Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism

Montell offers a brief snapshot of Syanon leader Chuck Dietrich’s language, which he uses to control his followers and organize a militarized coalition against what he called “splitees,” or those who left the group. Another prominent suicide cult, Heaven’s Gate, was founded by Marshall Applewhite and co-leader Bonnie Nettles, who died of cancer. They believed they were “elevated, extraterrestrial souls temporarily inhabiting earthly bodies” (70). Heaven’s Gate viewed human bodies as vehicles for corruption and preached to its followers that they needed to leave and board a passing ship to join the UFO Kingdom of God. As part of their conditioning, members were assigned new names and stripped of surnames, used sci-fi terms for everything, faced the constant threat of humiliation, and wore uniforms. Eventually, members of Heaven’s Gate poisoned themselves on a date they believed the UFO Kingdom of God to be passing through.

Montell describes The Power of Language and how it can be wielded for good or evil ends. She knows this firsthand from her experience as a suicide-hotline worker, where the right words could save someone’s life, and she illustrates the converse of this with the case of Michelle Carter, who coerced her boyfriend to kill himself. In this chapter, Montell also lays out the process for how people become entrenched in cults, starting with conversion, which consists of love-bombing, feeling “seen,” and inspirational buzzwords that feel like they’re meant specifically for the hearer. The next step is conditioning, which is when members who are now bought into the group get to learn the secretive, exclusive language of the cult, which builds camaraderie but also dependence on the leader. Lastly, the most tragic and toxic phase is coercion, when it’s too late to leave. Montell offers Trump’s rhetoric as an example of cultish language in politics, illustrating how the subtext of language influences its meaning.

Rather than being like mind-altering drugs, cults are like placebo pills that only work on the people open to receiving their effects. In addition to the methods explored in previous chapters, cults also function under a charismatic leader with a voice people can trust. Overwhelmingly, history demonstrates that the voices people tend to trust the most in American cults reflect the power hierarchy, with most cult leaders being middle-aged white men. However, Montell highlights a contemporary cult led by Teal Swan, a social-media guru and influencer whose content has influenced at least two members to commit suicide and many others to engage in controversial trauma healing and psychological practices. Swan also has a charismatic voice, which is described as motherly and soothing. Swan practices many of the same techniques used by other cults, like Heaven’s Gate and even Scientology: marrying scientific/technical terms with supernatural/spiritual ones. By appealing to her audience’s openness to New Age spiritual concepts and establishing her ethos by using DSM terminology, Swan can enrapture her audience into trusting her.

Montell works to dispel the myth of brainwashing and addresses attempts to regulate language, like the initiative to launch Basic English, a simplified subset of modern English created to assimilate non-English speakers after World War I. She describes the Moonie experiment, which tested the validity of brainwashing with two groups of people. The control group consisted of people with adverse life experiences and lower intelligence metrics, and at the end of the study, they found that there was no correlation between intelligence, stability, and the likelihood to join cults. Rather, ideal cult members are described as “good-natured, service-minded, and sharp” (97). They must be idealistic and possess “an overabundance of optimism” (98). The reason this works on anyone of this idealistic mindset, regardless of intelligence or emotional stability, is because most people filter language through the ideals they already believe in. So, once a person latches onto a group and believes in it, confirmation bias does the rest of the work with a little help from loss aversion, or the desire to avoid losing something as part of the sunk-cost fallacy in the hopes that things will get better. Brainwashing, according to Montell, isn’t real, and if it is, it’s a part of everyone’s daily lives.