Do you listen to Taylor Swift, browse Gwyneth Paltrow’s latest self-care obsessions at Goop, or follow Elon Musk’s interior monologues on X? They’re quite normal activities today, but beware: you might actually have joined a cult.
Is that really true? Probably not. But Swift, Goop, and Musk are all cultural mainstays that have had the cult label applied to them at some point, no matter how innocuous their fandoms may really be. This could simply be because cults seem to be everywhere these days.
News articles, documentaries and streaming series have shown us the sordid inner workings of countless real cults, from the Manson family to NXIVM (pronounced nek-see-um). And figures today, both popular and divisive, have seemed to embody the charisma and totalitarian tendencies we see in cult leaders, attracting millions of ardent fans.
So, are cults really spreading throughout modern society, invisibly sucking the vulnerable into a whirlpool of fear, loyalty, abuse and coercion? Have we grown more susceptible to cult recruitment in an age dominated by virtual interactions? Or is cult psychology perhaps more ingrained in human nature than we might want to believe?
Cults 101
The word ‘cult’ summons a fairly specific image. A group of unkempt, oddly dressed men and women, likely living in a compound, singing songs and perhaps farming beets. A leader – probably a man – walks among them, basking in their adulation, stopping to offer a word to a favourite follower.
Behind closed doors there are strange rituals, beatings, promises of eternal salvation, humiliation and abuse, people desperate to leave but unable to cut their ties. Murder and orgies may figure in as well.
Many of the more famous cults, like the Peoples Temple or the Branch Davidians, do stick to that stereotype to some extent. But there have been countless cults throughout history, not all exactly the same. Definitions used by experts can vary somewhat, but they’ve largely coalesced around several key characteristics.
The first is a leader who is both charismatic and authoritarian. Charles Manson bore more than a passing resemblance to Jesus, and strummed his guitar on street corners to attract young women.
Keith Raniere, the leader of the NXIVM cult now accused of sex trafficking, was hailed by his followers as a genius. Both also coerced their followers into horrifying acts.
Psychologists often speak of the ‘dark triad’ when they discuss cult leaders, or the personality traits of Machiavellianism, psychopathy and narcissism.
Narcissism in particular might be most dangerous says Prof Michael Hogg, a professor of social psychology at Claremont Graduate University, in the US. Not only do narcissists seek praise, but they’re far more likely to take leadership.
“They think themselves so fabulous, so wonderful, they think: ‘Well, of course I’m going to do the leadership’,” he says.
Secondly, cults have a structure that leverages a strict hierarchy while also being deeply isolating. Abandoning relationships with family and friends makes cult initiates far more vulnerable, and means they have little outside perspective on what’s happening to them.
“If you threaten people, and they're not isolated, they can run away or they can seek help. But if they are isolated within the system, they've got nowhere to go,” says Dr Alexandra Stein, social psychologist and author of Terror, Love and Brainwashing: Attachment in Cults and Totalitarian Systems.
Paul Waugh, the founder of the ‘life coaching’ group Lighthouse, now alleged by some former members to be a cult, has been accused of exhorting followers to cut ties with their families.
One follower told the BBC that Lighthouse wanted her to take her parents to court and “make them pay for not taking better care of her.” The compounds favoured by some cult groups can also create a more physical means of isolation, shutting the outside world out altogether.
Third, cults have a system of belief that is both divergent and all-encompassing. This often involves allusions to long-dead beings, deities, aliens or other supernatural entities, though not always.
“People often get tangled up in trying to unpick a belief system of a cult, which is really a waste of time,” Stein says. Stein would know: she spent about ten years involved with a left-wing cult in the US in the 1980s, a period she jokingly refers to as her “field work.”
It’s not the idiosyncrasies of cult beliefs that are important, she says, but the similarities. Cult beliefs purport to offer a unified explanation for everything, or a solution to worldly problems. “This is all you need,” is the unspoken message.
For example, Ramtha’s School of Enlightenment, the religious organisation based in rural Washington State in the US, has been labelled a cult by critics and past students. It teaches followers that they can “realise their divinity” by learning to tap into their bodies’ electromagnetic fields, harness higher levels of consciousness, and ultimately attain reincarnation following death.
Finally, cults are frequently accused of relying on high levels of emotional manipulation, often paired with physical coercion and abuse. Raniere, for example, branded his initials on female members of NXIVM. A former member of another cult known as the Family, recalled public beatings, isolation, starvation and more doled out to her and other cult members when she was a child.
Most cults don’t appear ‘cult-like’ at first, however. Prospective members are lured in with promises of personal improvement, newfound wealth, deeper understanding. This often involves systematic recruitment that targets those likely to be most receptive to their message.
“Cult recruiters are very good at sussing out the vulnerable,” says Prof Janja Lalich, sociologist and CEO of the Lalich Center on Cults and Coercion, who also spent time in a cult.
It’s also worth noting that many cult members are brought in by friends or family members, and others are born into cults, or kidnapped into them. It’s not known exactly how many people are recruited into cults each year, or what their paths look like.
To those who might scoff “not me!” Lalich says: don’t be so sure. “We are all vulnerable a million times in our lives,” she says.
A 2022 study that interviewed 100 family members of people in cults found some of the most common reasons for joining included the death of a loved one, the loss of a job, as well as a general dissatisfaction with life.
Some cults use day-to-day pursuits, like business coaching or yoga studios, as fronts to draw potential recruits in gradually deeper. Stein compares the structure of a cult to an onion, with the inner layers containing the more radical elements of the group’s behaviour, while the outer layers serve to normalise the group.
“But once you get through the layers, all of a sudden aliens are popping out of volcanoes and going into your body,” she says. “You can't start with that.”
The journey into a cult is paved with appeals to basic human instincts: the desire to be part of a group, the desire for greater self-knowledge, trust in strong leaders and the need for stability. Successful cults offer these in great quantities.
Once inside, things may take a darker turn. Cult members are often battered by powerful emotional swells — fear, love, hatred, anxiety — all emanating from a powerful leader and others in the hierarchy. Added to an environment that reiterates the primacy of the group above all else, it can be overwhelmingly difficult to muster the strength and the presence of mind to leave.
Isolation Age
In a digital age where humans are more connected than ever to new information, both real and false, and at the same time disconnected from both those around and perhaps even from ourselves, it is easy to worry that cults might be on the rise.
Actually determining whether there are more cults today than there were a few decades or centuries ago may not be possible, experts say. There is no directory of active cults to consult, and the secretive nature of many cults makes studying them difficult.
It may be better, Hogg says, to talk in terms of a ‘cultish’ spectrum — that is, how cult-like a group or set of behaviours appear to be. So, are cultish groups perhaps becoming more popular?
“Put my feet to the coals, I would probably say, ‘Yeah, I sort of worry that they are,’” Hogg says.
Cult-like attributes — revered leaders, unorthodox worldviews, recruitment of seekers and the lonely — do seem to have crept into a varied list of groups these days. Invite-only Pilates clubs promise exclusivity and body transformation.
Andrew Tate, now facing charges of sex trafficking, for years cultivated a devout following among a specific kind of young man. Antivaxxers cite fraudulent science claims as if they were scripture and scorn those who disagree.
It is not difficult to find the ingredients for a cult peppered into various groups today. It could be because cultish behaviour is becoming more prevalent. But it could also be simply because cult-like dynamics align so well with normal human behaviour.
“These are general human attributes, an extreme version of what we normally do in terms of forming identities and groups,” Hogg says. He says it’s natural for humans both to gravitate towards strong leaders and groups, and for those groups to prioritise the in-group over those outside.
“Groups tell us who we are,” he says. Only in a cult, that identity becomes absolutely consuming, which can lead to extreme behaviour.
Likewise, “everybody wants to have purpose, wants to have meaning, wants to make sense of the world,” Lalich says. But in a cult, you may be so cut off from normal reality that you cannot begin to separate what is real from what is false and lose the ability to make rational choices.
Researchers studying extremist groups, which share some attributes with cults, identify three pillars of radicalization: needs, narrative, and network. The first identifies a desire for personal significance, or meaning.
The second, narrative, describes a story of sorts that an individual can insert themselves into, like cults that promise members they play an integral role in saving the world. Finally, the network, or group itself, reinforces that narrative by validating it and providing rewards for adhering to it (or punishments for not doing so).
Two of the biggest, and most worrying, red flags for a potential cult are isolation and coercion. Taylor Swift fans may idolise the singer, but she is not convincing them to leave their families. The Catholic Church may hold views on the use of birth control that are considered extreme, but it is not entering its members’ bedrooms to enforce them.
“The difference is the level of control and the level of influence,” Lalich says. “Something can be very strict and restrictive, but not necessarily be a cult.”
Cultivating defences
Whether or not they are becoming more prolific, cults are unlikely to disappear anytime soon. The needs they speak to are too basic, the human psychology they exploit too ingrained. And there will always be those who wish to take advantage of those traits for their own gain.
At an individual level, Hogg says the best protection against falling into a cult’s gravitational pull is to bolster your sense of self-identity. People who rely on a single, dominant source for their identity — whether that be a religion, a job, or something else — are most vulnerable because they’ve put all their eggs in one basket.
“When people are fairly confident about who they are, or they're not too worried because they have many different identities, then these things don't happen,” he says.
People who draw their sense of self from multiple, unconnected places are more resilient, he says, as they’re unlikely to feel their core identity threatened should any one of those constituent identities fall apart.
At the societal level, Hogg says uncertainty often leads to more cult-like activity, like in the tumultuous 1960s as traditional notions of meaning and identity began to be questioned. In that milieu, strong leaders with clear messages offering meaning and identity become more appealing. Dial up the uncertainty and fear enough and people may begin to act strangely.
“When it gets taken to that extreme, because you desperately need to feel certain about who you are, then cultish behaviour happens,” he says.
Uncertainty may even make the emergence of cult leaders themselves more likely. A 2022 study by Hogg and two co-authors using interviews found that those who scored low on dark triad traits were less likely to assume leadership when they felt a greater sense of uncertainty. Meanwhile, those who scored higher experienced no such reduction in their desire for leadership.
Stein says her advice for picking out potential cult behaviour is simple: “Anyone who tries to isolate you, run a mile.”
Few healthy groups will try to cut you off from your friends or family. But cults typically need to isolate potential members to draw them in completely and make leaving feel impossible.
Another warning sign is a system of belief or leader who claims to possess the answers to nearly everything. In our complex, not-fully-understood world, it’s highly unlikely one theory or practice could ever explain everything perfectly — scientists still struggle to understand everything from the fundamental workings of the human body to the force of gravity, much less the mysteries of the human mind. How likely is it that one person has the answer to everything?
“If there's adulation of some human being that nobody dares criticise and everybody's just fawning over, that's probably not a good group for you,” Lalich says.
Changing the programming
The internet hasn’t exactly made it easier to guard against deceptive cult recruitment. The dominant dynamics of digital life have made people more isolated, shunted them into echo chambers, added fuel to between-group squabbles and probably worsened the modern preference for quick fixes.
Still, Stein says she’s confident we can make headway against dangerous cults. Awareness about what cults look like and how they operate is spreading (helped, and perhaps also hurt, by the barrage of cult exposés). Resources for cult deprogramming, which both Stein and Lalich provide, exist. Still, Stein argues we need to go further by prosecuting cult leaders for manipulative tactics, and ideally before they begin harming victims.
“If someone beats a person in order to control them, we already theoretically put that person in jail. But we don't do that if they use psychological means,” she says. “I think we need to start by understanding that this is a crime.”
As for whether we’ll ever see a benevolent cult emerge, Lalich is pessimistic. Cults range from extremely dangerous to merely somewhat benign, she says.
“Part of the definition of a cult is that you are giving up your critical thinking and your independence,” she says. “I don't think that's ever a good thing for us.”
About our experts
Prof Michael Hogg is a professor of social psychology and director of the Social Identity Lab at Claremont Graduate University.
Dr Alexandra Stein is a specialist in the social psychology of ideological extremism and other dangerous social relationships.
Prof Janja Lalich is a sociologist and writer who is an expert on cults, coercion and charismatic authority.
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