Cults & dictators on my mind

And, are they kind of the same thing?

I can’t stop watching docuseries about cults.

It all started with Wild Wild Country, a riveting 2018 Netflix original series that also inspired the best parody I’ve ever seen, Batshit Valley (YouTube) by Documentary Now!

After that, I was just chasing the dragon, which the streaming services of this era were only too happy to facilitate: the leggings MLM captured in LuLaRich, the mystery of Bad Vegan, Latter Day Saints in Keep Sweet: Pray and Obey, the icky internet-y Escaping Twin Flames, the even more internet-y Dancing for the Devil, sad and strange Love Has Won: The Cult of Mother God, and most recently and close to home, as a gal who has enjoyed plenty of kundalini yoga, Breath of Fire.

Shawbardists, followers of Owen Wilson’s fictional cult, only eat produce that has given its permission.

A friend turned me on to that last one while we were decorating her Christmas tree last month. That same day she had me subscribing to the podcast A Little Bit Culty, hosted by NXVM (pronounced “Nexium”) escapees who have their own HBO series, The Vow, and sent me off with her copy of

Amanda Montell

’s book Cultish, which I’m in the thick of.

Montell says we’re innately drawn to cult stories because we want to know how to keep ourselves safe. (To me, this is also the best possible explanation for the dark cult of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, which I cannot tolerate.)

Cultish getting read alongside a lot of political analysis and theory. (Y’know, because of that thing that happened back in November, which is still going on, and is about to be even more of a thing starting next week.)

And I noticed very quickly that one phrase kept cropping up, regardless of whether I was reading about fascists or cult leaders: the language of us-versus-them.

Let me share a few choice morsels from my reading, the first of which even draws the connection between cult and autocrat explicitly:

From Cultish:

“The first key element of cultish language? Creating an us-versus-them dichotomy. Totalitarian leaders can’t hope to gain or maintain power without using language to till a psychological schism between their followers and everyone else.

… The goal is to make your people feel like they have all the answers, while the rest of the world is not just foolish, but inferior. When you convince someone that they’re above everyone else, it helps you both distance them from outsiders and also abuse them, because you can paint anything from physical assault to undpaid labor to verbal attacks as “special treatment” reserved only for them.” — Cultish, p78

From How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them

Well there you go, Jason Stanley’s 2018 book puts it right in the subtitle! I’ve only just begun his book, but here are some sentences I’ve underlined, merely in the preface:

“The most telling symptom of fascist politics is division. It aims to separate a population into an “us” and a “them.” … As the fear of ‘them’ grows, ‘we’ come to represent everything virtuous. ‘We’ live in the rural heartland, where the pure values and traditions of the nation still miraculously exists … ‘We’ are hardworking, and have earned our pride of place by struggle and merit.” — xxxi

This mirrors the “conditioning” phase of the reel-you-into-the-cult-forever process that Amanda Montell describes. If we’re in MAGA, then “we” are good Americans working for the betterment of the nation, and “they” are enemies of the people. If we’re Scientologists, “we” are working for the betterment of the universe, “they” are Suppressive Persons trying to hold us back.

Stanley says that in politics, the fascists’ conditioning also works to “rewrite the populations’ shared understanding of reality by twisting the language of ideals through propaganda and promoting anti-intellectualism”—in other words, preemptively defending themselves against the very systems (a free press, universities, political opponents) or ideas that might criticize their fascism.

If we’re in MAGA, “we” are good Americans working for the betterment of the nation, and “they” are enemies of the people. If we’re Scientologists, “we” are working for the betterment of the universe, “they” are Suppressive Persons trying to hold us back.

In Cultish, Montell says that preemptive defense against critical thinking gets expressed in “thought-terminating cliches” like “Truth is a construct” or “It is what it is” or “it’s the media’s fault we’re being investigated by the FBI.”

In the cult, the conditioning makes you increasingly susceptible to coercion. An extremely common result of the us-versus-them conditioning, in cults, is literally separating members from their own family and friends. Once those “thems” are out of the way, “we” will hear far fewer objections to the things we’re now being asked to do: give all our money to the group, enact abuses on others, or, in the most tragic cases, participate in violence and death.

So too in fascism?

“A distinguishing mark of fascist politics is the targeting of ideological enemies and the freeing of all restraints in combating them,” Stanley says.

He goes on to quote writer Pratap Mehta in the Indian Express after Hindu nationalists attacked a university in New Delhi:

The targeting of enemies—minorities, liberals, secularists, leftists, urban naxals, intellectuals, assorted protestors—is not driven by a calculus of ordinary politics … When you legitimize yourself entirely by inventing enemies, the truth ceases to matter, normal restraints of civilization and decency case to matter, the checks and balances of normal politics cease to matter.” — Pratap Mehta

Okay, I’m bouncing back and forth between cults and fascist politics. Perhaps that feels alarmist. Let’s ask ourselves a check-in question: Is divisive rhetoric that important on a national scale? Maybe it’s just a tactic to rile up the base and win an election. After all, don’t the policies, which aren’t just made up by some random cult leader, matter more than the words?

Here’s how Stanley would answer:

“Was Trump’s harsh rhetoric against Mexican immigrants and Muslims mere political tactics? … In the ensuing years, [Trump’s executive orders banning] many of the world’s Muslims from entry to the United States has become normalized. It is no longer a salient topic of discussion in the U.S. Media. Trump’s fascist political tactics quickly were made material in policies of explicit exclusion.”

The worst-case end result

Living in the fog, fear, and fury of the wars in our headlines over the last few years, when I saw a book simply titled Why War? on display at the library, I snatched it up.

Military historian Richard Overy’s book examines explanations and evolving theories from the fields of Biology, Psychology, Anthropology, and Ecology.

It is this that brings the overlap between cults and fascism together, for me.

The dehumanization of the enemy makes such violence appear legitimate, reinforcing the sense of psychological identity of the in-group and removing any sense of guilt at inflicting harm. It is a short step from dehumanization to demonization, in which the enemy seems possessed of threatening powers to which a violent response seems the only remedy.

There are many examples of this psychological device in the modern age, in which language plays an important part. In the Rwandan genocide, the Hutu labeled the victim Tutsis as "cockroaches" to create an absolute difference between the two peoples and to justify extermina-tory violence. In Hitler's war on the Jews, the repeated images of the Jew as leech, vermin, or bacillus defined the enemy as less than human and exalted the genocide to a form of pest control or medical intervention.

… The war in the Pacific also saw the Japanese enemy presented as vermin or animalized as monkeys, rats, or spiders, a view that was reinforced by news of Japanese atrocities and wide belief that Japanese troops were "subhuman." The Japanese, wrote one American soldier back home, "live like rats, squeal like pigs, and act like monkeys." … In return, Japanese propaganda presented Allied servicemen as beasts of prey to be culled like any predatory animal, while the Chinese were simply regarded as "pigs" to be slaughtered like animals in an abar-toir. — Why War? p 48

So what’s the point?

Don’t join a cult? Don’t be like MAGA?

Definitely. Don’t do those things. Please.

But also: research has shown that, contrary to our stereotypes, the people most susceptible to being drawn into cults aren’t lost, gullible fools, but rather intelligent, curious people who value community and want to help the world. (Oh no, that’s me! I flattered myself when I read that.)

I wonder if what we know about cults should instruct us in how we deal with fascists … in abhorring the cult, or MAGA, do we accelerate the division of “us versus them” their leaders are hoping for?

Experts would suggest we try to maintain a respectful, positive relationship, especially so that they have somewhere to turn if and when they develop doubts about their group.

But how do we remain connected with those caught up in the mythology, without condoning it, or becoming morally complicit? The question has come up a lot since, ohhhh, 2016, whether it’s ethical or appropriate or even productive to draw a line in the sand when it comes to dealing with Trump supporters. (The NY Times Magazine’s Ethicist column, which I love, is replete with them.)

As one writer’s mother, born in 1930s Germany, had taught her: “Nice people make the best Nazis.”

Maybe, for those of us with the right kind of touch, the answer lies in the power of our language to remind those we’re close to of the things—the reality, the stories, and the lives—we once shared.

What do you think?