[article]

Successful Prophets

5 Jun 2026

We think of cults as the product of dangerously charismatic leaders but on examination this narrative falls apart. Really, the most successful prophets are not a person, but the followers, who use the leader as an emblem.

Editors note: republished from 2020 to 2026, after a pretty substantial revision. Worth knowing that this was written in September of the COVID pandemic though. Wonder why this was on my mind…

I’d like to start this article with a bit of a tangent. A journey through the concept of “shared madness”, from an article of mine that kicked this one off. It talks about how the same things that make some people go “mad” are actually at work in all of us. It’s a delightful little case study to illustrate how the way we talk about unusual human behaviour can obscure how vulnerable each and every one of us are to that exact behaviour. It makes us feel unreasonably safe, and I don’t think we are. Especially when you throw in a “prophet”.

Folie à deux describes a rare and curious phenomenon: when the madness of one becomes shared by another. Delusions of grandeur or paranoia spread and, together, the two people go on engage in the most bizarre acts.

Folie isn’t always just a madness of two, though. It can be:

folie à trois, the madness of three, or folie à famille, the madness of a family, and eventually the less romantic, but less constraining ‘shared psychotic disorder’

But they all share the same core attributes. See, these madnesses only occur in very specific contexts—when lonely people are isolated together, and an intense intimacy forms. It’s only when these circumstance arise that we see otherwise normal couples, or triads, or families, go out into the world to commit stunning murders, or suicide pacts, or run for days from mysterious followers. Cases of strange behaviour we see so frequently in the media that can’t be neatly grounded in a history of mental illness.

As I was writing about this, it raised a question for me. When loneliness is so endemic to modern life, why do cases of folie happen so rarely? I would suggest that they do not. Rather, the cases of folie that we come across are simply the most outlandish examples of the behaviour isolated people engage in. When humans are isolated, and we stumble across a home in someone else, we will go to unimaginable lengths to hold on to that connection.

¶Emotional contagion, spirituality, and unusual beliefs

The core features of a folie are not simply a common delusion, or the acceptance of that delusion, but intimacy in the context of isolation.

Catching feelings is common enough in humans. It’s commonly called emotional contagion. If someone smiles at you, you smile back. If someone shows they like you, that is possibly the most powerful determinant of your attraction to them. Our ability to catch each other’s feelings are so powerful, Facebook tried to study it (possibly illegally) and the mass media model is based around it.

If our capacity for emotional contagion is so powerful, what happens when we couple that with isolation? Our need for social contact is extraordinary. Loneliness is emerging as one of the single greatest threats to both physical and psychological well-being in the modern era. It’s not implausible that a lonely person might tolerate some strange beliefs if it would help maintain their otherwise rare social connections.

But, when coupled with emotional contagion, it seems similarly likely that a lonely person might catch some of the beliefs while they’re at it. Delusions often come with weighty emotional baggage. From delusions of grandeur inspiring pride and power, to delusions of persecution inspiring terror and rage. When the emotions accompany the beliefs, it would seem odd not to adopt the latter along with the former.

The integral nature of emotions to our decision-making make this seem even more likely. Antonio Damasio, a neuroscientist with some considerable academic celebrity, discovered early in the 2000’s that damage to the amygdala left people unable to make decisions. They could describe the courses of action available to them in a given task. They could even identify which actions were more favourable. But they couldn’t pull the trigger. The amygdala is a region crucially involved in the generation of emotions. Damasio has a go at explaining this, suggesting that decisions require emotions. Indeed, emotional decision-making may precede subsequent logical justification in many cases.

In the presence of such powerful emotions, our decision-making would likely be compromised. Coupled with isolation and a drive to connect, our decision-making may well derange.¹

Which brings me, finally, to my thesis. What phenomenon demonstrates all the features of a folie, from the symptoms to the outcomes? Where socially isolated people are likely to adhere to unusual beliefs, typically in the presence of a influential leader? The short answer is cults and the longer, less obvious answer is any ideologically-inclined figure with a basis in fact.

Very few explanations of cults centre on the experiences of the followers as central to the phenomenon. Rather they centre on the charismatic (and often corrupt) nature of the leader. And as religious phenomena, we are often hesitant to explore the connections to the non-spiritual characteristics of the followers. And yet, it seems possible to me that this facet of being human belongs to the same family as our folies. Not for the madness, but for the emotional connection. We know that spiritual experiences can be a powerful feeling, and while they can be unique in many respects, they are feelings nonetheless.

Perhaps, then, a successful prophet has little to do with the leader at all. Perhaps successful prophets are built off the back of the people.

¶The (apparent) profile of a cult leader

Joe Navarro is a former FBI counter-intelligence agent and behavioural profiler, best known for his work on body language. More recently, though, his name has crops up in media concerning the dealings of cult leaders. This has been particularly true among the overwhelming list of podcasts on the subject. Perhaps because of his 2014 book Dangerous Personalities. But more likely, it is because his 2012 article on “Dangerous Cult Leaders” ranks on the first page in a search. It’s a list of 50 “traits of cult leaders that give us hints as to their psychopathology”, to quote Navarro.

Navarro’s article, and the way it’s used, is exactly the kind of thing I think obscures our ability to identify the actual causes of strange human behaviour. In this case, I think it illustrates the bizarre way we imagine our prophets or charismatic leaders to be special. To credit Navarro, he makes it clear that it’s no definitive list—simply his opinion. But I think that it generally details our collective opinion of cult leaders, and demonstrates why our collective opinion is a puzzling one.

Firstly, the number of items—fifty—should concern us. These are Navarro’s “typical traits” of cult leaders. But are we to assume that cult leaders will have all of them? Or only a few will suffice? How are we supposed to score our cult leaders? To compare, the modern version of Robert Hare’s psychopathy checklist has only 20 items, and the scoring system is extremely clear. Up to two points per item, and a score of 30 of a maximum 40 to qualify as a psychopath.

The scoring problem isn’t a trivial one. All together, these traits describe an extremely problematic person. But any item taken individually, or even in batches, simply describe character flaws any given person is likely to have. For example:

Is frequently boastful of accomplishments.

or

Doesn’t seem to listen well to the needs of others; communication is usually one-way…

Some are more extreme, and less common:

When criticized he tends to lash out with not just anger but with rage.

or

Has stated that he is “destined for greatness” or that he will be “martyred”.

But still not entirely strange in an era of modern gurus. We’ve all met people like this, or listened to podcasts from people like this, and typically they are not cult leaders.

Some refer solely to individuals with existing power over a group:

Makes members confess their sins or faults, publicly subjecting them to ridicule or humiliation while revealing exploitable weaknesses of the penitent.

or

Takes sexual advantage of members of his sect or cult.

But even these are not uncommon in groups. We each know of many groups that sexually exploit members for example. This might be something high-profile and obscene like the historic and apparently endemic issue of child sexual abuse in the Catholic Church. But consider even the relationships that form between students and professors. These are often characterised by the kind of power imbalance that would constitute ‘taking advantage’. Power, like many things, is a vector for abuse. It’s unpleasant, but hardly surprising or unusual. As for the humiliating confession of sins or faults, spend twenty minutes in the pub with some friends and pay any kind of attention to the banter. Is this the behaviour of a cult?

No. There is nothing special about Navarro’s 50 traits. There is nothing particularly unusual about people with Navarro’s traits.

So what is unusual about our cult leaders?

¶The narcissism bias

The common claim made of our more famous cult leaders is that they demonstrate traits of narcissistic personality disorder (NPD). Persons with NPD can demonstrate grandiosity, a lack of concern for others, and a fundamentally selfish orientation. They can also be superficially charming, because they can be very good at manipulating people in the interests of the narcissist. Since many of the cult leaders we stumble across seem selfish and grandiose, it seems like a fitting description. They’re somehow damaged, and damaged in a way that makes them unusually good at manipulating people. But let’s look a little closer at NPD.

Narcissistic personality disorder is a Cluster B personality disorder. This is a somewhat arbitrary distinction, but Cluster B describes personality traits that are extremely dramatic, erratic, or emotionally involved. There are two reasons NPD lives in this somewhat vague category. Firstly, because at the core NPD is characterised by a lack of self-esteem or self-worth. They might build a grandiose sense of self to protect themselves from the fact they feel awful about themselves. Any time this protection is threatened, they’re liable to respond erratically and emotionally. The second reason is because NPD is also super vague. Grandiosity and superficial charm can appear. But both NPD and the less severe forms of narcissistic traits can take an enormous number of forms.

It may very well be that certain cult leaders have feelings of poor self worth, and this drives them to surround themselves with worshippers. Certainly many cult leaders have histories of neglect, suspected to be a key factor in culturing low self-worth. But even if this were the case, we would expect to see much more variation than “charming selfish person”.

¶Cult leaders are often just kind of odd people

And, perhaps unsurprisingly, we do. Take the time to go and watch two videos of two people—both well-known, and both accused to different degrees of being a ‘charismatic cult leader’.

First Marshall Applewhite in 1997, leader of the notorious ‘Heaven’s Gate’ cult, most of whom killed themselves to “transcend their human nature”.

According to interviewees and the media, Marshall Applewhite was:

very charismatic…had a lot of charisma

Or according to Sam Harris on his podcast:

his powers of mesmerism is his quality of eye contact

But in the video, I don’t see someone charismatic so much as someone somewhat deranged looking. He’s not unattractive, but his wide staring eyes and dazed manner are off-putting. His content too, is not particularly appealing. His voice isn’t unpleasant, but his words are equal parts platitude and impenetrable new age jargon. If I saw Marshall Applewhite on the street, I would not be inclined to stop and chat.

Second, consider this video from the more recent Mary Teal Bosworth, or “Teal Swan”, a currently active ‘spiritual guru’ who has been repeatedly accused of cult leadership.

Teal Swan has made an overwhelming number of videos like this dating back to \2011. I deliberately chose the most recent video at the time of writing to show that even after a decade of practice, Teal still comes off as your slightly drunk bohemian University student. She, like Marshall, is not unattractive. She also has an eye thing going on. But she’s at times awkward and her content similarly either lacks real depth or is unintelligible. It’s also a collection of fairly trite comments on the nature of human experience interspersed with standard new age spiritual jargon. And yet, here’s the first result in a search calling her charismatic.

Yet, in any given podcast documenting her controversies, her followers are repeatedly quoted as saying she has something special.

Both of these leaders are commonly portrayed as ‘charismatic’, drawing people in with their almost superhuman ability to connect. But they aren’t. Not universally. They’re just kind of odd people.

So what gives?

¶Another quick detour through serial killers

In the Netflix drama, ’Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile’ the objectively gorgeous Zac Efron plays notorious serial killer Ted Bundy. In the trailer, Bundy comes off like a playboy—winking and smirking at the camera, or undressing seductively with a woman. All interspersed with violence, but the message is clear. This is a charismatic man, who happens to have a penchant for serial murder and necrophilia.

This image isn’t a new portrayal. Dan Rather reported on his ‘intelligent’ and ‘articulate’ manner on the eve of Bundy’s execution. The Netflix doco released alongside the drama, Conversations with a Killer, shows footage repeatedly of those claiming Bundy was handsome, charming, or ‘the kind of guy you’d want your sister to marry’.

But Bundy wasn’t a charmer. Not to everyone. The same doco, in the course of putting tickets on the man, splices in conversations with people who knew him. His childhood friend says of his ‘charm’: “it was a lot of blowhard talk. He tried to fool you and lie to you. He wasn’t athletic. He wanted to be number-one in class but he wasn’t.” The testimony of his near-miss victim Carol DaRonch described him as creepy, and his one-time girlfriend thought he was an insecure loner who was ’pitifully weak’.

The narrative of the polite young man luring young women to their deaths also collapses upon inspection. For every case like Rhonda Stapley, who described him as ‘nice’ and ‘well-dressed’, there are many more involving him sneaking up behind women, or feigning injuries to seek help, or simply breaking into a house and going on a frenzied rampage therein.

Even the narrative of his intelligence only stretches so far. His legal representation of himself was a car crash. Here’s ‘intelligent’, ‘polite’ Ted losing his mind one day and rambling another. Makes sense, given his history of dropping out of college and working minimum-wage jobs. The man might have been able to joke with the press, but this is hardly the hallmark of a charismatic genius.

No indeed, Ted Bundy was an odd person. Perhaps not odd enough to be portrayed as depraved (though I think we can agree he was). But certainly not the embodiment of the media darling he became.

And Bundy’s story is something of a standard. We do our best to make serial killers seem special. In reality they’re fairly normal people, but usually quite odd. And unfortunately, their particular oddness led them to kill a bunch of people. Much was made of Jeffrey Dahmer’s ability to convince the police to return his latest victim, Konerak Sinthasomphone, to him despite the boy bleeding from a literal hole in his head. But Dahmer was repeatedly reported as an ‘oddball’ and a ‘loner’ throughout his life by those who knew him. Much is made of John Wayne Gacy’s apparent communitarianism and ‘model citizenship’ even as the testimony of his trial outlined his ‘multiple personalities’, his blatant criminality, and his bizarre commentaries during his conversations with others.

Are we beginning to see a pattern here? When something that’s difficult to understand happens, we look very hard for the ‘specialness’ of a person involved. We elevate those aspects, often unreasonably, and lose sight of some fairly important information. Serial killers and cult leaders are not unusually charming. They’re usually pretty weird, but even then not unusually so—not in public anyway. Not so weird that they stand out for most people until something weird enough happens that we can’t ignore. In hindsight though, and along the lines of something akin to Girardian scapegoating, we make them much bigger than they are to help explain it away. And we like them in particular to be charming. At least that would help us understand why their victims came under their influence.

So how, then, might kind of odd people build cult followings? I suspect that the clue lies in the sidelined narratives of the followers themselves.

¶The key is in the actions of the followers

It seems prudent at this point to quickly look at some reporting on cults that is fairly typical. These particular quotes are from the podcast “Cults” by the Parcast Network, on the group Eastern Lightning. It’s telling that each episode in this podcast has a dual name—one half is the group in question, the other half is the apparent leader of the group. It’s also telling that, at least at this point in the podcast’s history, each group is given two episodes—one on the leader and one on the impact of the leader on the group. Very infrequently does the podcast concentrate on the followers, except as an extension of the leaders’ mismanagement.

But to the quotes:

Cult leaders are gifted manipulators. …[Margaret] Singer… said ‘consciously and manipulatively, cult leaders and their trainers exert a systematic social influence that can produce great behaviour changes.’

This quote is followed immediately by:

Zhou’s [the leader] followers, for the most part, policed themselves… [fearing] the retribution of other followers.

The implication being, I suppose, that the policing of follower by follower is the product of the cult leaders. This is particularly curious because the narrators go on to note:

Yang and Zhou [being the messiah figure within the cult, and the apparent cult leader respectively] made no further public appearances [since moving from the origin of the cult in China to the United States] … they have since led incredibly private lives, seemingly separating themselves from Eastern Lighting … This deliberate fear-mongering so controlled the world-view of his followers that Zhou didn’t lose an ounce of his influence when he moved a continent away—they followed his orders in absentia to the letter.

In combination, the writers of the podcast appear to be spelling out a cult that has, at a minimum, grown into something that is substantially self-sustaining. Yet, even while the narrators point out that the cult is perfectly capable of managing its own ecosystem, they apparently can’t conceive of it. The role of the followers in ‘policing themselves’ is sidelined in favour of highlighting the more digestible role of the geographically and apparently functionally distant ‘leaders’.

Another curious feature about the reporting of this cult is the absence of information about the messiah figure. Most cults apparently prefer their messiah figures to be their leaders. But not Eastern Lightning. Their messiah is Yang Xiangbin and their leader is apparently Zhao Weishan. And yet the influence of a living and ostensibly literal goddess pales in comparison to the reported antics of Zhou. It would be easy enough to forget that Yang, again a living goddess to this group, existed at all. This is similarly true on the Wikipedia page and various other reports on the group—here’s CNN as an example, where Yang appears precisely once as an aside.

It’s difficult to believe that this kind of reporting is a true reflection of the dynamics of the group. Rather, all things considered, it seems like this inconvenient cult has been press-ganged into the usual narrative.

But these inconveniences seem like they deserve our attention, because these inconveniences hint at a story that’s not about the leader so much as the behaviour of the followers.

¶Followers seem to be the true drivers of a cult, the leader is just an emblem

Hunting for the specialness of cult leaders, I hope, is starting to look rather ill-motivated. Instead, I’d like to return to our folies. Shared madness. Social isolation in the context of intimacy deranging people’s connection to reality and allowing strange beliefs to drive their decision-making.

A core of this kind of shared madness that transfers nicely here is the combination of affiliation with vulnerability. Social isolation is the vulnerability that allows the intimacy to become strong. Inject a delusion, and the machine is going to start running in that direction.

Almost all high-control groups demonstrate something similar. From Margaret Singer’s seminal work, to more recent literature, most followers in these groups are otherwise normal people experiencing some specific kind of transient vulnerability: stress, crisis, loss, life transition, loneliness. The most common of these are depression and being between important affiliations.

Cultic groups represent a tonic in both new affiliations and the shared meaning such affiliation represents. Cult members aren’t converted so much as they’re befriended.

Rodney Stark, along with his colleagues John Lofland and William Bainbridge say as much across several historical and sociological forays into religious groups and other groups with beliefs that deviate from the mainstream. Conversion to a cult appears largely to require a pre-existing, or newly-formed affective bond that accompanies some kind of instability in other attachments. These conversions then travel down social ties, drawing others in along the same mechanical lines. Without these features, a potential member almost never converts—Eileen Barker noticed that nine in ten people who attended a meeting of the Moonies never joined, and half who did leave after a couple of years.²

But then we mislocate the source of our new attachment. Both from the outside in, and from the inside out. From the outside in, I hope I’ve made the mechanism obvious enough by now—the same thing that makes us manufacture specialness for serial killers to explain them away, we manufacture it for cult leaders to alleviate our discomfort around cults.³

Yet, we also do this from the inside. In the corporate world, we call this The Romance of Leadership: people are well-known to systematically over-attribute things the group achieves to leaders, when the actual causes are far more diffuse, or more situational.

¶Charisma is conferred, not earned

The way people attribute the successes and failures of a group to leaders is worth spending a little more time on. Again, I want to take a tangent—show how these same behaviours appear in contexts outside the cultic ones. In this case, I want to look at organisational psychology. The academic work on the Romance of Leadership in organisations is fairly specifically about this. They attribute it to something very like emotional contagion. If people feel a certain way about a leader, then they search for evidence to support that feeling. That process then gets propagated through network ties—we notice other people in the organisation attributing their happiness, or anger, to the leader, citing their successes or failures, and we’re more likely to do the same. We catch charisma, just like we catch emotions.

In cults, this effect is often more refined. As I point out elsewhere, cults often involve the social recognition of a leader’s charisma as part of the activity of the cult. Whatever guru sits at the head of the organisation is often the reason people think they’re there. The emblem of whatever values the group holds. This kind of institutionalised flattery becomes ritualised, and transforms into something like Weber’s Charismatic Authority:

he is set apart from ordinary men and treated as endowed with supernatural, superhuman, or at least specifically exceptional powers or qualities … and on the basis of them the individual concerned is treated as a leader

This helps explain why cult leaders like Applewhite or Swan who, superficially, seem supremely uncharismatic and yet are so frequently described as charismatic. Their charisma doesn’t emanate from them. Their charisma is in their being a representation of the group values and interests. Again, as I note elsewhere:

The followers believe, very strongly and for whatever reason, that the leader will pursue their interests or promote their values … charismatic relationships contain moments of authorization (the equivalent of “voting”), when followers “recognize” the leader’s charisma and submit themselves to the leader’s authority, and moments of accountability, when the base decides that some failure of the leader is sufficiently large that they no longer recognize his charismatic gift (they must have been “mistaken”). And charismatic leaders appear to be successful “representatives” to the extent that they mirror or amplify the identity, values, and interests of their base

And, given that I started this beat with a segment on organisational psychology, it’s worth emphasising that this isn’t a phenomenon of cults alone. Elon Musk is perhaps my favourite example of this. Written before his spectacular series of public disgraces, at the height of his popularity, I wrote:

Musk is regularly lauded as some kind of super-genius. He was a founder of Paypal. He founded private space-company SpaceX, he heads up Tesla, he co-founded Neuralink, and on and on and on. He’s a sci-fi fan’s wet dream … You can find Musk around the place talking, apparently intelligently, about each of these companies. He talks about how he wanders onto the floor of the Tesla manufacturies, spotting arcane issues and fixing them personally for his team. He talks about the challenges inherent in travelling to Mars. He talks about all kinds of shit in a manner that implies that he’s au fait with all these domains of engineering.

And we believed him! We believed him, even though:

regardless of whether he is or isn’t conversant with a questionably large range of disciplines, he’s also prone to the kind of embellishment that many would call lies … the most convenient example is the fact that he’s promised fully-autonomous self-driving cars every year since 2014. This is not an out of context embellishment. It’s characteristic … [alongside] his other embellishments about brain implants, humanoid robots, solar tiles, hyperloops, and Twitter. When Musk makes these kinds of claims, he only ever appears to me painting a picture of what he’d like to be true, and never what is true.

Musk is famously charmless. His spoken style is jarring and weird. His jokes are puerile and often vulgar. He’s prone to throwing tantrums and having little sooks. It’s one of the primary things people jab at him now that he’s as hated as he is lauded. But Musk wasn’t successful because he was personally magnetic—he was an emblem of progress. His charismatic authority was entirely representational.

At Sandhurst, I teach a little bit of this. The military is an organisation fairly terrified of groupthink and social identity. They spend a great deal of time worrying about problems of unethical group behaviour. They rely hugely on leaders to have moral courage and character and whatnot to “be the safety catch” for this kind of atrocity-inducing behaviour. The difficulty is that the influence leaders have seems to have less to do with their personal character than it does their ability to represent the group.

The work of Alex Haslam and Stephen Reicher on this is the facet of this I lecture about. They base things off social identity theory—the idea that people define themselves as members of a group when they can see clear differences between the in-group and some out-group. It’s been a core feature of group psychology and sociology for decades. Haslam and Reicher point out that this same mechanism determines the influential leaders of a group. We only identify with groups to the extent we can distinguish them from other groups. This means that members of the group have to represent some kind of group “prototype”. They need to represent something clearly enough to be distinguished from others. To be a leader one has to be particularly prototypical. To be one of the group to such an extent that they’re seen as crafting a sense of the group. These are the leaders who are rated as more charismatic. The charisma is a function of how representative the person is. They have to be an emblem of the group for the followers to confer it to them.

¶Emblems are immune to failure: image immunity

A chunk of my quotes before about Musk ran over the ways he reliably stretches the truth (lies). About self-driving cars, and hyperloops, and committing a very specific sum to solve poverty, but instead buying Twitter. But his provably false claims never really cost him anything in the public eye. He was still seen as an icon of techno-progressivism. It’s clearer why, now. Our attachment to Musk wasn’t about him but about what he represented to us.

Musk had image immunity. As I note elsewhere:

Beliefs may withstand the pressure of disconfirming events not because of the effectiveness of dissonance-reducing strategies, but because disconfirming evidence may simply go unacknowledged

One of the weirder aspects of cults is how they seem completely unaffected by false prophecy.⁴ Apocalypse dates can come and go. Pronouncements about markets or resurrections can speed by. Nothing seems to shake the beliefs of the community in their leaders. Any why should they? Disconfirming evidence can’t possibly erode an attachment that isn’t about facts.⁵

But more than this, the culture surrounding the leader is just as important in de-fanging the disconfirming belief. The charisma of the thing never emanated from the leader in the first place, so if the leader fails, the failing doesn’t matter. The culture makes the failure less salient by simply not acknowledging it. Janja Lalich calls this a ’self-sealing system’. In these systems, the leaders have image immunity.

¶A cult runs itself, for the emblem of the cult

Eastern Lightning makes all this very clear. Two leaders, functionally and geographically separated from their cult, but the cult went on uninterrupted. The followers don’t need their leaders to be present for their leaders to remain emblematic of the group. They remain a north-star in the hands of the community.

The Netflix documentary Wild Wild Country follows the story of the Rajneeshpuram community—a cult that incorporated a town in Oregon in the 1980s. Much like other media representations of cultic groups, it seems to think that the leader, Bhagwan, was the object of its attentions. Notably, however, the primary stories always seemed to follow his secretary Sheela. Sheela ran “The Sheela Group”, a collection of around 40 people who acted as a “special security team to protect Bhagwan”. The Sheela Group was responsible for many of the outrageous goings-on within the community: poisonings, wiretaps, frauds. Bhagwan was silent and in seclusion for years at a time. Quotes from member testimony frame the episode almost entirely as one around group power-dynamics, not the distant leader’s charisma.

Or, consider the True Russian Orthodox Church. Famous for the “Penza Recluses”, a group who isolated themselves in a cave to await the end of the world. Their leader, Pyotr Kuznetsov, had been arrested prior to their isolation. Not only did the group continue in his absence, they continued even after he attempted to kill himself when he realised his doomsday wasn’t coming. The brutal winter eventually forced the followers out of the cave, but even four years later, some were still carrying the torch.

In these examples, there’s more than just emblematic leadership at play. Marc Galanter points out that charismatic groups have many factors that make them attractive. The leader-as-emblem is a shared belief system people can gather around, yes. But also remember the affiliation that alleviates whatever transient vulnerabilities people had when they “converted”. High social cohesion around strong group norms is also a necessary feature, and the anxious relief provided by the groups acceptance and certainty.⁶

All of these things serve to insulate these groups from the very leaders they gather around. A self-contained social system perfectly capable of running itself, whether the leader is active or not.

This helps explain more destructive cults. Not all cults are destructive. Some are quite benign. Destructiveness is something that is supplied by the dynamics of the groups—highly-controlling norms policed by the members themselves.⁷ In her book, Bounded Choice, Lalich points out that destructive cults require charismatic authority, a transcendent belief system, and systems of control as well as systems of influence. It’s only with these systems that the community can ‘self-seal’ into one that bounds the choices its members can make.⁸ When the charismatic authority isn’t actually derived from an authority figure, but from the representation—the charisma conferred by the group onto a convenient emblem—then the leader really doesn’t need to matter much at all.

¶Outro

So, that’s what I reckon a successful prophet is. A shared abstraction. An ideal, or an emblem that represents the values of a group. Sometimes this is a leader, but often it isn’t. Mundane Cults frequently go leaderless—Crossfit and F45, or parenting and pedagogy practices, or communities around stock trading and investment. Leaders are just one optional sort of socket—much as the ’Great Men’ of history are faces we slap onto a much broader process of cultural identification. Roy Wallis named this ‘epistemic individualism’—the loose and individualised locus of authority in high-cohesion groups—the defining trait of cults.

The real object is the abstraction, and our connection to each other through it. And we’re very good at coming up with abstractions. It’s an almost necessary feature of living in a complex world.

Take a person with an idea, and so long as she can surround herself with enough people by catering to their vulnerabilities, she can elevate herself to an emblem for that idea. The human machine does the rest. A successful prophet.

Anthologies: Spiritual Architecture, Collective Architecture, Connection, Successful Prophets, On Leadership, On Thinking and Reasoning

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