Do Cults Like Us?

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My name is Jane Borden and I'm an author and journalist.

I was a religious studies major in college and thought I wanted to do that, be an an academic, but I figured I ought to take a break from school first.

So I moved to New York before applying to programs and then accidentally fell into the improv comedy scene and eventually creative writing and I got a job at a magazine.

And anyway, all these, you know, decade or more later, my two paths kind of came back together because I've written a book about religion and I tried to make it funny.

I'm Jane Marie and this is the dream.

So you know we talk about cults a lot here on the show.

In America at the moment, it seems like every other TV show and podcast is about a cult, high control groups.

The media saturation makes it feel like this is a new phenomenon, like something unique to right now.

But go back 10, 20 years.

Cults, 30 years, cults, cults, cults, 40 years.

Wow, so many cults.

50 years.

When you get to 80 years ago, Those are like the fun to me.

I mean, people probably died, but they were like the fun kind of hippie cults.

100 years ago, those cults really looked like cults.

Like those were the ones where they were doing seances and stuff.

So it's been up and down and up and down.

Cults are popular, cults are not popular, cults are popular, cults are not popular since the beginning of this country.

Today's guest posits that the reason we can't get away from this sort of thinking is because it's what built America.

I wanted to talk to you.

I invited you here because I

love talking about the Puritans.

I do.

It's one of those groups where I can go on a Wikipedia

poll.

Okay, so let's back up.

Tell me, first of all,

the thesis of your research.

Okay.

So the basic idea is that America was pretty much founded by what people today would call a cult, the Pilgrims and the Puritans, separate groups, but more or less believed the same things.

And they were a high-controlled doomsday group.

And their ideas didn't go away.

They became the foundation of secular American culture.

And so I trace those ideas through history in order to point out, hey, everyone, this is us and we don't acknowledge it.

The reason I want to point it out is because I think this latent indoctrination is being used against us by con artists and demagogues and cult leaders and dictators who wish to activate us to do things that serve them.

And it's very easy to push our buttons because we are all still indoctrinated in the Puritans' doomsday beliefs.

Can we go way back?

Yeah.

How did they get here?

Where were they from?

Who were these people?

Okay.

So it started with the Reformation, more or less.

I mean, if you're going to pick somewhere to start, that's as good a place as any.

Yep.

Nailed the theses to the church door.

The idea was that we don't need all of these go-betweens.

You know, we can have a relationship with God without

your bishops and your capes and all of the mediators.

There was more to it than that, but the Puritans really glubbed onto that part of it.

Like you can have a church in your home.

So they wanted to worship the way Jesus and the apostles had,

as simply as possible.

So the Puritans still had a church structure, and they, along with the Church of England, wanted to do away with Catholicism.

And the pilgrims were like, you haven't purged the church enough.

You haven't gone far enough.

They were separatists.

And so that's why they were basically run out of town.

So England was like, you guys are knobs.

We don't like you.

They got spit on, you know, called names.

They were persecuted from time to time, depending on who was in charge, because Queen Mary made England Catholic again.

And then when Elizabeth took the throne, it became Protestant again.

So it was touch and go.

I'm sensing fear.

toward the Puritans from the establishment.

Probably.

Like,

they had reason to not like this group.

Well, they were being jerks.

They were really critical.

They basically said everyone in the Church of England was going to hell.

They were obnoxious.

They were haters.

And all the Catholics, yeah.

So everybody.

Well, it gets a little messy because they believed in predestination.

So God had already chosen who would and wouldn't be saved.

But presumably...

they were the ones who were going to be saved because they were most righteous.

And how could you be righteous if you didn't have that inner election?

You know, you were supposed to look within and you were supposed to spend a lot of time self-investigating, which is something I explore in the book, this history of being obsessed with self-investigation to look for worthiness.

Right.

And they would literally make themselves sick with self-investigation, trying to figure out whether or not they were among the elect, the chosen.

Sick like in a stress way or in a like...

Yeah.

Okay.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, you know, mind-body connection, we understand understand that a lot more today

there was no theater there was no dancing I mean Shakespeare made fun of the Puritans and they weren't liked

so eventually they got out of Dodge in part because they knew they weren't wanted the persecution that we hear a lot about but also because they thought the apocalypse was coming any minute now.

They were a doomsday group and they thought it was going to start in England.

They thought God's fury was going to land first first in England because England hadn't done enough to purge the church of the Antichrist.

They believed the Pope was the Antichrist and the Catholic Church was like the arm of Satan.

Okay, this is a dorky question, but was Henry VIII like your first Puritan?

Kind of.

I mean, not Puritan, but Protestant.

I mean, he broke with...

the church because they wouldn't give him a divorce, right?

Because he wanted to have a boy.

And so he founded the Church of England, the Anglican Church, which was basically Protestantism.

Yeah.

Okay, so they come to America.

Where did they land?

Not Plymouth Rock.

Well, first of all, where they landed is not at all where they were headed.

The plan was to go to Northern Virginia.

Now, Northern Virginia actually extended pretty far north at the time.

So they were planning to go to the mouth of the Hudson River.

So I like to say, imagine if Staten Island had been the birthplace of a nation.

It would be a very different place today.

But they got way off course.

They wound up landing on the tip of Cape Cod.

Not a bad place.

No, except it was very cold and raining, and it was too late in the season.

The captain refused to keep going because he had to be back in England.

But then it took them like five months to find.

an appropriate spot anyway.

I don't understand why they couldn't have just been sailing south.

But at any rate, it took them a long time to find an appropriate spot.

Meanwhile, everyone's staying on the ship except for like scouting parties and they're just wading through the cold and wet water and people start getting sick and people start dying and within months half of them were dead.

Four adult women remained.

Now four?

Four.

Yeah.

Oh, those poor uteruses.

Uh-huh.

What was this collection of people?

Only about half of them were part of this radical religious group.

The rest were just people who wanted an opportunity.

Let's see what it's like over there.

Because, you know, obviously there had been settlements in the South that were growing.

Yeah.

The spot they eventually chose to settle in had been previously occupied by Native Americans who had all since died because of disease brought over by previous visitors.

Yeah.

And so they thought God left us this.

God

dispatched of the natives so that we could have this spot.

And there was a bunch of like buried corn and grain that this was all providence

in their mind.

Explain to me how they look like a cult.

Well, first of all, the doomsday ideology.

I mean, that's, I guess, the most glaring similarity.

They thought the world was going to end and very soon and they would be saved.

Specifically,

they mostly believed the story of the book of Revelation.

If they believed that, why did they need to leave?

Because England was going to burn.

And they were trying to outrun Armageddon.

That's so strange.

I mean, I get it, but

also that they could like carry the true church to this new spot.

You know, they could safeguard it.

So they get over here and they're doomsday preppers, essentially.

So

there was high pressure to conform and control over beliefs and behavior, the humiliating punishment being probably the most glaring example of behavioral control.

No swearing, no gossiping.

You weren't allowed to argue with the minister.

You weren't even allowed to like interrupt the preacher.

If they called him a pulpit, it was nothing like the pulpit.

Right.

Right.

The big boss guy.

Yeah, the big boss guy.

And that part's always what gets me about these theological battles is that Catholicism and Protestantism compared to the rest of the world religions are just the same.

Yeah.

But different outfits.

Different outfits and every minor point could keep Jesus from returning.

And they were hell-bent on bringing Jesus back.

Everything they did was to bring on the end of the world so that they could meet God.

Okay.

Like all their aggressions, or what do you mean by the stuff they were doing?

Well, for example, trying to purge the church of, say, a vestment worn by a church leader.

The idea was that even that article of clothing was keeping Jesus from coming back.

Because Jesus is a fashionist.

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So the high control group characterization especially applies to the Puritans.

And they showed up 10 years later.

Ships started coming over in 1630 and they founded Boston.

So Puritans founded Boston.

So the Puritans set up shop and they, unlike the pilgrims, were just fine with having like a church structure and church magistrates and all that.

And

those guys,

once they had control, they really didn't let it go

and became as rigid and intolerant, if not more so, than the structures they were fleeing.

Aaron Ross Powell, so we all know about like the Salem Witch trials, which were a little bit later.

Yes, about 60 years later.

But at the time when they first got here, what were the mechanisms by which they controlled people?

Like I'm picturing, what are those things called?

Oh, sure.

The stocks and the pillory and various instruments of torture that...

you attached around one limb or another.

Sometimes they just had you standing on a box in the middle of the town people could like stone you, talk shit and throw food and trash at you.

You had to wear your crimes pinned to you.

People got branded, A for adultery.

Yeah.

Scarlet letter,

but branded.

People got their tongues clipped, their ears clipped, sometimes reattached, not always.

One of my favorite stories is this guy got kicked out.

and they tossed him on a ship because that's how they banished people at the time back to England.

And there was like a

the only thing I can describe it as is a spank tunnel.

There were guys waiting in a line on either side with their muskets.

And as he walked past, each one had to thump him on the breech with the butt of his musket.

Wow.

No, people pay for all this shit.

Truly.

And

it's just another example of how deeply this is still inside all of us.

Okay, so that's Boston.

Like, does it spread?

Like, how does it start to become kind of the norm?

The Puritan settlements were extremely successful.

They did eventually blend in with larger New England society, but at that point, it was all culturally pretty much the same, in my opinion.

And Protestantism in general, you know, even if you're looking at the colonies further south, those guys were mostly Protestant.

And so it just became the culture at large.

I trace some of these ideas popping up at certain points.

Our desires for an autocrat, our desires for a strong man to come in and rescue us, which I think ultimately traces to the book of Revelation.

But we see that in Westerns, in comic books, and superhero movies, in vigilante films, we're obsessed with the vigilante story.

That's a very American, puritanical, radical Protestant story.

Anti-intellectualism, anti-elitism, we got that from the Puritans.

This idea of like forever rebels, that is our identity.

That came from the Puritans.

That's a radical Protestant idea.

The idea of being chosen, that we're the perfect nation, we're God's nation, so that's manifest destiny.

Why not spread more of it?

That's paternalism, essentially.

We know what's best for everyone else.

I feel like it's everything that comes out of J.D.

Vance's mouth.

Today I heard him say something about Greenland,

and he ended his argument about how Greenland isn't being stewarded over by Denmark properly.

But it doesn't matter because we're the best country to do it.

Yeah.

Anodoi is how he said it to like a news reporter.

Onadoi.

Kind of.

I think he was quoting Cod Mather when he said, Onadoi.

But he looked at the news reporter like, I mean, would you leave this up to any other country?

No, and that's straight out of Puritan thought, this idea that the quote-unquote wilderness, which of course is a fallacy from the start because people were living there,

needed stewardship.

That land wasn't meeting its full potential unless it was being worked by the Anglo-Saxons, right?

Yeah.

And so when they took land from the native peoples, it was for the good of the land.

It would be a sin to leave it with them because they were just letting it lay in waste.

Which now we know that it wasn't being wasted at all.

It just wasn't recognizable because

it wasn't being stripped.

Right.

It was being worked in a sustainable way.

Right.

Yeah.

Okay, so the Puritans start this place basically, culturally.

in my opinion.

I think it can be argued, yeah.

Yeah.

We don't talk about the Puritans as if they're a cult, in a doomsday cult, certainly not.

Let's go through some examples of organizations that we do think are cults, but look

eerily similar.

Yeah.

Jim Jones taking a bunch of people to another country.

Yeah, and the isolation in particular is, in my opinion, what led to the violent end of that group because

isolation as a force

impacts the way groups develop and almost always leads toward violence because isolation affects us psychologically and affects group dynamics.

But take me to the evolutionary...

So a lot of research suggests that we shot to the top of the food chain, not because we're smart, it's not our brains, but because of our ability to cooperate.

And we developed cooperation skills, not exclusively because of this, but in large part in response to outside attack or attacking outsiders,

both of which offense and defense require cooperation.

And obviously the groups who did it best live to tell the tale and pass on their genes.

So

we see the dynamics of that happening in every cult.

Social norm policing

being one example.

So a social norm is anything, any practice that a group all agrees they're going to do in order to cooperate better.

And children as young as three have been studied

tattletailing essentially on people they see violating social norms.

That's how baked into our DNA it is.

And so this is what happens in cults when people get policed for disagreeing about something or, you know, in

Warren Jeff's FLDS used to send people.

First thing I thought of with the hairdos.

He used to send people around knocking on doors to literally police social norms.

And it was the same thing with early humans.

So there was like a hierarchy of punishments that went from, you know, you get a strict talking to to execution or banishment, which was basically the same thing in that day as execution.

Yeah.

But what do we use it for now?

Now that everyone can go to the grocery store for food.

We still have an impulse to band together in groups.

And so we see that not only in actual physical cults, but in online communities.

And

identity is often shaped around in-group versus out-group.

So we still have in us that knee-jerk reaction to outsiders, fear of outside attack.

Let's band together as a group.

The stronger-knit we are, the tighter we are,

the more able we will be to keep our group alive.

And so we see that now it's less with

violence, although certainly we've seen that happen, than it is with ideas and ideologies.

Let's talk about some of the cults that have come out of what the Puritans were able to establish here.

So one of the first groups I explore is Church Universal and Triumphant, which was led by Elizabeth Clare Prophet.

And that was big in the 80s and early 90s.

They were out in Montana, and there's fun.

I mean, you know, they did Oprah, they did Donahue.

So her whole thing was that

doomsday is coming.

We're going to build a big bunker.

Come live in the bunker and you'll be safe.

Now, they were not

violent, from what I can tell.

They were amassing weaponry, but, and I interviewed two of her children, and they both said really the weapons were just for self-defense.

Like they had plans to help neighbors if they showed up while, you know, the sky was raining flames supposedly

what's interesting to

skeet shooting for food yeah yeah yeah

the reason I chose to write about this group in my book is because at a certain point Elizabeth Clare Prophet stopped praying for the ascended masters, that's who she called it, who were like holding back the world's, the punishment for the world's karma.

She stopped praying to them to hold off the violence and started praying for them to bring it.

She actively wanted and got her community to pray for this as well.

She actively wanted God to bring violence and judgment.

And that to me feels very Puritan.

They wanted the end.

They wanted to see it.

It's not just that they wanted to be with God.

which was the end result of it all, right?

The comfort and the peace of that.

They wanted to see the violence.

They wanted to see everyone else get it.

I mean, the most popular, it's been called America's First Bestseller, this long-form poem called A Day of Doom by Michael Wigglesworth.

Great name.

It's like 200 and some stanzas of people being punished and wailing for mercy and being denied and being thrown into the flames.

And then it's like five stanzas of what's waiting for the remaining people in heaven.

So it's like like very clear what they were more interested in.

It's so weird though, because, okay,

not to brag, but I've read the Bible a bunch of times.

Okay.

You don't need guns

if you're actually one of the good guys.

Yeah.

You just need to like keep watching TV, just sit in your house.

You know what I mean?

Like you don't.

Are you trying to poke holes in their ideology?

I'm trying to poke holes in the Bible.

But you know what I mean?

Like if you're, if you're a chosen

one, then why would you?

Why would you you even

you don't need to protect your neighbors?

Like it's already been decided who's going and who's staying.

You know, it's predetermined who's going up and who's not.

And so I don't understand the middle part where all the supposedly good humans have to become bad people for a little while

in the name of the Lord.

But I

think that's they're trying not to become collateral damage, I guess.

I don't understand.

In the meantime, while they're waiting

for all of the carnage.

But if you are collateral damage,

don't you still get to go there?

Right.

Wouldn't you, you'd be resurrected, presumably.

Right.

Yeah.

That's what I thought was going on.

But then you look at all these cults and no, that's not what's going on.

It's that you have to be kind of awful

here.

on this planet in this life.

Yeah.

But it's justified.

Right.

Because you're chosen by God.

And so whatever means necessary to carry out his desire is justified.

So that speaks to the Anglo-Saxon myth, which basically said that the Germanic people had been chosen by God to carry the true religion ever westward.

So first they went to England, you know, the Engels and the Saxons.

both came from parts of what are what's now Germany, and then to America.

The Puritan church is even more pure, right, quote unquote.

And then Manifest Destiny, and then on and on and on.

And so part of the idea is that the reason...

Well, the Philippines, it was used as an argument when they annexed the Philippines.

So

part of the argument for why the Germanic people were the chosen people

is because they were warmongers.

And so it wasn't their violent aspects that God wanted.

It was their enterprising nature.

It was their courage.

It was

their ability to be nomads.

And if the warmongering came along with that, well, then so be it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That's just a hazard of the game.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So let's talk about a few more cults.

Okay.

You do go into Amway.

Sure.

Yeah.

So the bit of Puritan ideology I explore in that chapter is

our obsession with wealth in this country, and we worship the wealthy, and that can be traced directly to Puritan ideas about work and having a calling.

And so, they thought the best way to glorify God was to have a calling to work.

And they also thought, like, their only purpose on earth was to glorify God, that that's what he wanted out of us.

And so, you better work all the time.

And you're going to have to do that.

And that work better be fruitful.

Yes.

It should make money.

Money

being

the natural side effect of hard work the hard work yes and so that was the distinction that the pilgrims and puritans made and there was a lot of talk at the time about if your neighbor wants money you give it to him even if you think you're not going to be repaid i don't fault the puritans for that the puritans were not amway however this belief that work was holy If work is holy, then the fruits of that work

are not bad.

And so how could you say that someone who's making money is bad if clearly this money is a result of your hard work?

And anyway, gosh, if God is rewarding the chosen on Judgment Day, then wouldn't he also reward his chosen here on earth?

So if you're rich, isn't that just another sign that you're one of the chosen, which everyone was Ergo Trump?

I mean, yeah.

And so there's this great quote saying that religion begot prosperity and then the daughter devoured the mother.

And so they saw it happening at the time.

Acquisitiveness became not just acceptable, but attractive.

The whole idea was about having it, not spending it or giving it away.

And so

the biggest problem with this is not just that we worship the wealthy here, but the inverse of that.

So if you don't have money, then you must be a sinner.

And there's all sorts of quotes in history of people saying, you know, why give money to almshouses?

Clearly, these beggars have been, you know, assessed by God and deemed unworthy.

And so if they're sinners,

sin should be punished.

And so we see the poverty being punished for their own state.

Which is oftentimes created by wealth hoarding.

Yeah, exactly.

the wealth hoarding being a sign from God that you get to be one of the chosen.

Right.

And so what we see is we see rich people manipulating our latent indoctrination into these beliefs to take our money.

Right.

To take all the money, which creates more poor sinners and it's their own damn fault.

And that's MLM.

Rockefeller famously said that his money came from God.

And we still believe that.

We believe that the number in a person's bank account reflects their moral character.

And during the Industrial Revolution and into the Gilded Age, you see this ideology being pumped out in all these pamphlets and books and at these seminars that people are taking, trying to figure out how to get rich, because suddenly there's all this prosperity that's coming from the Industrial Revolution, and everyone wanted a piece.

And the books don't offer any practical business advice.

They all just say, like, be a good person, have a good moral character and work hard and you'll get rich.

What that did is it allowed the barons to keep taking money because they, quote unquote, deserved it.

And they got it because they worked, not because they were getting subsidies from the government or government contracts, not because they were lowering wages and taking advantage of employees, not because they had wives who were doing everything behind the scenes for them and other free forms of labor.

Yeah.

It was wealth redistribution.

And that's, of course, exactly what's happening today.

Aaron Powell, Jr.: So, what you find today, I mean, like, correct me if this is a bridge too far.

Doubt it.

The uber, uber, wealthy starting cults and new religions

to, I think, absolve themselves of the ickiness it must feel to hoard so much

wealth.

Yeah, it's now completely overt and blatant.

Yeah.

The idea that like loving God is pay-to-play.

And if you don't have a church that fits that, you just go make a new one or make a new cult.

Yep, which is, I mean, that's what radical Protestantism is.

It's schismatic.

It splits and fractures.

There's one group, the Worldwide Church of God, that

split when the sun took over or something.

Anyway, long story short, within 10 years, there were like 200 branches beneath it.

And this is also a result of the Great Awakening, right?

It just, it flattened church hierarchy.

Anyone can be a preacher.

Anyone who's charismatic, you know,

gets a church.

Yeah.

So

any other

really outstanding cults?

By outstanding, I mean bananas.

I love the Oneidans.

Ooh.

So this was in the middle of the 19th century.

They were perfectionists.

They were part of the perfectionism movement.

The idea being that we don't have to wait for Judgment Day to

go into New Jerusalem.

We can deliver ourselves to New Jerusalem.

So, like, cut God out of the picture.

We know how to do this for ourselves.

And this guy, John Humphrey Noyes,

basically decided one of the ways to get there was through sex.

Ooh.

So why?

Am I in the 90?

Maybe.

Certainly feels like it.

So there were all these theories going on at the time about like people, we were just coming to understand electricity.

And so he thought that Jesus had electricity in him.

And so therefore each of us had a little bit of electricity in us.

And that when we had sex with each other, our electrical nodes stimulated one another and brought us closer to the electricity in Christ.

So therefore, the more people's batteries you hooked up to,

the closer you could get to God.

He called it complex marriage.

And the idea was that whoever you wanted to hook your battery to,

you had to like fill out a, you had to like make a formal request and then boom to noise and his committee.

So they got to choose

who got to pair with whom.

That part was kind of a bummer.

Yeah.

That I'm not into.

No.

The reason, well, control.

Control is the reason.

He had to control everything.

Cult leaders have to control every aspect of everyone's lives.

It's an insatiable impulse.

I say insatiable insatiable because literally where it leads is death.

That's the only way it ends.

That's Jonestown.

That's the insatiable desire for control over 900 people's lives.

So

he didn't really want people falling in love with each other because you were supposed to be spreading it around.

So that was part of why he wanted to control who could be with whom because if you requested someone too frequently, it was called sticky love and you were censured for that.

I know it's kind of a

poor choice of words.

How did babies get made?

Well, they didn't want babies to be made because they didn't have any money.

Now,

eventually they found a way to make money in the silverware business.

So this is Oneida Silverware.

Oh.

Which became a huge corporation.

Why?

Because stockholders.

Selling the silverware, just going around town trying to fuck everybody.

That's how you got popular.

Boy, do I have a deal for you?

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Here's a 16-piece set.

Listen.

Yeah, for sure.

Yeah.

No, but really, how did they sell so much silverware?

Well,

the cult

dissolved

before the turn of the century.

And

it was really well into the 20th century that they were in the trousseaus of every bride across the nation.

I mean, they were a huge, hugely successful.

People forgot that they were a cult.

Yeah, and they tried to distance themselves.

There's actually this wonderful book written by a historian named Ellen Wheland Smith, who is descended from members of the United Community.

And she...

Whoopsie, Days.

Yeah, whoopsie.

They got one through.

A smart one came out.

She tells a story about

the leaders of the corporation going into the archives, the community archives.

taking out a bunch of folders and papers and burning them at the town dump.

So they definitely tried to distance themselves from their cold origins.

You check your feed and your account.

You check the score and the restaurant reviews.

You check your hair and reflective surfaces and the world around you for recession indicators.

So you check all that, but you don't check to see what your ride options are.

In this economy, next time, check Lyft.

What didn't make it in that you were excited about?

Well, the story about the Cult Awareness Network is wild.

That ended up on the cutting room floor.

Are you familiar with this one?

No.

It was an anti-cultist organization.

This was during the cult wars of the 80s and 90s when deprogramming was all the rage.

You know, aka, you hire us to kidnap your child out of a cult.

Problematic from the start, but also very effective.

And for desperate parents, the choice of last resort.

So this organization, the Cult Awareness Network, you could call them for advice if your kid was trapped in a cult.

And so this was,

you know, there had been a huge cult boom.

in the 60s and 70s, and this was kind of in the aftermath of that Scientology, the Moonies.

The Mansons.

Yeah, yeah.

I mean, there was hysteria among parents whose children were disappearing to become hippies in California.

You could call the Cult Awareness Network for advice, like, oh my God, what's happening?

And the organization made a fatal mistake when they

brokered essentially a deal between this one family and a deep programmer named Rick Allen Ross.

You might be familiar with him.

Rick Ross, I am.

Yeah, Rick Ross.

Ross, he goes on Dr.

Phil all the time.

I've interviewed him several times.

I find him to to be an incredibly knowledgeable and generous source.

Yes.

And I admire the work he continues to do.

But he got in big, big trouble when he was part of an abduction.

Part of an abduction.

He was the exit counselor.

This guy, Jason Scott, was his name.

And Jason Scott escaped and ran to the authorities.

Everybody got arrested and taken to court.

And because there was so much attention on these groups and it was the cult wars and the cults were hiring academics to justify them.

And then the deprogrammers were coming out against the academics.

It was a mess.

And so

people in academia on both sides were testifying in court.

And there were millions and millions of dollars on the line in some of these settlements that either families were trying to get their kids back or that former cult members, successfully deprogramm members, were going back and suing.

And so organizations like the Moonies and Scientology had a vested interest to stop the Cult Awareness Network and Deprogrammers, and they won.

And in a bankruptcy sale, the Cult Awareness Network had to sell all of its assets and its name, and it was purchased by the Scientologists.

Oh, perfect.

So when you called the Cult Awareness Network now, That's who answered the phone.

It's like crisis pregnancy centers where you call, I'm having a crisis pregnancy.

And they're like, let me tell you how to keep the baby.

I feel like coming out of this interview, I'm like, well, then I guess cults are fine because that's just who we are.

I mean, a little bit.

Yeah.

Honestly, like researching and writing this book did bring me a lot of peace because I understand now where it comes from.

both culturally and from an evolutionary perspective.

And when you understand how how something works, you can't be as afraid of it because I also understand

how to quell these impulses and

if there were buy-in from society, how to keep us collectively from falling prey to them.

And I think a question that comes up a lot with our research on this show is...

What kind of an idiot or sucker would get into MLMs or a cult or the wellness cults or whatever?

Blaming the victim.

And it is in the DNA

to find a group.

I think ultimately the distinction between just having a tribe and being a cult, being in a cult, is whether or not you're being exploited.

And, you know, there are forms of exploitation that happen in groups that aren't cults.

So that's still not a super strict analogy.

But, I mean,

the agreed-upon definition of a cult by people like Rick Allen Ross is that there's a charismatic leader who's worshipped, that there are thought control

efforts, undue influence at play,

and that there's actual harm being done, either to people within the group or to outsiders.

And so that definition is really not that hard to meet, even when you're not talking about an isolated group.

But I think the reason why

there's so

much

exploitation happening currently in America, cult-like specifically exploitation, is because we're desperate.

I mean, the research and work you've done pointing out how MLMs prey on immigrants or people who've lost their jobs, it's in moments of crisis when we

grasp at straws.

And cult-like thinking is ultimately a promise.

It's a promise of salvation, right?

You'll get riches or you'll get to be, you'll have a seat on the spaceship that saves us.

It's a promise of some kind of salvation.

And when we're desperate, we're more easily victimized.

And we're desperate today because,

in my opinion, of the result of a chronic lack of resources because of the wealth gap and the billionaires taking all the money.

Agreed.

So how do we quell cult-like behaviors?

I think we resource people.

I think dealing with income inequality is going to go a long way toward quelling the psychological vulnerabilities that make us more easily victimized by bad actors pushing our buttons to activate us.

And I also think we turn toward each other because cult-like thinking thrives in isolation, whether that's a group being isolated or people being isolated from one another.

And that, of course,

has been one of the major outcomes of social media uh and technology in general is isolation and so i think the more we can turn toward each other actual face-to-face communication um whether that's across political divides or just friends and family tolerating your insane parents a little bit yeah more yeah

one last question yeah

We're obsessed with cults right now in popular culture, right?

Like every other television show is about a cult.

Every other podcast is about cults.

Sadly, not every other book, but we're working on it, right, Jane?

That's right.

See my volumes one through 15.

But do you think our obsession is another version of us versus them or like the outsiders and the insiders, like people who are obsessed with cult

pop culture?

comforting themselves by looking from the outside in and saying, oh,

I'm not those idiots.

Oh, I think that's a little bit of it.

Yeah.

I think we're trying to inoculate ourselves.

I think we see

how

prevalent cult-like thinking is.

I think we see how many active cults there are today.

And I think we're wondering what the hell is going on and how do I protect myself?

And I think we're doing that.

at on a national level.

And to a certain degree, that's what I'm trying to do with this book.

I mean, I, you know, I hope hope your listeners will buy the copy because I'd like to have a career, but I'm also like really trying to point out how the magic trick works.

Like, let's acknowledge, see it, acknowledge it.

This is what's happening.

And now we won't fall for it.

And these are some things we can do to keep everyone else from falling for it too.

Thank you.

Thank you so much for having me.

I really appreciate it.

Big fan.

Big fan.

You too.

Oh, the two Janes.

that's it for this week we have a tip line open call us at 323-248-1488 323-248-1488 and leave us a message about anything that you think is funky out there what's going on guys talk to me

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