You Could Be My Cult Leader

The Evil Series Part 1

NOTE: This is Part 1 of my 5 part Evil Series. I’ve wanted to write a series about evil for the newsletter for a couple of months. There are only so many newsletters I can write about my suffering, or staring at my baby’s face, or how much I love Carl Jung before I get bored of my voice. I’ve been working on a novel about a cult leader, so I figured I’d start there. If you like this kind of writing, I’d love to have your support via a paid subscription. I need to buy some new socks and a bottle of tequila.

"I will take you to the Promised Land, and you will be my chosen people. We will build a utopia where the evils of the world cannot reach us." - Jim Jones

“Look down at me, you see a fool; look up at me, you see a god; look straight at me, you see yourself.” - Charles Manson

I’m the kind of lonely person who’d love to join a cult.

I’d love for a mysterious man to approach me in an airport or an afterparty at 4 a.m., in one of those liminal spaces where I am open to new possibilities. He could seduce me with his dark features, rose-tinted glasses, and promises of a new life. I could join him on his compound, in the desert or by the sea, and subsume myself into all the rituals designed to prop up his God complex. 

Sure, it would all end horribly. It always does. Cult leaders are seldom content with their petty power. They need to keep pushing their followers until something breaks.  But it sounds better than sitting alone on a Friday night, watching Netflix and drinking a gin martini, trying to kill time because I don’t know what else I’m supposed to do with myself.

We’re drawn to stories about cults because cults are kind of romantic. They’re like a dark and mysterious family, the harbingers of forbidden knowledge. The cult exists on the cusp of society, in that beyond space where our understanding runs up to its limit. Life is full of secrets to be discovered. We put our ear to the ground to try to decipher the language of nature. We follow the tracks of deer to hidden springs where medicine grows. We hear a voice inside us that tells us to heat sand to become glass, and then transform that glass into machines.

You probably won’t meet God in a cult. You’ll probably just end up drinking poisoned Flavor Aid. You’ll become a domestic terrorist. You’ll be branded like cattle and married off to a sex pervert who already has six wives, or be promised heaven and get a bullet instead.

But, what if you did get a chance to meet God?

History is made by mysterious men with secrets, people who went to the edge of civilization and had a vision that changed the world. They are rare, sometimes impossible to distinguish from the egomaniac and the narcissist, but they do exist.

What would you be willing to do if you were given the chance to touch something hidden and divine?

What if you could be part of a mission that changed the world?

Sometimes, when watching an action movie, my throat tightens, and I become aware of an emptiness inside me. I want to be inside the screen doing important things worthy of a story, not on the outside watching it. God, I want a mission. I want to save a tankard from being blown up, or rescue the president. Instead of killing time on the couch, I’d like something to die for. 

I’m the perfect candidate for a cult.

What is a cult, exactly? The word cult now has a negative connotation, but it can really be any kind of organization that claims to have special knowledge. Laurie Smith writes in The Guardian:

“The essential difference is openness. Religions publish their beliefs openly in the Bible, Koran, Bhagavadgita, etc, and seek to persuade the public of their truth. Anyone who accepts these beliefs and the accompanying rituals is recognised as a member of the religion. There is a priesthood which is open to any (normally male) person with the necessary commitment. Religions therefore seek a mass following. Cults, however, rely on secret or special knowledge which is revealed only to initiates by the cult's founder or his/her chosen representatives. Beliefs aren't normally published. Everything depends on a personal relationship between the founder and followers, who are required to separate themselves from the rest of the world.”

The website Cult Escape has a quiz to determine if you may be in a cult. It has such questions as “Is your leader always right and therefore you are not allowed to criticise him/her, even if the criticism is true?”, and “Are members of your group discouraged from reading anything that is critical of the group?” It considers a cult as an organization with a leader with unquestioned authority, that demands ultimate loyalty and isolates its members from the outside world.

But really, what constitutes a cult is often a matter of perspective. Your local book club, run by an iron-fisted grandma named Maple, could be considered a cult. Three women who decide to meet on a rooftop balcony every week in secret, away from their husbands and kids, to drink and play with Tarot cards, could be considered a cult.

Even the family unit, with its special rules and rituals and secrets, might be a cult. Baby has a special password for her bedtime ritual. Mommy and Daddy have their own language. They share inside jokes and secret recipes and mysteries. And if needed to, they’d kill for each other without hesitation, for no other reason than an invisible force called love.

I’m probably already in a cult. Most of us are. There are already a hundred stupid little ideas I’d be willing to die for. We often look up to people who are even worse than the ideas themselves, smiling puppets who long ago decided they'd sacrifice their integrity to satisfy their ego. And it’s difficult to know what’s the truth and what isn’t, because the lies try to demand just as much of our time and attention.

The cult is not an accident of nature. It’s the basic structure of human organizations.

Still, maybe this all seems like quibbling. There’s a big difference between Maple at the book club demanding that everyone read another paranormal romance about werewolves and the Japanese doomsday cult, Aum Shinrikyo, who killed 13 people in a sarin gas attack in 1995 to hasten the end of the world. Maybe you’d go to VibeCamp and participate in some bizarre rationalist workshop with Aella, but you’d never join the Manson family and stab Sharon Tate to try to instigate race riots and destroy civilization.

Not me. I know better. I’m easily manipulated, prone to peer pressure, and liable to be swept up in the moment. It's easy for me to feel safe while I'm lying in bed writing this article about cults on my phone, but I know how much comfort distorts my sense of perspective. If a handsome cult leader fed me acid and took me on a trip to the edge of the woods, to the top of the moon, and told me that we could save the world, I’d probably do anything for them.

How do we protect ourselves from being exploited by a cult? We have to understand our weaknesses, and know to look for the signs of cult-like behavior.

Once we're committed to something, we can find it difficult to back down for various reasons, such as human pride, investment, or the fear of loss.

Deborah Layton writes about Jonestown:

"When I joined the People’s Temple, it was because I believed in Jim Jones’ vision of a society where everyone was equal, where there was no racism, and where the community took care of each other. The early days were filled with hope and a sense of purpose. It was only later, as we moved to Jonestown and became more isolated, that the darker side of the organization became apparent. By then, I was too deeply invested—emotionally, socially, and financially—to leave. Jones’ manipulation and control tactics kept me bound to the group, even as the reality became more and more horrifying."

The singer Lana Del Rey also talks about being in a cult:

“I used to be a member of an underground sect which was reigned by a guru. He surrounded himself with young girls. He thought that he had to break people first to build them up again. At the end I quit the sect.”

A lot of her music deals with themes of toxic romance and obsessive devotion. Her music video “Freak Like Me,” features a kind of hippie cult. Her song Ultraviolence is thought to be about the underground sect, with lyrics like “Jim raised me up/ He hurt me but it felt like true love/ Jim taught me that/ Loving him was never enough.”

Cult leaders sell a vision of a better world to manipulate their followers. We all hunger for a better world. Sometimes, we want it more than we want food, or water, or life itself. The dream can keep us going when we’re in a place of great despair. It pours through the cracks of our prison, like liquid gold, to nourish us.

Every human has a dream they hold inside of themselves, like a broken piece of heaven, that orients them toward the future.

The cult wants to capture that dream because it’s the most powerful thing you possess. With the dream, you can accomplish great good or great evil. It is the dream that builds civilizations, and it is the dream that can destroy everything we love, and turn our cities into ash.

The next time a cult leader approaches me in an airport bar, dark and smiling, I’ll have to remember I have something important I can’t let just anyone have. I have to be certain of my dream, and its purpose, so that I won’t end up on a deserted compound, drinking poison from a broken cup. I must make my dream powerful enough that a seductive promise can’t tear it away. I’ll fully understand the price of letting someone else control my dream. It’ll remain in my heart where it belongs.

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The second edition of Girl Like A Bomb (With a new Epilogue) is now available! Grab it either on Amazon or on the CLASH website.