Cults use language to cast their spell

What kind of person joins a cult? After hearing one too many stories of friends and acquaintances who’d handed their lives over to charismatic godmen in India, or of once-questioning college mates who’d succumbed to QAnon conspiracies in the US, I wanted to know more.

Cults are hardly a modern invention, but four new books on the subject offer some answers. If there’s one thing they make clear, it’s that given the right circumstances, intelligent — even sceptical — independent thinkers, as well as the vulnerable and credulous can easily become ensnared.

In Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism, linguist and journalist Amanda Montell makes the persuasive case that it is language, far more than esoteric brainwashing techniques, that helps cults to build a sense of unshakeable community.

“With emotionally charged buzzwords and euphemisms, renamings, chants, mantras, and even hashtags, pernicious gurus are able to instil ideology, establish an ‘us’ and a ‘them,’ justify questionable behaviour, inspire fear, gaslight followers into questioning their own reality . . . essentially everything a cult needs to do in order to gain and maintain power,” she writes in a related feature.

Montell draws a useful distinction between relatively benign self-help or fitness movements that might use “insider” language to create a powerful sense of belonging, and destructive cults. Montell’s father, now a successful neurologist, was forced to spend four years in the early 1970s in Synanon, a drug rehabilitation programme run by an unqualified addictions counsellor, Chuck Dederich, that spiralled into an abusive quasi-religion. Group encounters at the centre near San Francisco included “haircuts”, sessions where members were subjected to verbal abuse, ostensibly to help them discard the baggage of the past.

Cults and cultish movements of all kinds — religious, political or social — thrive on convincing those who are disillusioned that there is a better solution — and the internet is a force multiplier, enabling new, fringe movements to reach far more potential followers than was possible in the offline world.

The ‘language of fanaticism’ can be as comforting as a tranquiliser

Mike Rothschild’s timely and chilling study, The Storm is Upon Us: How QAnon became a Movement, Cult and Conspiracy Theory of Everything, traces the path back from the 2021 attack on Capitol Hill in Washington to the chat forums that drew over 40m Americans into a sticky web of conspiracy theories. “The hope that fuelled his initial belief,” he writes of one QAnon member, “turned into a type of addiction — an addiction to the discourse, to the special feeling of knowing something other people didn’t. And ultimately to that desperate need for something better.” Rothschild is brilliant at outlining the process by which people who were not previously drawn to political extremism come to see themselves as “patriotic researchers”, able to see patterns in the information that is fed to them.

That sense of higher purpose can also cause people to overlook suffering, and even abuse. Bexy Cameron’s parents were fervent followers of David Berg, a failed preacher who founded The Children of God, later superseded by a sect known as The Family International, in California in the late 1960s. Berg drew in Christians and hippies with his blend of religiosity and free love ideals, but his sect came to be accused of promoting child sex abuse and rape. In her memoir Cult Following: My Escape and Return to the Children of God, Cameron demonstrates that the urge to find a more perfect way of living in harmony with one another, and the earth, can be as dangerous as any drug.

The Indian-American journalist and author Akash Kapur’s haunting Better To Have Gone: Auroville: Love, Death and the Quest for Utopia narrates the story of his parents-in-law, Diane and John, two charismatic dreamers who moved to the utopian community of Auroville in South India in the late 1960s. Akash and his wife Auralice both grew up in Auroville, and this book is a harrowing quest to understand the blinkered idealism that led to John and Diane’s deaths, on the same day, in 1986. “The sixties,” Kapur writes. “All that hope, all that youthful confidence — and the darkness right around the corner.”

Reading Cameron, Kapur, Montell and Rothschild, I begin to understand that people walk into cults one step at a time, drawn into a community that seems so welcoming, so promising, that they are hooked before they know where they’re headed. The “language of fanaticism” that Montell describes so well can be as comforting as a tranquilliser.

“The truth is, I’ve always mistrusted faith a little,” Akash writes in a moving passage in Better To Have Gone. “Maybe it’s because I’ve grown up around its surfeit. And also, I’ve seen what faith can do.” Without that hard-won caution, it seems that much of humanity has no natural immunity to those who would play god.

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