There’s a book about cults that keeps getting 3 star reviews by my friends and people in bookish spaces on the internet that I follow. With a trendy cover and eye-catching graphic design, this nonfiction examination of the phenomenon of cults irrationally pisses me off. HarperCollins’ pitch for Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism includes the following sentence: “Montell argues that the key to manufacturing intense ideology, community, and us/them attitudes all comes down to language… Cultish language is something we hear—and are influenced by—every single day.” What about this argument is original or as enlightening as what Noam Chomsky’s concept of manufacturing consent has already proven to us; that language, media, and rhetoric deeply influences our personal beliefs and politics? Combating supposed general public sentiment about the nearly supernatural issue of ‘brainwashing’ by using extreme real life tragedies to argue the point that much of our culture is subtly inundated with cult-like messaging seems fundamentally juvenile. “Community” and “language” are intrinsic aspects of human nature, and it seems evident to me that cults, just like everything else, rise as responses to the world around us.
Even just reading the synopsis reminds me of how much of contemporary cultural commentary is watered down and recycled versions of ideologies already extensively examined by theorists of the previous century. I think a more thorough understanding of how humans form communities on the basis of our beliefs can be explored through fiction. As a form of rhetoric in dialectics with the material world around us, good fiction can help us safely explore extremities of the human experience. (Bad fiction can remind us that not everyone should be a writer.) Through fiction, we can move beyond the shock factor of the supposed “brainwashing” that cults necessitate, and sympathize with and understand the actual victims of cults, while answering the question of why cults even exist in the first place. I am deeply uninterested in reading Cultish, not because I am uninterested in the topic, but because I think that the loose cultural analysis it offers will not give me anything deeper to think about in comparison to how I already view the world. Through the lens of the Marxist base/superstructure, dialectical materialism, and my own personal experiences, I can see how language informs the thoughts and actions of me and my peers, and how that could potentially result in “cultish” dynamics. So I guess this is my attempt to write what I don’t think Amanda Montell could (as she has not experienced the gen z specific hellscapes of stan twitter, niche tik tok communities, and Letterboxd users).
I’ve been reading some novels centrally featuring cults this year, and like any other self-respecting-liberal-arts-college-student/graduate/drop-out, I’ve seen Ari Aster’s Midsommar (2019) a number of times. The novels I want to discuss here vary in levels of writing quality and genre, among many other differences, so it’s strange putting them on a list together, but they all focus on examining cults as a literal phenomenon, in various situations.
Many people online have agreed that instead of comparing our political reality to one that emulates Margaret Atwood’s 1995 The Handmaid’s Tale, we are living in the timeline Octavia E. Butler has constructed in her Earthseed series. In Parable of the Sower published originally in 1993, Butler delineates the dystopia of the 2020s, in which we are currently living. I have yet to finish reading the Earthseed trilogy, but based off of Parable of the Sower, I would have to agree with the internet’s analysis. Butler aptly predicted the chaos of a crumbling fascist American state, deftly illustrating the power of capital, innate police and political corruption, and rampant, inescapable diseases and ‘natural’ disasters amidst resource shortages and global chaos. Through the journal entries of our deeply insightful, intelligent, and determined main character Lauren Oya Olamina, a Baptist preacher’s daughter and eldest sister to multiple siblings, we come to understand the necessity of her walled off, tight knit, closed community that her family has constructed and maintained for her entire life. In some ways, the community in which she was born and raised could be classified as a cult. Usually a cult involves a strict ideology as well as a limited lifestyle, which is not conveyed in extremes throughout the novel, as the rules within the community are nearly entirely oriented towards mere survival as opposed to anything superfluous. Our main character, like everyone else in her closely guarded community, never ventures outside the walls of the gated community unless absolutely necessary. Lauren’s journal entries recording the events of her day, through which the entirety of the book is contained, alternate with religious verses she herself writes and creates. Well, Lauren does not believe she is ‘creating’ this ideology, which she calls Earthseed (hence the title of the series), but rather the force and life of it has been called into existence through the vessel of her being, and the words she writes and compiles regarding Earthseed are immutable truths and should be understood and followed as such. From the very beginning of the novel to the end, Lauren develops and creates Earthseed until it moves beyond a personal collection of truths, and onto an ideology, religion, and way of life.
Lauren is an admirable character who persists in the face of the horrifying apocalyptic landscape around her, but as a reader, watching her form and build her Earthseed ideology (and later on, community) from the ground up, is simultaneously impressive and concerning. I’m impressed by her initiative and application of survival tactics she has both been taught and learned through firsthand experience, her leadership ability, and her decisive approach to practical necessities of the day to day as well as the larger vision she has: “The Destiny of Earthseed is to take root among the stars.” Lauren’s hope, vision, and commitment to Earthseed drives the success she has against all odds. The resources she provides are essential to the community she builds and the relative safety of her Earthseed community as the rest of the world goes to shit.
Characters who join Earthseed late into the book are oftentimes quite apprehensive about Lauren’s ideology and book of verses. But those who are committed to her cause aren’t fanatics by any means, they have simply seen and experienced themselves the material results of Lauren’s leadership and vision. It’s only in later installments of the series (of which I have not read yet, so I will refrain from extensive commentary on it) where we see the cult of personality form around Lauren. Of course, cults do not necessitate a singular leader at the forefront of the group that others worship with commitment and fervor, but it usually does require if not a strict alignment with the group’s ideology, a commitment to not opposing the major tenets of that group– as expected and necessary for a group to maintain itself a group, which is by definition an exclusionary community. Holding particular ideologies and beliefs, solidarity around a common cause, and meaningful leadership or direction seem to be universally present in cult groups. It is also an apt description of many manifestations of major religions and political parties and organizations (The Church of Latter Day Saints, Donald Trump, etc.). As evidenced in the synopsis/pitch, Montell’s Cultish argues that cults are much more ubiquitous than the most extreme cults that have been universally condemned make them out to be. The differentiation of a community and a cult might have to do with the amount of delusion necessitated in being involved with said community/cult, but even that distinction is ambiguous, because who has the moral capacity to even be able to determine what is or isn’t delusional? Many people believe that communists are delusional, mostly because they do not understand anything about communism, but even in my own experiences as a communist, I see delusion and cult of personality seep into organizing spaces in frightening and deeply concerning ways.
A few of my friends have been involved in cults within the spheres of revolutionary political organizing. I’m using the word “cult” loosely here, as I think it should often be used. Oftentimes, the cults were directly tied to organizing initiatives that from the outside, entirely look beneficial to workers’ movements and decolonial efforts and on the ground action; from my outsider perspective, they feel like less extreme versions of the Black Hammer bullshit. So many people have spoken out on the cult-like natures of their political organizing groups, or even if that language is not specifically utilized, the common markers of cults of grooming, abuse, manipulation, silencing of victims, and dismissal of violent experiences for the sake of maintaining equilibrium within the organization are present. Many of my friends who organize extensively, far more than I have ever done or have ever claimed to do, have told me their horror stories with various parties and bullshit ranging from poor political lines regarding anti-imperialism to sexual harassment and 30 year old men attempting to sleep with teenage party/organization recruits. And this occurs across all political tendencies. I don’t think it can be exclusively tied back to male chauvinism and patriarchy (though of course that’s an influential element of it), I think it’s the fundamentally cultish participation required of even the most well intentioned members or allies that allow for these abuses to proliferate. In order to be armed against the world at large in such a major way, as required of revolutionary organizations, there is a need for solidarity and comradeship that feels harder and harder to cultivate and create. My friend Kennedy (also a writer with a phenomenal substack) was telling me about the well-meaning white brother of a friend who eagerly asks people to sign a petition for reparations for Black American descendants of enslaved people, only for the petition's parent organization later to be exposed as fraudulent. We commiserated over the sad and exhausting reality of entire organizing spaces with genuine intentions and admirable goals set up by and around cults of personality who’s interest lie more within grifting than in the supposed initiatives of whatever given cause the group is rooted in. I told her about how a few of my friends who were involved in the Stop Line 3 protests, and explained how the campaign ultimately dehumanized and exploited the very young and vulnerable teenagers camped out in the wilderness for weeks on end, who ended up getting hit with felonies. Again, this highly publicized initiative resulted in no change (the pipeline has been laid) but a lot of clout for the woman at the supposed head of it all, her wall calendar being decked out with production company dates for when TV people would come out into rural Minnesota to stick giant cameras in the faces of young people chained to equipment.
If we are living in the dystopia of Butler’s Parable of the Sower, and if Lauren’s compiled visionary survival tactics and cultivation of a community of resistance is what forms Earthseed, the attempts to create the equivalent of an Earthseed in our contemporary United States are laughable. All the attempts I have heard of initiatives for autonomous zones popping up have been questionable at best. This is also not to say that Lauren’s Earthseed community or ideology is ontologically good and something that we should be working to achieve, as it can also be perceived as somewhat of a vanity project, an attempt for Lauren to spread her truth to the masses, starting by establishing a small collective of people (led by her), working to provide the necessary resources and protection from the violence of unchecked fascist chaos across America. But this directly parallels historical and present revolutionary parties, which also attempt to provide survival resources and political education, spreading seeds of truth to the masses in building a better world birthed from the ashes of empire, capital, and patriarchy. Thus, the distinctions between a cult and a community– particularly a revolutionary one– are muddled, as seen in both my own mixed emotional responses to Lauren’s Earthseed community in a fictional universe, and the current reality around me of predatory cults emerging from revolutionary movement spaces. Characters turn to Earthseed because they have nowhere else to go; the secret commune Lauren has built by the latter portion of the novel is their only option amidst widespread chaos. For many of us living under late stage capitalism, some of us fantasize about autonomy and separation from the rest of the world in communes, others of us participate in revolutionary parties and mutual aid groups, and the rest of us attempt to find community wherever we can in order to survive and cope. The equivalent of Earthseed communities in our timeline can be found particularly in online spaces, because in an age of surveillance capitalism, the anonymity and community one can find on social media sites are far more accessible and prominent than real life physical communes. In Parable of the Sower, however, an important aspect of the worldbuilding is the lack of technology in this dystopian future.
Lack of technology and the essential communication frameworks of our contemporary reality also defines the cults constructed in many other dystopian fictional universes. A semi-recently published novel, A History of Wild Places by Shea Ernshaw, attempts to explore this cult phenomenon, but does so incredibly poorly. My GoodReads review of it was: “This is like if Midsommar was stupid.” And I stand by it! We follow a private detective investigating the disappearance of a creepy children’s author who has a special magical power of being able to sense and experience the history of any object he touches. We follow another perspective exhibiting a closed off remote community that collectively believes that the outside world has been decimated by a deadly plague, and that they are the only survivors who have managed to live due to their isolation from the rest of the world. Lacking the media of the rest of the actual world around the community, the effort of language as propaganda is bastardized through the plot revealing that the leader of the cult is a man who has studied hypnotism, which has allowed him to manipulate this commune into total isolation from outside civilization. The characters’ fear of the imaginary destruction of the rest of the world is overcome due to extreme circumstances after particular dangerous cult rituals, and this cult narrative coalesces with the storyline of the private detective searching for the children’s author: one in which both people had been indoctrinated, brainwashed, and hypnotized into integrating into the cult. One of my main qualms with this story, besides its terrible writing and core concept, is how the antagonist is characterized as almost a parody of a cult leader, possessing magical brainwashing capabilities due to his hypnotist skills. The issue with framing abusers and those who violate the power they hold as community leaders as mystically gifted and uniquely talented at amassing power is that it helps absolve them, to some degree. If someone is uniquely evil and not merely a product of their environment, perceiving them as an aberration to the norm only feeds into the cult of personality they have built that elevates them above everyone else. Ernshaw giving her fictitious cult of personality a power such as hypnotism to lean into the magical realism edge of the story is a lazy depiction of how cults actually work. By removing the victims of this cult of their autonomy through having their belief in the traditions and practices dictated by the leader largely reinforced through his special magical capabilities allows the author to avoid fiction’s legacy and responsibility to meaningfully examine the human condition. In reality, abuse of power in this manifestation requires a mutual relationship and non-magical manipulation. Victims of cults believe themselves to be rational actors, and I think the large majority of people are rational actors within the framework of their social conditioning. Throughout A History of Wild Places, Ernshaw characterizes the community members under the leader’s command as rational actors by showing the reader their thought processes, but the key tool required for the social conditioning present is essentially a supernatural power. There is no real world equivalent that allows this very physical manifestation of “brainwashing” to function as any sort of allegory; the tool of magical realism falls flat at criticizing the very legitimate issue of the dangers of a cult of personality and communities rooted in lies, delusion, and manipulation.
Whereas Butler’s main character possessing the supernatural power of “hyper-empathy,” in which she physically and emotionally experiences the pain of anyone she sees, allows us to think about the vulnerability of care in a disaster-ridden world, Lauren’s positionality as a leader, and how she experiences and builds community. Butler’s use of magical realism illuminates something profound about the human experience, exaggerating a trait nearly all humans have to parallel how communities emerging from survival can be exaggerated into dangerous, suffocating, or uneasy cult situations. Lauren’s character emphasizes the reality that those who acquire power do not usually do it by unnatural or extreme means– their dedication to a greater cause and the solutions they offer to immediate problems in the world has more power than anything as silly as hypnotism or “brainwashing.” It strips us of our autonomy to characterize others’ or our own processes of indoctrination and socialization when we reduce the existence of cults with the simple explanation of “brainwashing.”
My friend who was involved in a cultish (ha) organization with the supposed goal of organizing gig economy workers told me that throughout their whole experience of getting involved in the organization and in their ultimate decision to exit it, they were definitively thinking rationally. It is a disservice to ourselves to feed into the fictional logic that a cult of personality or celebrity is uniquely capable of “brainwashing” without our own participation and engagement with them. That isn’t to say that we are at fault for being influenced by leaders of cults, because there are very specific tactics and intentional formulas cults follow to effectively integrate members and victims into a group. My friend told me how the “cadre” of this organization were not allowed to have their own personal phones, and this was only something they noticed after another newer person in the group pointed out how many of the comrades in the higher levels of organization had to ask to borrow other people’s phones in order to make a call, as they did not have their own. When you walk into the office with interest and intent to get involved, a more experienced organization member will pull you aside and ask you seemingly innocuous questions: why did you decide to walk in the door? Why this organization and not a union, or party, or mutual aid group? What political tendency do you most resonate with and why? And through these questions, they are able to know what they can say about their organization that will seem most appealing to you. Every week you come in to do the work, they tell you that by next week, they want to up your hours. (They do this every week you come in.) By the time my friend left the organization, they were clear headed enough to realize these tactics, alongside the inappropriate relationships among people within the organization, were red flags. But it was still only when my friend was reflecting on their past and initial experiences with the group that they were able to recognize these tactics as the red flags they were.
The thing that caught my attention most significantly in their recollection of these events was how cadre members were not allowed to have their own personal phones. For better or for worse, technology and mobile phones have become so essential to the fabric of our current society that not having a digital marker of your existence effectively erases you from existence. One of the things that Butler’s Parable of the Sower gets wrong about the 2020s (not that her intention in writing the novel was ever about accurate prediction in the first place; no legitimate writer of science fiction believes in their individual ability to ‘predict’ the future) is America’s lack of technology and digital infrastructure. Because in the timeline of the 2020s that we find ourselves in now, technology has only become further integrated into our lives and identities. As a result, cults within the context of digital identity can look like the alt-right pipeline, multi-level-marketing schemes, toxic fandom forums… and much more.
Cults historically and presently prey on vulnerable people by creating specific situations where isolated individuals get brought into community dynamics; Dani’s transcendent smile at the end of the film Midsommar reminds us of this. Traumatized by the murder suicide of her whole immediate family and stuck in an unhealthy and unsatisfying relationship that she doesn’t want to leave, the cure to her isolation and the mistreatment the world has forced upon her is the call of a cult. The Hårga offers her an outlet, a community, a collective experience of suffering for Dani’s healing. The gut wrenching scene of Dani heaving and sobbing amongst the group of women, all dressed up in similar outfits, offers a source of communal ecstasy and a sense of relief alongside unsettlement for the viewer.
The Hårga provides a source of comfort and fulfillment for the void inside Dani’s soul that can be interpreted as sympathetic, elevated, and even enlightening. As this video essay posits, there is bliss to indoctrination. One of the most striking elements of this modern classic piece of horror cinema is the stark contrast between the aesthetic language and the graphic violence of Hårga rituals. It’s very intentional that drugs and strange foods and difficult sleeping arrangements are integral to the Hårga, because the discomfort of day to day living arrangements are essential tactics to wear down the potential victims of the cult.
Being enfolded into a shared lifestyle with shared values and cultural practices describes so much of human relationships, and cults are just an elevated and oftentimes violent and delusional extension of this characteristic of human nature. And to some degree, cults are only relegated as such if and when they rattle the status quo in a particular way. By definition, a cult is an unusual sort of religion, and what is considered “unusual” is obviously dependent on what is culturally normative in contemporary human society. The cultish nature of dominant culture, from sororities to Christian churches, are not branded as ‘cults,’ partially due to the reality that they are so ubiquitous. Groups that are generally recognized as cults are ones that have caused a great deal of harm, outside of the powers that be, in a mightily visible and extreme way. Cults usually require a commitment to a specific lifestyle in alignment with a particular ideology, but that lifestyle itself usually renders those attempting to be initiated into the cult more vulnerable to exploitation or elimination, as we see with the Hårga in Midsommar. I think a lot of fiction about cults helps reveal to us how the red flags of a new community we enter or a new experience we have often do not become visible to us until it’s too late.
The recently released novel Florida Woman by Deb Rogers follows our main character, Jamie, who gets involved with an organization called Atlas through a community service program as an alternative to prison. Jamie’s stint in jail has to do with her job as a bartender going up in flames– literally. Headlines frame Jamie as yet another ‘Florida woman’, a social media phenomenon referring to crazy shit happening in Florida as crazy in a Florida-specific way. For me as a reader, it is quite evident from the first page through the last that Jamie is the victim of extensive childhood trauma and that her criminal status has more to do with capitalism’s evils than her own moral failures. Like Midsommar’s Dani, Jamie is a vulnerable young woman in a desperate and bizarre situation via a strange and unexpected twist of fate. Both of them do not realize that they are amidst a cult until it’s too late, but Dani ends the film being integrated into the Hårga whilst being a victim of its indoctrination tactics in her vulnerable emotional state, whereas Jamie must flee for her life after the three charismatic women who run Atlas realize that Jamie cannot be sustainably integrated into their scheme. Both of these narratives frame our main characters as intelligent, complex, and plagued with emotional turmoil amidst a remote and seemingly utopian and well run community, rich with nature and steeped in culture, in spite of all the unsettling little details that add up over time. The lesbian romance subplot in Florida Woman and the emotional manipulation involved in it parallels the at first innocuous seeming attempted seduction of Christian in Midsommar, that eventually culminates in the seared-into-our-minds-forever scene of ritualistic sexual violation. Christian needs to be sexually utilized by the Hårga in order for that community to reproduce without constant inbreeding; he is disposed of once his function has been fulfilled, his paralyzed body engulfed in flames inside a freshly prepared bear hide.
Jamie starts her story in Florida Woman lit up inside a burning building, flames licking at her heels. Dani ends her story in Midsommar by watching her past life burn down with her boyfriend inside of it. Both of these narratives reveal the power and grip that cults, particularly ones that look too good to be true from the outside, can have on their victims. A parallel essential to both the Hårga and Atlas is the way our main characters work to achieve integration into the community, with the sympathies of the people already involved in the cults being on their side, insofar as they do not disrupt or challenge the pre-existing structures within said cults.
One of the major appeals of joining a Reddit forum, a stan Twitter space, a Tumblr community, or any other social media space, is the pre-existing dynamics of those communities being ones that new users must actively work to integrate themselves into. In order to successfully do that, they must study and learn the language of that space, which in the digital age, gets progressively more convoluted and abstract the more involved you are within any particular corner of the internet. People who have not experienced the realities of 2012 Tumblr are not going to have the cultural context of everyone else who did, but they will certainly experience the aftermath and consequences of that era on every current social media site and popular trend. Many people online have discussed at length the way that discourse and humor from five trend cycles ago get constantly recycled in nearly metanarrative ways– jokes and references like “you’re telling me a shrimp fried this rice?” “why does no one talk about how depression causes memory loss?” and “touch grass” exist in a specifically online context that only has meaning to people already in the loop. If cults are unorthodox religious sects, Twitter users worship the god of corny and overused phrases and punchlines.
Witnessing the more depressing sides of internet cults, like ED twitter (which emerged from pro-ana Tumblr and has also morphed into body-checking Tik Toks), radical feminist echochambers (rabbitholes of visceral and viscous transphobia), and tradwife romanticizations of a carefree past for women that has never existed– reveals to me how susceptible we are to cults far more than any documentary about Scientology or Jonestown. These simultaneously walled off and enticing circles that anyone with internet access can access have totally altered the way people interact with each other, even offline. When my Tik Toks about biphobia blew up and the backlash to it got circulated across every single queer person’s For You Page, I was introduced to the cult of piccrew profile LGBTQ minors obsessed with one animated show or the other, who were flooding my comments and DMs and replies with their gotcha politics. It did not matter how much I tried to explain myself or clear my name, the power and hold of an internet community (that you are supposedly a part of yourself) turned against you was as concerning as it was enlightening. You don’t need to be brainwashed by Charles Manson to be a cult of teenage girls with a common enemy and goal, you just need a Tik Tok account.
Florida Woman, Midsommar, and niche online spaces all centrally target one demographic of person: young women and girls. In fictional narratives, we follow these sympathetic and misunderstood main characters who are just trying their best, and unwittingly get embroiled in a pre-existing cult dynamic. In real life, lonely and sad teenage girls find community online wherever they can, no matter how toxic it can be. It occupies our time, our minds, our energy, and becomes central pillars of our identities. We worship at the feet of the ever-present digital gaze, a perpetual waiting audience ready for our apt participation in our own destruction. But the appeal of these online communities is how they also work as places where we can fall apart without judgment, cry with and among other people who seem just like us, who sympathize and empathize and heave and sob on the floor with us like Dani’s pivotal scene in Midsommar. That is the appeal of a cult– the ability to fall into a social safety net when the world at large is amidst apocalypse, and find yourself a community of people who share at least one common interest, whether that be watching high-brow movies or hating trans people.
"If someone is uniquely evil and not merely a product of their environment, perceiving them as an aberration to the norm only feeds into the cult of personality they have built that elevates them above everyone else" 1000%
visionary. elucidating. constantly setting a new bar