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.
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 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
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 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.
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.
A Brief History of the Word ‘Cult’
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 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.
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 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.
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 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.
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, 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.
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 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!
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.
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?
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 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.
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 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.
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.
