
That individual can do no wrong.
And you could say that you're worshiping them in some way.
You know, this is idol worship in the good old-fashioned sense.
And I would say that's a cult of personality.
Where I think it could become a genuine cult would be if that individual were to do something with that.
I think a proper fully functioning cult requires, I come back to this wonderful German word, a Welten Schaung.
It requires a worldview.
And that would be created by the individual that was the source of all this fervent worship.
But most cults of personality probably don't think about that.
So if you think about people like Kim Kardashian, I suppose, who are revered, they just want you to buy their perfume or whatever it is that they're doing.
She's just selling things.
That's all she's doing.
Exactly.
Yeah.
She's not creating a fully fledged or fully founded worldview about everything.
So I think that's the difference, personally.
I think a cult is a much bigger endeavor and it's it's really about controlling people in lots of ways, if not all the ways.
It's almost totalitarianism is another way to describe them.
So I think a cult of personality could just be a very charismatic person or a very beautiful person, or a very clever person who is um revered, a very marketed person.
Yeah, the other thing i'll throw throw in there is something that again, I don't know if it's a thing or whether it's just something that i'd like to investigate further, but i've i've thought of this idea of a proto-cult and I think that could be quite a useful way of thinking about some groups that we're not quite ready to say they're a, they're a fully blown cult, but they have a lot of cultic elements to them or potential to be cult.
So so they're kind of in that early stage where they've perhaps got some of the, the ingredients.
They might have a charismatic leader, they might have something approaching a um philosophy, but it's not quite there yet, it's not fully formed, and I would suggest there's probably quite a lot of those in lots of different situations, in sort of breakaway movements from existing religions, certain orders, commercial organizations, learning and development, leadership management leadership development, rather those sorts of areas.
I think there's potential for those to to become a bit culty.
I think most of them probably will never make that transition to fully blown cult, but some may.
Um and again, I think things like Nexium is a good example of that.
It seems to me that that group again, i'm not an expert in in that particular group, but it seems to me that that group started off as the same as many training development organizations that i've seen over the years, using tools like nlp and so on to try and influence people, ultimately to try and get them to buy more of their products.
But something then that happens, you've got the charismatic leadership and then gradually it becomes something different.
So I think it's possible.
This is just a um, it's not even a theory yet I haven't developed it, but it's.
It feels to me like there could be a transition process that goes from this proto-cult to a fully blown cult.
But again, that that's.
There's no evidence that I can, no scientific evidence I can give you on that.
It's just a right, a kind of hypothesis at the moment.
Just to preface this, I only began watching the vow yesterday.
I'm only three episodes in.
That's the HBO series.
That is uh, about nexium, but I think that already I think I can see what you're talking about regarding nexium, and I think that there's one factor that is often left out of these conversations and leads people to a lot of wrong conclusions, and that factor is opportunism.
So it seems like Nexium started as something, probably something like a multi-level marketing grift, and then eventually, someone in there very likely the guy at the very top saw an additional opportunity and then instituted some new things in his organization to manifest that opportunity, and he didn't have that as the goal at the start,
but once the opportunity presented himself, he was unable to resist.
And um, I have a among the many little thought experiments I do and have done and have discussed with people, one of them is I call it the Persian Emperor thought experiment, and that is that if you woke up tomorrow and everyone was agreeing with you with everything, What do you think you would do?
How do you think you would act?
Like you are a fully grown person who has lived your whole life the way you have, and then suddenly tomorrow, everything seems to change.
No matter what you say, everyone agrees with you.
Most people say, well, I don't know, that would be kind of weird.
But most people come around to the idea that they would start to test how far they could take it.
And I think this is indicative of something that is our relationship to power.
We have an adage that power corrupts.
And I think that's true.
It's difficult to say.
Obviously, we don't have any scientific data for sure, but it's difficult to say if it corrupts everyone or just some people.
But I think this is a thing that happens with some people who are leaders of cults.
They have a situation that you might, in your terminology, might call something like a proto-cult.
They have a structure.
They have some things in place.
They have people who are listening to them, perhaps even might be called members of a future cult or an almost cult.
And then they start to think in their heads, what if I tried to do this?
And then that's the moment where they cross a line and then they try something.
And for some of them, they try it and it fails.
And then things never become a cult.
But the story we hear about is always the situation of the one that tries a new thing and it works.
And then they sort of work toward becoming a cult.
And it's, I think that we always need to be careful about how much power we let each individual human have, because you never want to be in a situation where you are just at the mercy of one single person's conscience, if that makes sense.
You need everyone to have to pay social respect to their peers.
And if they have no peers, they don't care what anyone thinks of them.
And then you're really just at the mercy of their conscience.
And that's an aspect of this that I find interesting is that almost all the cult leaders have removed themselves from social feedback loops that would normally keep them in check.
I mean, we all have, they're so ubiquitous, we don't really think about them.
All of us have social feedback loops that we attempt to use to guide us in what we do in each day.
We dress.
We might prefer to dress a certain way, but we dress a different way instead.
I would rather wear sweatpants and a baggie shirt every day of my life, but I have to do some other things that are not socially acceptable to do that with.
So I dress in other ways in order to do that because there's a social contract between me and the rest of society that I will behave in a more of a certain manner.
There's a lot of things I would rather be doing, but I do other things instead because I am influenced by the social pressures around me to fit in, to participate, to be a part of society.
But when you don't feel that you're part of society, maybe it's a pride thing and you feel you're better and you have power, that's when you have a much more dangerous situation and you make a different level of decision still.
And you get the Persian Empire paradigm where you think you're a god because everyone agrees with you.
Whatever you say is law because you said it.
And that's the only reason why it's law.
And it must be difficult for any human ego to resist that.
And we can, the revered people in history must be the people who did that.
I mean, I'm talking about Marcus Aurelius and the many things he wrote down that were mostly about attempting to embrace humility rather than shrug it off and embrace arrogance, right, and embrace power.
And for that matter, George Washington, who could have become the first emperor of America if he really wanted to, but he chose to, you know, no, we're going to do this constitution.
We're going to follow through these things and I'll be president and that's fine.
But after I'm done being president, I'll stop being president.
Someone else will become president and it'll pass off to someone else.
And that's how it will be.
If he had made a different set of choices there, America would have been a much different country.
And that, to me, that's an amazing thing that we had a person who was that powerful and everyone listened to everything they said.
And even now, everyone, you know, it's difficult to say in a lot of conversations that George Washington was inherently wrong about some things.
It gets people really uptight.
I live right next door to the US and there's a lot of strong, you know, input on this.
And he wasn't right about everything, but he was right about this one thing, which was to give up power, which is a thing that a lot of people in history, we can tell by the fact that we know history, who just never did.
And that's a thing that must be in the heads of potential leaders of cults.
I think they must ask themselves a question at one point.
They go, how far can I take this?
How big of an opportunity is this?
And there's probably some people who are in that position who turn it down and say, yeah, I could go that route, but what would I look like?
And then they make different decisions that don't lead to a cult.
And then there's some who do, who give in to that urge to just see how far it goes.
And then once they feel that good based on having all that power, they embrace it further.
And that's, I think that's a part of this is that cult leaders are always lifting themselves out and they're shuffling off the regular social rules that apply to everyone else.
And some of them even claim openly that they're this way because they are better and they openly claim that they are higher than everyone else and therefore they can do these things.
And that's the thing that I think is very dangerous.
I think we need to always be, not just for cults, but for every situation, always be careful about how much power we let any one person have without the proper social feedback that would keep them in check.
No, that's right.
I totally agree with you.
I think power, I mean, you could throw everything we've talked about so far, or not just throw it away, but put it to one side and create a new model of what we're talking about just based around power.
You could say that what a cult is all about is about the monopolization of power within the social setting.
So one of the things that I think is quite interesting that hasn't, well, perhaps hasn't even been done as much as it could is using organizational psychology.
Because at the end of the day, cults are types of organization.
So it's one of my little beefs, really, is that whenever I talk to people about cults and experts and read books about cults, they generally come from a perspective that is from somebody who's been counseling or mental health professionals, psychotherapists who have helped people who have been in cults.
So that the field is certainly the popular study of cults is dominated by the psychotherapists and the counselors and so on, which is fine because that's a really important element.
Of course, we really need to understand how to help people.
But it's not the only lens through which to examine cults.
And one perspective is organizational psychology because these are organizations.
And we've learned quite a lot about the psychology of organizations and leaders over the years, which I feel like we probably should be applying to cults and asking how do these affect cults.
So one of these is a really famous analysis of power, really, which is French and Raven's power bases.
And basically what these researchers created with this was this model that in any organization, you've got various different bases of power.
So you've got legitimate power, which is the power of the leader who has been given authority by somebody else.
So, you know, most organizations have a leadership structure.
So you might have team leaders, you might have supervisors, you might have area managers, then you might have, you know, high-level managers and the CEOs, the board, and so on.
So you have various different structures, but you have these hierarchy of leadership.
And this is known as legitimate power because it's power given them by somebody that is in authority.
And we're pretty compliant as human beings to that type of power.
We've grown used to it.
It's a norm in society.
So, you know, if Jenny suddenly becomes the boss, then we just like, okay, that's Jenny's, Jenny's the boss now.
We report to Jenny and we're quite used to that.
But that's not the only source of power in organizations.
You've got other types of power.
You've got things like reference power, which is the power that people have over you because you like them.
You've got, which is where charisma comes in often.
You've got reward power, the power that people have when they can reward you or not.
There's expert power, which is the power that people have in an organization because they've been there a long time and they understand a lot about their subject.
And then there's other types of power that French and Raven didn't mention, like the power that workers have to say, you know, I'm going to down tools now.
I'm not going to take this anymore or I'm going to leave.
I'm going to leave this job.
So power is diffuse in most organizations.
There's, yeah, there's certain obvious bits of power, legitimate power, but then you've got all sorts of subtle power plays going on through different complex social arrangements.
And my argument is in a cult, the cult leadership is generally trying to monopolize all of that power.
So you don't get expert power.
Beryl, who's been there 30 years, doesn't matter if she's been in this cult 30 years.
Beryl is never going to be the one that you defer to if the leader doesn't agree.
So unlike in many organizations where you have this diffused power where everybody has a role to play, it's not even by any means.
There's always asymmetries of power, but at least you've got this complex web of power.
What cults are doing, and I think this might be get into the heart of what you were talking about with what cult leaders are doing, whether knowingly or not, and I'm still not convinced they're smart enough to know what they're doing necessarily, but at some level, they are trying to gain for themselves all of the power within that organization.
You look at some of these, well, some of these cults led by what can only be described as paedophiles who basically want to be able to choose for themselves which girls they're going to marry and sleep with.
It's just horrific.
Now, in normal social situations, they wouldn't have that power because there would be normal social blocks on that power.
You know, the parents would say, you must be joking, just leave them alone.
The young people themselves, the children themselves would have some power to not be involved in any of that.
But what's happened is this individual has set up a structure of power so that they can do anything.
So they have essentially created structures, systems of power that enable them to do what they want with impunity.
So I think that that is another way of thinking about cults.
It's the complete monopolization of social power within that group.
Whether that, let's say, whether that's done knowingly or just as opportunist might, you know, difficult to say.
So I have a question related to my question about cults of personality.
Is it possible that we are entering an age of digital cults that in thinking this, it's mostly defined by the number of followers you have or like we have in these social media networks,
we have some hard measurement on what level of influence a person might have and that this is a measure and that they don't, it's not that they are trying to track and have control over each individual member the way that a more traditional cult would have, but that they want to just keep their number count up.
Like, you know, the number should never drop.
And if it ever does, then they're, you know, that's the equivalent of a regular cult of having lost a number of members or something, right?
And it's, it's okay if some leave as long as they're replaced by others.
And as long as I have this much adulation or this much influence as I had before, that this is the thing.
Is this a thing that might be happening now?
And I think it's a really interesting example.
I think we can apply the power game to that as well.
If we think about for most, let's in scare quotes, influencers on social media, they are trying to, yes, gain followers often for some sort of end.
It might be because they want to get people to buy their products or watch their videos or become a patron on their YouTube channel or whatever it might be.
There might be some monetization around that.
But there's also a power going the other way, of course, because everybody has the choice whether they want to sign up to that thing or to be a subscriber or to become a patron.
So the creator of the contents is normally going to be aware that they need to do some certain things in order for them to get that continued followship.
So this is where, you know, a lot of leadership theory sits is that we often think about leadership as being a one-way street, but actually it's a dyad.
It's actually a relationship between the leader and the follower.
And I would suggest in most cases in a digital space, there is that.
So if a content provider started providing things that their followers didn't like, then they're aware that they're going to lose them.
So that creates a power that their listeners have over them.
Again, it's a weak power individually, but together it is a power.
And we've seen that with certain content providers who have said something or done something that has become shameful or has damaged their brand.
Then all of a sudden they find their standing amongst their followers has been damaged very, very badly.
So I guess it's always possible, isn't it?
And this is what we're talking about before, the fact that probably most potential cults never become cults for whatever reason.
By nature, cult leaders are probably not particularly strategic and disciplined, but some do.
And that can be for a variety of reasons.
So I guess there is a danger.
Taking that step further, which could give you a sleepless night, is when the algorithms start to work out how to create these sorts of followers.
And you could easily see the creation of a truly digital cult where the leadership is actually not even a human being and it's just responding in ways that it's seen, it's learned from others how to manipulate and coerce people.
So that could be very, very disturbing.
Yeah, I have a large number of thoughts on artificial intelligence, but I don't think we should divert too hard into that today.
Next time.
Yes.
So new question.
Is it possible to have a cult with just two people, a leader and a follower?
And kind of slurred right into this, is it possible to view an abusive relationship as a cult of just two people?
How does that look when I compare those things side by side for you?
Yeah, I personally believe that the answer to that is yes.
It probably doesn't make much sense to call it a cult.
No.
But it is using the same dynamics.
So this is where coercive control finds, I suppose, its original meaning.
So there's even legislation in the UK about coercive control within relationships, which is fairly new legislation, but it doesn't cover cults as far as I understand it currently.
But it does cover relationships.
So yeah, it's something that I'm interested in.
I interviewed someone called Min Grob going back probably six months now, who is an activist in the area of coercive control within relationships.
And we talked about the playbook for the coercive controller.
And yeah, it's pretty much the same, really.
It's the same stuff.
It's, yeah, love bombing when you first meet, putting them on a pedestal.
There's then a kind of test of whether they're willing to put up with something or not.
You know, there'll be an incident where once they've accepted that, then they know that they can get away with this behavior.
And Min said it's not just men towards women, but is more often men towards women, which I think we would unfortunately anticipate.
It's often the male partner saying, you know, I don't want you going out.
I don't want you mixing with anybody else.
I'm going to check your phone.
I'm going to control your information, where you go, even your thinking.
So yeah, it's very, it's very, very similar.
I think it is the same process.
And again, I'm sure there are some psychopathic men and women who do that thoughtfully and planned, but often they're fairly chaotic, which makes it worse in many respects because the other partner is trying to work out where, you know, where are they?
How can they behave now?
It's a long subject, so we don't, I'm sure we don't have time to get into it today.
But a book that I would recommend reading and to your listeners is by a guest we've had on before called Alexandra Stein.
And her book is called Terror, Love and Brainwashing.
And I really like this book because she talks about that and cults.
And she uses, there's a thing in psychology called attachment theory.
And it's quite a well-known theory.
It's about how as children, we form attachments with our main caregiver.
And that becomes a kind of model then for how we're going to form attachments in later life.
And there's various types of attachment, but there's a particular type of attachment called a disorganized attachment.
And this is where the child feels like they want to go to their caregiver for love and comfort and feelings that they can always go back there.
But because of a relationship breakdown, they're not able to do that.
And they fear the caregiver at the same time as want to go to them for help and comfort.
So it forms this disorganized attachment within the relationship where the child is scared of the parent, but loves them at the same time.
They need them, but they're afraid of them.
So they go to them, but they also know that that's the place where they're most afraid.
And so it creates this really damaging dynamic.
And Alexandra Stein suggests that that's what's happening in cults, but it's also what's happening in abusive relationships.
And I think there's a lot there, actually.
So yes, I think the short answer to your question is yes, absolutely.
We're not here for short answers.
When I came up with my list of the things that were always there in every cult, and then I looked at abusive relationships, it seemed to tick all four of the boxes I came up with anyway.
Most particularly that a claim to knowledge that is unavailable to the followers, that this is always a thing that anytime one member of the relationship is claiming that the other is stupid or ignorant somehow, that they don't know things, that's essentially part of the same thing that they are telling them that I know things that you don't know, and therefore I should be in charge of what we're about here.
And that's incredibly, well, I mean, it's abusive behavior, right?
Not something that used to be considered abusive behavior, but it is.
Absolutely, it is.
And it makes you, I think it should make us pause to think how many people have been victims of those sorts of relationships over the years of human history.
You know, it's the behavior of these abusive partners, I think, unfortunately, has been tolerated and seen as normal for many years.
So again, one of the reasons why we kind of need to address those, I think.
So I have one question that I had in my bonus questions section.
I imagine that I would have come up with more, but I only came up with the one.
And I jokingly said, if we think there's time, and of course, I think we're all realized that we're well over whatever time we thought we were going to take.
But that's okay.
Let's dive right in because I think it's a really interesting question.
So when I was listening to a lot of the episodes of your podcast about cults and indoctrination and this sort of thing, and then also with transitioning back to a society that's outside the cult, I, in my brain, I was comparing this against what we sometimes see with soldiers.
There's a large number of a large number of homeless people are former soldiers.
And, you know, people say, oh, well, they're in the military.
And you might rapidly point out, well, very few of them were officers.
They were almost always the infantry, the lower people on the totem pole sort of thing.
And I began to wonder if there was some psychological crossovers here, similarities between a cult indoctrination and like the, you know, boot camp for soldiers, because we, you know, in the military, we need the soldiers to follow orders at all costs.
That's the one thing drilled into them.
And everything is decided for them.
And, you know, as soon as you're looking at it that way, there's a lot of similarities between cults and the way we treat soldiers.
And then I began to think, well, is there anything that we've learned about transitioning cult members in a society that could help us to deal with soldiers being transitioned to civilian life that might ease their burden in some way?
What are your thoughts on this?
Yeah, it's something I have thought about actually.
In my research for my dissertation for my masters, I looked at identity.
That's something we haven't really touched on, believe it or not, after an hour and three quarters, we've not mentioned the word identity, but it's a big, very, very important part of cult life is identifying with the cult.
You know, you become the cult.
You are the cult.
It's something that I won't go into now, but it's a personal kind of realization that I underestimated the amount of identification that my family still have with their cult, which has cost me actually.
And that's surprising because I'd known about it, but it just shows you, you know, you don't always apply it to your own situation.
My dissertation was about ex-Jehovah's Witnesses who had left the organization over 10 years ago, but who were raised in the group.
So we call those second generation or multi-generation members.
So I wanted to do some qualitative research around their experience and in particular, how they managed with identity, because when you leave a group that is so all-encompassing, you are absolutely, you know, your whole identity is wrapped up in this organization.
There's all that practical stuff as well.
But just from a very psychological perspective, it is you, you know, is who you are.
And I thought about other groups that might also experience that.
And there's an interesting paper that I read about Marines who had left because of injury.
There's a couple of papers around this sort of subject.
So soldiers who have been injured in the line of duty so severely that they're not able to continue with their work anymore as a soldier or as a Marine.
And there's other research around other roles or other jobs where they kind of highly identify with the work.
But I think a soldier or a Marine in particular is very closely tied to their identity.
You know, I am a Marine.
And once leaving that, because not through their own choice, but because of this injury, some of them really struggle to come to terms with who they were now, you know, and actually what the research seemed to suggest is the soldiers who were able to talk about their experiences and their future as a single thread of story, a single narrative,
did much better than those who essentially talked about a full stop.
You know, this is the end of me as a Marine.
And they couldn't create a future story, a future narrative of how they were going to move on with their lives.
Those that did and were able to say, Well, I've learned these other skills, maybe leadership skills, maybe other practical skills that I can now apply in civilian life.
They were able to create a new story.
So, that got me thinking about the way that we generate our own narrative through our lives, and we make sense of our lives through story.
We make sense of who we are by telling a story about ourselves.
So, that is essentially what identity really is.
It's a story we tell ourselves about ourselves and that we tell other people.
And in that telling, we reinforce that story.
So, it becomes our own understanding of who we are.
And in my research, I found that, and I was kind of looking for this.
So, it's not, it's not an objective piece, it's a qualitative piece.
But I found good evidence that people who had adopted a career, maybe gone on to further education or something when they'd left, they were able to move their identity from Jehovah's Witness to whatever it was they'd done now.
I mean, there was an example of one guy there who was an elder, a Jehovah's Witness elder, and he tells the story of how he loved giving talks on the platform.
He was a good speaker and he used to get people laughing.
He was quite a funny guy.
And he said how difficult it was to leave.
But then he explained how he then took up, he became a stand-up comedian and went down to London and entered a competition and yeah, became a stand-up comic for about 10 years.
And he's managed to be able to explain that by saying, you know, I always loved doing public speaking.
I always loved making people laugh.
And then basically, I'm doing the same thing now.
So he's able to mend his identity.
He's able to tell a story about who he is.
And it's, it's a coherent story.
So I think that's the thing for me that I learned in the research around thinking about people who have left the army or any sort of service like that, that's very strongly identity driven is it's really important for us to help them and for them to find a new identity.
It could be linked to the one they've had before, but they need to be able to tell a story about themselves.
And that's maybe what's sometimes happening, what's going wrong when they're not able to make sense of who they are now because they can't tell a story about it.
So I think that's a really interesting area.
So that's an area of similarity.
The recruitment and socialization of cult members versus soldiers, I think, is more complex.
For a start, I think most people who join the army know what they're going for.
True.
So the con element isn't there so much.
I mean, there might be an, I mean, when I look at recruitment adverts on the television, you know, you just see really exciting lives landing planes on aircraft carriers, don't you?
Usually there's a helicopter involved.
Yeah.
Exactly.
Helicopters are always cool.
You don't see so much of the freezing cold.
Wading through swamps.
Exactly.
So you wonder whether there's an element of at least selective truth there.
But yeah, I think there are enough differences.
Margaret Singer talks about this in her book.
Again, another really well-known expert in cult.
She passed away many years ago, but her book, Cults in Our Midst, is one of the sort of received books that you should read if you're interested in the subject.
And she does address these similarities, but quite strongly argues against the idea that actually it's the same thing that's going on.
Yeah, it's clearly not the same thing, but no, but I think there are similarities.
And certainly, if we think about identity, then yeah, there's lots I think we can learn across both those two domains.
Yeah, I mean, I'm thinking about, I was never in the military, but I knew a few people who were, and I've seen some movies that were claimed to have some level of realism to them.
And that the number one thing that is, for lack of a better term, drilled into the soldier's head is that they have to follow orders.
You have to do what you're told.
And that everything about the soldier's life is decided for them.
And that when they come back to civilian life and then they lose track of paying their bills, part of me wonders why anyone's all that surprised by that if they were living for eight or ten years without them, with the, you know, the military, the army telling them, you know, paying all the bills for them.
And they live on a base and they sleep where the army tells them to sleep and they eat what the army tells them to eat.
And they listen to everything the army tells them to do.
And then they come out of that and then they have to start making those decisions for themselves.
It seemed a lot like what you were describing about the cults and the cult having made all these decisions for you and that you had to now think for yourself on these things.
And I wonder if there's a think for yourself problem for some of these, for some of the people that come out of the military, that they, you know, everyone who comes out has to think for themselves.
Some portion of them get to that place and some just don't.
And there's no going back, you know, because they have some trouble deciding things.
A cult member can still go back to the cult and say, please decide for me, but the soldier can't.
And he's just sort of lost.
Absolutely.
I think, I think, I totally agree with that.
But I think there's another, another sort of complexity, possible similarity in that, depending upon what type of military engagement you've been in, if you've just been in the army but not seen action, if you've been part of the war, then you know, sometimes the way of dealing with what's happened during that time can be very difficult.
So you may have done things that you had to do, that you were ordered to do, that you needed to do to fulfill your role as a soldier.
And it's very likely that there'll be feelings of guilt and regret and so on.
And that can be exactly the same in occults.
You know, if you've left a group where you may have been responsible for the recruitment of dozens of people coming into that group, and now you realize what that group is doing and how it's treating people, I think that's really hard.
I never became an elder, but if, you know, as a Jehovah's Witness, when you're an elder, you are part, or you may be asked to be a part of what's called a judicial committee.
And that the results of that judicial committee can determine whether your family are going to shun you or not.
So if you've been responsible for saying to the relatives who are also Jehovah's Witnesses, this person's been disfellowshipped, which means that essentially they can have nothing to do with them anymore.
When you leave, that must weigh heavy on some people.
So I think there's another element there.
There's the guilt element.
There's the, if you were a member of a war, sorry, if you fought in a war where society now sees that your own society sees it as a mistake, you know, the Iraq war, for instance, in this country.
I think that happened to a lot of people in Vietnam, right?
Vietnam's the same, yeah.
Um, you know, you're you're left trying to struggle with what not only what you've had to do in that situation, but even the meaning and purpose of what you were doing is now tainted and difficult for you to understand.
So, I really do feel for people who are going through that, and I'm not pretending I understand that particularly, but I think there are some similarities that we can understand to some degree.
Yeah, interesting question.
Yeah, okay, well, I think we probably should wrap this up.
Phil, taking enough time.
Well, it's been really interesting.
Thank you, Spencer.
Well, yeah, it's been really great.
I've learned a large number of things just in these last few hours here.
Great.
It's it's it's hard when you're being asked questions and uh you're trying to think of a coherent way of explaining something.
And of course, it's not like writing a paper where you can uh you can quote your references and uh yeah, stop and look things up, yeah, exactly.