Cults Like Us: Jane Borden on Puritans, Power & American Exceptionalism (Part 1)

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[00:00:28] [SPEAKER_03] Das Podcast ist für informational purposes only und nicht beachtet, legal, medical, oder mental-healt-advise. Die views und opinions expressed do nicht necessarily reflect die official policy oder position of the Podcast und sind nicht intended zu malign any religion, group, club, organization, business, individual, anyone, oder anything. Ich bin Sarah Edmondson.

[00:00:54] [SPEAKER_02] Und ich bin Anthony Nippy Ames. Und das ist A Little Bit Culty. Cults are commonplace now. From fandoms to fads, we're examining them all. We look at what happens when things that seem like a great thing at first go bad.

[00:01:07] [SPEAKER_03] Every week we chat with survivors, experts, and whistleblowers for real culty stories told directly by the people who lived through them. Because we want you to learn a few things that we've had to learn the hard way.

[00:01:18] [SPEAKER_02] For example, if you think you're too smart to get sucked into something culty, you might be prime recruitment material. And who knows? You could already be in a cult. If you're not aware of your programming, you're probably being programmed. So keep listening to find out.

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[00:01:51] [SPEAKER_03] Welcome to season seven of A Little Bit Culty. Welcome back to a very special episode of A Little Bit Culty.

[00:02:10] [SPEAKER_02] That was your NPR voice again.

[00:02:11] [SPEAKER_03] It was. It was a little bit of a movie announcer slash NPR voice. Yeah, yeah. I want to get back into voice work. I'm just like a subtle audition.

[00:02:20] [SPEAKER_02] That's your plug? It's a subtle audition tape to the world. All right, now we're still in the cult world.

[00:02:24] [SPEAKER_03] Still doing this. Still plugging away. This is a smorgasbord.

[00:02:27] [SPEAKER_02] Speaking of cults, when people think of cults, most people think of similar things, wouldn't you say? Mm-hmm. A hippie guru from the 60s, or some guy claiming to be the Messiah while stockpiling guns, saying God wants me to sleep with your daughter, or maybe a yoga instructor peddling expensive enlightenment courses. You probably don't picture buckled hats and muskets, correct?

[00:02:49] [SPEAKER_03] No.

[00:02:49] [SPEAKER_02] No, me neither.

[00:02:50] [SPEAKER_03] But we should. Our guest today is Jane Borden, an author and journalist who's written for Vanity Fair, New York Times Magazine, and many others. Her latest book, which we are obsessed with, Cults Like Us, Why Doomsday Thinking Drives America, and it explores how the Puritans were basically a high control doomsday cult.

[00:03:08] [SPEAKER_02] Yes, and how their legacy lives on. From American exceptionalism to an us-versus-them mentality, Puritan influence is everywhere, even in pop culture. Jane argues the superhero and cowboy archetypes can be traced back to the Puritans.

[00:03:22] [SPEAKER_03] So it turns out that America's Puritan past makes us uniquely vulnerable to culty thinking. Well, not me, because I'm Canadian, but I'm sure that's a whole different ball of wax. So in this episode, we'll get into the appeal of being controlled in times of crisis, and why so many Americans embrace doomsday thinking. The end of the world is nigh. It turns out a vulnerable society can fall into the same culty traps as vulnerable individuals. Go figure.

[00:03:47] [SPEAKER_02] Jane has a really unique, thought-provoking perspective on cults and history. So let's welcome her to our show.

[00:03:54] [SPEAKER_03] And note, this will be a two-parter. Enjoy. Jane Borden, welcome to A Little Bit Culty. Thanks for having me. I love that we have matching translucent hipster glasses.

[00:04:22] [SPEAKER_01] Is that what you call those?

[00:04:22] [SPEAKER_03] I lose them all the time, because when they're off, I can't see them. Yes, it's a problem. I feel you. When you first reached out and I saw the press sheet for your book, I was like, oh no, we have a lot of overlap. But truthfully, it's not as much overlap as I thought. There's some overlap in our books, but our tones are very different and you have so much content that we, some of it we haven't even heard of.

[00:04:43] [SPEAKER_02] I feel like I was reading a history book. Yeah, the history.

[00:04:46] [SPEAKER_03] So we're so excited. Oh, thanks. Yeah. It's just kind of rare now in the cult recovery space. Like even new cults, I'm like, oh, there they go again. They're love bombing and they're, you know, like we've kind of heard it, but I didn't know this history. So I'm really excited to talk to you about it.

[00:04:59] [SPEAKER_01] Thanks.

[00:05:00] [SPEAKER_03] I'm excited about your book too. Excellent. So you've worked on this for five years. Yeah. That's a long time. It's a long time.

[00:05:07] [SPEAKER_02] What was the impetus?

[00:05:08] [SPEAKER_01] Well, I've been really distraught about the division in America and just been trying to figure out why that being something that I thought I could do since it started. Maybe this is a way I can help. I can try to help bridge this divide. And so I started trying to investigate why it was happening. And I had been reporting on cults for Vanity Fair and I was a religious studies major and I was raised Protestant.

[00:05:36] [SPEAKER_01] So all of this stuff was sort of bubbling around in my mind and I just started seeing cult-like thinking. Once I really understood it, I started seeing it everywhere in America, in entertainment, in politics, in pop culture. And I was like, hmm, cults are fueled by division. Yes. So these things have got to be connected and I just started digging and pulling the thread and pulling the thread. And eventually one day it dawned on me that the Puritans were kind of a cult. They were basically a cult.

[00:06:04] [SPEAKER_04] Mm-hmm.

[00:06:04] [SPEAKER_03] Right. And that's one of your arguments, that America functions as the world's largest cult driven by Puritan credos. Can you kind of unpack some of those credos and explain how they make Americans uniquely vulnerable to cult-like thinking?

[00:06:16] [SPEAKER_01] Yeah. So like I said, I think we were founded by a group that most people would look at today and call a cult. More specifically, the Puritans were a high control doomsday group in my estimation. And their ideas, their doomsday ideologies didn't go away. They became the foundation of American culture.

[00:06:34] [SPEAKER_01] And so, for example, our desire for a strong man to come and rescue us, our knee-jerk anti-authoritarianism, our tendency to worship the wealthy and punish the poor as sinners. All of these things come from the Puritans. The grace-nature divide, the idea that the self is split, that there's grace that comes from God and that nature is evil.

[00:06:59] [SPEAKER_01] These things are, as I said, at the foundation of American culture in ways that we don't recognize or acknowledge. And as a result of that lack of awareness, we are vulnerable. We're credulous to con artists and cult leaders and demagogues and would-be autocrats. And I think we're seeing a lot of that today.

[00:07:21] [SPEAKER_02] Do you think it's proprietary to American culture or do you think European cultures have it too or the origins of it might be European or wherever? I don't know how far back it goes.

[00:07:31] [SPEAKER_01] Certainly. As you all know, cult-like thinking is all over the world. I, it's baked into our DNA as a species, us versus them thinking in particular. I like to say that homo sapiens have cult-like thinking in our DNA and then monotheism highlighted that strand of DNA. And then America took that line and turned it into, you know, the founding document for a nation.

[00:07:53] [SPEAKER_03] And every movie, every movie and film and like, I really loved, I'd never heard of the term the monomyth before.

[00:08:00] [SPEAKER_01] The American monomyth, yeah.

[00:08:02] [SPEAKER_03] Can you elaborate on that?

[00:08:03] [SPEAKER_02] Sure. Noah Ivald Harari gets a little bit into that, the myth that everyone has to get behind.

[00:08:09] [SPEAKER_01] So these two scholars, Robert Juett and John Shelton Lawrence, RIP, whose work is incredible. I found this book, their work comes from the 70s. The book's called The American Monomyth. I really can't recommend it enough. But basically, they were talking during the Vietnam War, trying to figure out how Americans could be stomaching this violence that was showing up in their living rooms on TV screens for the first time as well.

[00:08:36] [SPEAKER_01] And they eventually found this pattern in American entertainment, which they dubbed the American monomyth. And the narrative that's common is that of a small Edenic-like community that's under some kind of threat. And they're unable to rescue themselves. You know, the police force is inept. The politicians are corrupt. And then suddenly this loner appears. And it's always a guy. And it's always an outsider.

[00:09:05] [SPEAKER_01] Even if he's from the community, he's like an outsider within the community. And he saves everyone through violence. It's always violence. And it's precision violence. Only the bad guys get it. But everyone else is saved. And because of that precise nature, it's cleansing violence and therefore redemptive. And we see this in the Western genre, in comic books.

[00:09:31] [SPEAKER_01] Now, of course, in all the superhero movies, all the vigilante films, all the disaster films. It's even in Jaws. It's everywhere. And it makes it really hard to watch TV and film now.

[00:09:43] [SPEAKER_02] It really is hard to watch that stuff.

[00:09:45] [SPEAKER_01] Once you see it.

[00:09:46] [SPEAKER_02] It's no mystery.

[00:09:47] [SPEAKER_01] Yeah. But as Jewett and Lawrence argue that the result of this conditioning that we're getting through our entertainment, through this narrative that we love so much, is that it leads us away from the messy, laborious process of democracy. And makes us fantasize and wish for a dictator who will show up and just solve all our problems for us so we don't have to do anything ourselves.

[00:10:14] [SPEAKER_02] Well, you know, one of the things I think you may have touched on this in your book and I had kind of awareness of how it lays out a template for you to follow your own like, what I call it, like thirst for revenge. Like whenever I watch one of these movies, I watch myself wanting the revenge for the hero. And then how do you not go out into your world with that kind of template that you've been programmed by? So in a lot of ways, you don't have a chance. Yeah, that's my thesis.

[00:10:43] [SPEAKER_02] You don't have a chance in a lot of ways, you know.

[00:10:46] [SPEAKER_01] Yeah, we're being conditioned and it's very tempting to vanquish your enemy rather than find some way to have a conversation with them, you know.

[00:10:57] [SPEAKER_03] And so that very first enemy of Americans, and by the way, I'm Canadian, but I live here now.

[00:11:02] [SPEAKER_02] We're indoctrinating.

[00:11:03] [SPEAKER_03] I want to ask you about that.

[00:11:05] [SPEAKER_02] Karen is immune to all this, by the way.

[00:11:06] [SPEAKER_03] My grandparents were British aristocracy on one side. So like I have some very interesting templates in my DNA, but that's not relevant right now. But I am fascinated by the history, but the first enemy of the Puritans were the British because they had to rebel against them and cut those ties and then establish their own and then...

[00:11:25] [SPEAKER_02] An empire.

[00:11:25] [SPEAKER_03] An empire. And then what happened? Like, can you give us the brief history of the last 400 years, if you don't mind, in relation to cults?

[00:11:34] [SPEAKER_02] Can I add a caveat there? Yeah. Because I had this when I was thinking it's related to what you just asked. I drew the parallel of like, I remember there was this whole poll about who would go to Mars. It was like five years ago and like 85,000 people signed up. And I remember thinking, why would you want to go to Mars? In the similar sense of why would you get on a boat for three months and go to the United States? So I imagine not only are you getting the Puritans leaving, but you're probably getting people that were a little bit desperate and maybe a little bit extreme to just go, I'm going to get on a boat for three months.

[00:12:01] [SPEAKER_02] So you've filtered it for a certain kind of...

[00:12:04] [SPEAKER_03] Person anyway?

[00:12:05] [SPEAKER_02] Person to come here and start a country. I'm reluctant to say like the crazies or the people that are extreme would get on a boat and do that, or the desperate. So...

[00:12:14] [SPEAKER_01] Yes, the desperate for sure. And as you guys know, that's when people join a cult is when they're desperate. And that's when they fall for cult-like thinking at the society level. People also extreme. So the Puritans and the pilgrims before them were extremists. They were radical Protestants. At the time they were called hot Protestants, which I love. And they were different, of course. The pilgrims were separatists and the Puritans... And they weren't called that at the time.

[00:12:43] [SPEAKER_01] And the Puritans were called that. It was an insult. They didn't call themselves that. But the Puritans wanted to purify the Church of England. So in the Reformation, Protestantism was developed. The Church of England set itself up to be distinct from the Catholic Church. But the Puritans thought they weren't distinct enough. They hadn't purged enough remnants of Catholicism. And therefore, Jesus wasn't going to come back.

[00:13:09] [SPEAKER_01] And the pilgrims were like, there is no way to purify the Church of England. Be done with all of it. And that was treason because the church and the state were one in England. And so the pilgrims fled because they were being chased. They first were in Holland. And then eventually they came to Cape Cod in 1620. They were headed for Staten Island, another detail I love. They got way off course. And then Cape Cod, of course, is much colder than Staten Island.

[00:13:38] [SPEAKER_01] And that's mostly why within a few months half of them were dead. The number of adult women eventually shrunk to four, which is, as an adult woman, a terrifying prospect. Yeah. So and then the Puritans started coming 10 years later in 1630. And yes, in both colonies, about half of the people there were not necessarily hot Protestants, although they were all for the most part Protestant, being that that was the national religion at the time in England.

[00:14:06] [SPEAKER_01] However, the radical Protestants held the power and defined the culture in both of those communities. And although they were distinct, their commonalities are what I'm interested in. And that's really why I group them together. The radical Protestantism is what was so culty about them and their ideas, specifically the doomsday nature of it.

[00:14:28] [SPEAKER_01] So certain factions of the Protestants in England had become obsessed with the apocalypse and doomsday thinking, and they were starting to make predictions about when it would happen. And, you know, the Pope was the Antichrist and all of these things needed to be done in order to get the church to the point where Jesus would return. It was all about bringing Jesus back, which, as we've already alluded to, is when you get to see all your enemies vanquished and when you're chosen to go up to heaven.

[00:14:58] [SPEAKER_01] And it wasn't just about being chosen and rescued. It was also about seeing your enemies punished. And that is very American to this day. We want the bloodshed.

[00:15:11] [SPEAKER_02] It's ancient Hollywood right there.

[00:15:13] [SPEAKER_01] Mm-hmm.

[00:15:14] [SPEAKER_02] That is the template right there.

[00:15:16] [SPEAKER_01] Mm-hmm.

[00:15:16] [SPEAKER_02] Right?

[00:15:17] [SPEAKER_01] It's the book of Revelation.

[00:15:18] [SPEAKER_02] No, it's every book.

[00:15:19] [SPEAKER_01] We can't stop retelling that story.

[00:15:20] [SPEAKER_03] We're obsessed with it. With the 144,000 saved, which now I only know about from doing this podcast, not from reading the Bible.

[00:15:28] [SPEAKER_01] Yeah, that number is so often trotted out, even in groups that are not biblical or vaguely Christian or Jewish at all. It's fascinating to me that number's staying power. It's because of Revelations, correct? I'm not sure where that number comes from. Is it Revelation? I'm pretty sure. It is Revelation. You're right. Yeah?

[00:15:47] [SPEAKER_02] Mm-hmm. That number doesn't take into account inflation.

[00:15:49] [SPEAKER_04] It does.

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[00:19:16] [SPEAKER_03] Make mealtime effortless. Trust me. You'll love it. You've heard from our sponsors. Now let's get back to a little bit CULTI, shall we? Okay, so back to the history. And you cover a lot. And we want, obviously, people to read the book. It's really fascinating and pulls together a lot of things that, some of which we've discussed on our podcast, some of which we've not,

[00:19:40] [SPEAKER_03] but it almost like it weaves a tapestry that just pulls everything together in a really interesting thesis, which I loved.

[00:19:47] [SPEAKER_02] Well, I mean, that becomes a through line for almost any ideology. What's the appeal of doomsday thinking?

[00:19:52] [SPEAKER_01] So, doomsday thinking has been with us since the birth of monotheism. Some scholars find traces of it in ancient Egypt. That's up for contest. But certainly, with the development of Zoroastrianism, we see this idea of one God and that God's chosen people, the people who were smart enough to follow that God, are going to get saved and everyone else will burn. And then that heavily influenced Judaism. Then that's how it influenced Jesus, who was an apocalypticist.

[00:20:21] [SPEAKER_01] And the staying power of apocalyptic thinking is that it gives people hope. People who are being oppressed will grasp at this idea of divine rescue. And that's not always a bad thing. As I said, it's been shown to give communities hope. It bonds communities together. It helps them find a way through struggle and oppression. The problem is when the threat or the oppression is manufactured, right?

[00:20:47] [SPEAKER_01] And then you're just manipulating people because we are latently indoctrinated into these ideas of divine rescue. And usually the reason to manipulate people is to exploit them. And so that's why I focus so much on the vulnerability of Americans as a result of our latent indoctrination into these ideas because I see us being exploited again and again and again. And as you know, anyone can fall for a cult and anyone can fall for a cult like thinking at the society level.

[00:21:13] [SPEAKER_01] And so even these ideas I trace from the Puritans, for example, worshiping the wealthy and anti-authoritarianism and anti-intellectualism, etc. Even those ideas themselves are not necessarily problematic. Sometimes they are. The problem is when we get exploited by them. And so my goal in pointing them out is to show the magic trick, right? Because I think once we can recognize it and acknowledge it, we'll stop falling for it.

[00:21:40] [SPEAKER_03] Totally. That is one place where our books overlap is that we both want to inoculate people. Mm-hmm. And you're doing it through history. We're doing it through sharing our survivor stories. And I think it's so important because once you see the magic trick, and ironically, by the way, I have to just say, I don't know if you know this, in the NXIVM curriculum, that was actually in the module. Do you remember that, Neppy? Mm-hmm. It was in the module about what they called shifting.

[00:22:03] [SPEAKER_02] Do you like magic tricks?

[00:22:04] [SPEAKER_03] Do you like magic tricks? You do it. Do your impression.

[00:22:06] [SPEAKER_02] No, no. Yeah. That is, is a module that actually starts off. Do you like magic tricks?

[00:22:13] [SPEAKER_03] Yeah. And, and basically what they show is-

[00:22:16] [SPEAKER_02] The con.

[00:22:17] [SPEAKER_03] The con. But we thought we were learning it so we could see it out in the world. We didn't know that Keith was showing us what he's doing to us.

[00:22:23] [SPEAKER_02] Well, it occurred to many people, you know, I mean, Jane, you'd be interested in this. It occurred to a lot of people that like, wait, how do you know Keith's not doing it to us? So that was kind of the beauty of his con is he gave us the con and it kind of made people disarmed and unassuming that he would be giving us the playbook to something he might be doing to us. Mm-hmm. So there was a lot of people that were like, wait, what if Keith's doing the same thing?

[00:22:46] [SPEAKER_03] I never had that thought.

[00:22:47] [SPEAKER_02] I mean, we talked about it.

[00:22:49] [SPEAKER_03] Well, not to later, but I mean, I was already, already hooked.

[00:22:51] [SPEAKER_02] It occurred to me. I just didn't see it.

[00:22:53] [SPEAKER_01] They almost always tell us what they're doing. Yeah.

[00:22:56] [SPEAKER_02] Yeah. And that's what I found out when there was videos and books about it.

[00:23:00] [SPEAKER_03] When we educated ourselves after the fact. Yeah. So you just sort of said this, but just to piggyback off what you said that our Puritan roots make us more susceptible to cults and culty thinking. Where does American exceptionalism fit into this template? When did that start?

[00:23:15] [SPEAKER_01] Chosen nation, chosen people started from the jump. So the pilgrims and Puritans came here for the most part because they thought they were out running Armageddon. So they thought that God was about to rain down terror and punish England because England had failed to remove the Catholicism essentially. And so they thought the end is coming. The end is near. It's any day now.

[00:23:45] [SPEAKER_01] Let's get out of here because England's going to burn first. However, it wasn't long before they thought, you know, actually we're carrying the true church with us across the seas to America. So it's not just that America was conveniently provided to us as a place to escape to. America is also this chosen nation. God wants us to save the true church, bring it here, develop it here. And of course, they also thought they were saved.

[00:24:14] [SPEAKER_01] They were quick to qualify that with, oh, we don't, we don't actually, no one can know who's saved because they believed in predestination. And that God had already chosen who wouldn't, wouldn't go to heaven. And there was nothing you could do about it. So they would justify it. But still at the end of the day, they were like, well, we're pretty sure we're saved. And so they saw themselves as a chosen people in a chosen nation. And that has fueled manifest destiny. That's fueled a lot of foreign policy. And ultimately it's paternalism. Ultimately it's, we know best.

[00:24:44] [SPEAKER_01] And so we're going to make all the choices for everyone in this nation and for everyone in the world. And there was this, what historians call the myth of the Anglo-Saxon. And so the idea was that God had chosen the Germanic people specifically to carry forth the true church because of their conquering nature.

[00:25:05] [SPEAKER_01] So he didn't condone their warmongering, but there were all these other qualities they had. Their courage and those qualities justified essentially the warmongering and all that because that's who God needed to carry the true church. And so first they came from Germany and ended up in England. And then we had Protestantism.

[00:25:31] [SPEAKER_01] And then they left for England and ended up in America on the East Coast. And then we had Puritanism. And from there they headed West and West and West. And so just as the sun rises in the East and sets in the West, so they believed the church was moving ever westward.

[00:25:48] [SPEAKER_01] And when the Philippines were annexed, that was an argument about holding on to the country under American dominion was this idea that we had moved so far west that we had almost completed the mission. Wow. I didn't know anything about that.

[00:26:03] [SPEAKER_02] I knew nothing about that. Wow.

[00:26:05] [SPEAKER_01] You did so much research for this book. It's amazing. So much research that was supposed to come out in 2023.

[00:26:10] Yeah.

[00:26:12] [SPEAKER_01] Ultimately, if you break down the hours I worked, Simon & Schuster paid me to read, which is great. I have no beef with that. But it took a lot longer than I thought. Admittedly, planning to cover 400 years of American history was a bit of a rookie mistake. There are so many cults. So many cults. Yes.

[00:26:29] [SPEAKER_02] How do you think that is manifested in how our government is manipulating us today in the same way?

[00:26:36] [SPEAKER_03] Hmm. Or anything in between that you want to cover between then and now. The chosen nation, chosen people idea. Well, and the Puritans and like our template in history as a whole. How does it affect us now that people aren't making the connections to?

[00:26:51] [SPEAKER_01] Well, I mean, just to stay on the topic of that one idea of a chosen people. I think we see it today in the pronatalist movement. Elon Musk, of course, is a poster child of it. But many other people, J.D. Vance has spoken quite a bit about the importance of women having babies. And it's a wide movement. There are a lot of opinions within it.

[00:27:12] [SPEAKER_01] I don't want to overgeneralize, but there is a certain faction within the movement that believes that if Americans, if white Americans become the minority because people who've been in this country for generations are having fewer kids. And so to keep up the numbers would require immigration. So this is a little bit of the replacement theory. But their fear is that if that happens, then that's the end of civilization.

[00:27:38] [SPEAKER_01] So inherent in that is the assumption that America is the driver of global civilization. And further, I think subconsciously what's driving a lot of the pronatalist movement is the idea to only have certain people procreate. And that's the chosen people. And in some cases, that's as simple as saying white people. And in some cases it's rich people. But it's that paternalism again.

[00:28:05] [SPEAKER_01] It's people in power, and it's always the people in power who are paternalistic, deciding that they know what's best and they get to choose what happens to our bodies. And this was the eugenics movement in the 20th century, the idea that a certain chosen people, scientists in this case, and eventually the American government, could decide who was and wasn't allowed to have babies. Because feeble-minded people, that was a scientific term.

[00:28:33] [SPEAKER_01] Feeble-minded idiot was a scientific term. They didn't want them to procreate. Because they feared that this was the reason why almshouses were overrun. Because feeble-minded people were filling our nation with their progeny. Now, of course, that was based on bunk genetics, which we now know. Whether someone develops intelligence and succeeds in certain talents has more to do with opportunity of time and resources, right?

[00:29:02] [SPEAKER_01] If you're born into a wealthy family, you have both of those and you get to become whatever you want to be. And so it's that paternalism, and it always comes from power. So as you know, having lived among a narcissist for years, power only ever seeks more of itself. I believe power is like a parasite. It's like a psychological parasite. And it can't ever get enough.

[00:29:26] [SPEAKER_01] And eventually what power craves is control over other people's bodies, control over life and death. That's what gods do.

[00:29:35] [SPEAKER_02] Yeah, I was going to say this is God complex. There is something you just said. Aside from the white procreating or something like that, I have a belief or a fear that if Western culture or society fails, I do think that doesn't bode well for the rest of the world. At least the tenets and principles of it. Do you think that's what they advocate for? Or like for me, what's the alternative? Because there's a lot of other groups out there that are just as power hungry as the United States. And I do think maybe I'm wrong.

[00:30:05] [SPEAKER_02] The United States is kind of the backdrop or at least the – maybe this is my indoctrination as well – or at least the final stop of tyranny, even though we're perpetrators of it as well. I say that totally like poke holes in it. Like I don't – that is my kind of core belief of like better America being in control of those things than say a communist country or something like that.

[00:30:27] [SPEAKER_01] So what I'm hearing you say, especially now that you've just given the counterpoint of communism, is democracy, better democracy than –

[00:30:36] [SPEAKER_02] Yes, that's what I'm saying.

[00:30:37] [SPEAKER_01] Belief states, autocracies.

[00:30:39] [SPEAKER_02] In theory. Yes. I say everything within theory, yes. Sure, sure.

[00:30:42] [SPEAKER_01] And so then the idea then would be, well, let's promote democracy. And is making sure that only wealthy white people have babies – is that connected to democracy? No, no, no. I don't think it is. It seems like a different point or path altogether. It seems like an effort to replicate power, which is, of course, all that power ever does. And these guys are already replicating their power in a variety of ways.

[00:31:10] [SPEAKER_01] They don't need modern day eugenics to do more of it. It's already happening.

[00:31:14] [SPEAKER_02] Well, wealth – the redistribution of wealth to me is the biggest crime against –

[00:31:17] [SPEAKER_01] Agreed. And the biggest cause of the increases in cult-like thinking and cult participation, in my opinion.

[00:31:25] [SPEAKER_03] Because people are struggling and they're alone and they're – People are – Chronically under-resourced. Under-resourced, yeah. For more context on what brought us here, check out my memoir. It's called Scarred, The True Story of How I Escaped NXIVM, The Cult That Bound My Life. I narrate the audio version and it's also available on Amazon, Audible, and at most bookstores. And now, a brief message from our Little Bit Culti sponsors. And remember, when you support our sponsors, you're supporting this podcast.

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[00:34:47] [SPEAKER_02] It's a good one.

[00:34:49] [SPEAKER_03] I was fascinated by the work that you did about power, specifically, in regards to the science behind the psychology. Can you elaborate on what you learned about power and empathy?

[00:35:00] [SPEAKER_01] So I relied heavily on the work of Dr. Keltner and his research into power and the psychological effects of it, as well as some other researchers. But the basic idea is that the effect of power on a person causes them to widen the spectrum of what they deem to be acceptable behavior. They give in to their impulses because they lose filters. Is that okay to do that? They lose that question process.

[00:35:28] [SPEAKER_01] And because they're surrounded by yes people, no one's telling them they can't. And so the spectrum just gets wider and wider. Power decreases empathy because it causes someone to focus more on themselves. And so attention is a limited resource. You only have so much attention you can pay in a day or whatever it is. And if you're focusing more on yourself, you have less attention to focus on other people.

[00:35:54] [SPEAKER_01] This is a problem because focusing on other people is how we develop empathy. And that's because the physical precedes the emotional. So if I'm looking at a friend of mine who's telling me a sad story and her face is sad, my body will physically mimic her expressions. That's all we do is mimic each other. There's videos of people having dinner together and one person puts their hand on their face and then the other person doesn't.

[00:36:23] [SPEAKER_01] And one person crosses a leg and we can't help it. It's what we do. We evolved to. And so when I'm talking to my friend and she's sad, my facial muscles mimic hers and then I feel the sad emotion too. So the physical precedes the emotional and that's how I feel empathy for her. Well, if I'm not paying attention to her, then my face is not going to mimic her, then I'm not going to feel her sad. And so that's the mechanism behind why power diminishes empathy.

[00:36:51] [SPEAKER_01] And of course, that's a problem.

[00:36:54] [SPEAKER_03] So the powerful people are also just too busy to even stop and connect is part of it, I'm imagining. Their attention is pulled to other places. And this is just something we've noticed that some of the cult leaders that we've studied on the podcast, it seemed to have set out from the start to exploit people, whereas other people had a good idea perhaps and the power got to them. And then slowly their empathy eroded.

[00:37:19] [SPEAKER_03] So that explains that for me, which I never, I mean, I could kind of imagine, I always just said the power got to their head, but like more specifically, that's how it happens. Sounds like.

[00:37:28] [SPEAKER_01] Their empathy erodes and they fall prey to their impulses.

[00:37:32] [SPEAKER_03] Yep.

[00:37:32] [SPEAKER_01] Don't check themselves.

[00:37:33] [SPEAKER_03] And then they start to get paranoid and then the us versus them increases and then the people are coming for them, which they might be. Because they have neighbors. Paranoia always. Paranoia. Speaking of which, I remembered that Yellow Delhi is the 12 tribes cult, which you probably came across in your studies, but they specifically have the same 144,000 end times.

[00:37:57] [SPEAKER_03] And all of these groups, it seems to be, have the idea that the end times or the Armageddon or the doomsday, whatever you want to call it, keeps your people in line. Because if they can do all the right things, then they will be one of the saved people. So they're being controlled. So tell us what you learned about control and how is that easier to do when people are living through a hard time in a society?

[00:38:18] [SPEAKER_01] We all desire to create control out of chaos. We desire an ordered world and that's very much a part of our species. This is why I believe income inequality is the driving crisis that's fueling cult participation increases and cult-like thinking. Because there's little that can cause your world to wobble more than a lack of resources.

[00:38:46] [SPEAKER_01] That's basic human needs. But even beyond whether you're resourced or not, we like order. We like control. And cults provide that. It's a fiction, of course, because the danger is that if you join a cult looking for control or if you fall for the promises of a demagogue who's offering control, typically what happens is you're actually ceding control to that person because it's an autocracy.

[00:39:14] [SPEAKER_01] I mean, a cult is just a little dictatorship, right? But we have this semblance of control that attracts us. And part of that, as you said, is the Doomsday Promise. Follow these rules, do what I say, and you'll get whatever it is. A bed in the fallout shelter or a seat on the spaceship or a better job. Mankind United, which I detail in the book, one of the biggest cons in history, promised people that if they banded together and helped fight this fictional evil power,

[00:39:43] [SPEAKER_01] that everyone would get a job, everyone would get a job that paid like $600,000 a year in today's money. Every house was going to have a water fountain and microwave. I mean, the promises were really specific, but it's always that pay to play. There's always a contract. Join me. Follow me. Give me everything you have. Leave your family behind. And you will get A, B, or C. And that's a comforting promise to some people. That's a contract they're willing to sign.

[00:40:12] [SPEAKER_02] It also ensures their survival. So I imagine knowing that with a certain demographic of people, you can create this myth. And if people don't challenge it, you can get away with whatever. That's what we've seen in almost every one of our...

[00:40:26] [SPEAKER_03] And you say that in the book, too. If you want to be a con man, now's the time because we're so... Actually, that's something that we were laughing about because in our book, we lay out the template with the goal so that people can understand what it looks like so that you can inoculate yourself. But I also am looking at it going, well, if somebody wanted to do it, they could also read it as a playbook and then do it.

[00:40:46] [SPEAKER_01] And anyone could Google how to start a cult. That's true. Or just watch any of these documentaries. We're so obsessed with these stories because the details are always different. The belief systems are so wild, and I think that really interests us. But the manipulation is exactly the same. Exactly the same. Always the same. Yeah. Every time.

[00:41:04] [SPEAKER_03] Actually, you just said that a cult, the mini dictatorship. Did you see that series, How to Be a Dictator? And it was like Stalin and Hitler and Mao and like, remember that? Yeah, yeah. And I was like, whoa, this is the exact same thing as a cult.

[00:41:16] [SPEAKER_02] Yep.

[00:41:16] [SPEAKER_03] Isolate the members, create the ideology, like all the things.

[00:41:19] [SPEAKER_02] In your travels of all the modern cults, MLMs, political extremism, which contemporary examples surprise you the most?

[00:41:27] [SPEAKER_01] Love has won because it was a little different than this mold we've just been talking about. What? That one.

[00:41:35] [SPEAKER_02] So I will just say, we've done over 300 interviews. All of them have an effect on me. But two to three weeks later, I was thinking about this one.

[00:41:43] [SPEAKER_03] And Amy Carlson.

[00:41:45] [SPEAKER_02] I just.

[00:41:45] [SPEAKER_03] You wrote about it for Vanity Fair, right? Yeah. I did. You were one of the first, if I recall.

[00:41:49] [SPEAKER_02] Because it was like, when I saw her young, I was like, oh my God, I totally could have run into her somewhere. She seemed like a girl that would have gone to college. Yeah. And then to see how off the rails it went. It had an effect on me to the point where I thought about it for like two, three weeks. I just couldn't believe how.

[00:42:05] [SPEAKER_01] What was surprising for you? She didn't seem to be driving the train. She was not a traditional cult leader. I think her followers were so desperate that they fashioned her into the person, into the leader they wanted to follow. And to elaborate on that a little bit, part of their desperation came from healthcare issues. So they were people who'd been burned by the traditional healthcare system and were literally Googling online, how do I cure whatever?

[00:42:35] [SPEAKER_01] And found her websites and social media profiles and became interested in her. She claimed to be a healer. She claimed to be able to cure cancer. More specifically, other people claimed she had cured their cancer. And I interviewed Andrew Profaci, who was one of her father gods. There were several. Father God number two? I think he was number two. Two or three. Yeah. But he said that there were times when he was able to convince her, you're not God.

[00:43:03] [SPEAKER_01] And she would say, oh yeah, no, you're right. You're right. And then the next morning, everyone else in the cult would pull her right back into it and convince her otherwise.

[00:43:13] [SPEAKER_02] It's almost like a reverse indoctrination. They got her to believe she was God.

[00:43:19] [SPEAKER_01] And she had created this world in which the traditional healthcare system was evil and couldn't help anyone. And so as she was dying from a combination of anorexia, addiction, alcohol abuse specifically, and ingestion of colloidal silver, which is why her corpse turned purplish, grayish. As she was dying, they refused to take her to the hospital because that's where bad things happen.

[00:43:48] [SPEAKER_01] And they thought that the evil agents out in the ether were going to inhabit the bodies of the medical care professionals in the hospital and then do more harm to her because this was all ideas she had suggested. So they refused to take her to the hospital even at times when she asked for it. And so it's a very tragic story. It really is.

[00:44:11] [SPEAKER_02] I think that's what bothered me the most about it.

[00:44:12] [SPEAKER_03] Also, I was bothered that nobody was held accountable for that when she could have been saved. I don't know if this is a rabbit hole that you want to get into, but one of the things that I really loved about your book was your explanation of the cult apologists and the anti-cultists that occurred before our time in this space that the cult experts that we know now refer to and make reference to. But I haven't been able to distill the information well enough to understand what happened.

[00:44:43] [SPEAKER_03] And I think that's really fascinating because it's sort of the underpinning for a lot of what we're dealing with right now. Why don't we save that for part two, which drops in a couple days, and come back next time as we get into a history that nobody has been able to explain to me properly until Jane Borden. Coming soon to a podcast near you.

[00:45:03] [SPEAKER_02] If you like the show, please consider supporting us by giving us a rating, a review, and subscribe on iTunes. Cults are commonplace now, and we're looking at them all, and every little bit helps. Hit that subscribe button so you don't miss an episode.

[00:45:20] [SPEAKER_03] That wraps up part one. Join us in a few days this Thursday, or Wednesday if you're on Patreon, for part two with Jane Borden. A Little Bit Culti is a Trace 120 production.

[00:45:48] [SPEAKER_03] Executive produced by Sarah Edmondson and Anthony Nippy Ames, in collaboration with Amphibian Media. Our co-creator is Jess Templtardy. Audio engineering by Red Cayman Studios, and our writing and research is done by Emma Diehl and Kristen Reeder. Our theme song, Cultivated, is by the artists John Bryant and Nigel Aslan.