If you have ever called yourself a fan of anyone—a musician, a director, a writer, a politician, a technological genius, a scientist—you are experiencing the first stage of cult indoctrination. If you were to meet the person you most admire and be offered the chance to hang out with him or her on a regular basis—would you? You would. What happens next would depend on a chaotic series of variables; sometimes the result is a cult, and sometimes those cults live on beyond their leaders. There is no agent behind it, no person deciding to form or join a cult. Cults aren’t designed. They form as a
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