Cultish

By Amanda Montell

10 min read

Why does it matter? Because the cult you'd never join is already speaking through you.

You'd spot a cult. You know the tells: the remote compound, the matching robes, the charismatic leader with his hand in the till. You're too educated, too skeptical, too self-aware to fall for any of it. The thing is, this book isn't really about those people. It's about the mechanism underneath — a specific linguistic toolkit that every charismatic leader deploys to attract, condition, and reshape followers. Loaded language. Thought-terminating clichés. Neither requires a commune. They're already running in your gym, your company Slack, your Instagram algorithm, and the quiet internal voice that tells you to push harder because you're almost there. The question this book actually asks isn't "how could anyone fall for a cult?" It's "what are you already inside — and do you know it?"

Cults Don't Need Kool-Aid — They Just Need the Right Six Words

Tasha Samar was thirteen when she heard the prayers through a studio window in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The voices chanted in a language she couldn't name — Gurmukhi, the script of Sikh sacred texts, as she'd learn — but it was how the people spoke that pulled her through the door. Within five years she had moved to Los Angeles, renamed herself Daya Kaur Khalsa (it said so on her California ID), and was teaching Kundalini yoga to Demi Moore and Russell Brand in Malibu.

The group was 3HO (Healthy, Happy, Holy Organization), built around a man named Yogi Bhajan who claimed to be a Kundalini yoga master sent to the West to raise consciousness. What it ran on was language: specific, managed, weaponized. Mantras were assigned to outcomes: one to attract a soul mate, one to accumulate wealth, one to produce children born into a higher spiritual frequency, by his cosmology. Obedience earned a new name (assigned by a numerology system he invented, purchased for a fee); defection promised a worse reincarnation. Ordinary English phrases were quietly inverted into threats. "Old soul," a gentle compliment outside the group, meant something different inside 3HO: a person who had failed across so many lifetimes they kept cycling back. Not wisdom. Spiritual failure.

Now meet Alyssa Clarke, who moved to LA the same year at the same age to start college. She joined CrossFit to avoid gaining the freshman fifteen. Within months she had a full private vocabulary: the gym was a "box," trainers were "coaches," workouts were "functional movements." Acronyms stacked up — WoD, DOMS, C2Bs — until she was no longer speaking the same language as anyone outside. She dropped $400 on Lululemon (whose shopping bags printed founder Chip Wilson's mantras). She cut gluten and sugar. She started sleeping with a trainer who had renamed himself Flex. Missing a workout meant public shame in a Facebook group.

Tasha ended up broke, friendless, and clinically traumatized. Alyssa ended up with a strained hamstring and too many leggings. The stakes couldn't be more different, and yet the machinery was identical. Both women woke up one day unable to speak recognizable English, held in place by jargon that made their group feel chosen and the outside world feel foreign. Three years out, Tasha still flinches when she hears "old soul." The definition changed. The reflex didn't.

Every Cult Leader Uses Two Linguistic Tools — and You Encounter Both Before Lunch

Jim Jones redefined the word "accidents." He told his followers that accidents only happen to people who deserve them — an ordinary word quietly colonized with a verdict. If someone got sick, suffered a loss, had any setback at all, a single syllable delivered the conclusion: you brought this on yourself. No drugs, no physical coercion, no raised voice. The word did the work. That's loaded language: move a word's meaning far enough, and ordinary conversation becomes a control system. Every time followers used the word, they reinforced the framework Jones had built into it.

The second tool runs the mechanism in reverse. Where loaded language fires the emotional response, thought-terminating clichés cut the reasoning that might question it. The psychiatrist Robert J. Lifton named these "semantic stop signs": catchphrases so tidy and certain that they end inquiry rather than advance it. Jones kept several ready — "It's all the media's fault," "Everybody dies," "It's out of our hands" — deploying them whenever a follower's concern threatened to produce an inconvenient answer. Heaven's Gate, the UFO-based California group whose members died in a mass suicide in 1997, was run by a man named Marshall Applewhite. He had an elegant variant: if you found his cosmology unconvincing, the problem wasn't the cosmology. You simply hadn't been "bestowed the gift of recognition." Doubt, reframed as personal deficiency, has nowhere to go.

Three-Quarters of People Ignored Their Own Eyesight to Agree With a Group — Including, Probably, You

Imagine you're in a room with five strangers. Someone holds up four vertical lines and asks which two match. The answer is obvious. But one by one, the other five people point to the wrong pair. What do you do?

In 1951, Solomon Asch ran exactly this setup at Swarthmore College. The five were confederates, actors playing participants. The one real subject had working eyes and a plainly correct answer. And yet three out of four chose the group. They went with the room.

The compulsion to conform isn't a character flaw or a sign of fragile intelligence. It's so close to universal it barely qualifies as variation. The fear of social exclusion activates the same distress pathways as physical pain. Charismatic leaders, from 3HO's Yogi Bhajan to CrossFit's Greg Glassman, didn't invent this vulnerability. They found it sitting in everyone and learned to aim it.

What's changed is that the institutions built to absorb this hunger for belonging have been hollowing out. By 2019, four in ten millennials had dropped any formal religious affiliation — nearly twenty percentage points more than seven years earlier. But the hunger didn't leave with the institutions. A Harvard Divinity School study found that young people still want what religion delivers: meaning, community, purpose, ritual. They're not finding it at church anymore. So they look for it at a spinning studio, in a wellness influencer's comment section, in a multi-level marketing team call.

Tara Isabella Burton has a name for these people: the Remixed. They piece together bespoke spiritual lives from whatever's available: a meditation app, a horoscope, a Reform Shabbat dinner. She includes herself in that count. The mix doesn't matter; the function does. Anything that provides all four will start to operate like a religion. By that logic, SoulCycle qualifies. So does CrossFit. So, probably, does something you attend every week without calling it church.

The ground shifts when you see it clearly: susceptibility to cultish influence isn't stupidity or desperation. It's what a healthy social animal looks like when its habitat has stopped providing what it needs.

The People Who Died at Jonestown Were Not Weak — They Were Idealists With Everything to Gain

A sociologist named Eileen Barker tracked over a thousand people through recruitment workshops for the Unification Church (the group its critics called the Moonies) and found exactly the opposite of what the brainwashing story predicts. That story says cult recruits are desperate, broken, their critical faculties not quite up to the task. The data said otherwise.

In the 1970s, nine out of ten workshop attendees simply walked away. They came, decided it wasn't for them, and left. Of the ten percent who joined, half departed on their own within two years. The five percent who stayed long-term weren't who conventional wisdom would pick: not low-intelligence, not psychologically fragile. Barker ran a control group with exactly those traits (unhappy childhoods, limited education) and they either never joined or left within weeks. The people most assumed to be vulnerable were the least susceptible. The committed converts were the opposite: intelligent, optimistic, raised by activists and educators to find the good in people, sometimes even when it hurt them.

So what made them stay? Not weakness. A genuine stake in the promises.

Historian Sikivu Hutchinson's analysis of Jonestown makes this precise. Black women died in disproportionate numbers on November 18, 1978. The standard explanation, that despair made them more susceptible, gets it backwards. Jim Jones had real ties to the Black Panthers, Angela Davis, and left-leaning Black churches across San Francisco. Black women in the 1970s were pushed to the margins of the white feminist movement and sidelined in civil rights organizations run mostly by men. Jones offered something genuinely rare: a political space where their voices might count. Hutchinson's conclusion is stark. These women staked everything on that promise because, for once, there seemed to be everything to gain.

Confirmation bias did the rest. Cult language is deliberately vague; phrases stay amorphous so each follower can project whatever meaning they need. Laura Johnston Kohl, who survived only because she happened to be away from Jonestown that day, described it plainly: Jones always addressed her political priorities, and she put blinders on for everything else. Not tricked — choosing, as we all do, to hear what she already hoped was true. Her solution, once she got out, would take a while to find.

That's the mechanism. Language doesn't override belief; it licenses you to believe what you already want to. That's why the most persuasive cult leaders are never the ones who argue hardest — they're the ones who find the hope already sitting in you and aim language at it. The most dangerous convert isn't the desperate one. It's the idealist with every reason to leap.

The Amway Rally That Ends With 'I Love You' Uses the Exact Same Playbook as Your Boss's All-Hands

The Rocky theme song hits, and a man in a suit walks out to four thousand people losing their minds.

He's an Amway "Diamond," one of the company's elite few who've supposedly built businesses from nothing, and his keynote is a PowerPoint of yachts, vacation homes, and Cancún sunsets. The crowd chants "Ain't it great?" and "I believe!" Amway's top titles climb from Ruby through Pearl, Emerald, Diamond, Crown Ambassador, each rung promising you're getting somewhere real. The session closes with everyone singing "God Bless America," many of them crying. Then, one by one, uplines look their downlines in the eye and say "I love you."

Here's what happens next, for most of those downlines: they spend years trying to build a network that statistically almost never pays, and when they finally try to leave, the people who said "I love you" ghost them without explanation. A former distributor described it precisely: she'd been embraced, flattered, told she was genuinely cared for as a person, and discovered, the moment she wanted out, that none of it was actually about her. The love was a retention mechanism. Its withdrawal was the exit cost.

That's the Amway playbook. It is also, in structure, your company's all-hands meeting.

When everyone in an organization speaks in the exact same tone using the exact same words, and those words sound like the person in charge, something is wrong. That's the diagnostic for when a workplace has gone cultish. Management scholar Manfred Kets de Vries spent fifty years studying corporate culture and kept arriving at it. At Amazon, Jeff Bezos codified fourteen "Leadership Principles" (vague directives like "think big" and "dive deep") and required new employees to memorize all 511 words, then pass a quiz. Those who recited perfectly earned the right to call themselves "Peculiar." From then on, they were expected to tear apart each other's ideas in meetings, "even when doing so is uncomfortable or exhausting." In his 1999 shareholder letter, Bezos wrote that he constantly reminded employees "to be afraid, to wake up every morning terrified." That is not a company encouraging people to have a life and language of their own.

The exit cost at Amazon is not the same as leaving an Amway downline. The exit cost at Amway is not the same as leaving Heaven's Gate. But the machinery — manufactured intimacy, in-group language, the withdrawal of belonging as punishment for departure — is the same machinery running at different intensities. What distinguishes a dangerous cult from a merely cultish workplace is how much it costs to leave, not what it asks you to believe.

The question isn't whether you've encountered this toolkit. It's whether the version you've encountered charges a fee you could afford to pay. Which raises the only question worth sitting with: if you already know this, what do you do with it?

You're Already Speaking Cultish — the Only Question Is Whether You Know It

Awareness is the protection against cultish influence: the ongoing, deliberate awareness that you are already inside something, and that knowing this is what keeps you tethered to yourself.

That distinction has a track record. In 1993, the FBI arrived at the Branch Davidian compound in Waco with rifles, tanks, and tear gas, already certain it was another Jonestown. David Koresh, who led the Branch Davidians, was violent and manipulative, and almost certainly ordered the conditions that killed nearly eighty people. Once a group gets labeled a cult, the label does the reasoning.

The livable alternative is what Montell calls a "vigilant twinkle": the awareness that any group you belong to involves some degree of shared metaphor and make-believe. The twinkle isn't detachment. It's full participation with a private asterisk: feeling the pull of the ritual, letting the chant work, wearing the brand, while holding one part of yourself in reserve, belonging to no one but you. You can be inside a community and know you're inside it, aware that the language is designed to move you, that the rituals create belonging on purpose, that the warmth is real even if the cosmology isn't. Laura Johnston Kohl — the same Jonestown survivor we met earlier — found her way to this after escaping the most lethal single example in American history. She replaced her one-commune life with involvement in several separate communities: chanting, organizing, belonging, but in multiple directions at once, so no single group held her entire identity as collateral. The protection wasn't cynicism. It was distribution.

Chant, hashtag, manifest, show up to spin class, recite the company values out loud if you have to. Just notice that you could stop. You'd still be you. You are already speaking some version of Cultish. The only question is whether you know it well enough to find your way back to yourself when the app closes.

The Last Thing the Vocabulary Lets Go Of

Frank Lyford, a Heaven's Gate member who left four years before the 1997 mass suicide, still calls it "the classroom." Not as a joke. Not with irony. The language stayed in him long after everything else had gone — and that's the most useful thing Montell leaves you with. If the words are the last thing to leave, they're also the first thing worth watching. You don't have to avoid every group with its own vocabulary and rituals — that would mean avoiding almost everything worth belonging to. You just have to stay curious about whether the words you're using to describe your life are still genuinely yours. Strip off the linguistic uniform at the end of the day. If you can still hear yourself thinking in your own voice underneath it, that self — the one that exists before and after the vocabulary — is still intact.