The “C” Word
How one Little Label can Lead to Recovery
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The first time I can remember hearing the word “cult” was around my 18th birthday when I saw on the news that 39 people had been found dead in Rancho Santa Fe, California. The Heaven's Gate cult, which started up in the 70s, had ended in what the news had covered as “a group suicide” in 1997. The group was comprised of web developers who had created a website that they used to recruit new members. This group of intelligent adults had been somehow convinced that once they left their earthy bodies, a spaceship that was trailing the comet Hale-Bopp would transport their souls to a higher state of existence. My mom was astonished—when she was a teenager, she had been sitting in a Tim Hortons when a man approached her about an end-of-the-world prediction and invited her to join him “when the spaceship came.” He handed her a boarding pass dated sometime in 1980 and then went on to emphatically attempt to recruit her. Obviously, the end-of-the-world prediction came and went, yet somehow the followers stayed loyal, which is actually typical. Understanding why helps us to understand the popularity of commercial cults, which is a category of destructive cult that multilevel marketing companies fall under.
So at this point you might be squinting your eyes now, thinking, “Noooo, MLMs are at best, business opportunities, or at worst, scams—but cults? That’s a pretty big stretch.”
The word “cult” is just one syllable and four letters that pack a heavy punch. When we hear it, many of us immediately think of Heaven’s Gate, or the Jonestown massacre, where 918 innocent lives were taken in 1978. And, many people mistakingly assume, as the news had reported, that the 39 Heaven’s Gate members had taken their own lives, or that hundreds of people in Guyana willingly guzzled laced Kool-Aid simply because their leader, Jim Jones, told them to. The expression, “She really drank the Kool-Aid!” doesn’t help and actually distances us further from these tragedies making us subconsciously dismiss these events as nothing that could ever happen to us.
It is important to know that undue influence was wielded by cult leaders Marshall Applewhite and Jim Jones. The men, women and children in Jonestown did not drink poison with their free will intact. While the media had originally described the Jonestown event as “mass suicide,” shaping how we’d view it in Memoriam, the event was a murder, as there was no option for whether to partake. Those who disagreed with the orders were injected with cyanide. The orders in both tragedies were also preceded by many years of building trust and faith in their leaders. Both men could be described as charismatic, caring and devoted to the family-like communities they created. Jim Jones was respected as a social justice warrior who fought for the liberation of black people in a time that was fraught with inequality.
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The second time I ever heard the word “cult” was when I was working for a fitness company. I was completely obsessed with my job and the company; I worked nonstop and had little else to talk about. I will never forget one night, out with friends, when my friend Bob unexpectedly unloaded on me. He had seen a change in me, a personality makeover replaced the one he had grown to care about. My pseudo-self was high on being part of something so much bigger than myself. I used different words and was part of a “club” that was privy to different knowledge. “You know it’s a cult, right? And that they’re using you,” he said as he looked me square in my eyes, “and once they use you up completely, they will replace you with the next young, energetic person that they can control.” I was stunned. I literally ran away from him and out of the bar as my amygdala’s “flight” response took over. I was understandably insulted, shocked and upset. How could he say that? It implied that I wasn’t valued, it implied the opposite actually, and the confrontation created distance between me and my friend. Only 20 years after this encounter do I understand what Bob saw, and while his approach was misguided, he was coming from a legitimate place of concern.
If we as a society had a better understanding of what cult experts call “undue influence” or “bounded choice,” we could run more successful, sustainable organizations, and we could know what to look out for and be better equipped to support our friends and family when their behaviour becomes intuitively concerning. We would also be better armed—instead of complacently believing it could never happen to us.
Sociologist and author Janja Lalich comprised a theory called Bounded Choice, for which she wrote a book by the same name. The theory is comprised of four elements: charismatic authority, transcendent belief system, systems of control and systems of influence. Applying this as a litmus test to the group I was in, I found the following:
Multilevel marketing is structured in a hierarchy wherein the person who recruits you is your “upline,” and you are subjected to (what is called) “coaching” and “training” by those who are in leadership positions. Those who have climbed to a certain rank are put on a pedestal and celebrated. You “earn” time with them, which lends legitimacy to the leadership and enters you into a power dynamic. Within this dynamic, one doesn’t want to waste the busy leader’s time and is perpetually seeking approval. Emotional bonds are created between leadership and followers. Charisma, coupled with power and leveraged trust, are the hooks that bind us as devotees to leadership and their ideas.
The ideas of leadership provide an overarching ideology that further binds group members. Over time, as we do what we are told, we become adherents to the group and keep behaving in the manner prescribed by leadership and touted as the recipe for success. We each are repeatedly asked to create our vision (our personal version of salvation) for which they link their prescribed actions and thoughts to. No matter what our goal or our “why” is, the recipe is the same. We are to believe blindly and behave accordingly.
In multilevel marketing, systems of control look like “DMO” (Daily Method of Operation) and requirements to live life in a specific way, from what we eat to what we say. With all of this, we are told we have a choice, of course, but not if we want to be successful, not if our “why” is important to us. And as success stories and “what if’s” are being thrust in our faces, as they water the seeds they’ve planted, we even self-indoctrinate, making their jobs easier. We are encouraged to revise our “why” until it is powerful enough to make us emotional—thus, we are tricked into self-binding ourselves to the doctrine set forth.
Influence is created by the culture we step into when joining an MLM. Love-bombing is a normalized part of the recruitment process. There are social gatherings where members are encouraged to be vulnerable with one another to create bonds within the group. Behaviours and attitudes are spread as social contagions at mandatory events such as company conventions, wherein members dress a certain way (matching t-shirts with a certain phrase, for example) and desired emotional states are evoked through repeated ideas and storytelling meant to make audience members attach to specific ideas and systems.
Cult expert Steven Hassan has a similar theory he created, called “The Bite Model,” to help identify groups that have crossed into the territory of destructive cults. Behaviour, information, thought, and emotion control are the four benchmarks that cult leaders use to promote compliance and dependency. Once one of these areas are successfully altered, the other three move into alignment with greater ease.
Behaviour: We are prescribed work for which there is no guarantee of pay while being subjected to propaganda and stories that convince us that the world and pretty much everybody we know is in dire need of what we can offer (thus, we are part of a mission—versus working for no pay).
Information: “The science” is something that we were always trained to refer back to, to complement our anecdotal and emotional stories and accounts of how the products had changed our lives and our family’s lives. There were some negative blog posts out there, but our most charismatic of leaders had a trusty Voxer voice note to wipe that concern clear of our minds. In a smiling yell voice trained in neuro-linguistic programming (NLP), we were told that anything at all which threatens Big Pharma would be campaigned against. “Bloggers are paid well to write nonsense opinion pieces to try to tear down anything that can help prevent dis-ease. The fact that they are paying any attention to us at all is actually good news because it shows how impactful we are.”
We are discouraged from associating with those who have left the company.
Thought: We have prescribed a belief system and explicitly told that realizing our goals and living in our “why” is dependent on these beliefs. To believe in what we offer, to believe in the leadership and believe in the business model. We are discouraged from researching our company or product beyond what they provide us internally and are given scripts to follow for conversations. Thought-stopping cliches (e.g. “The system works if you work it,” “Happiness is a choice,” “Another level, another devil.”) are used to quell cognitive dissonance and keep us thinking in circles.
Emotion: Events, “coaching” sessions and “connection calls” are used to keep us emotionally bound, motivated and striving for ever-moving goalposts month after month, year after year. If you can’t attend these events, you’ll have to watch everyone else enjoying the festivities as your upline goes live to show you what you chose to miss out on. The assumption is you chose to miss it because “leaders show up.” Leaders are then given exclusive privileges and advantages—easy leads for sales, red-carpet events, and personal development programs, which you feel would greatly help you if you can get them. The blame is placed squarely on you for not achieving your goal. You must not be “ready,” and we are reminded that “success leaves clues.”
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More can be said on each facet of Janja Lalich’s “Bounded Choice” and Steven Hassan’s “BITE model,” but those will be covered in future posts.
When our society lacks cult literacy, it makes us become vulnerable to unwittingly becoming “cult-hoppers,” thinking it was just the company, the group, or the product that wasn’t working for us. Not understanding it was actually the power dynamics, the hierarchy, the recruitment and the retention tactics which had unwittingly captured us. Tactics which have been tried, tested and based in psychology. What most don’t understand is that cults fall on a spectrum and usually do not involve headline-worthy practices or end in death. What makes a cult a cult is not what most people think, and unfortunately, the assumptions cause us to place blame on the victims as opposed to the institutions that entrap people.
The unravelling process took me a full two years before I understood that “the mission” I was part of was something else entirely. It was when the phrase “commercial cult” entered my consciousness that I began to get my energy back. Once I knew there was a word for mental and spiritual manipulation I was exposed to (and perpetuated), I could not stop the puzzle pieces from flying in at me. The more I read, the more it made sense. Words indeed have power, and just as they could help to indoctrinate me, the art of language would also end up saving me. I had words for what had happened!
Understanding what conditions create psychological dependence gives victims a place to start taking their life back. It gives friends and family insight and empathy for what attracted the person they love to the all-consuming group they’ve joined. It illuminates a starting place to extricate one’s self from the ties that bind them. It empowers survivors to begin to choose themselves.
Montell, A. (2021). Cultish. Harper Wave.
Lalich, J. (n.d.). Using the Bounded Choice Model as an Analytical Tool: A Case Study of Heaven’s Gate [. CULTIC STUDIES REVIEW, 3(3).
Hassan, S. (2018). Combatting Cult Mind Control. Freedom of Mind Press.
Netflix . (n.d.). How to Become a Cult Leader: Ep 1 Build Your Foundation . Retrieved August 9, 2023, from https://www.netflix.com/watch/81553197?trackId=255824129.
Hassan, S. (2023, July 6). Multi-level marketing and self-help cult groups: Learn the warning signs. Freedom of Mind Resource Center. https://freedomofmind.com/multi-level-marketing-and-self-help-cult-groups-learn-the-warning-signs/
Heller, Z. (2021, July 5). What makes a cult a cult?. The New Yorker. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/07/12/what-makes-a-cult-a-cult