Cults Like Us: Why Doomsday Thinking Drives America

by Jane Borden

However, there’s a paradox in asserting no one can tell us what to do: it opens us to that exact result. The demagogue or cult leader’s pitch warns of evil agents who wish to control us. Popular paper tigers have included “communists,” our own psychological limitations, a “cabal of pedophiles” who run the government, and “woke” culture. How attractive it can be, then, when said leader offers to save us from that supposed persecution. If we follow their instructions—or buy their coaching sessions or supplements—we will receive a better life, either now on earth or everlasting, come doomsday. In an effort to dodge control, we fall under theirs.

In their pitch is always the specter of a thief: They want to take your cigarettes… your inheritance… your guns. But beware: when someone claims others aim to steal from you, the thief is usually the one talking.

He also deduced a witness could carry out an ordained and prophesied task only if the witness had total freedom from the state. The origins of the Constitution’s Establishment Clause and Free Exercise Clause are wrapped up in the mission of a man who believed he had been prophesied in Revelation to buck the authoritarian structure of his day in order to prepare the way for Jesus to drop the hammer.

Although this research has received a fair amount of criticism over the years, its basic arguments remain: we humans typically prefer to explain away pesky evidence rather than change our beliefs. The degree to which one has invested in a set of beliefs will largely determine how willing they are to argue away reality in the face of disconfirmation.

No wonder Americans are tempted by the monomyth! Not only have we been unconsciously indoctrinated by it for centuries, the narrative also conveniently relieves us of individual responsibility for community success. But unlike most myths, which support the foundational philosophies of their host communities, the American Monomyth undermines our nation’s founding ideology, democracy. It subconsciously encourages the public to forgo the messy, laborious, and painstaking process of cooperation and compromise by instead waiting for a superhero—and then granting that figure unlimited and unchecked power. It creates a passive public desiring a totalitarian leader.

Paternalism is the exercise of power but also an effect of power, in that power literally disables people from seeing perspectives other than their own.

Protestantism is by nature schismatic and has continued to fracture through history, with each new sect or denomination accusing its precursor of tyranny.

Many Americans assumed that strong concerted forces—whether Communists, industry barons, Jews, or some combination thereof—pulled strings behind the curtain in order to gain power and wealth, while ruining good simple folk. (Again, that is happening now, but the forces are less cinematic: corporate leaders who successfully lobby government for the right to increase their salaries while decreasing worker pay and increase their profits while spoiling natural environments.) McCarthy simply stoked an existing fire.

In that way, we manifest what we fear into reality. We become the enemy we claim to hate. Or maybe we invent the enemy in our image to justify acting on our impulses.

Fueling but also complicating the enlightenment rush was the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act. When Lyndon Johnson abolished national-origins quotas, Indians immigrated in droves, particularly to the West Coast. “They brought spiritual ideas a lot of Americans were not yet exposed to,” Lane explains. This influx met a generation of young adults who desired the order, comfort, and safety of spiritual salvation, but were too disillusioned by the previous generation’s actions to remain brand loyal to religions of their youth. Eastern philosophies surrounding reincarnation, meditation, and consciousness, though not new to the country, suddenly went viral. Enter scam artists looking to ride the guru wave, to exploit a new camouflage, in order to make a buck and, at worst, secure the kind of absolute power only divinity provides.

An outsized focus on mindset is another modern manifestation of the grace-nature divide. It’s mind over matter, and “matter” is the rest of your body. This kind of hierarchy is possible only in the wake of a division. Which is why bad actors engender such a split. If the mind is put above the body, they can silence your instincts with their rhetoric. This was a textbook tactic in the self-help therapy cult NXIVM, according to former member Jessica Joan. “In the curriculum, you focused more on the mental and intellectual aspects of understanding,” Joan told me. “If you had a physical reaction, like a gut feeling, they would say, ‘Oh, that’s just a bodily expression.’ ”

Victim blaming is a hallmark of almost every abusive relationship because it leads to silence. It’s especially pernicious in financial scams because those who see wealth as proof of salvation also claim poverty indicates sin.

Carnegie and others saw an important distinction between philanthropy and charity, though. It’s one thing to build a hospital. But giving directly to the poor would only “teach the hard-working, industrious man that there is an easier path.” None of the $125 million he gave away between 1887 and 1907 went to direct relief because, Carnegie believed, “every drunken vagabond or lazy idler supported by alms bestowed by wealthy people is a source of moral infection to a neighborhood.”50 Church leaders mostly agreed. Beecher said, “Looking comprehensively… no man in this land suffers from poverty unless it be more than his fault—unless it be his sin.”51 Wyllie’s research turned up a handful of extreme views, including from one leader who wanted to abolish almshouses altogether and instead send missionaries to tell the needy that God had decreed only those who work get to eat. Another advocated systematic starvation of the impoverished since they had deliberately chosen poverty and therefore should be allowed to suffer its natural consequences.

Cultures affected by the Protestant Reformation became “obsessed with the idea of defining right and wrong in an objective way that everyone can agree with,” scholar Angus Fletcher told me. “Once you have that, that’s the end of stories because they all become allegories.”

When we blame others, we tend toward conspiracist thinking. When we blame ourselves, we are more easily victimized. Personal responsibility has a place in society. But when someone encourages us to take none or all of it, that person has something to gain from our consent.

Ultimately, the cult of the self-made man was a house of cards. Nevertheless, we are all deeply indoctrinated into this belief system of financial success or failure as evidence of morality or sin. Our inherited Puritan beliefs—of work as holy and idleness as evil—have been perverted by those wishing to plunder, to justify having already done so, and to ensure their ability to continue on. These beliefs have metastasized to the degree that today, what’s often being plundered are people themselves. It’s classic extraction economics.

Without a finding of market saturation, the judge determined that Amway was not a pyramid scheme. DeVos and Van Andel paid a fine for the price-fixing charge and went about their business. The FTC, meanwhile, was baffled. But then, in 1984, a light bulb: the Washington Post reported, “In 1975, when Amway came under a Federal Trade Commission investigation as an alleged pyramid scheme… Van Andel and DeVos had a 43-minute Oval Office visit with [then president Gerald R.] Ford. A month later, Van Andel was quoted in a Michigan newspaper as saying that Ford was aware of Amway’s troubles with the FTC.84 You tell me what happened.

People join MLMs because they’re tricked. And they stay because they’ve already sunk costs, MLMs are usually high-control groups, and latent indoctrination into the cultural remnants of Puritan doomsday ideology has trained them to blame themselves for failing and believe they can still succeed if they work harder. Eventually, though, no longer able to ignore their mounting debt, they quietly leave. By my best guesstimate, about half of the members of any destructive cult eventually leave. (This is why recruitment is so important.) That’s exactly the number of people who quit MLMs each year.

The more outrageous the belief and the more aberrant it is from the beliefs of surrounding cultures, the stronger the social bonds within the group and the stronger the loyalty of members to the group. We see this play out again and again in cults, which, when threatened by outsiders or concerned family members trying to spread quote-unquote truth, will adopt even wilder ideologies. And when a cult isolates itself, it once again becomes a solo act, bereft of cooperation from neighbors, surrounded by foes and fearful of attack.

Seems to me the two camps were more interested in squashing one another than finding truth. We evolved because competition led us to collaborate. When we stop collaborating, we devolve. Meanwhile, Sun Myung Moon and Scientology leader David Miscavige laughed all the way to the offshore bank.

Most instances of violence occur in groups that meet three criteria: they believe the end of the world is near, have a charismatic leader, and become socially encapsulated.34 At least some degree of isolation, whether physical or virtual, is a hallmark of all destructive cults. Typically, though, isolation results in plummeting recruitment, which is in part why so many groups fizzle out and disappear.35 However, when groups have enough people and resources to maintain themselves, isolation can hurtle them toward an ending that’s less fizzle and more pop.

When you encapsulate yourself within only one group of people, who have similar ideas and goals, eventually no filter remains.

He then explained that kinship “never really goes away and always tries to reassert itself. 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.

We seek cults when our realities feel out of control, then cede control upon joining.

A split person is easily conquered while a whole person is not. The false separation between the analytical mind and instinctual “gut” is cult thinking, full stop. It’s similar to that between the supposedly saved spirit and the evil corrupted body, the paradigm that begat the grace-nature divide. I hope we can hear our intuitions, and thereby become whole.

We should test for malignant narcissism before putting people into positions of power. We should read literature to increase empathy, hug children more so they develop enough social and emotional stability to resist a cult leader’s siren call, experience psychedelic-driven ego death in order to release control and accept impermanence, and fight overconsumption in society and the self.