I love you guys but I think a lot of you are the kind of people who are susceptible to falling in with a cult.
i know this was an offhand shitpost, but i couldn’t let this pass by.
as a survivor of a cult: please trust me when I say that the most dangerous mistake people can make wrt cults is thinking there is a special “kind” of person who is susceptible to one
anyone, given the “right” set of circumstances, can be victimized in such a way.
and they don’t always look obvious from the outside, contrary to what you’ve seen on tv and in movies. it’s not always about weird clothes and glassy eyed people.
i thought people who got caught up in cults were stupid, weak-minded, easily led. I was “too smart” to fall for that. but the kinds of people who perpetrate cultish abuse are master manipulators who are very good at sinking their claws into people. like most abusers they know when and how to fuck you up.
cause the thing is, cults are ultimately just a very specific environment for abuse, and if you correctly understand that it’s neither helpful nor appropriate to blame other kinds of abuse survivors for what happened to them, watch how you talk about cults.
Advanced Bonewits’ Cult Danger Evaluation Frame was designed WRT to religious neopagan groups but is applicable to literally any group of folks. read it and keep those signs in your head.
I’ve had a few people reply to my reblog saying “Yeah …nah. I’d never fall for that. Those signs are all glaringly obvious.” But I want you to pause and consider:
How many unpaid internships fit more than half these criteria?
How many entry level service jobs?
Football in the state of Texas is a cult.
There are a lot of tech companies, video game companies, special effects companies, and 3D animation studios that run like cults. Replace the word “religion” with the word “company culture.” Replace the word “reverend” with “team leader.”
I had a door-to-door sales job for 6 months that ticked more than half these boxes.
A lot of non-religious non-profits and charities like Greenpeace rely on people signing up for a monthly donation to stay funded. In religious parlance, we call that a “tithe.” The way these organizations manage their sales teams (the people you see on street corners with clipboards) is often very cultish. Unsurprising, considering the job essentially boils down to proselytizing to the masses, “Do you have a minute to help the environment?”
If you live in Northern California you might have heard of Cafe Gratitude, the raw vegan restaurant chain. Maybe you wouldn’t be surprised that this place ran like a cult, but I had to fight to persuade a number of otherwise intelligent and discerning college friends that applying for a job there was a bad fuckin’ idea.
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How we read signs depends greatly upon the context in which those signs present themselves. People often don’t notice the signs that an organization is behaving like a cult because they expect the cult leader to wear robes and sandals call himself, ‘the prophet.’
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