cultish, a talk with amanda montell [video]

Two podcasters together? Now, that's dangerous, so buckle your seatbelt. Amanda has written three books, one of them is about to come out. It's called the Age of Magical Overthinking.

Obviously, we're all going to be reading it when it comes out, but today I want to zoom in on one of our many common interests. She wrote a book called Cultish. She wrote an book about cults, the language used in cults, cult-like behavior. I'm excited to talk to her about cults as a whole. But more than anything, discuss how we participate in cult-like behavior on a day-to-day basis without even realizing it.

She's really investigated.

The line between what is a cult and what is just cult-like behavior, what makes it healthy and what makes it dangerous? This is something I am curious to explore because I think it's a little bit more relevant than we even realize. What got you interested in cults? When did that become a fascination for you?

My dad's dad was one of those people who was kind of bored of nuclear family life and wanted in on this experimental lifestyle. He forced my dad, who was 14 at the time, to move to this compound, where children lived separately from their parents. In these dismal barracks, people weren't allowed to work or go to school on the outside. Although my dad did lay low and hitched a ride into San Francisco every day so he could go to a normal school, it was really oppressive.

Everybody wore similar clothes. But life in Synanon was defined by this one core activity, which was a mandatory nightly ritual called the game, which was framed as a form of group therapy. But really, it was a means of social control, where everyone was divided into groups. They would gather in a circle and be subjected to hours of vicious interpersonal criticism. They would call someone out and say, Emma, I'm not going to insult you by the way you can. I'm not a sensitive person.

I'd be like, You're really gorgeous, you're really too gorgeous, You're giving hot, It's so sweet. I don't think either of us would.

I grew up on these stories of Synanon as I came of age. I couldn't help but notice that the techniques of influence that my dad described on the compound showed up in everyday life. Like my high school theater program and the startup where I worked in my 20s. Certainly, once I moved to L.A. the ways that everyone would talk about fitness, soul cycle, wellness, goop. I was like, cultishness is everywhere. I studied linguistics in college.

Language is my passion, it's like the lens through which I see the world, I see cultishness, but more so, I hear it. The ways that we speak every day are really reflective of our various.

Doomsday preppers, the heaven's gate types. How could they ever believe this poppycock? Obviously untrue. I would like to think I'm not so amenable to this type of group. Indeed, I was humbled by the research process because I would speak to members of cultish groups along this wide spectrum and I saw myself in them.

They were not the sort of desperate, intellectually deficient stereotype that tends to be portrayed by the media coverage of so many of these cult tragedies. They were, if nothing else, optimistic, extremely, so I think of myself as a super optimistic person. They were service oriented.

They were really interested in actively finding their life purpose. They were not interested in mainstream institutions, mainstream healthcare system, government, traditional religion. They were sort of countercultural. These groups tend to flourish during times of broader sociopolitical tumult like now. I really saw myself in a lot of them.

It's been fascinating to take everything I believed about cults. Oh, I know what a cult is, you know it, when you see it, there are so many quotes that sort of reflect that prevailing wisdom.

A cult is a group where the leader thinks he can talk to God. A religion is a group where that leader is dead. There are all these things that put it into perspective, the word cult is so subjective, it's so hard to define actually objectively.

It's so sensationalist, it's so alarmist. There's something about them that's not all bad, that's why they're alluring.

That's why people end up in them. They are aesthetic, they do provide a sense of community and belonging and ritual and meaning. These things that we all want. Up until a certain point, they're great.

I did research about what a cult.

That's what I assumed. That's actually not the definition, the definition is more about there being a set of rules and a really strong leader. And it usually ends badly. That's how I've.

That's part of the mystique, and that's part of what makes it so insidious. I feel you. Because I grew up with these scientist parents. One of them was a cult survivor. I was conditioned to think cults must have some element of the metaphysical or the supernatural, but Synanon didn't. It wasn't a religious group.

The whole experience of writing this book and seeing cultishness in everyday society has really invited me, and I hope others too, to look more at our own cultish affiliations. And to have more empathy toward people who it would be so easy to say, Oh, they're in a cult, they're brainwashed.

Honestly, the bounds separating cult from religion, from culture, from celebrity worship, a cult leader can be a politician meets business, leader meets celebrity. These boundaries are so blurry, and I think we're all a member of a group like that. But we might not all be comfortable describing it as a full-blown cult, so we can at the very least say, Okay, yeah, the group is cult-ish. Sometimes I'll be cheeky about it, but I go line dancing every week.

He kind of has a cult-y following and I'm totally buying it, but it's so positive for me. I think we're both right now talking about a part of our weekly routines that has a cult-like feeling to it. But that's actually kind of healthy.

Sort of these traditional practices that signal something important is happening. They satisfy our cravings for meaning, they give us an identity template. It's like we're living in the 21st century. There are nearly infinite options for directions that our life can go in, or at least the illusion of those infinite options.

We see them online every day. A cult or a cult-ish group, even a positive one shows you this is what someone in this group does. This is how they dress. Honestly, I don't buy clothes anymore that I can't wear to line dancing.

It doesn't give you any dignified exit strategy. That's when it starts to cross the line.

Cult-ish behavior is one thing. things can be cult-ish without being a cult. The line is so blurred, It's unbelievable. It's unbelievable how blurred the line is. It's hard to navigate when we all know cults are bad, right?

Or we think cults are bad?

We'll see, we'll get into that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's hard, I think it's so...

This is why we're all.

None of us are safe because there is no manual to navigating, none of us are safe, none of us are safe. Okay, any of us could.

Fully.

We could avoid a behavior that feels cult-ish because we're like, Oh, this is unhealthy. I shouldn't be doing something like this, but meanwhile, that's actually a really healthy human behavior.

It's more to lean into that critical thinking and to always have that skeptical twinkle in your eye. That suggests that there's always some amount of make-believe here. And our identities are more complex than any one given group, guru or glossary. So maybe the answer is to become a member of multiple different cults, to diversify your.

You don't want to.

People were saying, Crossfit is my religion. When you compare the groups, it's like there is a charismatic leader who has these incredible oratory stylings. Speaking of losing control when I'm at line dancing, I love this. This is my reference point, but I'm sure everyone has one that they can think of from their own life.

I do appreciate a certain feeling of surrender that I feel during that four-hour period, four hours, listen to me, sometimes it's even longer.

Maybe there's a ritual to signify that that period has begun, then there needs to be a ritual to signify that that ritual time has ended. Whether it's taking off your goblet boots, or blowing out a candle, or taking off your shoes, or whatever it is, the word sacred literally means to set aside. I think that some of these more transcendent, surrendering experiences need to be set aside from our more complex, nuanced life in order.

The answer is clearly yes.

Do you have a life outside of it? I think you do with line dancing, I think I do with my hot pilates class.

You know what I mean, maybe that's it. It's like having a healthy space where you can surrender in a safe environment, you can surrender and sort of lose control. And let somebody else guide you in a way for a little while, knowing that you will be going back to you at some point that day, here's the.

This is why this book is about cult language, because I genuinely believe that that is a cult leader's most powerful tool. Because it's invisible, it's seemingly commitment free, but every clue that this group is maybe too cultish for comfort can be heard. In the way that they use language and the way that they encourage their followers to.

When you use it, you are filled with a sense of superiority. It's like I'm on the inside of this group that knows how to use these buzzwords, and just using them alone is a signal that I'm in. There's an U.S. versus them dichotomy that may or may not be super destructive. But when it starts to become a little bit more of a red flag is when you hear techniques like the thought terminating, cliche. This is like my favorite element of cultish language to discuss, because once you know what it is, you won't be able to unhear it. It's a sort of stock expression that's easily memorized, easily repeated, and aimed at shutting down independent thinking or questioning.

Every cult leader needs a roster of thought terminating cliches in their arsenal. A thought terminating cliche might sound like something along the lines of, in a new age group. Well, that's just a limiting belief. In a pyramid scheme environment, they might say, Well, if you're not making the money that you were promised. Well, that's a victim mindset. Then you can just repeat victim mindset, victim mindset. I can't have a victim mindset. I can't have those limiting beliefs.

Thought terminating cliches also show up in our everyday lives in the form of phrases like, Oh, boys will be boys, or It's all in God's plan. Everything happens for a reason. They're really effective because they put your cognitive dissonance to bed when you feel that sickening internal skirmish where you're like. This group that I've invested in for so long should be great and I want it to be everything it was promised to be. But actually, I have this intuition that something is hypocritical or something is amiss. A thought terminating cliche can be delivered to you to put that cognitive dissonance right to bed. That will allow those in power to remain in power for a little bit longer.

It's eerie how a lot of us, I think.

He took many wives, he had 80 wives, some of them were underage. They were all instructed at every turn to keep sweet, which was this very haunting, spooky, almost nursery rhyme-sounding phrase that meant You cannot question me. You need to abide by our standards of femininity and subservience and deference.

If you don't, there will be terrifying consequences, you could be excommunicated, you could be punished in various ways. But it was all under the guise of this catchy tagline.

Nonprofits can be insidiously culty, but ultimately this is a nonprofit that I support. I think that they're doing amazing work. It can be hard to drum up the motivation to continue to fundraise and support a cause where a lot is working against you. To have these ra-ra phrases, mantras, if you will, that everyone can lean on for inspiration, I think that can be beautiful. There is something actually physiologically transcendent that happens when we engage in a group mantra or a group dance.

It really bonds us. That can be a beautiful thing. But it's when we're in that state of vulnerability that someone uses that to come in and influence us in an insidious way. That it's a double-edged sword. Do you think that?

Totally.

He is, Listen, no, that is a cult, that's a cult, that is a full cult. My dad would be the first guy to say he'd be like, No 100, this is a cult.

Are you kidding me? He's obsessed, Yeah, and there is. There's the mantras, there's the mindset, there's the people, there's the word, there's all the different words, there's the gatekeeping, there's the like, you know, there's earning this and earning that.

Totally he is going to lol.

Yeah, and I'm, like, blowharding about how, like, I only hedged my language. But here's the thing, too, is that we as conversationalists are so inherently good at being able to pick up on the intentions and the context and the stakes of whatever we're discussing. In a conversation like this, that you kind of can use the word cult in in this lighthearted of a capacity, and we all know that we're not actually.

It's not the backbone of society that it used to be, especially in the United States, right? It? The numbers are going down, a lot of people who even are religious are starting to branch off and form their own individual spiritual. Whatever. And so I love to analyze these things in my free time. I'm laying in bed and I'm like, what's going to happen with this?

Because for so long, traditional religion was the backbone of society. It's how everybody got through challenging times, it's how everyone, you know, decided to structure their lives. It was so key. And we're losing that and on top of that, we're in a very.

Confusing, unsettling moment where there's just this lack of structure. I think. And I don't necessarily think that that's bad, because I think that that just means we're evolving. And we're, you know, we're making changes based on our new circumstances, so we have to do this right. I have had this hunch that there's going to be this like resurgence of the 60s and 70s, where there's all these cults, because history mirrors itself sometimes.

It does. And are we going to have a rerun of the 60s and 70s, or are we already experiencing the modern cult? It's just different, and it's just not religious, I think the latter, me too, and here's what's.

Gen Z women are actually the population who is rejecting religion faster than anyone else. It was true for a long time. Like, Pew research data reflected for a very long time that women were actually more religious than anyone else, and very recent Pew data has reflected that. I think 49 of Gen Z women identify as religious nuns, not identifying with any religious community whatsoever. But our desire for all of these things, you know, connection and something to believe in, doesn't go away.

We, as humans, have always been like lovers of fiction. We don't know why we're fucking here, we don't know what the point of all of this is, so we have to make it up. And even if we are obsessed with physics and empirical facts, it still doesn't fulfill this sort of emotional, psychological need to answer the question of why.

Why? How do we spend our time meaningfully? how do we experience awe? how do we connect with others most effectively and meaningfully? It's a confounding existence that, I think you're right in a way, is only becoming more confounding. As we become more globalized, as we at the same time become lonelier and more disconnected.

But there's the illusion of connectedness through social media, like we compare despair when we look online. And we've lost touch a little bit with that sense of, you know, tight knit tribalism that our species was built on. So, yeah, there's a lot going on. But at the same time, you know, our cultishness is going to look different than it did in the 60s and 70s, despite being motivated by similar things. Because our culture looks different.

And the language is going to sound different. But yeah, like in the 60s and 70s, we think of that as a peak cult moment. Because, you know, we had the Vietnam war and the civil rights movement and the Kennedy assassinations. There were, like, so many things that caused the average person to lose trust in the church and in the government and healthcare system. Like now. And that's when we saw so many sort of like occultic movements start, you know, the sort of like a Midsommar-esque vibe, the Mansons and such. And now cults are largely online. It's interesting because I'm realizing.

Because I was imagining an exact replica of what was happening in the 60s and 70s, because I guess I don't know any different. It's almost like we don't know what our cult era of now really is. Yet. We're too close to it, we're too close to it, and we're going to find out later.

Yeah, like to me, the online forums, because there are so many. And that's a huge thing that I sort of turn a blind eye to. If that makes sense, because it makes me uncomfortable. And there's so many like it's on Reddit.

It's everywhere, it's even, but it's in corners of the internet that I'm not in. So I choose to turn a blind eye to that me, turning a blind eye to that is completely ignoring what might be our cult of today. You're not a discord girlie.

I'm not a my god. No, that is like, not my thing. Like my cult behavior shows up in other areas. You're like, I'm a traditionalist. I bow down to my pilates instructor.

And he is, well, that man, he has never not spoken truth to me. I'll tell you that, but anyway, more on that later.

Do you think that public figures are unintentional cult leaders? Cause I don't think a lot of public figures go into becoming a public figure for power control. A lot of people there's a creative element, there's an art element, there's a story that they want to tell.

And it's about helping society, right, ideally. But do you think public figures are cult leaders? In a way they certainly can be.

Do you think they can be? yeah?

But yes, I think we also live in this very strange time of personal branding and extreme individualism. That creates a scenario where, like, I am my own cult leader. At this point, it's like, I'm not like a novelist, right? Like I write nonfiction and I talk about nonfiction in public. And this person that I'm not to be like, totally navel gazing, but for argument's sake, like this person talking to you right now is a version of me.

And yet it's not wholly me, it's the version of me that's talking about cults, but this is the version that people see and want to see. So I lean into that more. And so you sort of like, disconnect from a sense of self.

And so then you're like following your own personal branding journey, you're like chasing that. And so in a sense, like, yeah, because of this culture of extreme individualism and micro-lebrities and such, like, I sometimes feel like I am cult following.

You can't listen to that, but if you do, then you kind of fall into this place where, like, you're stuck, you feel stuck. It's interesting because it's like, fame in general gives the illusion that someone is almost godlike. When we look at our favorite celebrities, we look at them as almost gods, like they're deities to us.

We sometimes worship them, we sometimes see them as non-human. Yeah, it's just interesting that it seems like on both sides there's a very culty element.

Do you think it can be healthy? Because I have an existential crisis about this? All the time? Because I am a public figure myself, I'm like, Am I contributing to something that is actually unhealthy for society? I don't know. That's a moral dilemma I face constantly.

There's something intrinsic in us that causes us to worship role models that maybe were once our parents or our community leaders. Now that it's hard to tell who even is in our social circle anymore. Is it celebrities? is it my coworkers, celebrities? These larger than life, godlike figures can become the new subjects of our worship, our new role models.

That bias is deep within us. It can be a double edged sword and very destructive in this time in society, because to deify someone is to dehumanize them. I think that's why we see such extreme cycles of celebrity worship and dethronement, because the halo effect causes us to think that. Because we like one thing in a person, because we like their music, or we like their fashion sense, then they must be perfect overall. When they don't live up to that standard, we punish them.

That halo is doused in ice water. I think communities surrounding certain celebrities can be really beautiful and offer solace, and again, all those positive, cultish things to marginalized communities as well. Female pop stars often serve as a mouthpiece for queer community. That can be a really beautiful thing, totally.

But there is copious research demonstrating that a certain extreme amount of deleterious, parasocial, delusional worship has serious mental health repercussions, including narcissistic tendencies, a propensity for suicidal thoughts, excessive self-focus, severe body image issues. I've been thinking about it a lot because certain celebrity communities, celebrity stand dynamics, I should say, are more extreme now and growing more extreme.

I think so, but I think that's new, Yeah, that's actually somewhat new.

Like people thought, Paul McCartney was their husband and God, God and husband. Yeah. And so that was an era that felt similar, like a predecessor to what we're seeing now. But what Jessica Gross wrote about was how, in the Reagan era, that's when we started to perceive celebrities as not just entertainers, but spiritual guides. People we should look to for politics, because Reagan was an actor who then became the president.

Interesting, So it was like, Okay, now the lines are really starting to blur. Celebrities aren't just famous singers and actors, they're people we should look to for moral guidance, They're people that we should quote, unquote, worship.

And ever since then, and that coincides, I mean, the Reagan era came on the heels of the cult era of the 60s and 70s. There's a historical, cultural path that you can follow and it makes sense. So it will be interesting in 20 years to make sense of this. Yeah, oh my god, it's so interesting.

Well, you have to. I've seen this so many times.

You are no different from other humans.

We're all capable of anything good, bad, so don't think that you're different. You know what I mean? Yeah, everybody has to keep their eyes peeled, my love.

We all have to keep, we just have to be aware of the fact that we could fall into some shit. Yeah, you know what I mean? Yeah, especially during a time like right now, where we're all very vulnerable.

For sure, and a lot of us are very.

Confused? And a lot of us are lacking foundation because there's no foundation to just be handed to us right now. Totally like there was in the past. Yeah, we feel like existentially unmoored.

Yeah, yeah, so I think, you know, beyond, like celebrities, I've noticed that there's a lot of cultiness around vanity, like skincare, plastic surgery.

You know, what else did I write down on my clipboard? It's workout classes, it's diet culture, it's there's a cultiness around appearance, too, yes.

Like, that's a huge section of this debacle. Yeah, I think, well.

And our standards for perfection have increased as the technology to attain those standards has increased. But I actually think that those phenomena, you know, our obsession with skincare and plastic surgery and such. And working out is still connected to the religious origin story of the United States. Because this is fundamentally like a Protestant capitalist nation, you know? And we have these standards of perfection and obedience and self-improvement baked into who we are as a society. And wherever the culture is, at any given moment, will determine what the aesthetic looks like. You know, at a certain time it was, you know, going to church and, you know, doing the rituals of Protestantism, and now the new Protestantism, in a way, is working out. Having a perfect body, having a perfect face. It's still achieving those deep rooted standards of perfection and obedience, and self-improvement and ambition. You know, all these things that define the American dream. But in the aesthetic of the sort of like, extremely individualist, image-centric social media era.

Cults are everywhere. Yeah, there's like, cult-like.

You know, I think the more aware we are of it, the better we can navigate our own lives and sort of deal with that inevitable piece of being human. Yeah, it's all we can do, because.

And you know what if we end up going and doing a retreat for three weeks with a group that has kind of, like, you know, seems like they have good intentions? Maybe we do that too. Yeah, I think my concluding question is, do you think that there's any way a religious cult can be healthy? And this is an opinion question.

This is not you don't have to know the answers to the universe. I'm just curious about your perspective. With careful words, a.

And if these boxes are checked off, like, yeah, no, you actually have to fully invest in this group, and the further you're in, the harder it's going to be to get out. And your friends and family on the outside don't like it, actually, come to think of it, you don't have any friends and family on the outside. Yeah, those are some of the characteristics that signal too cultish for comfort.

That's the perfect way to end it.