Cultish: The Language of Fanatism (Amanda Montell)

 

I have a fascination with cults and I feel sympathy for those who get involved. Often they're just people looking for community. Life is hard. They want companionship. But they get swept up in the unhealthy environment without even realizing what is happening. This was so good I listened to it twice. As soon as it was finished, I started it again.

Notes:

Part 1 talks about her experience and how the word cult has changed over time. It was once a neutral term for religious worship but gradually became associated with manipulation, extremism, and dangerous groups. She argues that many popular ideas about cults are oversimplified.

- the author's father was part of a cult called Synanon

Part 2 Congratulations - You have bene chosen to join the next evolutionary level above human (or in other words, how the recruiting works)

- the first steps are creating an "us versus them" language

- confirmation bias (look for what you agree with and ignore the rest)

- she talks about Trumps similarities to Jim Jones (nicknames, zealous deliveries, populous language, insider terminology/loaded language where they twist the meaning of familiar language to create dog-whistles, semantic stop signs like "don't believe what you see, believe me", "it is what it is", "boys will be boys" to alleviate cognitive dissonance). Jones also villainized the media (as does Trump, Putin, Erdoğan in Turkey, Xi Ping in China and in the past Nixon, Stalin and Hitler also did this). She also admits that it isn't always helpful to point this things out to people who love Trump. 

- talk is vague to leave space for change and followers can project whatever they want on to the languages to 

- Cults she explains: Heaven's Gate, Jim Jones, Tia Swan

I had a big lightbulb moment when she discussed QAnon in the last chapter. I've always wondered how so many women I know became obsessed with saving children from trafficking. It was a big thing for a while with Women Changers groups. Now they seem to have gone quiet....along with QAnon. It seems QAnon warned about child trafficking and said that Trump would fix the problem. Ah ha!! Many of the women I know who were involved with this are right wing Maga people. Make sense now!

- good recruits are service minded, good natured and sharp, not people with psychological problems.

Goodreads says:
What makes “cults” so intriguing and frightening? What makes them powerful? The reason why so many of us binge Manson documentaries by the dozen and fall down rabbit holes researching suburban moms gone QAnon is because we’re looking for a satisfying explanation for what causes people to join—and more importantly, stay in—extreme groups. We secretly want to know: could it happen to me? Amanda Montell’s argument is that, on some level, it already has . . .

Our culture tends to provide pretty flimsy answers to questions of cult influence, mostly having to do with vague talk of “brainwashing.” But the true answer has nothing to do with freaky mind-control wizardry or Kool-Aid. In Cultish, Montell argues that the key to manufacturing intense ideology, community, and us/them attitudes all comes down to language. In both positive ways and shadowy ones, cultish language is something we hear—and are influenced by—every single day.

Through juicy storytelling and cutting original research, Montell exposes the verbal elements that make a wide spectrum of communities “cultish,” revealing how they affect followers of groups as notorious as Heaven’s Gate, but also how they pervade our modern start-ups, Peloton leaderboards, and Instagram feeds. Incisive and darkly funny, this enrapturing take on the curious social science of power and belief will make you hear the fanatical language of “cultish” everywhere.