Transcription
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So, you want to start a cult. You want to have followers that don't just like you, but adore you, worship you, and would lay down their life for you. Well, my friend, you have come to the right place because today we are looking at how you, yes you, can start a successful cult using this book by Stephanie Alice Baker, Eugene Mccclofflin, and Chris Roek as our guide. My name is Joe Folly, and this is unsolicited advice.
One, the cultic moment. If you want to start a cult, the first thing to remember is that timing is everything. It's no use attempting to kick one off in an age or a place where everyone is broadly contented. They feel like they live meaningful lives and they have a deep trust in the people and authorities around them. The old economist dictim prevails. To sell a successful product, you have to go where the demand is. And starting a cult is in many ways quite like selling a product. You might think that a cult would succeed based on the strength of its philosophical convictions or the persuasiveness of its theology, but the cult leader probably has far more in common with the adman or the business executive than they do with the philosopher or the theologian. This is not about cold, precise reasoning through difficult ideas. This is about getting people on board with a set of ideas that will take over most or all of their life. We don't have time for detailed philosophizing. We need results now.
Stephanie Alice Baker and her co-authors refer to the times that are ripe for the founding and growth of cults as maybe unsurprisingly cultic moments. Their explanation of what a cultic moment consists of is nuanced and detailed. But there are a few key things that you should know as a budding cult leader. The first is that you want to look for economic and social instability. Cults find it easier to lay down roots in situations where people already feel somewhat unmoored from their former stable everyday lives. If you try to start a cult in a happy, satisfied time where there is economic prosperity and broad social cohesion, you'll just find it much more difficult. I'm not saying it can't be done, but why make life hard for yourself? Instead, it's best to wait for a moment where the soil is already prepared for you to step in and get things started. We're looking for a time of enormous social upheaval or instability. Perhaps social values that were previously considered certain and sacrosanct are starting to fade. Maybe people's lives feel that bit more perilous because of a declining job market or rising costs of living and necessities. Maybe a section of society specifically feels like it is already excluded from the mainstream and that can be your specific target market when you are searching for recruits. Hopefully, it is a potent mixture of all of the above.
The second thing to really look out for is spiritual or existential malaise. This doesn't necessarily mean that people are having outright crises left, right, and center, though, you know, it's probably handy. More valuable than any individual crisis, though, is a general cultural sense that life and society has become gray or damp or disenchanted. That at some nebulous point in the past, the world used to shine with a certain meaning or energy or virility. But that past is long behind us. And in its place, there is a world that is missing some key ingredient. You want the community you're targeting to already be having some kind of difficult to pin down crisis of meaning. You don't actually need to genuinely solve the crisis. You just need to know how to exploit it. The idea is to position your organization, shall we say, as a kind of vaguely defined cure-all to these problems, especially the one to do with the crisis of meaning. You will present the cult as a place where people can find a real, secure social circle, safe from the instability of the outside world. It's a place where people can go to find the community they so crave. You can sell your cult's dogma as the solution to any kind of latent nihilism or hopelessness or aimlessness. You can do this in a number of ways. One popular strategy is to paint the cult as returning its followers to a kind of mythical past, a golden age that the society used to have but has lost, probably due to its own sinfulness and decadence. But you can now rediscover it in the glories of your doctrine. Alternatively, you can choose to position yourself as a kind of utopian cult striving for a grand future to come that will abolish everything dusty, grim, or unpleasant about the current situation. As Eric Hoffer might put it, you present the solution to present problems in another world that isn't here now, but might return or come to pass at some unspecified time in the future. If it's your preference, you can spin this into a full-blown doomsday or apocalyptic cult and herald the glory of you and your followers in the ashes of the current world. The important thing really is to heavily devalue the present and place the true value in life either in the pre-collapsed past or the utopian future. Such ideas are admittedly unrealistic. But this isn't a weakness. This is what makes them so motivating. Their promise to solve the vague, omni-problem plaguing all of us means that they can inspire real fervor in their true believers. And if people are so very dissatisfied with their current society, what have they got to lose?
The final piece of the puzzle in the cultic moment is for there to be a rising skepticism in more traditional or established avenues of gaining information, meaning justice or community. This is what Baker et al. refer to as a low-trust society. Most communities will, if they're going well, at least already have people or institutions that they turn to for things like knowledge or wisdom or instruction or justice. For the 14th-century European, it might have been the priest. For the modern-day person, it might be the scientist or the medical researcher or the therapist. It doesn't matter to you how reliable these sources of knowledge might be. But if you want your cult to be successful, you'll have to wait until your target community has just lost enough trust in these sources that you can get you and your own sources in the door and then proclaim to have the real truth of the matter. Again, it's something akin to supply and demand. The demand for wisdom is there, but the supply is no longer trusted. How fortunate it is then that you are here to pick up the slack. I should note here that presenting solutions or trying to help with these sorts of problems doesn't inherently make you a cult leader. In fact, if cult leading is not your intention, you might inadvertently end up founding quite a benevolent organization. But this is no fun at all. So, we won't explore it further in this video. We'll instead look at how to get the most out of your cult personally later in the video.
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But anyway, back to the video. So, you found a community that is ripe for cultification. It is in a full-blown cultic moment. What should you do next? Well, a cult is nothing without its recruits. You can't get by merely by positing an idea and then vanishing into the atmosphere. You need concrete followers. And this is where you need to pick your targets wisely. Here's where the whole delicious spectrum of human vulnerability comes into play. Each of the factors that goes into the cultic moment is mirrored at the level of the individual. Just like societies can drift into unspecified states of malaise, can have vast economic problems, and become increasingly atomized and isolated, so too can individuals be impoverished or lonely and feel like their life has no meaning. These are the people who are so starved of the basic human needs for companionship, purpose, or even just the bare economic necessities that you require to survive and thrive that they will happily accept almost any outstretched hand that's offered to them. It definitely helps if they personally already feel alienated from more traditional societal structures or feel left behind in an age that has been made unfamiliar by the march of technical or social change. There are many routes to the situation that the ideal cult recruit ends up in. The important thing is to learn how to identify them. And of course, the particular need they have will dictate your approach towards them. Well, if they lack meaning, then go with your doctrine. If they lack community, then paint your cult as just a fun group to hang out with and make friends in. Vitally, you must make the recruit feel both special and like they're on the cusp of a turning point in their life. You have to set yourself and your group up as the solution to their problems, even if those problems are as vague as "I feel like my life has gone flat."
In the next section, we'll look at how to pull on their emotional heartstrings in order to make it truly feel to them like you have solved their problems and thus get them on the line, as it were. Additionally, to make the recruit feel like they're making progress, you can dangle different levels of hierarchy in the cult that they could one day ascend to, each with its own level of esoteric knowledge and power that only they have access to. This, in effect, means that the recruit is always kept in the position of having more to learn and never getting the final answer. They're effectively being re-recruited at each level of the hierarchy. And this conveniently means that when their problems do inevitably remain or return in some way, shape, or form, you can just say, "Because they're not advanced enough yet." Obviously, they can't have the answers in full form now. Their spirit is not ready. They're still full of impurities and unfaithfulness. It's only through continual cult involvement that they can be cleansed of such impurities and learn to ascend to real bliss, real enlightenment. Although I have been using religious terms here, you don't necessarily need an outright religious element for your cult to succeed. There are plenty of successful cults who have sated the human spiritual needs by appealing to an extremist political ideology or a pseudoscientific yet still materialist worldview like the existence of higher alien life forms that we're in constant contact with. As long as it's something that can fill that nebulous existential void in the recruit's heart, you are on to a winner.
So that is general timing and target selection covered. Now we can look at the next step.
Two, recruitment and the internet. There is no such thing as a cult without a strong sense of in-group loyalty. And what better way to secure that than by identifying an enemy? We covered this a little bit on our video on extreme groups, but it also forms a key part of Baker et al.'s analysis of cults. As they put it, citing work by Theodore Roszak, "Cults resemble countercultural groups whose identity is predicated on opposition to and rejection of the mainstream." Of course, not every countercultural movement is a cult. In fact, the vast majority are not, but this oppositional dynamic is one of the cult's strongest ideological weapons, and I highly recommend that you use it in your own cult. So it is important to know how to pick a good enemy. It can help to present your enemy as extrinsically powerful but intrinsically weak. This is also something that Eric Hoffer talks about. Of course, this notion is a little bit obscure. So let's use a hypothetical example. I think that might help. Say you wish to position your cult as the spiritually elect, the small group of people that God has uniquely singled out for salvation and power in some great event like a rapture or some other apocalypse. It is helpful to pick an enemy. And in this case, the natural one to pick is the vague spectre of corrupt modernity. That's going to be your word and your characterization for the mainstream. This allows you to both paint the enemy as incredibly powerful since it is large in numbers and wealthy in resources, but also to paint it as intrinsically weak and intrinsically feeble. While together, the forces and people of corrupt modernity are strong by virtue of sheer numbers, individually, they are pathetic and puny and degenerated. Your group of the spiritual elect may be small in number and to that extent extrinsically weak, but each of them is higher and more powerful than those that make up the ever-hated herd. This allows you to both position yourself as the underdogs, the little man striving against a nomnipotent machine without also undermining the individually enhancing effect of your cult's esoteric knowledge. You are, in effect, under this framing, the spiritual aristocracy looking down on the swarming mass of humans from on high. This creates both a sense of permanent external threat, which increases the urgency to remain in and strengthen the cult, but it also somewhat nurses the egos of you and your acolytes, who will be able to see yourselves in really quite a flattering light despite your relative material powerlessness. It makes it a far more attractive ideology.
To ensure complete obedience, however, it is important to make the doctrines and beliefs of your cult totalizing. If you're simply preaching some abstract spiritual doctrine, then there isn't really much that separates you from a standard religious sect. And there's also not much there to ensure total, unmitigated loyalty from your recruits. Baker and the other authors emphasize the importance of blurring the boundaries between mere articles of spiritual or metaphysical faith and the concrete actions and behavior in your recruits' lives. As she puts it, "A sect becomes a religious cult when the article of faith that confers doctrinal identity spills over into grievances and nostrums born and applied in the areas of politics, culture, economics, race, ethnicity, etc." The idea here is that when your cult ideas impinge on more and more of your recruits' belief system, you will draw them ever closer into your social structures. This again is where the strength of the all-pervading enemy rears its head. Once the enemy is seen around every corner, you have greater reason to make decrees that cover a greater and greater portion of the cult members' lives. At its most extreme, this can involve your converts coming to live on a physical compound with you and your inner circle. And at this point, every aspect of their existence will be inextricably linked with your cult.
And this is where we need to talk about the virtues and vices of using the internet for your cult recruitment. In theory, the internet is a fantastic tool for getting people to join your cult. Whereas before you might have to seek out vulnerable people yourself in person, which is a slow and tedious process, now you can find them at the click of a button. Even better, sometimes they will drift towards you themselves, carried by the tide of algorithmic forces beyond our ken. This could be a real boon for you and your cult. It certainly widens the amount of people that you can talk to and thus your market for potential recruits, but it's worth noting there are pros and cons to the internet cult. While there is the obvious pro in the sheer number of people you can reach, the con is that you can't really monitor or control them in the same way that you would if you were an in-person cult leader. One of the classic cult recruitment tactics that you would use in the offline world would be to target an already lonely person and use the promise of social acceptance and belonging. You and a few of your trusted acolytes would approach them, befriend them, and slowly reel them in, using their reliance on your group as strong social leverage. This means that although you have a smaller pool to swim in, you can get your teeth much more firmly into any potential recruits. This dynamic is effectively just reversed on the internet. For a lot of people, leaving an online cult is as simple as logging off and going for a walk. They will also likely have social interactions with people outside of your cult and find that many of them are normal and not corrupt moderns or spiritual degenerates or vicious heretics or whatever pejorative label that you've chosen for non-believers. They will have so many more off-ramps. And this could mean that you spend weeks carefully indoctrinating someone only for them to just disappear on you. And additionally, this will create a decentralized structure to your cult, which is great for things like plausible deniability, but it doesn't really allow you to exploit them in the hands-on way that an in-person cult leader would be able to. So, in my estimation, in order to maximize the effectiveness and utility and personal benefit to your cult, the best way forward is to try and get any online recruitment offline as soon as you can. It's fine to make connections online, but try to get someone in person to solidify the conversion and then integrate them into the social structures and structures of your cult in a material, concrete sense.
In terms of ground-level, nitty-gritty cult recruitment tactics, there are just so many to choose from, and we can't cover all of them here. Most of them play on the pre-existing social isolation, lack of trust, or existential nihilism of the potential recruits. So, a classic one is love bombing, where you bombard the recruits with affection, attention, and social praise and make them feel like they are one of you before withdrawing that and only giving it back at the cost of them intertwining their lives more closely with the cult. This works for roughly the same reason that many drug dealers give out free samples. It provides the recruit with an emotional high before placing that high behind a locked gate, which only increased loyalty can open. As a side note, this isn't just helpful for recruiting. You can also use it to keep your current members in line. If they begin to question you or waver in their fidelity, you can then employ social isolation as a weapon and withdraw every morsel of community that they have come to rely on. Your personal charisma can really help here. Baker references written accounts from the followers of Charles Manson detailing the feeling that his attention had on them. When he focused his attention on you, he made you believe there was no one else in the world. He had an uncanny sensibility bestowed upon him. You can only imagine how someone might feel if this ecstatic feeling were taken away.
Other tactics to draw the recruit ever closer include the active isolation from any pre-existing social connections via various tools, including the use of tactical moralism. So, you might say something like, "Don't talk to your parents because they've turned their back on the truth and are spiritually fallen." Or encouraging them to have tangible monetary investments in the cult and thus utilize the sunk cost fallacy in human reasoning to make them think that they have to stay since they've gone this far. And if they're already socially isolated, well, who else would take them now? And finally, you may want to ensure that your cult members never feel totally safe and secure, but at the same time aren't so hopeless that they are driven to leave the cult. In the last video, we talked about romantic limerence and the idea that sometimes instability and unreliability in love can paradoxically draw someone in closer even as the romantic relationship is hurting them. You, as cult leader, can use a similar strategy by being hot and cold with your acolytes. Have one of your recruits be your favorite guy for the week and then act cold with them for the following month. Alternate who you are truly warm and kind with so that your recruits are constantly competing for your affections. And when you do pick someone for your favor, really show it. Lavish them with praise and attention and then suddenly stop, seemingly at random. This will leave them wondering what they did wrong, and it will also give them the hope that one day they might be able to earn their way back into your good books. Be unpredictable so that they never really know where they stand with you for any length of time. This allows you to dangle your affection in front of them like a carrot and make it seem like that they could get it back permanently if they only devoted more of their time and energy and loyalty to the cult and cult activities. Before long, they will have no one else in the world but you. And then they are truly yours.
So, those are some avenues for recruitment and maintenance that you can use when you're just starting out. But that is only one piece of the puzzle. If you want to help me make more videos like this, then please consider subscribing either to the channel or if you're feeling incredibly generous and want to gain access to exclusive content, including my slow-motion book-by-bookshelf tour, then consider subscribing to the Patreon, though it's absolutely no pressure. The links are in the description.
Three, how to get the most out of your cult. There are numerous benefits that you can have from being a cult leader, but some of them are in tension with one another and they depend on which cult you set up. So, it's very important to choose wisely. Your first choice is to do with the centralization of your cult. Is it going to be a relatively small, tight-knit group of people who are just based around you and a few trusted but subservient lieutenants? Or will it be a more decentralized organization which can make autonomous decisions without your direct oversight? Or will you go incredibly decentralized and start to appear less like a full-blown cult and more like a cult brand? Each of these has its pros and cons.
With centralization comes increased control, but decreased reach, decreased numbers, and almost certainly decreased monetary gain. Depending on the purpose of your cult, this may be ideal. If you've started your organization out of a bare wish to have an awful lot of power over a small group of people whose lives you basically control absolutely and who you can exploit at your malicious leisure, then the highly centralized cult is definitely for you. You want to introduce a strict hierarchy with you at the top, obviously, your most trusted partners at the second level, their most trusted partners at the third level, and so on and so forth until you get to the most meager and measly of new recruits. This will hopefully create pretty much total authority for you with everyone else's power in some sense derived from your own. This structure is also very well suited to a spiritual or at least quasi-spiritual kind of cult. This is because you can claim to have a personal revelation or special relationship with God or whatever divine being that you are substituting in. This will help ground your authority in something that no one else can easily access. It's a bit like the divine right of kings but now in an occult setting and on a smaller scale.
However, there are notable downsides to this highly centralized, highly hierarchical power structure. For a start, it suffers from the same fault that Machiavelli identifies with all tyrannies or quasi-tyrannies, which is that it is pretty precarious. If you're in the top job, someone else is going to want to get that job, and they will do or say whatever they need to in order to get it. Additionally, this structure is absolutely ripe for uncontrollable [snorts] and basically unlimited abuse. You're a cult leader, so you know, you just may not care about this, but too much internal abuse can easily lead to the dissolution of your cult. While it is well attested that members of a cult will get used to a certain level of abuse and exploitation, that doesn't mean that you can get away with anything. As one report on cults in Spain put it, "Most of our participants walked away from the group by themselves or did so following a period of personal reflection due in the main to a sense of disenchantment or their apprehension of inconsistencies between the doctrine and the group's ideals and its actual practices as well as their becoming aware of deceit." So it is important not to push your adherents too far. You can't appear to be hypocritical in the eyes of your believers. Another downside to this tightly affiliated cult structure is that you will necessarily have fewer adherents. And if money or widespread influence is your main motive, this is a real drawback. It's all well and good fleecing your particular acolytes for donations, but if your circle is small but fervent, they just won't have all that much to give. Additionally, the kind of person who's willing and able to totally [snorts] uproot their life to come live with you on a compound is just probably not that financially mobile, especially if they're now living and working within that compound and being exploited by you for a very low wage. Again, if your main goal is something different like simple devotion or you're a true believer in your own esoteric spiritual cause, then this may not matter. But if you want to get that bag, as the kids say, then you'll probably want a slightly looser organizational structure. And lastly, sometimes these sorts of cults come into direct conflict with governmental organizations, which are just far more powerful than they are. Baker and her co-authors look at examples like the Waco cult and the Manson family, both of whom eventually fell foul of the law and ended in violence and death. Maybe you're crazy enough to do that sort of thing, but most people are not.
So, if you do want to try a different approach, Baker and her co-authors also examine a number of much more loosely organized cults, or perhaps more appropriately, cult-like entities that cast their net far wider, but as a result, are both much more financially lucrative and also fit more comfortably into mainstream life, with the trade-off being that they have much less control over their acolytes. One example they give is self-help cults. These are modern self-help organizations which broadly speaking promise that if you just join them, you will be able to succeed in anything you set your mind to, be it economic or relationship or spiritual. They might posit a conspiratorial enemy that's currently keeping you down, but if you only follow their program, you will be set free through the acquiring of esoteric business acumen or whatever and will escape your sorry fate. Such promises clearly speak to general social and economic anxieties. Some of these cult-like entities specifically target romantic worries from young men in their broad pitch. Since they're often selling a product, these organizations tend to be far less centralized than something like the Waco cult and instead congregate on private message boards or chat rooms where they can reach anyone in the world and charge for access. They'll still employ the same kind of loyalty tactics we looked at in the last section, but obviously to a lesser extent since, well, they're not looking for undying faithfulness. They just want to know that the mark is willing to keep spending their money to be in the group. There are certain multi-level marketing scams that also fit this description, promising absurd levels of wealth in exchange for your money upfront. As ever, these labels that we use like cult or scam or cult-like entity or, I don't know, guru organization have quite blurry boundaries, and where you choose to lay yours is always going to be somewhat a matter of taste. The point is, these particular organizations sacrifice a measure of comfort for a measure of reach. And if you see yourself as more of a general con artist rather than a full-blown cult leader, well, then this may be the route you want to go down.
However, Baker et al. also point out that since cult dynamics are a sliding scale, there are many organizations that use elements and strategies from cults for their own benefit, but aren't best described as full-blown cults. In their introduction, they point to the phenomenon of cult brands, companies that manage to create a cult-like following by using a strong brand image and creating a form of strong in-group identity based around consumption of that product. Sometimes this is unintentional, though it has become something of a subfield within advertising and communication studies to find out how to reliably cultivate this sort of semi-fanatical brand loyalty. Think of the number of companies who encourage you to buy their product almost as a form of rebellion or who encourage a line between people who own the product and people who do not. At least in the UK when I was a teenager, and this is anecdotal, there was a certain prestige that someone would have if they owned an iPhone as opposed to some other form of smartphone. Even though they basically did the same thing, the image of the brand and the image of what constituted an Apple customer, which at that time was a kind of sleek, modern, innovative young person, created more motivation for people my age to buy Apple products. This is obviously not the same thing as a cult, but it is a form of in-group loyalty that is turned into monetary benefits for the company in question.
Possibly the closest example of this looser cultesque or cult-borrowing dynamic that Baker and her co-authors cover specifically in their book is the cult of the celebrity. They introduce the concept as follows: "The nucleus of the relationship between a cult and a celebrity is unpunctuated consciousness. That is the conviction of cult members that they and celebrities are intimately on the same wavelength. Celebrity cult members relate to celebrities as more acute versions of what is gleaned intuitively of their inner selves. That is, there is a sense among a cult following that the celebrity and the celebrity's fan base are to a certain extent in-group allies. An in-group is formed around the celebrity and those that admire them and the out-group is sort of everyone else." Of course, this is a much milder kind of in-group/out-group dynamic than the ones that we've already looked at. Whereas in a highly concentrated cult, the out-group might be considered degenerate or actively hostile or the enemy. And in a self-help cult, the out-group might be condescendingly looked down upon as unenlightened or doomed for failure. I very rarely see people behave so hostilely towards people who just aren't a fan of their favored celebrity. The upside of a celebrity cult is that it's highly profitable, with many celebrities making an awful lot of money and garnering an awful lot of social status through their cult following. However, there are also downsides to such a highly decentralized structure. For a start, the celebrity holds no real tangible power over their cult following. The follower could at any point turn on their chosen celebrity and devour them, as has happened in some celebrity cancellations. Additionally, since the following is desperate and has little direct contact with the celebrity, they might just move on to other things. If centralized cults can self-destruct in a blaze of infighting, then celebrity cults can just vanish through a kind of social entropic decay. Another important downside is that you cannot just choose to be a celebrity. However, Baker and her co-authors do point out that if you want to gain some kind of micro-celebrity cult, it helps to position yourself as some kind of alternative to the mainstream and hostile towards the mainstream. Or as they put it, "Celebrities that present themselves as displaced from normative order are a staging post for those who feel underestimated, sidelined, damaged, or bewildered. The corollary of all of this is that normative order is itself insufficient and must be surpassed." By opposing yourself to the mainstream and presenting yourself as this real, authentic, true alternative to that mainstream, you will be more likely to garner disaffected followers and it will be easier to replicate the kinds of semi-fanatical loyalty that you can find in other cults. I bet as I describe that description there, there will be certain names that come to mind. And I also bet that depending on your own pre-existing beliefs and biases, different ones will have occurred to each of you.
So, that is a rough scale of different styles of cult you might want to start and how to get the most out of them. Each of them presents its own challenges and its own rewards, and it's important to pick the right one depending on what specific flavor of cult you're going for. But, as we touched upon in this section, there are little flavors of cultishness in far more places than you might initially expect. And I want to take a moment to talk about that and the wider future of cults.
Four, a world of cults. One of the main differences between our current information economy and the pre-internet age is that our information streams are now highly personalized and to a certain extent atomized. I'm not here talking about the concept of an echo chamber, but just the mere fact that now there are so many more places to get information. And thus, the ability for different groups to wildly disagree on even basic facts about the world has increased. They don't need to be totally locked in echo chambers for that to occur. Whereas 40 years ago there was basically the newspapers and official news channels and maybe the parish bulletin if you wanted to find out what was going on. Now there are innumerable websites, blogs, forums, YouTube channels, and podcasts, each of which has the potential to garner its own niche following. In many ways, this is a really great thing. One of George Orwell's complaints about his own information age was that information forever remained in the hands of a tiny group of rich media magnates and anyone else either couldn't have their voices heard or had to rely on much smaller-scale forms of information dissemination like pamphleteering or flyering. However, any system has its drawbacks and it does seem like if we look at the factors involved, our own time presents a unique opportunity to any wannabe cult leaders out there and also a real hazard to those who wish to not fall into their clutches.
Baker and her co-authors end their book on a chapter about the future of cults in which, among other things, they discuss how the all-pervasive presence of the internet is likely to affect the level of cultic influence that's swimming about in a society. As they put it, "The technological affordances of digital technologies create new opportunities to network that were not available in the age of legacy media. However, there are numerous pathways to radicalization and violent extremism, and online exposure to cultic influence does not guarantee conversion or radicalization." As we've touched upon a number of times, online cultic conversion trades ease of access for level of control. Within Baker et al.'s framework, this suggests that there could be a real proliferation of lots of different loose cults, while tighter cults struggle to utilize these new tools to as great an extent. There just is no substitute for offline, in-person isolation. And intermittent internet propaganda can only get you so far in inspiring fervent loyalty, at least for most people. Though of course, since you've got access to more people, you might just tap into a particular subset of them who are already prone to fervent loyalty and thus, you know, you get a kind of biased sample. As the information space increasingly splits off into smaller and smaller communities, it will probably be more difficult to draw the line between loose cults, strange businesses, extremist organizations, genuine mass movements, or just trends.
But the internet as it exists now is only the start. Baker and her co-authors predict that there will be new innovations in the world of cults in years to come. And some of them are pretty terrifying. For instance, they say the following: "With the ubiquity of AI, personalized chatbots, and virtual influencers on the horizon, we can expect new forms of cultic influence to emerge, which integrates technology and popular cultural artifacts into a spiritual framework." I'm not sure exactly what specific conclusion to draw from this. And the authors themselves are hesitant to draw definite conclusions. Academics are always, you know, always pretty hedgy about predicting the future, which I think is probably a good instinct. It could be that the cult leaders of the future will utilize personalized AI chatbots that are targeted and programmed to appeal to just our biases and just our weak points. If such technology comes to prominence, I'm genuinely not sure how we are meant to resist cultic influences. And after all, we already have bots that track and predict our future purchasing decisions. So, it's a slippery slope is what I'm saying. These technologies don't seem far-fetched. I think they are plausibly on the horizon. And who knows, maybe there'll be such a reaction to this that we will stop trusting messages we receive online altogether and we'll always be working under the assumption that there's a high chance that we could just be talking to an unconscious bot, in which case the personalized bot approach might not be so disastrous after all.
And as always, the strategies that cults use will depend on the particular features of their cultic moment. Baker and her co-authors are pretty sure that we are in a cultic moment, but the particular flavor will matter when it comes to the specifics of the futures of cults. In this final chapter, they choose to focus not so much on the loss of institutional trust, which was their main focus when defining the cultic moment earlier in the book. Instead, in this final chapter, they focus on the meaning-giving nature of cults. As long as there is a lack of meaning and a lack of community for many people, we can expect more cults and cult-like entities to spring up. Because ultimately, cults can only really take advantage of the gaps that we in wider society let emerge when we collectively speaking allow people to feel purposeless and alone and robbed of guidance and disoriented and crying out for some group to belong to. Well, we can't expect cult-like entities to not fill this unmet demand.
Baker and her co-authors end their book by discussing this shared sense of vulnerability and idealism that cults tap into. And their tentative answer is to quote the French absurdist philosopher Albert Camus, who famously said that "the struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy." They don't expand on this point. In fact, they use this quote as the final line in the book. But if the idea is that we should expect people to make their peace with a situation where they feel like they are Sisyphus, that they are robbed of purpose, I'm just a little bit skeptical. Many people who leave cults do so because they become closer with family and friends or some outside, in-person influence manages to tug them out of it. But if an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, then perhaps the broader answer is for us, and I do mean all of us, to work so that fewer people feel so alienated and alone and aimless. And as a result, fewer people feel like they have to turn to these cultish answers as a solution. I'm well aware that this is a pretty tall order, but I also just can't think of another answer. At least I can't think of something else that we can actively do. Though, of course, if your aim is to start a cult instead, then I will refer you back to the last few sections. There really has never been a better time to try it. And with the internet, the best part is if you ever want to back out, it can be as simple as switching off your laptop.
But if you want to check out one of my previous videos about cults, this time the relationship between cult dynamics and pseudoscience, you can watch it right here. Thank you so much for watching and have a wonderful day.