Sounds Like A Cult - The Cult of Audiobooks (CULTISH, Amanda's Version)

Episode Date: November 4, 2025

What is the definition of the word "cult" anyway, according to Sounds Like A Cult??? This week, for the first time ever, host Amanda Montell takes the mic to read from her New York Times bestseller Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism, the book that inspired this entire pod. It’s a behind-the-scenes listen into the language of persuasion, belonging, and belief infiltrates everything from religious movements to self-help brands to our favorite podcasts. So relax and take a listen to the source material for all our juicy, culty lore. Subscribe to Sounds Like A Cult on Youtube!Follow us on IG @soundslikeacultpod, @amanda_montell, @reesaronii, @chelseaxcharles.  Thank you to our sponsors!  To save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain using code CULT ⁠https://www.squarespace.com/CULT⁠ Earn points on rent and around your neighborhood, wherever you call home, by going to ⁠https://joinbilt.com/culty⁠ London! Come see Sounds Like A Cult LIVE!! November 24th at Bush Hall. Get tickets before they're gone!  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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This podcast is for entertainment purposes only. This recording was made with the permission of my publisher, Harper Collins. This is Sounds Like a Cult, a show about the modern day cults we all follow. I'm your host Amanda Montel, author of the book Cultish, The Language of Fanaticism. Every week on the show, we discuss a different zeitgeisty group that puts the cult in culture, from Disney adults to incels to try and answer the big question. This group sounds like a cult. But is it really?

And if so, which of our three cult categories does it fall into? A live your life, a watcher back, or a get the fuck out. At least, that's typically what we do on this show. But this episode is a little bit special, because today I'm going to be recording the cultish audio book, Amanda's version. So some OG culties may know that sounds like a cult, is a podcast inspired by my book, Cultish, the Language of Fanaticism, that came out originally in 2021 and then in paperback this year. And unfortunately, I didn't get to record my own audiobook because the book came out during the pandemic. And there was just a lot of publishing Hullabaloo.

Legally, the publisher owned the rights to the audiobook, so I couldn't really re-record it myself until now. Now I finally convinced the publisher to let me do at least part of the one of the cultish audio book myself. And that's what today is all about. Listeners of this podcast will oftentimes ask, and reasonably so, what is your working definition of the word cult on Sounds Like a Cult? Where is the lines separating cult from culture, cult from community, cult from religion? We don't necessarily have the time at the beginning of every single episode of Sounds Like a Cult to do all of that exposition, but it is important. And while the majority of this book talks about how this wide spectrum of cultish groups from Scientology to Soul Cycle,

from Jim Jones to Jeff Bezos, use a specific roster of language techniques to influence their followings, including us all in our everyday lives. Part one of the book actually talks more about the language that we as everyday people use to talk about cults. So this is kind of a long time coming sharing this exposition on Sounds Like a Cult. I've never gotten the chance to until today. So you might recognize some of the groups that I mention in this reading because they served as inspiration for what would later become sounds like a cult episodes. I hope you enjoy this reading.

I hope it gives you more context and a little window into the source material for this whole podcast. And if you like what you hear, I hope you'll consider buying the paperback from your favorite bookstore. So without further ado, I am going to read part one of my book cultish, the language, of fanaticism. Part 1, Chapter 1. Repeat after me.

It started with a prayer. Tasha Samar was 13 years old the first time she heard the bewitching buzz of their voices. It was their turban-to-to-white ensembles and meditation malas that first caught her eye, but it was how they spoke that beckoned her through the front door. She heard them through the open window of a kundalini yoga studio in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The prayers were so strange, all in another language, Tasha, now 29, tells me over macadamia milk

lattes at an outdoor cafe in West Hollywood. We're less than a few miles away from the epicenter of the sinister life she led until only three years ago. Judging by her crisp, cream, button-down, and satiny blowout, you'd never guess she could once tie a turban as naturally as any other young woman in this courtyard could toss her hair into a top nut. Yeah, I could still do it now if I had to, Tasha assures me, her meticulous acrylics clack, clack, clacking on her porcelain mug. Tasha, a first generation Russian-American Jew who experienced an agonizing lack of belonging her entire childhood, was struck by the

yoga group's sense of closeness, so she peeked her head into the lobby and asked the receptionist who they were. The front desk girl started telling me the basics. The phrase, the science of mind, was used a lot. Tasha reflects. I didn't know what it meant. I just remember thinking, wow, I really want to try that. Tasha found out when the next yoga class would be, and her parents let her attend. You didn't need to be a permanent member of the group to take a class. The only requirement was an open heart. Learning and reciting their foreign prayers, all directed toward a man with a long peppery beard whose photograph was plastered throughout the dimly lit studio,

cast a spell over tween Tasha. It felt ancient, she says, like I was a part of something holy. Who was this group in all white? The Healthy Happy Holy Organization, or 3-H-O, a sick-derived alternative religion founded in the 1970s, which hosts Kundalini yoga classes all over the U.S.

The guy with the beard? They're captivating, well-connected leader Harbajan Singh Kalsa, or Yogi Bhudjan, who claimed to much contest to be the official religious and administrative head of all Western Sikhs, and who was worth hundreds of millions of dollars by the time he died in 2004. The language? Gurmukhi, the writing system of modern Punjabi and Sikh scripture. The ideology? To obey Yogi Bhudgeon's strict new age teachings, which included abstaining from meat and alcohol, surrendering to his arranged marriages, waking up at 4.30 every morning to read scripture and attend yoga class, and not associating with anyone who didn't follow or who wouldn't be following soon.

Speaking of alcohol, booze was 3-H-O heresy, so in place of happy hour, everyone guzzled gallons of tea. Specifically, members drink yogi tea, a multi-million dollar brand you yourself can find in almost every American grocery store. This was no accident. Yogi tea was created and owned by Yogi Bhajan. It's not 3-HO's only corporate endeavor. Among the group's many enterprises is the half-billion-dollar company Akal Security, which holds contracts with everyone from NASA to immigration detention centers. What's the word for lay capitalism in Gurmuky? As soon as she turned 18, Tasha moved to Los Angeles,

one of 3-HO's home bases, and for eight years she dedicated her entire life, all her time and money to the group. After a series of exhaustive trainings, She became a full-time kundalini yoga instructor and within months was attracting big name, spiritually curious celebrities

to her Malibu classes. Demi Moore, Russell Brand, Owen Wilson, Adrian Brody. Even if they didn't become full-time followers, their attendance was good PR for 3-HO. Tasha's Swamis, teachers, praised her for raking in the dollars

and allegiances of the rich, famous, and seeking. At the cafe, Tasha unsheathes her phone from an inky black clutch to show me old photos of her and Demi Moore, garbed in ghost white short shorts and turbans twirling around a desert retreat, backdropped by Joshua trees. Tasha slowly blinks her eyelash extensions as a bewildered smile blooms across her face as if to say, yeah, I can't believe I did this shit either. Obedience like Tasha's was promised to yield great rewards. Just learn the right words and they'd be yours. There was a mantra to attract your soulmate, one to acquire lots of

money, one to look better than ever, one to give birth to a more evolved, higher vibration generation of children. Tasha divulges. Disobey? You'd come back in the next life on a lower vibration. Mastering 3-HO's secret mantras and code words made Tasha feel separate from everyone else she knew. Chosen. On a higher vibration. Solidarity like this intensified when everyone in the group was assigned a new name. A namegiver, appointed by Yogi Bhajan, used something called tantric numerology as an algorithm to determine followers' special 3HO monikers, which they received in exchange for a fee. All women were given the same middle name, Kar, while men were all christened, Singh. Everyone shared the last name, Kalsa, like one big family. Getting your

new name was the biggest deal ever, Tasha says. Most people would change their names on their driver's licenses. Until last year, Tasha Samar's California ID read Daya, Kaur, Kalsa. It might not have been totally apparent, what with the peaceable yoga classes and high-profile supporters. But there was a dangerous undercurrent to 3HO. Psychological and sexual abuse by Yogi Bajan, forced fasting and sleep deprivation, threats of violence toward anyone attempting to leave the group. Suicides, even an unsolved murder. Once followers fully adopted the group's jargon, higher-ups were able to weaponize it. Threats were structured in phrases like Piscian consciousness, negative mind, lizard brain. Take a bite of a friend's meaty burger or fail to attend yoga class, and lizard brain, lizard brain, lizard

brain would play on a loop in your mind. Often, familiar English terms that once held a positive meaning were recast to signify something threatening. Like Old Soul, Tasha tells me. To an average English speaker, Old Soul connotes someone with wisdom beyond their years. It's a compliment. But in 3HO, it incited dread. It meant someone had been coming back life after life, incarnation after incarnation, and they couldn't get it right, she explains. Even three years after escaping THR.O., Tasha still shudders whenever she hears the phrase. In 2009, shortly after Tasha arrived in Southern California to give her life to 3HO, another 18-year-old moved to L.A. to start a new life.

Her name was Alyssa Clark, and she'd come down the coast from Oregon to start college. Afraid of gaining the freshman 15, Alyssa decided to try joining a gym. She had always struggled with body image, and she was intimidated by L.A.'s formidable fitness scene. So, over holiday break, when she reunited with a family member who'd recently started a new workout program, dropped a ton of weight, and beamed with the honeymoon glow of fresh muscle tone, Alyssa thought, damn, I have to check that out. The new workout was called CrossFit, and there was a location right near Alyssa's dorm. Upon returning from break, she and her boyfriend signed up for a beginner's workshop.

The sweaty, sculpted instructors oozed masculine enthusiasm as they introduced Alyssa to a whole new world of terminology she'd never heard before. The gym wasn't called a gym, it was a box. Instructors weren't teachers or trainers. They were coaches. Their workouts consisted of functional movements. You had your wad, workout of the day, which might consist of snatches and clean and jerks. You had your BPs, bench presses, your Bs's, back squats, your C2Bs, chest bars, and your inevitable doms, delayed onset muscle soreness. Who doesn't love a catchy acronym?

Alyssa was captivated by how tight-knit all these Crossfitters seemed. They had such a culture and was dead set on mastering their private patois. A portrait of Crossfitt's founder Greg Glassman, known then to devotees as the Wadfather, or simply coach, hung on the wall of Alyssa's box next to one of his most famous quotes, a fitness proverb that would soon sear into her brain. Eat meat and vegetables, nuts and seeds, some fruit, little starch, and no sugar. Keep intake to levels that will support exercise but not body fat. Practice and train major lifts. Master the basics bike, run, swim, row, hard and fast, five or six days per week. Alyssa was taken with how CrossFit focused on shaping members' mentalities not just inside the box, but everywhere. When driving

trainees to work harder, coaches would bellow beast mode, a motivational phrase that reverberated through Alyssa's thoughts at school and work, too. To help you internalize the CrossFit philosophy, they'd repeat EIE, which meant everything is everything. When Alyssa noticed everyone at her box was wearing Lulu Lemon, she went out and dropped $400 on designer workout swag. Even Lulu Lemon had its own distinctive vernacular. It was printed all over their shopping bags, so customers would walk out of the store carrying mantras like, is little difference between addicts and fanatic athletes. Visualize your eventual demise, and friends are more important than money. All coined by their so-called tribe leader, Lulu Lemons founder,

Chip Wilson, an aging G.I. Joe type, just like Greg Glassman, whose accolites were equally devout. Who knew fitness could inspire such religiosity? As soon as Alyssa learned that most crossfitters followed a paleo diet, she cut out gluten and sugar. If she made plans to go out of town and knew she wouldn't be able to make her normal workout time, she quickly alerted someone at the box, lest they publicly shame her in their Facebook group for no-showing. Coaches and members were all fooling around with each other. So after Alyssa and her boyfriend split, she started hooking up with a trainer named Flex, real name Andy.

He changed it after joining the box. So here's the big question. What do Alyssa's and Tasha's stories have in common? The answer? they were both under cultish influence. If you're skeptical of applying the same charged cult label to both 3-H-O and CrossFit, good. You should be.

For now, let's agree on this. Even though one of our protagonists ended up broke, friendless, and riddled with PTSD, and the other got herself a strained hamstring, a codependent friend with benefits, and a few too many pairs of overpriced leggings, what Tasha Samar and Alyssa Clark irrefutably share is that one day they woke up on different sides of Los Angeles and realized they were in so deep

they weren't even speaking recognizable English anymore. Though the stakes and consequences of their respective affiliations differed considerably, the methods used to assert such power, to create community and solidarity, to establish an us and of them, to align collective values, to justify questionable behavior, to instill ideology and inspire fear, were uncannily, cultishly similar. And the most compelling techniques had little to do with drugs, sex, shaved heads,

remote communes, drapey koftans, or Kool-Aid. Instead, they had everything to do with language. This episode is brought to you by Square. You're not just running a restaurant. You're building something big. Square's there for all of it, giving your customers more ways to order, whether that's in-person

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Cultish groups are an all-out American obsession. One of the most gushed over debut novels of the 2010s was Emma Klein's The Girls, chronicling a teenager's summer-long dalliance with a Manson-type cult in the late 1960s. HBO's 2015 Scientology documentary Going Clear was critically deemed impossible to ignore. Devoured with equal gusto was Netflix's 2018 docu-series Wild Wild Country, which told of the controversial guru Oshow, Bhagwan Sri Rajneesh, and his Rajneeshpuram commune, embellished by an irresistibly hit playlist and vintage footage of his red-clad apostles, the show earned an Emmy and millions of online streams.

All any of my friends could talk about the week I started writing this book was the 2019 folk horror film Mid Samar, about a fictional, murderous Dionysian cult in Sweden, characterized by psychedelic-fueled sex rituals and human sacrifices. And all anyone is talking about now, as I edit this book in 2020, are the vow and seduced, dueling docu series about nexium, the self-help scam turned sex trafficking ring. The well of cult-inspired art and intrigue is bottomless.

When it comes to gurus and their groupies, we just can't seem to look away. I once heard a psychologist explain that rubbernecking results from a very real physiological response. You see an auto accident, or any disaster, or even just news of a disaster, like a headline, and your brain's amygdala, which controls emotions, memory, and survival tactics, starts firing signals to your problem-solving frontal cortex to try and figure out whether this event is a direct danger to you. You enter fight-or-flight mode, even if you're just sitting there. The reason millions of us binge cult documentaries or go-down rabbit holes researching groups

from Jonestown to QAnon is not that there's some twisted voyeur inside us all that's inexplicably attracted to darkness. We've all seen enough car crashes and read enough cults. exposes. If all we wanted was a spooky fix, we'd be bored already. But we're not bored, because we're still hunting for a satisfying answer to the question of what causes seemingly normal people to join, and more importantly, stay in fanatical fringe groups with extreme ideologies. We're scanning for threats, on some level wondering, is everyone susceptible to cultish influence? Could it happen to you? Could it happen to me? And if so, how?

Culture tends to provide pretty flimsy answers to questions of cult influence, mostly having to do with vague talk of brainwashing. Why did all those people die in Jonestown? They drank the Kool-Aid. Why don't abused polygamous sister wives get the hell out of Dodge as soon as they can? They're mind-controlled. Simple as that. But it's actually not that simple. In fact, brainwashing is a contested term that some of the psychologists I interviewed avoid altogether. Trueer answers to the question of cult influence can only arrive when you ask the right questions. What techniques do charismatic leaders use to exploit people's fundamental needs for community and meaning? How do they cultivate that kind of power? The answer, as it turns out, is not some freaky mind-bending wizardry that happens on a remote commune where everyone dons flower crowns and dances in the sun?

That's called Coachella, which one could argue is its own kind of cult. the real answer all comes down to words delivery from the crafty redefinition of existing words and the invention of new ones to powerful euphemisms secret codes renamings buzzwords chants and mantras speaking in tongues forced silence even hashtags language is the key means by which all degrees of cult-like influence occur exploitative spiritual gurus know this but so do pyramid schemers, politicians, CEOs of startups, online conspiracy theorists, workout instructors, even social media influencers. In both positive ways and shadowy ones, cult language is, in fact, something we hear and are swayed by every single day. Our speech in regular life, at work in spin class on Instagram, is evidence of our varying degrees of cult membership. You just have to know what to listen for. Indeed, while we're distracted by the Manson family's peculiar outfits and other flashy cult iconography, what we wind up missing is the fact that one of

the biggest factors in getting people to a point of extreme devotion and keeping them there is something we cannot see. The infatuation with cult garb runs deep. In 1997, 39 members of the UFO doomsday cult Heavensgate participated in a mass suicide, all wearing matching pairs of black and white, 93 Nike Decade Sneakers. Two surviving Heavensgate followers maintained that their leader chose the footwear for no particular reason other than that he found a good bulk deal.

Nike hastily discontinued the style after the tragedy, nothing like a cult suicide to ruin your product's good name. At made the sneakers an instant collector's item. At the time of this writing, 22 years post Heavensgate, a pair of size 12 Nike decades from 1993 was listed on eBay for $6,600.

Though cult language comes in different, varieties. All charismatic leaders, from Jim Jones to Jeff Bezos to soul cycle instructors, use the same basic linguistic tools. This is a book about the language of fanaticism in its many forms, a language I'm calling cultish, like English, Spanish, or Swedish. Part one of this book will investigate the language we use to talk about cultish groups, busting some widely believed myths about what the word cult even means. Then, parts two through five will unveil the key elements of cultish language and how they've worked to inveigal followers of groups as destructive as Heaven's Gate and Scientology, but also how they pervade our day-to-day vocabularies.

In these pages, we'll discover what motivates people throughout history and now to become fanatics, both for good and for evil. Once you understand what the language of cultish sounds like, you won't be able to unhear it. Language is a leader's charisma. It's what empowers them to create a mini-universe, a system of values and truths, and then compel their followers to heed its rules. In 1945, the French philosopher Maurice Morleau-Ponty

wrote that language is human beings' element just as water is the element of fish. So it's not as if Tasha's foreign mantras and Alyssa's acronyms played some small role in molding their cult experiences. Rather, because words are the medium through which belief systems are manufactured, nurtured, and reinforced, their fanaticism fundamentally could not exist without them. Without language, there are no beliefs, ideology, or religion. Johnny Joseph, a professor of applied linguistics at the University of Edinburgh wrote to me from Scotland.

These concepts require a language as a condition of their existence. Without language, there are no cults. Certainly, you can hold beliefs without explicitly articulating them, and it's also true that if Tasha or Alyssa did not want to buy into their leader's messages, no collection of words could have forced them into it. But with a glimmer of willingness, language can do so much to squash independent thinking, obscure truths, encourage confirmation bias, and emotionally charge experiences such that no other way of life seems possible. The way a person communicates can tell us a lot about who they've been associating with, who they've been influenced by. How far their allegiance goes. The motives behind culty-sounding language are not always crooked. Sometimes they're quite healthy, like to boost solidarity or to rally people around a humanitarian mission.

One of my best friends works for a cancer non-profit and brings back amusing stories of the love-bomby buzzwords and quasi-religious mantras. they repeat on end to keep fundraisers hyped. Some days today, this is our week of winning. Let's fly above and beyond. You are the greatest generation of warriors and heroes in this quest for a cancer cure. It reminds me of the way multi-level marketing people talk, she tells me, referencing culty direct sales companies

like Mary Kay and Amway. It's cult-like, but for a good cause, and hey, it works. In part five of this book, we'll learn about all sorts of woo-woo chants and hymns, used in cult fitness studios that may sound extremists to skeptical outsiders, but aren't actually all that destructive when you take a closer listen. Whether wicked or well-intentioned, language is a way to get members of a community on the same ideological page to help them feel like they belong to something big.

Language provides a culture of shared understanding, said Eileen Barker, a sociologist who studies new religious movements at the London School of Economics. But wherever there are fanatically worshipped leaders and belief-bound, clicks, some level of psychological pressure is at play. This could be as quotidian as your average case of FOMO, or as treacherous as being coerced to commit violent crimes. Quite frankly, the language is everything, one ex-scientologist told me in a hush tone during an interview. It's what insulates you. It makes you feel special, like you're in the know, because you have this other language to communicate with. Before we can get into the nuts and bolts of cultish

language, however, we must focus on a key definition. What does the word cult even mean exactly? As it turns out, coming up with one conclusive definition is tricky at best. Over the course of researching and writing this book, my understanding of the word has only become hazier and more fluid. I'm not the only one flummoxed by how to pin down cult. I recently conducted a small street survey near my home in Los Angeles, where I asked a couple dozen strangers what they thought the word meant. Answers ranged from a small group of believers led by a deceptive figure with too much power to any group of people who are really passionate about something, all the way to, well,

a cult could be anything, couldn't it? You could have a coffee cult or a surfing cult. And not a single response was delivered with certainty. There's a reason for this semantic murkiness. It's connected to the fact that the fascinating etymology of cult corresponds precisely to our society's ever-changing relationship to spirituality, community, meaning, and identity. A relationship that's gotten rather weird. Language change is always reflective of social change, and over the decades, as our sources

of connection and existential purpose have shifted due to phenomena like social media, increased globalization, and withdrawal from traditional religion, we've seen the rise of more alternative subgroups, some dangerous, some not so much. Colt has evolved to describe them all. I've found that cult has become one of those terms that can mean something totally different depending on the context of the conversation and the attitudes of the speaker. It can be invoked as a high-stakes warning about death and destruction, a cheeky metaphor suggesting not much more than some matching outfits and enthusiasm, and pretty much everything in between. In modern discourse, someone could apply the word cult to a new religion, a group of online radicals, a startup, and a makeup brand, all in the same breath. While working at a beauty magazine a few years ago, I promptly noticed how commonplace it was for cosmetics brands to invoke cult as a marketing term to generate buzz for new product launches. A cursory search for the word in my old work inbox yielded thousands of results.

Take a sneak peek at the next cult phenomenon, reads a press release from a trendy makeup line, swearing that the new face powder from their so-called cult lab will send beauty junkies and makeup fanatics into a frenzy. Another pitch from a skin care company vows that their $150 cult favorite set of CBD-infused elixirs is more than skin care. It's the priceless gift of an opportunity to decompress and love oneself

in order to handle whatever life throws at them. A priceless opportunity? To handle anything? The promised benefits of this eye cream sound not unlike those of a spiritual grifter. Even among cult experts, disagreement and sensitivity surround how to define the word cult, as well as whose rubric for identifying one is most trustworthy, further reflecting how charged these semantics really are.

Still, confusing as this panoply of cult definitions might be, everyday speakers seem to be navigating it okay. Sociolinguists have found that overall, listeners are quite savvy at making contextual inferences about the meaning and stakes implied whenever a familiar word is used in conversation. Generally, we're able to infer that when we talk about the cult of Jonestown, we mean something different than the cult of CBD skincare or Taylor Swift fans. Of course, there is room for misinterpretation as there always is with language. But overall, most seasoned conversationalists understand that when we describe certain fitness fiends

as cult followers, we might be referencing their intense, indeed, religious-seeming devotion, but we're probably not worried that they're going to drown in financial ruin or stop speaking to their families, at least not as a condition of their membership. Regarding swifties or soul cyclers, cult may serve as more of a metaphor, similar to how one might compare school or work to a prison as a way to describe an oppressive environment or harsh higher-ups without raising concerns about literal jail cells. When I sent my initial interview requests to Tanya Lerman, a Stanford psychological anthropologist and well-known scholar of fringe religions, she responded with Dear Amanda, I would be happy to talk. I do think that Soul

Cycle is a cult, smiley face. But during our conversation later, she clarified that the statement was more tongue-in-cheek and something she'd never say formally, which, of course, I already understood. With groups like SoulCycle, cult works to describe members' fierce fidelity to a cultural coterie that may very well remind us of some aspects of a Manson-level dangerous group, the monetary and time commitment, the conformism, and the exalted leadership, all of which certainly have the potential to turn toxic. But not the wholesale isolation from outsiders or life-threatening lies and abuse. We know, without needing to explicitly state it,

that the possibility of death or a physical inability to leave is not on the table. But like everything in life, there was no good cult, bad cult binary. Cultishness falls on a spectrum. Stephen Hassan, a mental health counselor specializing in cults, author of the cult of Trump and creator of the bite model of authoritarian control, has described an influence continuum, representing groups from healthy and constructive to unhealthy and destructive. Hassan says that groups toward the destructive end use three kinds of deception, omission of what you need to know, distortion to make whatever they're saying more acceptable, and outright lies.

One of the major differences between so-called ethical cults, Hassan references sports and music fandums, and noxious ones, is that an ethical group will be up front about what they believe in, what they want from you, and what they expect from your membership. And leaving comes with few, if any, serious consequences. If you say, I found a better band or I'm not into basketball anymore, the other people won't threaten you, Hassan clarifies. You won't have irrational fears that you'll go insane or be possessed by demons.

Although, Stan culture, camps of online superfans who religiously worship and defend music stars like Taylor Swift, Lady Gaga, and Beyonce, has gotten dicier than the celebrity fandom of generations past. In 2014, a psychiatric study found that celebrity stands tend to struggle with psychological issues like body dysmorphia, cosmetic surgery obsession, and poor judgment of interpersonal boundaries, as well as mental health conditions like anxiety and social dysfunction. The same study found that stands may also display qualities of narcissism, stalking behavior, and dissociation.

Or, in the case of our former 3-HO member, Tasha, fears of turning into a cockroach. To my core, Tasha answered, when I asked if she truly believed the group's promise that if she committed a serious offense, like sleeping with her guru or taking her life, she'd come back as the world's most reviled insect. Tasha also believed that if you died in the presence of someone holy, you'd reincarnate higher. Once, she spotted a cockroach in a public restroom and was convinced it was a Swami who'd done something awful in a past life and was trying to come back on a higher vibration. I was like, oh my God, he's trying to die around me because I'm an elevated teacher. Tasha shivered. When the cockroach scuttled up into the full sink, Tasha opened the

plug so it wouldn't have the honor of drowning in her proximity. I freaked out and ran out of the bathroom, she recounted. That was probably the pinnacle of my insanity. By contrast, our crossfitter Alyssa told me that the scariest possible outcome for her might be getting called lazy on Facebook if she skipped a workout. Or if she decided to quit the box and start spinning instead, heaven forbid, her old pals and paramours might slowly dissolve from her life. It is to qualify this wide gamut of cult-like communities that we've come up with colloquial modifiers like cult followed, culty, and indeed cultish. That's annoying.

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While also leaving his life and our family in chaos. What did you think when I first told you? I was thinking of doing a podcast about. about our family. How much collateral damage is it going to cost? From Vanity Fair, I'm Sarah Amos. And this is Tough Cookie, the Wally Famous Amos story. Available wherever you get your podcasts.

Chapter 3. It's really no coincidence that cults are having such a proverbial moment. The 21st century has produced a climate of sociopolitical unrest and mistrust of long-established institutions, like church, government, big pharma, and big business. It's the perfect societal recipe for making new and unconventional groups, everything from Reddit in cells to woo-woo wellness influencers, who promised to provide answers that the conventional ones couldn't supply

seem freshly appealing. Add the development of social media and declining marriage rates, and culture-wide feelings of isolation are at an all-time high. Civic engagement is at a record-breaking low. In 2019, Forbes labeled loneliness an epidemic. Human beings are really bad at loneliness. We're not built for it. People have been attracted to tribes of like-minded others

ever since the time of ancient humans who communed in close-knit groups for survival. But beyond the evolutionary advantage, community also makes us feel a mysterious thing called happiness. Neuroscientists have found that our brains release feel-good chemicals like dopamine and oxytocin, when we partake in transcendent bonding rituals like group chanting and singing.

Our nomadic hunter-gatherer ancestors used to pack their village squares to engage in ritualistic dances, though there was no practical need for them. Modern citizens of countries like Denmark and Canada, whose governments prioritize community connection through high-quality public transportation, neighborhood co-ops, etc., self-report higher degrees

of satisfaction and fulfillment. All kinds of research points to the idea that humans are social and spiritual by design. Our behavior is driven by a desire for belonging and purpose. We're cultish by nature. This fundamental human itch for connection is touching. But when steered in the wrong direction, it can also cause an otherwise judicious person to do utterly irrational things. Consider this classic study. In 1951, Swarthmore College psychologist Solomon Ash,

together half a dozen students to conduct a simple vision test. Asch showed four vertical lines to the participants, all but one of whom were in on the experiment, and asked them to point to the two that were the same length. There was one obviously correct answer, which you needed zero skills other than eyesight to figure out. But Ash found that if the first five students pointed to a blatantly wrong answer, 75% of test subjects ignored their better judgment and agreed with the majority. This ingrained fear of alienation, this compulsion to conform is part of what makes being part of a group feel so right. It's also what charismatic leaders from 3HO's Yogi Bhajan to Crossfitz Greg Glassman have learned to channel and exploit. It was once true that

when in need of community and answers, people defaulted to organized religion. But increasingly, this is no longer the case. Every day, more and more Americans, are dropping their affiliations with mainstream churches and scattering. The spiritual but not religious label is something most of my 20-something friends have claimed. Pew Research Data from 2019 found that four in 10 millennials don't identify with any religious affiliation. This was up nearly 20 percentage points from seven years prior. A 2015 Harvard Divinity School study found that young people are still seeking, quote,

both a deep spiritual experience and a community experience to imbue their lives with meaning. but fewer than ever are satisfying these desires with conventional faith. To classify the skyrocketing demographic of religious disaffiliates, scholars have come up with labels like The Nuns and the Remixed. The latter term was coined by Tara Isabella Burton, a theologian, reporter, an author of Strange Rights, New Religions for a Godless World. Remixed describes the tendency of contemporary seekers to mix-and-match beliefs and rituals from different circles,

religious and secular, to come up with a bespoke spiritual routine. Say, a meditation class in the morning, horoscopes in the afternoon, and then ultra-reform Friday night Shabbat with friends. Spiritual meaning often doesn't involve God at all anymore. The Harvard Divinity School study named Soul Cycle and CrossFit among the groups giving America's youth a modern religious identity. It gives you what religion gives you, which is the feeling that your life matters.

Channy Green, a 26-year-old actress, and die-hard soul-cycler, living in Los Angeles, told me of the exercise craze. The cynicism we have now is almost anti-human. We need to feel connected to something, like we're put on Earth for a reason other than just dying. At SoulCycle for 45 minutes, I feel that, she said. For those who bristle at the idea of comparing workout classes to religion, know that as tricky as it is to define cult, scholars have been arguing even harder for centuries over how to classify religion.

You might have a feeling that Christianity is a religion while fitness is not, but even experts have a tough time distinguishing exactly why. I like Burton's way of looking at it, which is less about what religions are and more about what religions do, which is to provide the following four things, meaning, purpose, a sense of community, and ritual. Less and less often are seekers finding these things at church. Modern cultish groups also feel comforting, in part because they help alleviate the ancient, mayhem of living in a world that presents almost too many possibilities for who to be, or at least the illusion of such. I once had a therapist tell me that flexibility without structure isn't flexibility at all. It's just chaos.

That's how a lot of people's lives have been feeling. For most of American history, there were comparatively few directions of person's career, hobbies, place of residence, romantic relationships, diet, aesthetic, everything could easily go in. But the 21st century presents folks, those of some privilege, that is, with a cheesecake factory-sized menu of decisions to make. The sheer quantity can be paralyzing, especially in an era of radical self-creation, when there's such pressure to craft a strong personal brand, at the very same time that morale and basic survival feel more precarious for young people than they have in a long time. As our generational lore goes, millennials' parents told them they could grow up to be whatever they wanted,

But then that cereal aisle of endless what-ifs and could-bees turned out to be so crushing. All they wanted was a guru to tell them which to pick. I want someone to tell me what to wear every morning. I want someone to tell me what to eat. Phoebe Waller Bridges' 33-year-old character confesses to her priest, the hot one, in season two of her Emmy-winning series Flea bag. What to hate, what to rage about, what to listen to, what band to like, what to buy tickets for, what to joke about, what to joke about.

I want someone to tell me what to believe. who to vote for, who to love, and how to tell them. I just think I want someone to tell me how to live my life. Following a guru who provides an identity template, from one's politics to one's hairstyle, eases that choosers paradox. This concept can be applied to spiritual extremists like Scientologists and 3HO members, but also to loyalists of social media celebrities and cult brands like Lulu Lemon or Glacier. Just being able to say, I'm a Glossier Girl, or I follow Joe Dispenza, softens the burden and responsibility of having to make so many independent choices about what you think and who you are.

It cuts the overwhelming number of answers you need to have down to a manageable few. You can simply ask, what would a Glossier girl do, and base your day's decisions, your perfume, your news sources, all of it, on that framework. The tide of change away from mainstream establishments and toward non-traditional groups is not at all new. It's something we've seen all over the world at several different junctures in human history. Society's attraction to so-called cults, both the propensity to join them and the anthropological fascination with them, tends to thrive during periods of broader existential questioning. Most alternative religious leaders come to power not to exploit their followers, but instead to guide them through social and political turbulence.

Jesus of Nazareth, you may be familiar, arose during what is said to be the most fraught time in Middle Eastern history, a fact which speaks for itself. The violent encroaching Roman Empire left people searching for a non-establishment guide who could inspire and protect them. Fifteen hundred years later, during the tempestuous European Renaissance, dozens of cults cropped up in the rebellion against the Catholic Church. In 17th century India, fringe groups grew out of the social discord that resulted from the shift to agriculture and then as a reaction to British imperialism.

compared to other developed nations, the U.S. boasts a particularly consistent relationship with cults, which speaks to our brand of distinctly American tumult. Across the world, levels of religiosity tend to be lowest in countries with the highest standards of living, strong education levels, long life expectancies, but the U.S. is exceptional and that it's both highly developed and full of believers, even with all our nuns and remixed. This inconsistency can be explained in part because while citizens of other advanced nations like Japan and Sweden enjoy a bevy of top-down resources, including universal health care and all sorts of social safety nets, the U.S. is more of a free-for-all. The Japanese and the Europeans know their governments will come to their aid in their hour of need, wrote Dr. David Lutton, a language psychologist at Georgia Gwynette College for psychology today. But America's laissez-faire atmosphere makes people feel all in their own.

own. Generation after generation, this lack of institutional support paves the way for alternative supernaturally minded groups to surge. This pattern of American unrest was also responsible for the rise of cultish movements throughout the 1960s and 70s when the Vietnam War, the civil rights movement, and both Kennedy assassinations knocked U.S. citizens unsteady. At the time, spiritual practice was spiking, but the overt reign of traditional Protestantism was declining. So new movements arose to quench that cultural thirst. These included everything from Christian offshoots like Jews for Jesus and the Children of God, to Eastern-derived fellowships like 3HO and Shimbala Buddhism, to pagan groups like the Covenant of the Goddess and the Church of Aphrodite, to sci-fi-esque ones like

Scientology and Heaven's Gate. The first three were a string of zealous evangelical revivals that word through the American Northeast during the 1700s and 1800s. Different from the earlier Protestant awakenings, the fourth was populated by seekers looking toward the east and the occult to inspire individualistic quests for enlightenment. Just like 21st century cult followers, these seekers were mostly young, countercultural, politically divergent types, who felt the powers that be had failed them. If you subscribe to an astrology app or have ever attended a music festival, odds are that in the 1970s you'd have brushed up against a cult of some kind.

ultimately the needs for identity, purpose, and belonging have existed for a very long time and cultish groups have always sprung up during cultural limboes when these needs have gone sorely unmet. What's new is that in this internet-ruled age, when a guru can be godless, when the barrier to entry is as low as a double-tap, and when folks who hold alternative beliefs are able to find one another more easily than ever, it only makes sense that secular cults, from obsessed workout studios to startups that put the cult in company culture, would start sprouting like dandelions. For good or for ill, there is now a cult for everyone. Chapter 4. A couple years ago, amid a conversation about my decision

to quit the competitive and quite cultish theater program at my university in favor of a linguistics major. My mother told me that my change of heart really came as no surprise to her, since she'd always considered me profoundly unculty. I chose to take this as a compliment, since I definitely wouldn't want to be characterized the opposite way, but it also didn't fully digest as praise. That's because, juxtaposed with the dark elements, there's a certain sexiness surrounding cults, the unconventional aspect, the mysticism, the communal intimacy. In this way, the word has almost come full circle. Cult hasn't always carried such ominous undertones.

The earliest version of the term can be found in writings from the 17th century, when the cult label was much more innocent. Back then, it simply meant homage paid to divinity or offerings made to win over the gods. The words culture and cultivation, derived from the same Latin verb, cultus, are cults closed, morphological cousins. The word evolved in the early 19th century, a time of experimental religious brouhaha in the United States. The American colonies, which were founded upon the freedom to practice new religions, gained a reputation as a safe haven where eccentric believers could get as freaky as they liked. This spiritual freedom opened the door for a

stampede of alternative social and political groups, too. During the mid-1800s, well over a hundred small ideological cliques formed and collapsed. When the French political scientist Alexis de Tocqueville came to visit the U.S. in the 1830s, he was astonished by how, quote, Americans of all ages, all stations in life, and all types of disposition were forever forming associations. Colts of the time included groups like the Oneida community, a camp of polyamorous communists in upstate New York, sounds fun, the Harmony Society, an egalitarian fellowship of science lovers in Indiana, how lovely,

And my favorite, a short-lived vegan farming cult in Massachusetts called Fruitlands, which was founded by philosopher Amos Bronson Alcott, an abolitionist, women's rights activist, and father of little women author Louisa May Alcott. Back then, cult merely served as a sort of churchly classification alongside religion and sect. The word denoted something unorthodox, but not necessarily nefarious. The term started gaining its darker reputation toward the start of the foreman. Great Awakening. That's when the emergence of so many non-conformist spiritual groups spooked old-school conservatives and Christians. Cults soon became associated with charlatans, quacks, and heretical

pukes. But they still weren't considered much of a societal threat or criminal priority. Not until the Manson family murders of 1969, followed by the Jonestown Massacre of 1978. After that, the word cult became a symbol of fear. The grisly death of over 900 people at Jonestown, the largest number of American civilian casualties prior to 9-11, sent the whole country into cult delirium. Some readers may recall the subsequent satanic panic, a period in the 80s defined by widespread paranoia that Satan worshipping child abusers were terrorizing wholesome American neighborhoods. As sociologist Ron Enroth wrote in his 1979 book The Lure of Cults, the Unprecedented media exposure given Jones, downtown, alerted Americans to the fact that seemingly beneficent religious groups can mask a hellish rot. Then, as these things tend to go, as soon as cults became frightening, they also

became cool. Seventy's pop culture didn't wait long to birth terms like cult film and cult classic, which described the up-and-coming genre of underground indie movies like the Rocky Horror Picture Show. Bands like Fish and the Grateful Dead came to be known for their parapathetic cult followings. A generation or two after the fourth grade awakening, the era began to take on a nostalgic cool factor among cult curious youth. Fringe groups from the 70s now boast a sort of perversely stylish vintage cachet. At this point, being obsessed with the Manson family is akin to having an extensive collection of hippie-era vinyl and band teas. At an L.A. salon the other week, I eaves dropped on a woman telling her stylist that she was going for a Manson girl hair look,

overgrown brunette, middle-parted. A 20-something acquaintance of mine recently hosted a cult-themed birthday party in New York's Hudson Valley, the site of numerous historical cults, including The Family, Nexium, and Countless Witches, as well as the Woodstock Music Festival. There are several cultish groups who hide behind the vague moniker, The Family. This one was a 60s-born New Age doomsday commune run by a sadistic Australian yoga instructor named Anne Hamilton Byrne, who, common story, claimed Messiah status and was busted in the late 80s for kidnapping over a dozen children and abusing them in aberrant ways, like forcing them to take ritualistic heaps

of LSD. The dress code at this cult birthday party? All white. Filtered photographs of guests sporting ivory slips and glassy-eyed, oops, I didn't know I was haunted, expressions flooded my Instagram feed. Over the decades, the word cult has become so sensationalized, so romanticized, that several experts I spoke to don't even use it anymore. Their stance is that the meaning of cult is too broad and subjective to be useful. As recently as the 1990s, scholars had no problem tossing around the term to describe any group considered to have socially deviant beliefs and

practices. But it doesn't take a social scientist to see the bias built into that categorization. Some scholars have tried to get more precise and identify specific cult criteria, charismatic leaders, mind-altering behaviors, sexual and financial exploitation, and us versus them mentality toward non-members, and an ends justify the means philosophy. Stephen Kent, a sociology professor at the University of Alberta, adds that cult has typically been applied to groups that have some degree of supernatural beliefs, though that isn't always the case. Angels and demons don't usually make their way into, say, cosmetics pyramid schemes, except when they do. Stay tuned for that story. But Kent says that the result of all these institutions is the same,

a power imbalance built on members' devotion, hero worship, and absolute trust, which frequently facilitates abuse on the part of unaccountable leaders. The glue that keeps this trust intact is members' belief that their leaders have a rare access to transcendent wisdom, which allows them to exercise control over their systems of rewards and punishments, both here on earth and in the afterlife. Based on my conversations, these qualities seem to encapsulate what many everyday folks view as a real cult, or the academic definition of a cult. But as it turns out, cult doesn't have an official academic definition, at least not one that's universally satisfying. Because it's inherently pejorative, argued religion professor at San Diego State University Rebecca Moore during a phone interview, it's simply used to describe groups we don't like.

Moore comes to the subject of cults from a unique place. Her two sisters were among those who perished in the Jonestown massacre. In fact, Jim Jones enlisted them to help pull off the event. But Moore told me she doesn't use the word cult in earnest because it's become inarguably judgment-laden. As soon as someone says it, we know as readers, listeners, or individuals exactly what we should think about that particular group, she explained. Equally, brainwashing is a term tossed around incessantly by the media, but that some sources I consulted for this book resist, because they find it hypocritical.

We don't say that soldiers are brainwashed to kill other people, that's basic training, offers more. We don't say that fraternity members are brainwashed to haze their pledges, that's peer pressure. Here's a fun little story. In 1959, a Southern California cult conducted an unusual initiation ceremony, men who were wished to be part of the clan, had to prove their devotion by ingesting a nightmarish buffet of pig's head, fresh brains, and raw liver. In his attempts to complete the challenge, one young recruit named Richard kept vomiting up the concoction, but desperate for acceptance, he eventually forced it down. Promptly, a hulking mass of liver became wedged in his windpipe

and he choked on it. By the time he reached the hospital, he was dead. But no criminal charges were ever filed, because this wasn't actually a cult. It was a fraternity at USC. enacting just one of countless pledge hazing rituals, which are often far more disgusting, outlandish, and deadly, and involve more vomit and other bodily fluids than anything you'll find in most alternative religions. Many of us tend to take brainwashing literally, imagining that some neurological rewiring occurs during cult indoctrinations. But brainwashing is a metaphor. Everyone interprets it differently. Moore attests she would be the perfect candidate to believe in literal brainwashing, considering her two sister's role in the Jonestown tragedy.

But she still refutes the concept because she says it disregards people's very real ability to think for themselves. Her belief centers humans' autonomy, taking the stance that we are not helpless drones whose decision-making skills can be wiped clean at any time. If brainwashing were literal, claims more, quote, we would expect to see many more dangerous people running around planning to carry out reprehensible schemes.

Her perspective, simply put, is that you cannot force someone to believe something they absolutely do not on any level want to believe by using some set of evil techniques to wash their brain. To be sure, not every cult expert agrees with this take and plenty still endorse the use of the word brainwashing to help survivors understand the psychological abuses they endured. And yet, another of Moore's counterpoints is that brainwashing presents an untestable hypothesis. For a theory to meet the standard criteria of the scientific method,

It has to be controvertible. That is, it must be possible to prove the thing false. For example, as soon as objects start traveling faster than the speed of light, we'll know that Einstein got his theory of special relativity wrong. But you can't prove that brainwashing doesn't exist. Where everyday communication is concerned, the term can be alienating. The minute you say someone is brainwashed, the conversation often ends there. No room is left to explore what might specifically be motivating the person's behavior.

which, as it turns out, is a much more interesting question. When tossed around to describe everyone from a political candidate supporters to militant vegans, the terms cult and brainwashing acquire a sort of armchair therapist, Eklat. We all love a chance to feel psychologically and morally superior, without having to think about why, and calling a whole bunch of people brainwashed cult followers accomplishes just that. This negative bias can be detrimental, because not all alternative groups are depraved or perilous.

To the dismay of some and the fascination of others, sociologist Eileen Barker claims that out of the thousand-plus alternative groups she's documented that have been or could be described as cults, the vast majority were not involved with criminal activity of any kind. Moore and Barker note that fringe communities only gain publicity when they do something awful, like Heavensgate and Jonestown. And even those groups didn't set out with murder and mayhem in mind. After all, Jonestown started as an integrationist church.

Things escalated as Jim Jones grew hungrier for power. But most cults never spiral as catastrophically as his did. A feedback loop of scandal is created. Only the most destructive cults gain attention, so we come to think of all cults as destructive, and we simultaneously only recognize the destructive ones as cults, so those gain more attention reinforcing their negative reputation and so on at infinitum.

More troubling is the fact that the word cult has so frequently, been used as permission to trash religions that society just doesn't approve of. So many of today's long-standing religious denominations, Catholics, Baptists, Mormons, Quakers, Jews, and most indigenous American religions, to name a few, were once considered unholy blasphemies in the United States, and this was a nation founded on religious freedom. Today, some Americans regard alternative religions, oppressive and not, from Jehovah's Witnesses to folk magicians as cults. Barker has noted that official reports out of majority Catholic Belgium condemned the Quakers, just about the chillest religion ever, as a cult, or sect, actually, as the word cult in French has held on to its

neutral connotations. Throughout the world, cultural normativity still has so much to do with the religious groups perceived legitimacy, no matter if its teachings are any weirder or more harmful than a better established group. After all, what major spiritual leader doesn't have some trace of blood on their hands. As the religion scholar Reza Aslan famously stated, the biggest joke in religious studies is that cult plus time equals religion. In the U.S., Mormonism and Catholicism have been around long enough that they've been given our stamp of approval. Having earned the status of religion, they enjoy a certain amount of common respect, and, importantly, protection under the Constitution's First Amendment. Because of this protection

variable, labeling something a cult becomes not just a value judgment, but an arbiter of real life-or-death consequences. To quote Megan Goodwin, a researcher of American alternative religions at Northwestern University, the political ramifications of identifying something as a cult are real and often violent. What do these ramifications look like? Dig no deeper than Jonestown. Once the press identified Jonestown's victims as cultists, they were instantly relegated to a subclass of human. This made it easier for the public to distance themselves from the tragedy in its victims, dismissing them as weak, gullible, unsuited to life, and unworthy of post-mortem respect, wrote Laura Elizabeth Willett, author of the Jonestown-inspired novel, Beautiful Revolutionary.

Bodies weren't autopsied. Families were denied the timely return of their relatives remains. Another example of how judgments of cult followers might contribute to stigma and escalation centers on the case of the Branch Davidians, the victims of the notorious Waco tragedy of 1993. Founded in 1959, the branch Davidians were a religious movement, descended from the Seventh-day Adventist Church. At its peak in the early 1990s,

the group had about 100 members who lived together on a settlement in Waco, Texas, preparing for the second coming of Jesus Christ under the abusive governance of David Koresh, who claimed to be a prophet, as solipsistic new religious leaders tend to do. Reasonably perturbed

and in urgent need of help, followers' families tipped off the FBI. who, believing the compound was illegally stockpiling weapons, decided to confront them. Several dozen agents arrived, armed with rifles and tanks, among other forceful supplies, to address what they suspected to be a threat posed by a dangerous cult and its brainwashed followers. As Tara Isabella Burton analyzed, the prevailing narrative presumed that all inhabitants of the Branch-Dividian community were crazy, and that therefore any violent means used against them would be justified. But the intervention didn't go to plan.

Instead, it led to a 51-day standoff, which ended only after a few hundred more law enforcement officials showed up and used tear gas to flush their targets out of hiding. In the mayhem, a fire broke out, resulting in the deaths of nearly 80 Branch Divideans. Koresh was absolutely not innocent in all this. He was maniacal and violent. In fact, he may have lit the fatal flame, and his dogmatism was largely what led to so many casualties. But as some experts including Burton and Goodwin have pointed out, perhaps so was the fear surrounding the word cult. Catherine Wessinger, a religion scholar at Loyola University in New Orleans, suggested that if the FBI had used such aggression against a religious group not labeled a cult, even one with similarly harmful leadership, the public may have responded with more alarm. While power abuse can show up in any religion, fringe or mainstream, the cult label can have a dehumanizing effect. Once followers are branded as such, it becomes easier to justify brutality towards them. Religion is a constitutionally protected category, and the identification of Waco's branched divisions as a cult places them outside the protections of the state, Wessinger explained.

The FBI may have gone to save the compound, but when 76 civilians ended up dead instead, most everyone. everyday Americans blamed the branch of Indians themselves, because they weren't a church. They were a cult. Alas, the semantics of sanctimony. In a classic 1999 study, the famous Stanford psychologist Albert Bandura revealed that when human subjects were labeled with dehumanizing language such as animals, participants were more willing to harm them by administering electric shocks. It seems that the cult label can serve a similar function.

This is not to say that some groups that have been or could be called cults aren't hazardous. Certainly, plenty of them are. Instead, because the word cult has become so emotionally charged and up for interpretation, the label itself does not provide enough information for us to determine if a group is dangerous. We have to look more carefully. We have to be more specific. In an attempt to find a less judgy way to discuss non-mainstream spirit, cultural communities. Many scholars have used neutral sounding labels like new religious movements

or high-control groups. But while these phrases work in a more formal context, I find they don't quite capture the crossbits, multi-level marketing companies, college theater programs, and other hard-to-categorize points along the influence continuum. We need a more versatile way to talk about communities that are cult-like in one way or another, but not necessarily connected to the supernatural, which is why I like the word cultish. Chapter 5. I grew up entranced by all things cult, mostly because of my father. As a kid, he was forced to join one.

In 1969, when my dad, Craig Montel was 14, his absentee father and stepmother decided they wanted in on the blossoming countercultural movement. So they moved young Craig and his two toddler-age half-sisters onto a remote socialist commune outside San Francisco called Sinanon. In the late 1950s, Sinanon started as a rehabilitation center for hard drug users, labeled dope fiends, but later extended to accommodate non-drug-addicted lifestylers. In Sinan, children lived in barracks miles from their parents

and no one was allowed to work or go to school on the outside. Some members were forced to shave their heads. Many married couples were separated and assigned new partners. But everyone on the Synanon settlement, no exception, had to play The Game. The game was a ritualistic evening activity where members were divided into small circles and subjected to hours of vicious personal criticism by their peers. This practice was the centerpiece of Synanon. In fact, life there was divided.

into two semantic categories, in the game and out of the game. These confrontations were presented as group therapy, but really, they were a form of social control. There was nothing fun about the game, which could be hostile or humiliating, yet it was referred to as something you played. It turns out that this type of extreme truth-telling activity is not uncommon in cultish groups. Jim Jones hosted similar events called family meetings or catharsis meetings, where followers would all gather in the Mother Church on Wednesday nights. During these meetings, anyone who had offended the group in some way was called to the floor, so their family and friends could malign them to prove their greater loyalty to the cause.

I cut my teeth on Sin and On Tales from my father, who escaped at 17 and went on to become a prolific neuroscientist. Now his very job is to ask hard questions and seek proof at every turn. My dad was always so generous with his storytelling, indulging my wide-eyed curiosity by repeating the same stories of Synan's dismal living quarters and conformist milieu, of the biologist he met there, who tasked him with running the commune's medical lab at age 15. While his peers outside Sinan were fretting over puppy love squabbles and SAT prep, my dad was culturing followers' throat swabs and testing food handler's fingertips

for tuberculosis microbes. The lab was a sanctuary for my dad, a rare space on Synanon's grounds where the rules of empirical logic applied. Paradoxically, it's where he found his love of science. Hungry for an education outside the commune's closed system and desperate for a legitimate diploma that would allow him to attend college. When he wasn't in a white coat or playing the game, he was sneaking off the settlement to attend an accredited high school in San Francisco, the only synon child to do so. He stayed quiet, flew under the radar, and privately interrogated everything. When I was a little kid, what always gripped me most about my dad's synonon stories was the group's special language, terms like in the game and out of the game, love match, meaning synonon marriages, act as if, an imperative never to question synon's protocols to simply act as if you agreed until you did.

Demonstrators and PODs, parents on duty, the rotation of adults randomly selected to chaperone the kid's school and barracks, and so many more. This curious lingo was the clearest window into that world. As the daughter of scientists, I figure some combination of nature, nurture, and synonon stories caused me to become a rather incredulous person, and since early childhood I have always been keenly sensitive to cultish-sounding rhetoric, but also beguiled by its power. In middle school, my best friend's mother was a born-again Christian,

and I'd sometimes secretly skip Hebrew school on Sundays to accompany the family to their evangelical megachurch. Nothing enraptured me more than the way these churchgoers spoke, how upon setting foot in the building, everyone slipped into a dialect of evangelical ease. It wasn't King James Bible English. It was modern and very distinct. I started using their glossary of buzzwords whenever I attended services, just to see if it affected how the congregants treated me. I picked up phrases like, on my heart, a synonym for on my mind, love up on someone to show someone love, in the word, reading the Bible, Father of Lies, Satan, the evil that governs the world, and convicted to be divinely moved to do something. It was like the code language of an exclusive clubhouse.

Though these special terms didn't communicate anything that couldn't be said in plain English, using them in the right way at the right time was like a key unlocking the group's acceptance. Immediately, I was perceived as an insider. The language was a password, a disguise, a truth serum. It was so powerful. Creating special language to influence people's behavior and beliefs is so effective, in part simply because speech is the first thing we're willing to change about ourselves, and also the last thing we let go.

Unlike shaving your head, relocating to a commune, or even changing your clothes, adapting new terminology is instant and seemingly commitment-free. Let's say you show up to a spiritual meeting out of curiosity, and the host starts off by asking the group to repeat a chant. Odds are you do it. Maybe it feels odd and peer-pressurey at first, but they didn't ask you to fork over your life savings or kill anyone. How much damage can it do?

Cultish language works so efficiently and invisibly to mold our worldview in the shape of the gurus that once it's embedded, it sticks. After you grow your hair out, move back home, delete the app, whatever it is, the special vocabulary is still there. In part two of this book, we'll meet a man named Frank Lifford, a survivor of the 1990s suicide cult Heaven's Gate, who, 25 years after defecting and disowning its belief system, still calls his two former leaders by their monastic names, T and Doe, refers to the group as the classroom, and describes its members haunting fate with the euphemism leaving Earth, just as he was taught to do over two decades ago. The idea to write this book occurred to me after my best friend from college decided to quit drinking and go to Alcoholics Anonymous.

She lived 3,000 miles away from me at the time, so I only saw her a few times a year, and from afar I couldn't tell how committed she was to this no-drinking thing, or really what to make of it. That is, until the first time I went to visit her after she got sober. That night, we were having trouble figuring out dinner plans when the following sentence exited her mouth. I've been halting all day. I caught a resentment at work, but trying not to future trip. Let's just focus on dinner. First things first, as they say. I must have looked at her as if she had three heads. Halt? Future trip? Caught a resentment? What on earth was she saying? I'd quickly learned that halt stands for hungry, angry, lonely, and tired. Future tripping is stressing out over potential events you can't control. Caught a resentment means to be overcome

by disdain for someone, and first things first is a self-reclaimed AA cliche that means just what it sounds like. Admittedly, these are extremely useful mottos, as are most of the zingers in AA's clever lexicon. Three months in AA, and this person who was so close to me I could have accurately distinguished the meanings of her different exhalations was suddenly speaking a foreign language. Instantly, I had a heuristic reaction. It was the same instinct I felt looking at those old photos of Tasha Samar in the desert. The same response my dad had the day he first stepped onto synon's grounds. A Jonestown survivor once told me, they say that a cult is like pornography. You know it when you see it. Or if you're like me,

you know it when you hear it. The exclusive language was the biggest clue. A.A. wasn't synodon, of course. It was changing my friend's life for the better. But its conquest of her vocabulary was impossible to unhear. Instincts aren't social science, though. And in truth, I didn't actually know A.A. was a cult. But I had a strong inkling that there was something mighty and mysterious going on there. I had to look deeper. I had to understand. How did the group's language take such rapid hold of my friend? How does language work, for better and for worse, to make people submerge themselves in zealous ideological groups with unchecked leaders? How does it keep them in the whirlpool? I began this project out of the perverse craving for cult campfire

tales that so many of us possess. But it quickly became clear that learning about the connections across language, power, community, and belief could legitimately help us understand what motivates people's fanatical behaviors during this ever-restless era. A time when we find multi-level marketing scams masquerading as feminist startups, phony shamans ballyhooing bad health advice, online hate groups radicalizing new members and kids sending each other literal death threats in defense of their favorite brands. Channey, the 26-year-old soul-cycler, told me she once saw one teenager pull a weapon on another over the last pair of sneakers at an L.A. Hype Beast sample sale. The next crusades will not be religious, but consumerist, she suggested. Uber versus Lyft,

Amazon versus Amazon boycotters, TikTok versus Instagram. Tara Isabella Burton put it well when she said, if the boundaries between cult and religion are already slippery, those between religion and culture are more porous still. The haunting, beautiful, stomach-twisting truth is that no matter how cult-phobic you fancy yourself, our participation in things is what defines us. Whether you were born into a family of Pentecostals who speak in tongues, left home at 18 to join the Kundalini yogis,

got dragged into a soul-sucking startup right out of college, became an AA regular last year, or just five seconds ago clicked a targeted ad promoting not just a skincare product, but the priceless opportunity to become part of a movement. Group affiliations, which can have profound, even eternal significance, make up the scaffolding upon which we build our lives. It doesn't take someone broken or disturbed to crave that structure.

Again, we're wired to. And what we often overlook is that the material with which that scaffolding is built, the very material that fabricates our reality, is language. We have always used language to explain what we already knew, wrote English scholar Gary Eberl in his 2007 book Dangerous Words. But more importantly, we have also used it to reach toward what we did not yet know or understand. With words, we breathe reality into being. A linguistic concept called the theory of performativity says that language does not simply describe or reflect who we are, it creates who we are. That's because speech itself has the capacity to consummate actions.

thus exhibiting a level of intrinsic power. The plainest examples of performative language would be making a promise, performing a wedding ceremony, or pronouncing a legal sentence. When repeated over and over, speech has meaningful, consequential power to construct and constrain our reality. Ideally, most people's understandings of reality are shared and grounded in logic. But to enmesh in a community that uses linguistic rituals, chance, prayers, turns of phrase, to reshape that culture of shared understanding

can draw us away from the real world. Without us even noticing, our very understanding of ourselves and what we believe to be true becomes bound up with the group, with the leader, all because of language. This book will explore the wide spectrum of cults and their uncanny lexicons,

starting with the most famously, blatantly dreadful ones, and working its way to communities so seemingly innocuous we might not even notice how cultish they are. In order to keep the scope of these stories manageable, because goodness knows I could spend my whole life interviewing people about cults of all kinds, we're going to focus mainly on American groups. Each part of the book will focus on a different category of cult,

all the while exploring the cultish rhetoric that imbues our everyday lives. Part two is dedicated to notorious suicide cults, like Jonestown and Heaven's Gate. Part three explores controversial religions, like Scientology and Children of God. Part 4 is about multi-level marketing companies, MLMs. Part 5 covers cult fitness studios, and part 6 delves into social media gurus.

The words we hear and use every day can provide clues to help us determine which groups are healthy, which are toxic, and which are a little bit of both, and to what extent we wish to engage with them. Within these pages lies an adventure into the curious and curiously familiar language of cultish. So, in the words of many a cult leader, come along. Follow me.

Thank you so much for listening to Me Read, part one of cultish. You can listen to the rest of the audiobook, wherever you find audiobooks, Audible, Spotify, Libro FM. There are so many great audiobook providers. And you can also get Cultish now out in paperback wherever books are sold. Don't worry. We'll be back with our regularly scheduled Sounds Like a Colt programming next week. And in the meantime, stay culty. But not too culty. Sounds Like a Cult was created by Amanda Montel and edited by Jordan Moore of the Pod Cabin.

This episode was hosted by Amanda Montel. Our managing producer is Katie Epperson. Our theme music is by Casey Cole. If you enjoyed the show, we'd really be really. appreciate it if you could leave it five stars on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. It really helps the show a lot. And if you like this podcast, feel free to check out my book, Cultish, the Language of Fanaticism, which inspired the show. You might also enjoy my other books, The Age of Magical Overthinking, notes on modern irrationality, and word slut, a feminist guide to taking back the English language. Thanks as well to our network studio 71. And be sure to follow the Sounds Like a Cult cult on Instagram for all the discourse at Sounds like a cult pod or support us on

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