Cults Like Us: Why Doomsday Thinking Drives America

by Jane Borden

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.