Why People Join Cults

No, it's not because they're lost and "just want to belong."

Francisco Goya, Witches’ Sabbath, 1789

Like many others, I used to think cult members should take responsibility for their choices.

That they were just lost, forgotten people, who didn’t have their own fulfilling life and had to glom on to someone else’s. That they were looking to belong somewhere, and just because of that lovely feeling of belonging, they renounced their previous life because they finally — ohh, finally! — felt loved.

I watched the documentaries. And though I felt sorry for the members, I couldn’t quite empathize. We tend to do this thing when we hear about horrible stories, as humans. We immediately look for “how this would never happen to me.” We do it with car crashes, assaults, illnesses — we want to know exactly how it happened so we can tell ourselves how we could have never been the victim. Sometimes we might even be correct, but either way it’s a protection mechanism. And it often takes a giant humbling by life to make us realize that sometimes, it could have been us, after all, even when we thought that would be impossible.

This attitude toward cult members I described above is the common one. I’ve even seen people who write about cults slip into the idea that cult members were just lost when they joined, looking for something missing in their life. There is another fairly common narrative, especially popular in social media comments about cult documentaries, that says that the cult members were bad people themselves (which is again, another way to say, “I never would have acted that way, so that would never have been me”).

And at the same time, we are living in the golden age of cults, and many of us are starting to wake up to the fact that mind control is everywhere — not just from some delusional guy thinking he’s the next reincarnation of an ancient alien, but from our own governments, our media, and in our personal relationships.

Mind control is how cult leaders manipulate their followers. It is how narcissists manipulate the people around them to keep their supply of drama, praise, and attention flowing. It is in our relationships with our parents. It is in our relationships with our children. It is in our romantic relationships, in the articles we read, in the groups we join, in the algorithms we scroll through, on the posters we walk by on the street.

It is so slow and subtle that we don’t realize how easy it is for it to take over our minds. We think it would be obvious, that we would know immediately if someone entered our mind without our permission. But unless we have had the experience with it, it’s not easy to notice. It is like the air we breathe, the smells to which we become accustomed. When we live in a city we often don’t notice just how loud the sirens are until we spend a week out in the country, listening to crickets under the stars.

I will tell you the reason why people join cults:

They have been deceived.

Deception is the only reason for joining a cult. Deception is the only reason for having gotten involved in a relationship with a narcissistic person. (Assuming you are a regular person, and not a fellow sociopath).

And while there can be many lower-level (but still devastating) types of deception involved in cults (financial exploitation, the beliefs the organization really has, the way members are actually treated, the lies that are about everything from how much money they are making to what that person said one time, etc) — when I say “deception” I am speaking to something higher-level, bigger, life-exploding:

The deception of evil pretending to be good.

You will not see evil in front of you because it looks like good. It says the same words, it dresses in the same clothing. It is charismatic. Sometimes it is even more beautiful, more compelling, more magnetic on the surface than actual good. The devil writes beautiful lyrics, poetry, melodies, has a beautiful voice. Some are lucky and have a good feel for this early. Most of us only learn when we have been tricked by this effectively and are humbled and intrigued enough to learn the lesson.

It’s different than a lie. We all have the experience of being lied to, of being mistreated, or having something not turn out the way we thought it would. These things are unfortunate parts of life, and they even happen from people or groups who at their core are good.

This is not the same as a person or a group pretending to be good when their core has been taken over by evil.

In a relationship with a narcissist you form a relationship with a person who does not in fact exist. You form a relationship with how this person presents him or herself to you over time, which is just the narcissist mirroring back to you the things you like about or aspire to have in yourself. It is smoke, a mirage. You are building a relationship the way you do with any other person you love in your life. The narcissist is creating a holograph for you to interact with. He tells you how to view him. She tells you how to interpret what she does.

You form a relationship with evil itself.

So when it collapses, the hardest part is realizing that this thing you felt you had a deep connection with, loved so much, might have given your life to… was never really there.

It was just pretend. The whole thing was pretend. You thought it existed, and it did not. This person never loved you, because this person never existed in the way you thought they did. Your feelings were real; theirs were a manipulation. You never really existed to them either; your qualities were just bits and pieces for them to form into an image of themselves.

Cults aren’t looking for broken misfits. It’s much better if a cult can attract charismatic, productive, skilled and thriving members. Those people will be wonderful spokespeople for the cult; they will bring in money and more people. They will make the cult look important and legitimate. There will be some strugglers who enter, but they will always be the more disposable ones to the cult.

We all want to belong. We all want to feel loved. These qualities are not unique to cult members.

We are all susceptible to mind control and manipulation. We are all capable of being deceived. Some of us are more trusting and idealistic than others. But that doesn’t mean the cynical among us are safe, it means that they simply have different buttons to press in order to take control. I actually think that cynical people can be more susceptible than others to the subtlest kind of mind control tactics, because a cynical and pessimistic attitude toward life and God is already evidence of evil working its way in.

The cultural narrative we tend to have toward cult members (and all victims of mind control and narcissistic abuse) is especially unfortunate because an effective cult teaches members to doubt themselves. So when a member breaks free, they already place high blame on themselves for it occurring. It is common to have feelings like, “How could I have been so stupid,” “How did I not know,” and “I did this to myself.”

Don’t get me wrong — it is of course valuable for all of us to examine what our role was in any circumstance, what parts of our own conditioning and patterning were at play, and to learn from those realizations. It is not helpful for anybody to take on a permanent identity of being a victim and live the rest of their days blaming everything on everybody else and feeling sorry for themselves. But those things are separate from and do not negate the neutral fact of having been a victim of deception.

As Mark Vicente put it, “Nobody joins a cult. They join a good thing. And then they realize they were fucked.”