Cults Like Us: Why Doomsday Thinking Drives America

by Jane Borden

For example, if participants could actually sell products to customers outside of the scheme, these products would immediately dominate a market, due to the sheer number of participants in any market, thereby consuming any need for what’s sold—and the company would collapse. In the 2018 season of the podcast The Dream, host Jane Marie points out that lotion and soap MLM Rodan + Fields had 400,000 distributors across the country when, by her math, America has “fewer than 20,000 CVSes and Walgreens—aka lotion and soap stores—combined.”

Starbucks sells $5 bracelets to support investment in impoverished communities, which distracts from the fact that it keeps almost $2 billion offshore to avoid paying taxes that would support investment in impoverished communities.

Increases in power correlate with, for example, avoiding taxes, cheating on taxes, skipping fare on public transport, applying for government benefits for which you don’t qualify, accepting bribes, and shoplifting.98 There’s a pattern in those examples: taking.

“That’s right,” he replies. “The difference between taking money and making money has kind of been obliterated.”

He explained that the biggest enemies of Nixon’s campaign had been Black Americans and the antiwar left. “We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or Black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and Blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

We didn’t evolve to seek truth; we evolved to be social.

The term brainwashing was coined in 1950 by Edward Hunter, a CIA operative who wrote about a trend among American prisoners in the Korean War, who had been subjected to Chinese Communist thought reform and came out of prisoner camps praising Chairman Mao.29 The word itself is a rough translation of xi nao—the pinyin version of two Mandarin characters, which literally translate to “wash” and “brain”—a colloquial phrase for the formal thought-reform process exercised under the Mao government.

Stop the Steal marchers in 2021 may have also been experiencing folie à groupe, aka shared psychosis. Be careful to whom you listen, because pathological symptoms are literally contagious. They spread just like viruses except through emotional bonds, which I guess makes emotional bonds the bodily fluids of the mind. According to forensic psychologist Dr. Bandy X. Lee, three conditions are necessary for infection: an influential figure who is suffering from severe pathology, high emotional investment among group members, and an environment that fosters contagion. Mental symptoms most commonly go viral in isolated settings (think hospitals, prisons, households, and gangs). The most common symptoms to transmit are delusions of persecution or general paranoia—both of which are hallmarks of isolated apocalyptic groups.

Previously, when not much changed from decade to decade, we understood time as circular. Then, in a state of constant growth and change, we started seeing time as linear—as if on a graph, having started from some source while heading toward some destination, just beyond the paper’s edge. If life keeps getting better, surely our source was insufficient and our destination ecstatic. This paradigm feeds into the grace-nature divide, the one which claims all nature is depraved, and we are separated from it by grace, which will carry us to heaven. It’s another form of separation, of isolation. And if we believe we won’t return to source—whether figuratively because of technology and progress, or literally because of doomsday prophecy—why not isolate from

it? Why not fell a forest, dredge a marsh, and dump in the ocean? If we are headed somewhere else, what do we care?

One of the things about a very individualistic society is you end up with a lot of loneliness and people can feel disjointed from societies unless they’re able to join voluntary communities. That’s why voluntary communities have been so important in U.S. history.” For most of America’s past, those voluntary associations were churches, which provided services for members in need. As America grew more secular, many of those services fell to the state. But our government has been eroding social safety nets ever since FDR dared to roll across the earth. Therefore, when crisis strikes, many of us, having nowhere else to turn, will take the hand of a narcissistic charlatan who promises community and purpose, but instead triggers us-versus-them thinking, isolates us, and robs us of all we have and are. This is particularly dangerous at a time when shocks and times of crisis are no longer occasional aberrations but our constant reality.

“It’s so easy on the left to look at people as repugnant, rather than as people who have been failed by our social system,” Olson says. “Reality doesn’t make sense for a lot of people because of enormous income inequality. My generation has not inherited the world we were promised.”

Trump exploits such grievances expertly. He tells his followers they’ve been screwed by a system of power. They have. Many politicians neglect to acknowledge it. Sure, Trump isn’t totally honest about who does the screwing, since many of them are his fat-cat Wall Street friends. And worse he was lying when he said he’d help. Instead, he has screwed the average American even more, to enrich said friends. But he does acknowledge their pain. No one should be surprised by his popularity. He promised to steady their wobbling worlds. In exchange, they made him sovereign.

Social-media algorithms are maybe the most successful cult leaders in the history of humanity.

If I had a minimum ask of you, reader, it would be to identify and acknowledge Puritan doomsday ideologies, wherever they exist, so we can determine whether or not they are being used against us.

We evolved as a result of empathy and compassion. It’s our secret weapon. And it’s the one skill lacked by con-artist, cult-leader autocrats. When we turn away from each other, those skills atrophy and we literally devolve. That’s what doomsday thinking encourages us to do: mistrust and blame, isolate from, seek dominion over, disregard the needs of, and even wish violence upon one another.

The researchers hoped to understand why some citizens helped victims of the Nazi pogrom and others did not. But the case studies fit no demographic patterns. Helpers were young and old, rich and poor, male and female, religious and atheist, educated and illiterate, urbanites and rural, and held a wide variety of occupations. The sociologists found only one commonality: everyone who helped had a prior, close relationship with someone of Jewish descent, for example a neighbor, colleague, playmate, or stepparent.1 Familiarity mitigates hate.

“In a consumer society, contentment is a radical proposition. Recognizing abundance rather than scarcity undermines an economy that thrives by creating unmet desires.”

Hey, psst: [*whispers*] What if there is no enemy? What if there is only chaos and the fear we feel in response to it, which causes us to become the enemies we imagined? Perhaps that’s naïve… even delusional… as much of a fever dream as Revelation itself. I’m clinging to it anyway.

This is the last divide I want us to bridge. I no longer believe evil is even separate from good, is even different from good. Our capacities for violence and cooperation developed side-by-side, literally begat one another. They are indivisible. Oxytocin enables both deep love and brutal violence via the same mechanism. Good and evil are one and the same.