[audio]

Mundane Cults

29 Nov 2025

We’ve been taught that cults are dark and scary things. But we have been fooled. The cult is a prominent building block of modern community. If you’re not in one, you’re probably doing something wrong. The question is, is the cult you’re in a cult you chose?

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Show Notes

References

Speechnotes

Intro

Welcome to the btrmt Lectures. My name is Dr Dorian Minors, and if there’s one thing I’ve learned as a brain scientist, it’s that there’s no instruction manual for this device in our head. But there are patterns. Patterns of thought, of feeling, and of action. That’s the brain’s job: creating the patterns that gracefully handle the predictable shapes of everyday life.

We call these things ideologies, rituals, biases. But there’s something else I’ve learned teaching this stuff: we’re animals first. You can’t escape these patterns, but you can choose which ones to emphasise.

So lemme teach you about ‘em. One pattern, one podcast. And you choose if it works for you. That’s the idea, so let’s get into it.

Now, this is the third in this initial attempt of mine to turn my lectures into podcasts, and probably the last one I’m going to really polish. Last long intro, for example. Be happy to do away with that. Last long session of editing too. You’ll just have to put up with my coughs and mumbles.

But so far, it seems like it’s going down pretty well. I’m still spending more time getting them done than I’ve been hoping to, but I can still pump one out after a day of lecturing.

But once again, the feedback coming in suggests that, as a baseline for new people coming in, I should make sure to go beyond the stuff I’m teaching here as associate professor at the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst, and beyond the stuff I studied as a brain scientist at Cambridge and as a clinician. And in the feedback, one bit that I do kept coming up as one people wanted to hear about.

My bit about mundane cults.

and since i;ve mentioned Snadhurst I should, as always, be clear that this is my own perspective not snadhurst.. jsut dorian doing his little podcast

so, since it’s honestly, one of my favourites too, i thought i’d give it a go. the background here comes from a project i have been doing for a while now on human systems. the best article for this is called true family ties. it’s probably worth it’s own podcasts, but essentially it talks about

it’s no secret that we are lonelier than ever. we have many complaints of modern society, but our growing isolation is a common one. there are two reasons for this unhappy accident—the difficulty of finding people in ever more crowded cities, and the fact that we have lost sight of what a community is really made of.

And I think that the way we talk about cults is one of the more enteretaing examples of this.

So Let’s get into it.

Assumption

The word cult is an undeniably dirty word. It conjures images of hooded people in circles around fires. It conjures images of mass suicide and self-harm. It conjures images of tragic figures, brainwashed to abandon their families. And it conjures images of the infamous ‘narcissistic leader’.

You think of the Jonestown Massacres in the 1970s: 900 dead—either by murder or suicide. All members of Jim Jones’ People’s Temple.

You think of Heavens gate, twenty years later. 39 suicides by poison, all to chase the ‘Next Level’ and marry up with the UFO that was Hallies Comet.

Aum Shinrikyo, a Japanese doomsday cult, carried out a sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway in 1995, killing 13 people and injuring thousands.

And if we’re not describing something this dramatic, we do use it to talk aboutn groups we’re wary of

We talk about vegans as cult-members, or fitness communities as if they are training grounds for zealots.

Crypto is cult-like

Political factions are cults! It’s increasingly trendyto make the link between political ideology and religious ideoloy!

If it’s not describing actual destructuve cults, it’s a rhetorical bludgeon, a way to dismiss without engaging, to pathologise people

In my mind, this image of cults is a problem. The kind of problem that actually makes us more likely to fall victim to the destructive groups that gifted the word cult these connotations.

Cults are better seen as, if not a basic, then at least a pervasive building block of modern day life. There’s every chance you’re in one now. And there’s every chance you’re better off for it. Which makes the likelihood that you might fall victim to a destructive version even more likely.

Subversion

The word ‘cult’ started as a sociological classification. A slow growing attempt of theologians to distinguish between different kinds of religious behaviour. In particular, the word cult was used to carve out the kind of groups that emphasised the personal and private nature of religious beliefs, particularly those which embraced the more mystical or ecstatic aspects of a connection to the divine.

so the people who wanted that more personal, almost gnostic connection to god—in christianity, these are the Pentecostal/Charismatic; Kabbalah in judeism; Sufism in islam is interested in this, and so on

as opposed to a connection to the community, or the church, or the priest, and accessing god that way

As time went on, this classification began to emphasise a feature that was often common among these more personally oriented and mystically inspired groups—their deviancy from the mainstream.¹ The pursuit of the personal in the context of the religious often results in a break from the predominant religious culture. Institutions have little room for individuals. This, indeed, was a core thread of the Protestant Reformation.

so cult was a way of distinguishing these people—mysically oriented, and thus increasingly deviant from the mainstream

One final transformation completes the history of the term cult for us—the rise of the non-religious or ‘new religious’ movement.

so, spiritualism in the 1850s, New thought in the late 1800s, the occult in the turn of the century, then the human potential movement, neo-paganism, and transhumanism

In an attempt to characterise the increasingly secular nature of the cults academics were seeing, the emphasis began to zoom out from the religious nature of the groups. Rather than consider how cults were defined by their adherance to or deviancy from some established religion, instead academics began to concentrate on the beliefs of the individuals.

In this new foray, we see something of a return to our first use of the term. The personal nature of cultic beliefs became central again. Cults were seen to be ephemeral groups, arising in response to the needs of some transient collection of individuals, with loose boundaries and no clear centres of authority. Sociologist Roy Wallis called this ‘epistemic individualism’ the characteristic trait of cults.

so let me illustrate what I mean and I’ll use neo-paganism because I’m pretty fond of it

Modern Neo-Paganism, including Wicca (Gardner, 1950s) and broader Pagan-inspired movements (1970s onward) like neodruidry, popular here, emerged as a revival or reconstruction of pre-Christian European religions. though the accuracy here is as loose as the boundarie—good fella to read on this is Ronald Hutton

Unlike older religious “cults,” these groups often don’t have a formal heirarchy—covens/gatherings form and disslve flexibly, or central texts—non rigid orthoday—ways of doing things. It’s focused more on personal believe. You pick and choose and blend practices, deities, rituals, and cosmologies according to personal preference rather than conforming to a central dogma. I remember a druidry course that skipped from Chakras to Jung to Irish poetry. I doubt the found that in caeser’s accounts back when he was purging them from gaul

everyone is negotiating their own spiritual truth

And that’s, more or less, it. Cults are, and always have been groups that centre on the needs of a loose collective of individuals, that engage in religious behaviour, and that by the nature of their personalisation often deviate from the mainstream.

You might ask when cult became such a dirty word,then.

deviation has its own connotations

I talk about this more elsewhere, but largely, it’s because of marketing.

Most people will trace the modern idea of cults back to Robert Jay Lifton and Margaret Thaler Singer.

During the Korean War, the Chinese were so effective at indoctrinating their prisoners of war,

this is where brainwashing comes from—a chinese term for this practice that we adoptied as a domain of research. Lifton, writing on the topic,² spoke to the idea of totalism: organisations and ideological movements that explicitly seek total control over human thought and behaviour.

We then saw a rise in visibility,

though not in not in number,

iof high-control and destructive groups from the 1960s through the 1990s, culminating in cases like Jonestown, Heaven’s Gate (religious group), and the Manson Family.

Singer, a ‘brainwashing’ academic in her own right, spent a great deal of time during this period in courts and on TV speaking about the phenomenon. By the 90’s two popular books were circulating. Singer’s [own book](Cults in Our Midst: The Hidden Menace in Our Everyday Lives), co-written by Janja Lalich and foreworded by Lifton, and another by Steven Hassan which was a (bestselling!) practical guide to extracting people from these groups. Both have the word ‘Cult’ in the title, which indicates that, despite Singer’s book explicitly noting:

the term cult is not in itself pejorative but simply descriptive

…it had become the word de jour for destructive cults. That early association with deviancy had become the association that stuck.

But, by pushing back before the media panic of the late 20th Century, we can see that this isn’t the critical feature of all cults, just destructive ones. The critical feature of all cults is religious behaviour.

The ubiquity of religious behaviour

It’s important that we don’t confuse religious behaviour with religion. Indeed, this was the very aim of the cultic classification in the first place—to mark out those which had replaced the religion with new beliefs.³

Religious behaviour is, at its core ritualistic behaviour around some kind of article of faith. You have religious behaviours around doing. Things like prayer, or the kinds of sacrifices that have you perform a service—a pilgrimage for example, or the sacrifice of an animal. rituals where you do things

And you have religous behaviours around not doing. These are often sacrifices too, but ones in which you give up something—a fast perhaps, or a set of purity rules. And also, in these not doings, there is the rich domain of taboos—actions that are forbidden for whatever reason the faith would have it so.

so ritual behaviouras around faith where you either do or don’t do sometihng as a consequence of that faith

Importantly, religious or not, everyone engages in religious behaviour. Humans take many more things on faith than we might care to admit.

and I write about this alot. I’ll drop some linkds in the shownotes, but essentially the world is super complicated—we can’t know everything

Perhaps the best example is our faith in the consciousness of others. There is, under our current model of scientific enterprise, no possible way of assessing whether something is conscious or not.⁴ We each have some experience of consciousness, but we will never know if others share that experience with us. Youll never know if you are the only conscious being in a sea of automatons. But no one behaves like this. Take politeness—socially derived rituals of behaviour that necessarily assume others are conscious.⁵ It’s a technically perfect example of religious behaviour!

And where religious behaviours collect, cults are likely to emerge. If you haven’t heard people describe veganism as cult-like, you haven’t been in a western city. This is because it is cult-like. Veganism, when done for humane reasons, are religious behaviours around the consciousness of animals at their most prominent. An almost punitive collection of not doings. And in support of these faithful efforts, a transient, leaderless collective sprung up to meet the needs of vegans—to help insulate them as they deviated from the mainstream views on animal consciousness in the process.⁶

I’m not saying any of this to be perjorative—it seems like we’re really moving in that direction for all sorts of reasons. What is true is that being a vegan would be hard without the cult of veganism. My mum had to give up be cause she was doing this in the 90s, before it was so established

cults are defined by religious behaviour

There’s another example, worth mentioning, to drive the point home. The world of health and nutrition is extraordinarily fertile soil for the development of cults. Absolutely no one seems to have a good idea about how nutrition works, outside of the basic average macronutrient profile. And health is almost as much of a crap shoot. I’ve talked before about how much of a failure modern therapy is. And our weirdly quixotic relationship with the world of medicine is almost entirely faith-based. So it’s no surprise that the realm of health and wellbeing is a treasure trove of cultic movements. Everything from neo-pagan religions, to loose-knit groups of crystal healers, to the communities that populate websites like Goop or any number of topical substacks, to franchises like F45 and Crossfit. All of these loose collectives of people are creating their personal relationship with health and supporting each other through religious behaviour oriented around a health-related faith that deviates from the mainstream.

they’re cults! technically@!! and importantly none of that is perjorative! I mean that it describes healthy groups AND problematic ones

I hope I’ve convinced you, but I assume you’re wondeirng at this point, so what. Why bother trying to reclaim the word? We don’t care about all cults, we care about destructive ones

And that’s where I disagree with you. I think it isn’t the right cut. Let me wrap up with a little explanation.

Outro

I’ve talked before about how our attraction to destructive and spectacular cults distract us from the real and important dynamics of these things.

and I hope II’ve just illustrated some of that

but there’s one idea I haven’t really talked about here, which is the notion that a charismatic leader is required to make a cult whole. It’s actually part of the literature—I mentioned Singer and Lalich’s book earlier and they explicitly define a cult as:

a group that forms around a person who claims to have a special mission or knowledge, which they will share with those who turn over most of their decision making to that self-appointed leader.

there points of light in the dark and this is what Weber says,

. This is where charisma shines as a guiding force, before structure begins to emerge. But these charismatic leaders rarely rise to the top of these loose collectives.

this is true of spectcular cults we’ve talkied about, but this doesn’t normally happen

Rather they serve as eddies and currents in the transient cultic milieu.

like who is the leader of vegans

And, as Weber noted, charismatic leadership will eventually give way to traditional or rational leadership as the cult begins to require structure, and as its growth creates its own mainstream presence.

Now, that’s not to say that these structures can’t become problematic. There’s a reason Lifton was worried about ‘totalising’ organisations and Singer about their leadership. Authoritarian structure in high-control groups is something we should be worried about. But we shouldn’t be worried about cults. Cults are simply communities organised around shared values that engage in religious behaviour around those values. We need to strip cult of its dark mystique, and point our concern at the things that matter or risk people mis-identifying a good cult as a bad one, or worse, failing to recognise a bad one because it seems good.

so, with that out of thwe ay I want to bring it back to my interest on human systems. The problem of rising loneliness and isolation in modern cities is a common one. I spend a lot of time notiing that one reason for this is becauwe we really seem to have missed what binds a community

cults-mundane cults-some of the most obvious examples of community left in a modern world

Mundane cults describe many loose collectives where people come together, in person or online, to share their values and their beliefs. To share their faith in things that an increasingly specialised world makes difficult to understand. To share their rituals around their faith. And in doing so, to find their people. And this is why, in the academic world, cults which are not destructive or totalistic are seen as a place of value. A place where one can find affiliation and spiritual fulfillment. A place where we find community and purpose in a world that sidelines those things in favour of individual productivity.

so that’s muy challenge

So stop using cult as a dirty word. If you’re not in one, or two, or even a handful, then you’re probably doing something a little weird.

The REAL question is, are the cults you’re in cults you’re choosing to be in? Because if you’re not asking that question, you’re exactly the kind of person who’s likely to end up in a circle of hooded figures.

Implication and outro

What are the implications for the audience?

Edited Transcript

Below is a lightly edited transcript. For the articles that inspired this one, see Mundane Cults and True Family Ties.

Welcome to the btrmt. Lectures. My name is Dr. Dorian Minors, and if there’s one thing I’ve learnt as a brain scientist, it’s that there’s no instruction manual for this device in our head. But there are patterns—patterns of thought, of feeling, of action. That’s the brain’s job: creating the patterns that gracefully handle the predictable shapes of everyday life.

We call these things ideologies, rituals, biases. But there’s something else I’ve learnt teaching this stuff: we’re animals first. You can’t escape these patterns, but you can choose which ones to emphasise.

So let me teach you about them. One pattern, one podcast. And you choose if it works for you. That’s the idea, so let’s get into it.

But so far, it seems like it’s going down pretty well. I’m still spending more time getting them done than I’ve been hoping to, but I can still pump one out after a day of lecturing.

My bit about mundane cults.

And since I’ve mentioned Sandhurst, I should, as always, be clear that this is my own perspective—not Sandhurst’s. Just Dorian doing his little podcast.

So, since it’s honestly one of my favourites too, I thought I’d give it a go. The background here comes from a project I’ve been doing for a while now on human systems. The best article for this is called True Family Ties. It’s probably worth its own podcast, but essentially it talks about how it’s no secret that we are lonelier than ever. We have many complaints of modern society, but our growing isolation is a common one. There are two reasons for this unhappy accident—the difficulty of finding people in ever more crowded cities, and the fact that we have lost sight of what a community is really made of.

And I think that the way we talk about cults is one of the more entertaining examples of this.

So let’s get into it.

The Dark Image of Cults

You think of the Jonestown Massacres in the 1970s: 900 dead—either by murder or suicide. All members of Jim Jones’ People’s Temple.

You think of Heaven’s Gate, twenty years later. 39 suicides by poison, all to chase the ‘Next Level’ and marry up with the UFO that was Halley’s Comet.

Aum Shinrikyo, a Japanese doomsday cult, carried out a sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway in 1995, killing 13 people and injuring thousands.

And if we’re not describing something this dramatic, we do use it to talk about groups we’re wary of.

We talk about vegans as cult-members, or fitness communities as if they are training grounds for zealots.

Crypto is cult-like.

Political factions are cults! It’s increasingly trendy to make the link between political ideology and religious ideology!

If it’s not describing actual destructive cults, it’s a rhetorical bludgeon, a way to dismiss without engaging, to pathologise people.

In my mind, this image of cults is a problem. The kind of problem that actually makes us more likely to fall victim to the destructive groups that gifted the word cult these connotations.

A Brief History of the Word ‘Cult’

So the people who wanted that more personal, almost gnostic connection to god—in Christianity, these are the Pentecostal/Charismatic; Kabbalah in Judaism; Sufism in Islam is interested in this, and so on—as opposed to a connection to the community, or the church, or the priest, and accessing god that way.

As time went on, this classification began to emphasise a feature that was often common among these more personally oriented and mystically inspired groups—their deviancy from the mainstream. The pursuit of the personal in the context of the religious often results in a break from the predominant religious culture. Institutions have little room for individuals. This, indeed, was a core thread of the Protestant Reformation.

So cult was a way of distinguishing these people—mystically oriented, and thus increasingly deviant from the mainstream.

One final transformation completes the history of the term cult for us—the rise of the non-religious or ‘new religious’ movement.

So, spiritualism in the 1850s, New Thought in the late 1800s, the occult in the turn of the century, then the human potential movement, neo-paganism, and transhumanism.

In an attempt to characterise the increasingly secular nature of the cults academics were seeing, the emphasis began to zoom out from the religious nature of the groups. Rather than consider how cults were defined by their adherence to or deviancy from some established religion, instead academics began to concentrate on the beliefs of the individuals.

So let me illustrate what I mean and I’ll use neo-paganism because I’m pretty fond of it.

Modern Neo-Paganism, including Wicca (Gardner, 1950s) and broader Pagan-inspired movements (1970s onward) like neo-druidry, popular here, emerged as a revival or reconstruction of pre-Christian European religions—though the accuracy here is as loose as the boundaries. Good fella to read on this is Ronald Hutton.

Unlike older religious “cults,” these groups often don’t have a formal hierarchy—covens/gatherings form and dissolve flexibly, or central texts—non-rigid orthodoxy. It’s focused more on personal belief. You pick and choose and blend practices, deities, rituals, and cosmologies according to personal preference rather than conforming to a central dogma. I remember a druidry course that skipped from Chakras to Jung to Irish poetry. I doubt they found that in Caesar’s accounts back when he was purging them from Gaul.

Everyone is negotiating their own spiritual truth.

You might ask when cult became such a dirty word, then.

Deviation has its own connotations.

I talk about this more elsewhere, but largely, it’s because of marketing.

Most people will trace the modern idea of cults back to Robert Jay Lifton and Margaret Thaler Singer.

During the Korean War, the Chinese were so effective at indoctrinating their prisoners of war—this is where brainwashing comes from, a Chinese term for this practice that we adopted as a domain of research. Lifton, writing on the topic, spoke to the idea of totalism: organisations and ideological movements that explicitly seek total control over human thought and behaviour.

We then saw a rise in visibility—though not in number—of high-control and destructive groups from the 1960s through the 1990s, culminating in cases like Jonestown, Heaven’s Gate, and the Manson Family.

the term cult is not in itself pejorative but simply descriptive

…it had become the word de jour for destructive cults. That early association with deviancy had become the association that stuck.

The Ubiquity of Religious Behaviour

And you have religious behaviours around not doing. These are often sacrifices too, but ones in which you give up something—a fast perhaps, or a set of purity rules. And also, in these not doings, there is the rich domain of taboos—actions that are forbidden for whatever reason the faith would have it so.

So ritual behaviours around faith where you either do or don’t do something as a consequence of that faith.

Importantly, religious or not, everyone engages in religious behaviour. Humans take many more things on faith than we might care to admit.

And I write about this a lot. I’ll drop some links in the show notes, but essentially the world is super complicated—we can’t know everything.

Perhaps the best example is our faith in the consciousness of others. There is, under our current model of scientific enterprise, no possible way of assessing whether something is conscious or not. We each have some experience of consciousness, but we will never know if others share that experience with us. You’ll never know if you are the only conscious being in a sea of automatons. But no one behaves like this. Take politeness—socially derived rituals of behaviour that necessarily assume others are conscious. It’s a technically perfect example of religious behaviour!

I’m not saying any of this to be pejorative—it seems like we’re really moving in that direction for all sorts of reasons. What is true is that being a vegan would be hard without the cult of veganism. My mum had to give up because she was doing this in the 90s, before it was so established.

Cults are defined by religious behaviour.

There’s another example, worth mentioning, to drive the point home. The world of health and nutrition is extraordinarily fertile soil for the development of cults. Absolutely no one seems to have a good idea about how nutrition works, outside of the basic average macronutrient profile. And health is almost as much of a crapshoot. I’ve talked before about how much of a failure modern therapy is. And our weirdly quixotic relationship with the world of medicine is almost entirely faith-based. So it’s no surprise that the realm of health and wellbeing is a treasure trove of cultic movements. Everything from neo-pagan religions, to loose-knit groups of crystal healers, to the communities that populate websites like Goop or any number of topical substacks, to franchises like F45 and Crossfit. All of these loose collectives of people are creating their personal relationship with health and supporting each other through religious behaviour oriented around a health-related faith that deviates from the mainstream.

They’re cults! Technically!

And importantly none of that is pejorative! I mean that it describes healthy groups AND problematic ones.

I hope I’ve convinced you, but I assume you’re wondering at this point, so what. Why bother trying to reclaim the word? We don’t care about all cults, we care about destructive ones.

And that’s where I disagree with you. I think it isn’t the right cut. Let me wrap up with a little explanation.

Community in a Lonely World

I’ve talked before about how our attraction to destructive and spectacular cults distract us from the real and important dynamics of these things.

And I hope I’ve just illustrated some of that.

But there’s one idea I haven’t really talked about here, which is the notion that a charismatic leader is required to make a cult whole. It’s actually part of the literature—I mentioned Singer and Lalich’s book earlier and they explicitly define a cult as:

a group that forms around a person who claims to have a special mission or knowledge, which they will share with those who turn over most of their decision making to that self-appointed leader.

Because there is clearly a role of charisma in a cult. Obviously, the charisma of some new article of faith—the core of the religious behaviours that engender the cult. And charismatic leaders will arise to embody that charisma—leaders in the Weberian sense. Leaders who through their religious behaviour appear exceptional, or through their aggression become prominent, or through their being in the right place at the right time attract a following. These kinds of leaders are a feature of any kind of novel environment—points of light in the dark. And this is what Weber says. This is where charisma shines as a guiding force, before structure begins to emerge. But these charismatic leaders rarely rise to the top of these loose collectives.

This is true of spectacular cults we’ve talked about, but this doesn’t normally happen.

Rather they serve as eddies and currents in the transient cultic milieu.

Like who is the leader of vegans?

So, with that out of the way I want to bring it back to my interest on human systems. The problem of rising loneliness and isolation in modern cities is a common one. I spend a lot of time noting that one reason for this is because we really seem to have missed what binds a community.

Cults—mundane cults—some of the most obvious examples of community left in a modern world.

So that’s my challenge.

So stop using cult as a dirty word. If you’re not in one, or two, or even a handful, then you’re probably doing something a little weird.

Transcript

[00:00] Welcome to the btrmt

[00:12] Lectures. My name is

[00:12] Dr. Dorian Minors, and if there is one thing I’ve learned as a brain scientist, it is that there is no instruction manual for this device in our

[00:19] head. But there are

[00:20] patterns. There are patterns of thought, of feeling, of action, because that’s the brain’s job, creating the patterns that gracefully handle the predictable shapes of everyday

[00:29] life. And we call these things ideologies or biases or

[00:34] rituals. But there’s something else that I’ve learned teaching this stuff, and that’s that we are animals

[00:40] first. And as animals, you can’t escape these patterns, but you can choose which ones to

[00:45] emphasize. So let me teach you about

[00:47] them. One pattern, one podcast, and you choose if it works for

[00:50] you. That’s the

[00:51] idea. So let’s get into

[00:52] it.

[00:53] Now. This is the third in my initial attempt here to turn my lectures into podcasts, and it’s probably the last one I’m going to really

[01:00] polish. It’s the last long intro, for

[01:03] example. I’d be happy to do away with

[01:05] that. And it’s the last long session of editing,

[01:08] too. You’re just going to have to put up with my coughs and mumbles and whatnot from now

[01:13] on. But so far, it does seem like it’s going down pretty

[01:17] well. I’m still spending more time getting them done than I’ve been hoping to, but I can still pump one out after a day of

[01:23] lecturing. So I’m going to keep it

[01:24] up. And once again, I want to respond to

[01:26] feedback. So the feedback coming in suggests that, you know, as a baseline for new people coming in, I should be sure to go beyond the stuff that I’m teaching here as associate professor at the Royal Military Academy,

[01:37] Sandhurst. And I should also go beyond the stuff I studied as a brain scientist at Cambridge and as a

[01:42] clinician. And in the feedback, one bit that I do keeps sort of coming

[01:48] up. This one bit that people seem to want to hear about is a bit on mundane

[01:53] cults. And since I’ve mentioned cults in Sandhurst and the same sort of verbal paragraph, I should probably be pretty clear that this is, as always, my own

[02:02] perspective. And not the perspective of

[02:04] Santos. It’s just Dorian doing his little

[02:06] podcast. So, with that said, since this piece of mine on mundane culture is one of my favorites too, I thought I’d give it a

[02:13] go. And the background for this comes from a project I’ve been doing for a while now on human

[02:18] systems. And the best article I have on my website on this is called True Family

[02:23] ties. I’ll leave a note to that in my show

[02:25] Notes. And it’s probably worth its own podcast, that

[02:28] article. But what it essentially talks about, the main point is that, you know, as a society, it’s no secret that more people are lonelier than

[02:36] ever. We have many complaints of modern society, but our growing isolation is a very common

[02:43] one. And there are a couple of reasons for this unhappy

[02:45] accident. There is firstly, the just the difficulty pragmatically of finding people in an ever more crowded

[02:52] city. Where do you go to find

[02:54] them? How do you do

[02:55] it? But that aside, we also seem to have this problem where we routinely and systematically have lost sight of what a community is really made

[03:05] of. And I think that the way we talk about cults is one of the

[03:11] more. Well, it’s tangential for sure, but it is certainly one of the more entertaining examples of

[03:16] this. So let’s get into

[03:18] it.

[03:25] Now. The word cult is an undeniably dirty

[03:27] word. It conjures images of hooded people in circles around

[03:31] fires. It conjures images of mass suicide, of self harm, of tragic figures brainwashed to abandon their

[03:40] families. And it always conjures images of the infamous narcissistic

[03:45] leader. I mean, you just think of the Jonestown massacres in the

[03:48] 70s. Something like 900 people dead, either by murder or suicide, all members

[03:54] of. Of Jim Jones People’s Temple or Heaven’s Gate, Marshall Applewhite’s

[04:00] baby. Twenty years later, 39 suicides by poison, all to

[04:05] chase. I think they called it the next

[04:06] level. And, and to marry up with Halley’s Comet, which they believed was UFO or some, some, some sort of alien

[04:14] transport. Or you think of Aum Shinriko, a Japanese doomsday cult that carried out a sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway in

[04:22] 1995. They killed something like 13 people, but they injured

[04:27] thousands.

[04:28] Right. And if we’re not describing something this dramatic, when we talk about cults, we are describing groups that we’re wary

[04:36] of. At a minimum, we talk about vegans as cult members when they’re annoying

[04:41] us. Or we talk about fitness groups, fitness communities, like they’re a training ground for

[04:46] zealots. Crypto is called cult, like pretty often

[04:50] now. And political factions, I mean, it’s super trendy to make the link between political ideology and religious ideology these

[04:57] days. So political factions are cults

[05:00] too. So if it’s not describing actual spectacular and destructive cults, it’s, it’s, it’s a sort of rhetorical bludgeon, a way to dismiss without Engaging to sort of pathologize people belonging to certain

[05:13] groups. And in my mind, this image of cults is a

[05:18] problem. It’s the kind of problem that actually makes us more likely to fall victim to the destructive groups that gifted the word

[05:25] cult. These

[05:26] connotations. Cults are better seen as, if not basic, then at least pervasive, building blocks of the modern day

[05:34] experience. I reckon that there’s every chance that you’re in one right now, and there’s every chance that you’re actually better off for

[05:41] it. Which in turn makes the likelihood that you might fall victim to a destructive version of the same thing even more likely if you keep using this term

[05:50] uncarefully. Now I’ve got some convincing to

[05:54] do. I know

[05:54] that. But I want to start off with a bit of history because I think that it is maybe the most convincing thing, or it is the most convincing thing for

[06:03] me. The word cult started as a sociological

[06:06] classification. It was this sort of attempt of theologians to distinguish between different kinds of religious

[06:12] behavior. In particular, they were using the word cult to carve out the groups that were emphasizing the personal and private nature of religious beliefs, and particularly the people that were embracing the more mystical or ecstatic aspects of a connection to the

[06:29] divine. So we’re talking here about the people that wanted that more personal, almost gnostic connection to

[06:34] God. You know, in Christianity these are the Pentecostals or the charismatic

[06:38] movements. In Judaism it’d be the Kabbalah, in Islam it’d be

[06:43] Sufism.

[06:43] Right. The Sufis were quite interested in this and so on and all of this as opposed to more traditionally a connection to the community or to the church or to the priest, and accessing God that way through the

[06:56] institution. And as time went on, this classification began to emphasize a feature that was often more common among those people who are more personally oriented or mystically

[07:06] inspired. And that’s that they started to deviate from the

[07:10] mainstream. If you’re going to pursue something that’s more personal in the context of a religion, then you’re more likely to break away from the predominant religious

[07:19] culture. You know, institutions have very little room for

[07:23] individuals. I mean, this is like a core thread of the Protestant

[07:27] Reformation. So the word cult for these sociologists was a way of distinguishing these people mystically oriented and thus increasingly deviant from the

[07:37] mainstream. So there’s that and then there’s this one final transformation that completes the history of the term cult, and that’s the rise of the non religious or the new religious

[07:47] movement. So you’re thinking Here of like spiritualism in the 1850s or new thought in the late 1800s, or the occult in the turn of the

[07:56] century. And then you have the, the human potential movement, you have neopaganism and transhumanism, all these non religious or new religious

[08:05] movements. So in an attempt to characterize the increasingly secular nature of these cults, the emphasis started to zoom out away from that religious nature of the

[08:16] groups. Rather than considering how cults were defined by their adherence to or deviants from some established religion, they started to concentrate instead on the beliefs of the

[08:28] individuals. And it’s here in this new sort of foray into the topic that we see a bit of a return to that first definitional use of the

[08:36] term. We’re talking again about the personal nature of cultic

[08:40] beliefs. This became central

[08:42] again. Cults were seen to be ephemeral groups arising in response to the needs of some transient collection of individuals with pretty loose boundaries, with very little center of

[08:54] authority. You know, sociologist Roy Wallace called this epistemic

[08:58] individualism. But I think illustrating it is probably better to help us understand what he

[09:04] meant. And I’ll use neopaganism for this because I’m pretty fond of it

[09:08] myself. So modern neopaganism, including things like Wicca,

[09:12] right. Modern witchcraft or broader pagan inspired movements, you know, you know, Druidry is very popular

[09:18] here. Neo druidry, all of these things emerged as a revival or a reconstruction of pre Christian European

[09:26] religions. Although calling this a reconstruction is pretty, pretty

[09:31] loose. There’s this guy, Ronald Hutton, who writes a lot about how we should treat the accuracy of these

[09:37] reconstructions. But the point is that unlike these older religious cults, to use air quotes, these newer groups often don’t really have a formal

[09:47] hierarchy.

[09:48] Right? You have covens or gatherings that form or dissolve flexibly, or they lack central texts, for

[09:55] example. They have non rigid orthodoxies, you know, ways of doing things that are pretty

[10:00] flexible. It’s more focused on personal

[10:03] belief. You pick and choose and blend practices, deities, rituals,

[10:07] cosmologies. It’s all about your personal preference,

[10:10] really. Certainly more so than conforming to a central

[10:15] dogma. I remember a druidry course that skipped from chakras to Jung to Irish poetry,

[10:21] right? Which is something that I doubt we would have found in Caesar’s accounts back when he was purging the druids from

[10:27] Gaul. So everyone in these groups are negotiating their own spiritual truth,

[10:33] right? And that’s it, More or

[10:35] less. Cults are, and they always have been this combination groups that center on the needs of a loose collective of individuals that engage in religious

[10:44] behavior. And I’m going to return to that term a little bit later

[10:47] on. And that by the nature of their personalization, they often deviate from the

[10:52] mainstream. You might ask then, when did cult become such a dirty

[10:57] word? And deviation has its own

[11:00] connotations. And I talk about that more elsewhere and I’ll link to that in the show

[11:04] notes. But largely, I think it’s because of

[11:07] marketing. Most people will trace the modern idea of cults back to Robert

[11:12] J. Lifton and Margaret Thaler Singer, two big academic in the

[11:15] topic. You see, during the Korean War, the Chinese were super effective at indoctrinating their prisoners of

[11:21] war. This is where the term brainwashing comes

[11:24] from. Actually, they were so good at it, it was like they were washing all the wrong thoughts out of their

[11:29] head. It’s actually a Chinese term that we adopted from them as a domain of

[11:35] research. And Lift, in writing on the topic, spoke to the idea of totalism, organizations and ideological movements that explicitly seek total control over human and

[11:47] behavior. And it’s from this point where we started getting interested in it academically that we saw a rise in visibility of these high control and destructive groups from the 1960s or thereabouts all the way through the 1990s, culminating in the cases I talked about before Jonestown, Heaven’s Gate and the Manson

[12:07] Family. Another good

[12:08] example. Now, Singer, who was a brainwashing academic in her own right, spent a lot of this time in this period on TV or in the courtroom giving expert testimony speaking about this phenomenon,

[12:20] brainwashing. And by the 90s, its popularity as a way to describe something quite negative culminated in these two

[12:29] books. Singer’s own book, co written with another author, Lalek, and forwarded by Robert

[12:36] Lifton. And this one was called Cults in Our the Hidden Menace in Our Everyday

[12:41] Life. And another by Stephen Hassan a couple of years earlier, and it was a best selling guide to extracting people from these

[12:49] groups. He called it Combating Cult Mind

[12:52] Control.

[12:53] Right. Both of these have cult in the title, which indicates that despite, you know, Margaret Singer’s book explicitly saying the term cult is not in itself pejorative but simply descriptive, that it had become the word du jour for destructive cults, that early association with deviancy had become the association that

[13:12] stuck. But I hope you can see that by pushing back before the media panic of this late sort of 20th century period, you can see from the history that this isn’t the critical feature of all cults, this brainwashing destructive

[13:26] aspect. It’s just the destructive

[13:29] ones. Rather, the critical feature of all cults is religious behavior, and there’s that term

[13:37] again. So let me break it down for

[13:39] you.

[13:45] Now. It’s important that we don’t confuse religious behavior with

[13:49] religion. And in fact, this was the very aim of the cultic classification in the first place,

[13:55] right? To mark out groups that had replaced the mainstream religion with new

[14:00] beliefs. So religious behavior at its core is ritualistic behavior around some kind of article of

[14:07] faith. So I’ll give you a couple of

[14:09] examples. You have religious behaviors that are around doing

[14:12] things. So prayer, for example, or making a sacrifice when you perform a service, if you’re doing a pilgrimage or sacrificing an animal, these are rituals where you do

[14:23] things. And then you also have religious behaviors around not doing so often these are sacrifices too, but ones where you give stuff

[14:30] up. So you might be fasting, for example, or you might adopt a set of purity rules, you know, and in fact, in these not doings there is this rich domain of taboos, actions that are forbidden for whatever reason the faith would have

[14:43] it.

[14:43] So. So you have these ritualistic behaviors around faith where either you do or you don’t do something as a consequence of that

[14:52] faith. That’s what religious behavior and what’s important about that definition is whether you are a religious person or

[15:00] not. Everybody engages in religious

[15:03] behavior. It’s one of the things I talk about maybe the most on this website, and I’ll link to a couple of my articles there in the show

[15:10] notes. But humans take a huge amount of things on faith, much more probably than we would care to

[15:16] admit. And in fact, we have to,

[15:18] right? I set it up the top an impossibly complex

[15:21] world. We need graceful solutions to

[15:24] them. So we engage in religious behavior, behavior around articles of

[15:29] faith. And I’ll give you a concrete example of this because I think it’s the best

[15:33] example. It’s our faith in the consciousness of other

[15:36] people. You see, under our current model of scientific enterprise, we don’t have any way of assessing whether something is conscious or

[15:45] not. We each have some kind of experience of consciousness, but we’ll never know if others share that experience with

[15:52] us.

[15:52] Right? You’ll never know if you were the only conscious being in a sea of

[15:56] automatons. But nobody behaves like

[15:59] this. Well, maybe not nobody, but you know what I

[16:02] mean. Instead, we all behave as though everybody else is

[16:06] conscious. You know, you could just take politeness as an example of

[16:09] this. Politeness is at its core a cluster of socially derived rituals of behavior that I mean, at least in part necessarily assume others are conscious,

[16:20] right? It’s a technically perfect example of religious

[16:23] behavior. And where religious behaviors collect, anywhere that they collect, cults are likely to

[16:29] emerge. You know, if you haven’t heard somebody describe veganism as cult like, then you haven’t been in an Anglosphere city, because veganism is cult

[16:39] like. Veganism at its core, when done for humane reasons anyway, is a set of religious behaviors centered around the consciousness of animals,

[16:49] right? It’s an almost punitive collection of not doings that considers animal

[16:55] consciousness. And in support of these faithful efforts, this transient leaderless collective sprung up to meet the needs of vegans, to help insulate them as they deviated from the mainstream views on animal consciousness in the

[17:08] process. And importantly, I’m not saying any of this to be

[17:12] pejorative. If anything, it seems like we’re moving closer to vegans on average for all sorts of reasons,

[17:17] right? But what is true is that being a vegan would be pretty hard without the cult of

[17:21] veganism. My mum, for example, had to give up being a vegan in the 90s before it was so

[17:25] established. So what I’m trying to say here is that cults are defined by this kind of religious

[17:30] behavior. Now there’s another example I think is worth mentioning just to drive the point home, and that’s the world of health and

[17:36] nutrition. It is extraordinarily fertile soil for the development of cults, and that’s because almost nobody seems to have a good idea about how nutrition works outside of the basic sort of macronutrient

[17:50] profile. And health is almost as much of a crapshoot,

[17:54] right? I’ve talked before and I’ll link to that in the show Notes about how much of a failure modern therapy is, for

[18:00] example. And I’ve also written about our weirdly quixotic relationship with the world of medicine,

[18:06] right? It’s almost entirely faith based because none of us have the time to become doctors, you

[18:11] know. So it’s no

[18:11] surprise. The realm of health and well being is a treasure trove of cultic

[18:16] movements. And here you have everything from the neo pagan religions that I was talking about before to loosen it, groups of crystal healers, to communities that populate websites like Goop or any number of topical substacks, to franchises like F45, right, or

[18:32] CrossFit. All of these loose collectives of people are creating a personal relationship with health and they are supporting each other through the religious behavior that’s oriented around a health related faith that deviates from the mainstream,

[18:47] right? They’re cults technically, you

[18:50] know. And again, none of this is

[18:52] pejorative. I’m pointing out, or I’m trying to very explicitly, that this describes both healthy groups and problematic

[18:59] ones. And I hope I’ve convinced you by this

[19:02] point. But I’m also suspecting that you’re starting to wonder why you should

[19:07] care.

[19:08] Right? Why am I trying so hard to reclaim the word

[19:11] cult? You know, we don’t care about all

[19:14] cults. We care just about destructive

[19:16] ones. And I think that that’s a good question, but I think it’s not quite the right

[19:21] question. I think it’s not quite the right

[19:22] cut. So let me do a final bit to wrap up with a little explanation, and then I’ll let you

[19:28] go. Now, I’ve talked elsewhere about how our attraction to destructive and spectacular cults distracts us from the real and important dynamics of these

[19:51] things. And I’ll link to that article in the show Notes, but I hope that I’ve illustrated some of that in the

[19:56] here. But one of the things I haven’t talked about so much is that there is this notion that a charismatic leader is required to make a cult

[20:05] whole. And clearly there is a role of charisma in a

[20:09] cult. I mean, obviously there’s got to be the charisma of some new article of faith,

[20:13] right? The core of the religious behaviors that engendered the cult in the first

[20:17] place. And then you’re going to get charismatic leaders that embody that

[20:22] charisma.

[20:23] Right? Leaders in the variant

[20:24] sense. And what I mean by that is leaders who either through their religious behavior, like Singer and Layla talk about, or through their aggression, seem exceptional or become prominent or just by being in the right place at the right

[20:40] time. And they attract a

[20:41] following. And these kinds of leaders are a feature of any kind of novel

[20:44] environment. They are points of light in the

[20:48] dark. And this is what Weber says about

[20:50] them. This is where charisma shines as a guiding force before the structure that really solidifies the group starts to

[20:58] emerge. But what’s notable is that charismatic leaders rarely rise to the top of these loose

[21:04] collectives. It’s often true of the spectacular cults we’ve talked about, but it doesn’t normally

[21:10] happen. You know, normally leaders serve as eddies and currents in this more transient cultic

[21:17] milieu. Like, you know, who’s the leader of the

[21:20] vegans? You know, you wouldn’t be able to name somebody, or certainly I

[21:23] wouldn’t. And as Weber noted, charismatic leadership will eventually give way to more traditional or rational leadership, as the cult begins to require structure, and its growth creates its own mainstream

[21:34] presence. All of this to say that it’s not that these structures can’t be problematic or charismatic leaders can’t ruin

[21:42] them. There is a reason that Lifton was worried about totalizing organizations and that Singer was worried about their

[21:49] leadership. Authoritarian structure in high control groups is something we should be worried

[21:54] about. But what we shouldn’t be worried about is

[21:57] cults. Cults are just communities that are organized around shared values, that engage in religious behavior around those

[22:05] values.

[22:05] Right? We need to strip cult of its dark mystique and point our concern at the things that actually

[22:10] matter. Or

[22:11] otherwise. We’re going to risk misidentifying a good cult as a bad one, or much, much

[22:17] worse. We’re going to risk failing to recognize a bad one because it seems

[22:21] good. So with that out of the way, I want to bring it back to my interest in human systems, this problem of rising loneliness and isolation in modern

[22:31] cities. And I said it before, I spent a lot of time noting that a reason for this is because we seem to often be missing the factors that really bind communities together and

[22:44] cults. Mundane cults like the ones I’ve described are some of the most obvious examples of community left in a modern

[22:51] world. Mundane cults describe many loose collectives where people come together either in person or online, to share their values, their beliefs, to share their faith in things that an increasingly specialized world makes difficult to

[23:07] understand. And then they share rituals around their faith, and in doing so, they find their

[23:13] people.

[23:14] Right. And this is why, in the academic world, cults which aren’t destructive or totalistic, are seen as a place of value, a place where you can go and you can find affiliation and spiritual

[23:26] fulfillment. A place where you can find community and purpose in a world that often sidelines these things in favor of individual

[23:33] productivity. So that’s

[23:36] it. That’s my challenge to

[23:37] you. Stop using the word cult as a dirty

[23:39] word. If you’re not in one or two, or even a handful, then you’re probably doing something a little

[23:43] weird. The real question isn’t

[23:45] that. The real question is, are the cults you’re in cults you’re choosing to be

[23:50] in? Because if you’re not asking that question, then you’re exactly the kind of person who’s likely to end up in a circle of hooded

[23:58] figures. I’ll leave you with that,

[24:00]

Best expressed in the work of Troeltsch (who looked specifically at church vs sect) and Niebuhr (who looked at other sociological deviancies). See here. ↩
Though, he preferred ‘thought reform’ to brain washing. Probably because it meant he’d be cited more. ↩
This in comparison to a sect which refers to those which split from a religion in some way—a schism—but otherwise maintains the traditions and beliefs of the religion. ↩
I had an email where someone complained that consciousness isn’t derived from faith, but through abductive reasoning. That is, we observe similarities in others that, in us, are explainable by consciousness and so, we conclude that others are conscious. It seems like a reasonable argument, until you realise that you’re just describing an example of what researchers call the “teleological bias”. Fundamentally we have a tendency to ascribe purpose and causes to natural events and entities, and it’s one of the major phenomena put forward to explain humanity’s pervasive attraction to gods and spirits. It superficially makes sense to treat humans as other conscious beings, but it seems like our cognitive architecture systematically generates beliefs of this kind through that process of abduction. Even if it started with imagining other minds in humans, the identical process is put forward to explain our belief in gods. Hence, faith-based. ↩
My own contrarianism is making me want to argue against myself here. I reckon you could probably argue that this isn’t a ritual around consciousness but more of a coordination problem or something like this. As in, you’re not being polite to avoid making the other person feel bad, you’re doing it because you know that people respond better to politeness than impoliteness. But I think it’d be weird to be responding only to behavioural outcomes without baking in some kind of assumption about consciousness. Unless everyone else really is a robot… ↩
Some might go as far as to point out that strains of the Effective Altruism movement are a new version of same thing. ↩

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Mundane Cults

¶Show Notes

¶Further reading

¶References

¶Speechnotes

¶Intro

¶Assumption

¶Subversion

¶The ubiquity of religious behaviour

¶Outro

¶Implication and outro

¶Edited Transcript

¶The Dark Image of Cults

¶A Brief History of the Word ‘Cult’

¶The Ubiquity of Religious Behaviour

¶Community in a Lonely World

¶Transcript