Fear

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

Page 132 of 529 · 20 per page

• From Cultish (2021)

  With dissociation, a person’s behaviors or experiences seem to just happen all by themselves, outside of their control, as if in a trance. There’s a wide spectrum of what scholars might classify as dissociation, from severe cases of dissociative identity disorder all the way down to common feelings of detachment, like searching all over for your phone when it’s right in your hand, or zoning out while staring at a bonfire. But dissociation can also present as self-deception, where appearances in consciousness seem real despite evidence to the contrary. Under the pressures of an ill-intentioned leader, glossolalia can compromise a speaker’s ability to unsnarl the overwhelming metaphysical experience they seem to be having from the guru’s influence. In the end, glossolalia is a powerful emotional instrument—the ultimate form of loaded language—and some religious higher-ups absolutely take advantage. The Way International, a violent and controlling evangelical Christian group, is famous for teaching its members that every true believer can and should speak in tongues, as it is the “only visible and audible proof that a man has been born again.” One anonymous ex-Way member recalled a traumatic glossolalia experience from her childhood for the blog Yes and Yes : “When I was 12, I was . . . required to speak in tongues in front of everyone , and I was so shy I couldn’t do it,” she said. “The man hosting the class . . . put his face very close to mine and essentially bullied me into speaking in tongues.” The girl’s parents watched the interaction unfold from across the room, benumbed by cognitive dissonance. “I was crying,” she continued. “The man was inches from my face . . . using the language of love in the most terrifying, bullying way.” Say you’re a child like this Way International survivor was or one of the Jesus Camp kids, who grew up in an oppressive religious environment and only ever knew its language. You’d think these young folks would be doomed; if “brainwashing” were real for anyone, it would have to be impressionable kids. But the truth is that it’s still quite possible to develop a sense of doubt, even when you’re very small and lack the access or permission to describe it. Just look at Flor Edwards. Now a writer in her thirties, Flor was raised in one of the most notorious Christian doomsday cults in modern history, the Children of God, which she documents in her memoir, Apocalypse Child . Later renamed the Family International (for “branding” reasons), the group was founded in California in 1968. Its leader, David Berg, known as Father David, later ordered his followers to move to developing countries, believing Western nations would be “first to burn in the fires of hell.” Along with her parents and eleven siblings, Flor spent most of her ’80s-era childhood in Thailan d. The Children of God is perhaps best known for its troubling convolution of Christianity, love, and sex.

• From Cultish (2021)

  I do think that SoulCycle is a cult :-)”—but during our conversation later, she clarified that the statement was more tongue-in-cheek and something she’d never say formally. Which, of course, I already understood. We’ll hear more from Tanya later. With groups like SoulCycle, “cult” works to describe members’ fierce fidelity to a cultural coterie that may very well remind us of some aspects of a Manson-level dangerous group—the monetary and time commitment, the conformism, and the exalted leadership (all of which certainly have the potential to turn toxic)—but not the wholesale isolation from outsiders or life-threatening lies and abuse. We know without needing to explicitly state it that the possibility of death or a physical inability to leave is not on the table. But, like everything in life, there is no good cult/bad cult binary; cultishness falls on a spectrum. Steven Hassan, a mental health counselor, author of The Cult of Trump, and one of the country’s foremost cult experts, has described an influence continuum representing groups from healthy and constructive to unhealthy and destructive. Hassan says that groups toward the destructive end use three kinds of deception: omission of what you need to know, distortion to make whatever they’re saying more acceptable, and outright lies. One of the major differences between so-called ethical cults (Hassan references sports and music fans) and noxious ones is that an ethical group will be up-front about what they believe in, what they want from you, and what they expect from your membership. And leaving comes with few, if any, serious consequences. “If you say ‘I found a better band’ or ‘I’m not into basketball anymore,’ the other people won’t threaten you,” Hassan clarifies. “You won’t have irrational fears that you’ll go insane or be possessed by demons.” * Or, in the case of our former 3HO member, Tasha, turn into a cockroach. “To my core,” Tasha answered, when I asked if she truly believed the group’s promise that if she committed a serious offense, like sleeping with her guru or taking her life, she’d come back as the world’s most reviled insect. Tasha also believed that if you died in the presence of someone holy, you’d reincarnate higher. Once, she spotted a cockroach in a public restroom and was convinced it was a swami who’d done something awful in a past life and was trying to come back on a higher vibration. “I was like, ‘Oh my God, he’s trying to die around me because I am an elevated teacher.’” Tasha shivered.

• From Cultish (2021)

  At its peak in the early 1990s, the group had about one hundred members, who lived together on a settlement in Waco, Texas, preparing for the Second Coming of Jesus Christ under the abusive governance of David Koresh, who claimed to be a prophet (as solipsistic new religious leaders often do). Reasonably perturbed and in urgent need of help, followers’ families tipped off the FBI, who, in February 1993, seized the Branch Davidian compound. Several dozen agents arrived, armed with rifles, tanks, and tear gas, to “save” the “brainwashed cult followers.” But the invasion didn’t go to plan. Instead, it led to a fifty-one-day standoff, which ended only after a few hundred more FBI agents showed up and used tear gas to flush their targets out of hiding. In the mayhem, a fire broke out, resulting in the deaths of nearly eighty Branch Davidians. Koresh was not innocent in all this. He was maniacal and violent (in fact, he may have lit the fatal flame), and his stubbornness was part of what led to so many casualties. But so was the fear surrounding the word “cult.” If the FBI had applied such excessive violence to a more socially accepted religion, one that benefited from the First Amendment safeguard, there likely would have been much more of an uproar. Their attack on the Branch Davidian base, by contrast, was both legally sanctioned and socially condoned. “Religion is a constitutionally protected category . . . and the identification of Waco’s Branch Davidians as a cult places them outside the protections of the state,” explains Catherine Wessinger, a religion scholar at Loyola University in New Orleans. The FBI may have gone to “save” the Branch Davidians, but when they killed them instead, few Americans cared, because they weren’t a church—they were a “cult.” Alas, the semantics of sanctimony. In a classic 1999 study, the famous Stanford psychologist Albert Bandura revealed that when human subjects were labeled with dehumanizing language such as “animals,” participants were more willing to harm them by administering electric shocks. It seems that the “cult” label can serve a similar function. This is not to say that some groups that have been or could be called cults aren’t hazardous; certainly, plenty of them are. Instead, because the word “cult” is so emotionally charged and up for interpretation, the label itself does not provide enough information for us to determine if a group is dangerous. We have to look more carefully. We have to be more specific. In an attempt to find a less judgy way to discuss nonmainstream spiritual communities, many scholars have used neutral-sounding labels like “new religious movements,” “emergent religions,” and “marginalized religions.” But while these phrases work in an academic context, I find they don’t quite capture the CrossFits, multilevel marketing companies, college theater programs, and other hard-to-categorize points along the influence continuum.

• From Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble (2014)

  But I’ve worked in some rough places, from a textile mill to a Hollywood writers’ room, and I’ve never experienced anything like Trotsky. I never got bullied in school, either, but I imagine this is what it feels like. Some guy is tormenting me, and I’m afraid to tell anyone, because I’m pretty sure that telling someone will only make things worse. That fear, in turn, sends me down a different rabbit hole and I start to hate myself for being such a coward, for being afraid to stand up for myself. I feel ashamed of myself. This guy is using me as his punching bag, and I’m not doing anything to stop him. It seems to me that if I can just keep it together, eventually he will realize that I won’t fight back and he will get bored with harassing me. Instead the opposite happens. When he realizes that I will not fight back, he becomes even more aggressive. It’s as if I’ve given him permission to beat the shit out of me. In a strange way, I almost admire Trotsky. As the subject of a psychology experiment, he’s fascinating. The problem is that this is not a psychology experiment, and despite my attempts to pretend that it is, the abuse begins to take a toll on me. I dread going to work. The office seems surreal, almost Kafkaesque. Trotsky has become my jailer, and I live in fear of doing something that will arouse his ire, but I have no idea what those things might be. Anything can set him off. I feel overpowered and helpless. Spinner sits around the corner from me, braying like a donkey at her own jokes. I’m surrounded by happy, upbeat young people who are all having the time of their lives in this adult kindergarten. Their latest innovation is a random lunch date generator, created by the women who work for Jordan, the creator of Fearless Friday: Sign up, and once a week you’ll be paired up with another HubSpotter for a getting-to-know-you-better lunch. The cheery atmosphere doesn’t offset the bleakness that I feel but instead makes it worse. I would love to work from home, but the podcast job requires me to be in the office, and anyway, Trotsky says I need to come into work to show that I’m a team player and that I’m “all in.” For weeks I put up with Trotsky’s abuse. No matter what he says, I respond in a calm, measured way. It takes a huge amount of energy to maintain that composure—and eventually I can’t do it anymore. One day I lose my temper and tell him to get off my back. It’s a Friday afternoon in October.

• From Cultish (2021)

  The odious “Sky God” (the bogus Christian deity) described the enemy to “God in the Body,” aka Father Jones. But the words themselves only did half the job; the other half was the performance. As anyone who ever attended one of Jim Jones’s sermons remembers vividly, the guy had a flair for the dramatic. On the pulpit, he’d pound out short, hyperbole-laded phrases to get his congregation fired up. Once the group energy was high, it did the work for him. Every time Jones gave a sermon, he’d pick one fact from the news, or a historical event, and catastrophize it. Jonestown survivor Yulanda Williams recalls Jones showing the Redwood Valley congregation a film called Night and Fog about the Nazi concentration camps. “He said, ‘This is what they have planned for people of color. We’ve got to build our land up over there in Jonestown, we’ve got to get over there. We’ve got to move fast, we’ve got to move swiftly, we’ve got to pool our resources together,’” she explained. Garry Lambrev couldn’t forget Jones’s rococo preaching style if he tried: “He’d say things like, ‘The paper idle’ [his term for the Bible] ‘is useful for one thing,’ and he’d point to his ass—toilet paper,” Garry narrated. “He would tear it up theatrically on the podium and let the pages fly all over. Then he’d say things like, ‘Nobody touch it, it’s damned,’ he’d cackle away, and we’d all laugh.” This phenomenon of listeners mistaking say-it-like-it-is honesty (which of course isn’t actual honesty, just a lack of filter) for the refreshing voice of antiestablishment dissent might feel familiar to anyone who’s lived through the reign of a problematic populist: Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi, Slovakia’s Vladimír Mečiar, Donald Trump. It would be irresponsible, I think, not to mention the oratorical similarities between Trump and Jim Jones, who shared the same love of coining zingy, incendiary nicknames for their opponents. (“Fake News” and “Crooked Hillary” were Trump’s analogs to Jones’s “Hidden Rulers” and “Sky God.”) Even when their statements didn’t contain any rational substance, the catchy phrases and zealous delivery were enough to win over an audience. It’s riveting to watch someone on a podium speak from a place so animalistic that most of us don’t let ourselves behave that way even with our closest friends. As Atlantic staff writer George Packer wrote in 2019, the strength of Trump’s populist language lies in its openness: “It requires no expert knowledge. . . . It’s the way people talk when the inhibitors are off.” Over time, the memorable nicknames and insider-y terminology acquire a strong emotional charge. When a word or phrase takes on such baggage that its mere mention can spark fear, grief, dread, jubilation, reverence (anything), a leader can exploit it to steer followers’ behavior. This lingo is what some psychologists call loaded language.

• From Cultish (2021)

  No communication, no solidarity. No chance to figure a way out. iv. Cultish language isn’t a magic bullet or lethal poison; it’s more like a placebo pill. And there are a host of reasons why it might be likelier to “work” on certain people and not others. We’ll investigate some of these factors throughout this book, but one of them has to do with a type of conditioning most of us have experienced: the conditioning to automatically trust the voices of middle-aged white men. Over the centuries, we’ve been primed to believe that the sound of a Jim Jones–type voice communicates an innate power and capability—that it sounds like the voice of God. In fact, during the heyday of television broadcasting, there was a known style of delivery labeled “the voice of God,” which applied to the deep, booming, exaggerated baritones of newscasters like Walter Cronkite and Edward R. Murrow. It doesn’t take much analysis to notice that the voices of history’s most destructive “cult leaders” largely fit this description. That’s because when a white man speaks confidently in public about big topics like God and government, many listeners are likely to listen by default—to hear the deep pitch and “standard” English dialect and trust it without much questioning. They fail to nitpick either the delivery or the content, even if the message itself is suspect. In Lindy West’s essay collection The Witches Are Coming, there is a chapter titled “Ted Bundy Wasn’t Charming—Are You High?,” which criticizes America’s frightfully low standards for men’s charisma. As long as someone is white, male, and telling us to pay attention to him, we’ll follow even “the most obviously bumbling con artist dumbass ever birthed by the universe,” West says. Even rude, mediocre, murderous Ted Bundy. Even buffoonish Fyre Festival fraudster Billy McFarland. Even racist fascist misogynist Donald Trump. Even diabolical despotic Jim Jones. Admittedly, it isn’t always productive to make blanket statements equating Donald Trump (or any problematic leader) to Jim Jones. That’s chiefly because it’s not the most useful way to evaluate their specific danger. Jonestown, cult scholars agree, was a singularly extraordinary tragedy, which had never happened before and remains unreplicated to this day.

• From Cultish (2021)

  And yet policy makers and media professionals across the political spectrum have been guilty of tossing around “Jonestown” and “Kool-Aid” as omens to warn against all kinds of people they disagree with, from PETA members to abortion rights activists and right back at the anti-PETA and antiabortion protesters screaming at them about Kool-Aid. I am not the first person to point out the similarities between Jones and Trump, but I highlight their overlapping oratories more as an invitation to consider the precise language forms that contributed to Trump’s deceptive and violent charisma, not to drum up fear that the man is capable of orchestrating a mass poisoning in Guyana (I doubt Trump could even name which continent Guyana is on). To think this reductively creates a false dilemma—a scenario where something is either just like Jonestown or otherwise totally fine. Which is obviously not the case; there are nuances. And isn’t cultish rhetoric worth a look even when the stakes aren’t literally Jonestown? In every corner of life, it’s true that the way we interpret someone’s speech corresponds precisely to the amount of power we think they ought to have. When it comes to “suicide cult” leaders, I can think of just one woman who’s gained any significant amount of attention and authority. Her name is Teal Swan, and at the time of this writing, she is very much still alive. Swan is a thirtysomething self-help guru who operates mostly on social media. To her loyalists, she is known as the “spiritual catalyst”; to her critics, she’s the “suicide catalyst.” On the cultish continuum, Swan seems to fall about halfway between Gwyneth Paltrow and Marshall Applewhite—the midpoint between a self- serving “wellness” influencer and a bona fide sociopath. Most people who find Swan do so on YouTube. There, her “personal transformation” videos offer tutorials on everything from how to overcome addiction to how to open your third eye. She started posting videos in 2007, and altogether they have received tens of millions of views. Swan utilizes SEO strategies to target the lonely internet searches of people struggling with depression and suicidal thoughts. A person might search “I’m all alone” or “Why does this hurt so much,” and those keywords could lead them to her content.

• From Cultish (2021)

  Excessive “garbage language” may signal that upper management is suppressing individuality, putting employees in a headspace where their entire reality is governed by the company’s rules, which likely weren’t created with much compassion or fairness in mind. (Research consistently shows that something like one in five CEOs has psychopathic tendencies.) “All companies have special terms, and sometimes they make sense, but sometimes they’re nonsense,” said Kets de Vries. “As a consultant, sometimes I enter an organization where people use code names and acronyms, but they don’t actually know what they’re talking about. They’re just imitating what top management says.” At Amazon, for instance, Jeff Bezos’s ideals are strikingly similar to those of MLM leaders: disdain for bureaucracy, fixation on hierarchies, incentives to rise to the top no matter who gets thrown under the bus, and a juxtaposition of lofty motivational-speak with metaphors of defeat. Bezos created his own version of the Ten Commandments called the Leadership Principles. It’s a code for how Amazonians should think, behave, and speak. There are fourteen of these principles—all vague platitudes, like “think big,” “dive deep,” “have backbone,” and “deliver results.” Employees recite them like mantras. According to an explosive 2015 New York Times Amazon exposé, these rules are part of the company’s “daily language . . . used in hiring, cited at meetings, and quoted in food-truck lines at lunchtime. Some Amazonians say they teach them to their children.” After an Amazon employee is hired, they are assigned to commit all 511 words of the Leadership Principles to memory. They are quizzed a few days later, and those who recite the principles perfectly receive a symbolic award: permission to proclaim “I’m Peculiar,” Amazon’s catchphrase for those who admirably push workplace boundaries. From then on, employees are expected to tear each other’s ideas apart in meetings (similar to the vicious confrontations of the Synanon Game), “even when doing so is uncomfortable or exhausting” (that’s according to Leadership Principle #13). If an underling gives an opinion or responds to a question in a way their manager doesn’t like, they can expect to be called stupid or interrupted midsentence and told to stop speaking. According to ex-Amazonians, maxims often repeated around the office include: “When you hit the wall, climb the wall” and “Work comes first, life comes second, and trying to find the balance comes last.” As Bezos himself wrote in a 1999 shareholder letter, “I constantly remind our employees to be afraid, to wake up every morning terrified.”

• From Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble (2014)

  No one has ever berated me and insulted me, or expressed such hostility and contempt for me. Maybe I’ve just been lucky. Maybe this kind of treatment is what most people experience at work. But I’ve worked in some rough places, from a textile mill to a Hollywood writers’ room, and I’ve never experienced anything like Trotsky. I never got bullied in school, either, but I imagine this is what it feels like. Some guy is tormenting me, and I’m afraid to tell anyone, because I’m pretty sure that telling someone will only make things worse. That fear, in turn, sends me down a different rabbit hole and I start to hate myself for being such a coward, for being afraid to stand up for myself. I feel ashamed of myself. This guy is using me as his punching bag, and I’m not doing anything to stop him. It seems to me that if I can just keep it together, eventually he will realize that I won’t fight back and he will get bored with harassing me. Instead the opposite happens. When he realizes that I will not fight back, he becomes even more aggressive. It’s as if I’ve given him permission to beat the shit out of me. In a strange way, I almost admire Trotsky. As the subject of a psychology experiment, he’s fascinating. The problem is that this is not a psychology experiment, and despite my attempts to pretend that it is, the abuse begins to take a toll on me. I dread going to work. The office seems surreal, almost Kafkaesque. Trotsky has become my jailer, and I live in fear of doing something that will arouse his ire, but I have no idea what those things might be. Anything can set him off. I feel overpowered and helpless. Spinner sits around the corner from me, braying like a donkey at her own jokes. I’m surrounded by happy, upbeat young people who are all having the time of their lives in this adult kindergarten. Their latest innovation is a random lunch date generator, created by the women who work for Jordan, the creator of Fearless Friday: Sign up, and once a week you’ll be paired up with another HubSpotter for a getting-to-know-you-better lunch. The cheery atmosphere doesn’t offset the bleakness that I feel but instead makes it worse. I would love to work from home, but the podcast job requires me to be in the office, and anyway, Trotsky says I need to come into work to show that I’m a team player and that I’m “all in.” For weeks I put up with Trotsky’s abuse. No matter what he says, I respond in a calm, measured way. It takes a huge amount of energy to maintain that composure—and eventually I can’t do it anymore. One day I lose my temper and tell him to get off my back. It’s a Friday afternoon in October.

• From Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble (2014)

  That deal makes sense if you’re a professional athlete who can earn millions of dollars a year and retire at age thirty or thirty-five, but seems a bit ruthless when applied to the rank-and-file worker. The result, according to countless articles in publications like Fortune, the New Republic, Bloomberg, and New York Magazine, is that Silicon Valley has become a place where people live in fear. As soon as someone better or cheaper comes along, your company will get rid of you. If you turn fifty, or forty, or thirty-five; if you demand a raise and become too expensive; if a new batch of workers comes out of college and will do your job for less than what you are paid—you’re gone. So don’t get too comfortable. This new arrangement between workers and employers was invented by Silicon Valley companies and is considered an innovation as significant as the chips and software for which the Valley is better known. Now this ideology has spread beyond Silicon Valley. We are living in a period of huge economic transformation, in which entire industries—retail, banking, healthcare, media, manufacturing—are being reshaped by technology. As those industries change, so does their approach to treating workers. But does anyone really want to have twenty to twenty-five different jobs over the course of a forty-year career? It’s hard to see how this arrangement can be good for workers. Bouncing around when you’re young is one thing, but at some point people want to get married, have kids, and settle down. Stability becomes important. In the World According to Hoffman, you will spend half of your life searching for a new job, going on job interviews, getting trained, settling in, signing up for the new insurance (that is, if you get insurance), filling out your tax paperwork, moving over your 401(k) plan. You’ll barely figure out where the foosball tables are located before it’s time to go find a new job. Amazon, which has gained a reputation as an especially harsh place to work, adds a cruel twist to Hoffman’s short-term “tour of duty” philosophy. The median Amazon worker lasts only one year at the company, according to a 2013 study by PayScale, a company that tracks compensation data. Amazon compensates workers in part with restricted stock units spread over four years— but, unlike most tech companies which distribute an equal number each year, Amazon backloads the grants so that the lion’s share of the stock units arrive in years 3 and 4. Employees who leave after one year might reportedly get only 5 percent of their grant. While many tech companies treat employees poorly, they also expect them to be loyal, to feel for their employer the kind of passion that a sports fan feels for a team.

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  On the fourth day of the festival, priests and choristers filed into Marduk’s shrine for the recitation of Enuma Elish, the creation hymn that recounted Marduk’s victory over cosmic and political chaos. The first gods to emerge from the slimy primal matter (similar to Mesopotamia’s alluvial soil) were “nameless, natureless, futureless,”95 virtually inseparable from the natural world and seen as enemies of progress. The next gods to emerge from the sludge became progressively more distinct until the divine evolution culminated in Marduk, the most splendid of the Anunnaki. In the same way, Mesopotamian culture had developed from rural communities immersed in the natural rhythms of the countryside that were now regarded as sluggish, static, and inert. But the old times could return: this hymn expressed the fear of civilization lapsing back into abysmal nothingness. The most dangerous of the primitive gods was Tiamat, whose name means “Void”; she was the salty sea, which, in the Middle East, symbolized not only primeval chaos but the social anarchy that could bring starvation, disease, and death to the entire population. She represented an ever-present threat that every civilization, no matter how powerful, had to be ready to confront. The hymn also gave sacred sanction to the structural violence of Babylonian society. Tiamat creates a horde of monsters to fight the Anunnaki, a “growling roaring rout, ready for battle,” suggestive of the danger the lower classes presented to the state. Their monstrous forms represent the perverse defiance of normal categories and the confusion of identity associated with social and cosmic disorder. Their leader is Tiamat’s spouse Kingu, a “clumsy laborer,” one of the Igigi, whose name means “Toil.” The narrative of the hymn is repeatedly punctuated with this pounding refrain: “She has made the Worm, the Dragon, the Female Monster, the Great Lion, the Mad Dog, the Mad Scorpion and the Howling Storm, the Fish-Man, the Centaur.”96 But Marduk defeats them all, casting them into prison and creating an ordered universe by splitting Tiamat’s corpse in two and separating heaven and earth. He then commands the gods to build the city of bab-ilani, “gate of the gods,” as their earthly home and creates the first man by mixing Kingu’s blood with a handful of dust to perform the labor on which civilization depends. “Sons of toil,” the masses are sentenced for life to menial labor and are held in subjection. Liberated from work, the gods sing a hymn of praise and thanksgiving. The myth and its accompanying rituals reminded the Sumerian aristocracy of the reality on which their civilization and privilege depended; they must be perpetually primed for war to keep down rebellious peasants, ambitious aristocrats, and foreign enemies who threatened civilized society. Religion was therefore deeply implicated in this imperial violence and could not be separated from the economic and political realities that sustained any agrarian state.

• From Cultish (2021)

  So they fed her a line—“Everything happens for a reason”—to simplify the situation and put everyone’s cognitive dissonance to bed. “It’s work to think, especially about things you don’t want to think about,” confessed Diane Benscoter, an ex-member of the Unification Church (aka the Moonies, an infamous ’70s-era religious movement). “It’s a relief not to have to.” Thought- terminating clichés provide that temporary psychological sedative. Jones had a whole repertoire of these phrases, which he’d whip out whenever a follower’s question or concern needed silencing. “It’s all the media’s fault— don’t believe them” was a go-to whenever someone brought up a piece of news that challenged him. On the day of the tragedy, he delivered phrases like “It’s out of our hands,” “[The] choice is not ours now,” and “Everybody dies” to shut down dissenters like Christine Miller. In Heaven’s Gate, Ti and Do frequently repeated rote sayings like “Every religion is less than the Truth” to halt consideration of other belief systems. To muzzle accusations that their theories were illogical, they argued that if “the TRUTH about the Evolutionary Level Above Human” was not yet clear to you, it wasn’t their fault. You simply hadn’t been “bestowed the gift of recognition.” * Having thought-terminating clichés like these meant that whenever difficult queries arose—like, how can Jonestown be our only good option if we’re all starving? Or, is there a way to achieve enlightenment without killing ourselves? —you had a simple, catchily packaged answer telling you not to worry about it. Digging for more information is poison to a power abuser; thought-terminating clichés squash independent thinking. This simultaneously puts the follower in their place and lets them off the hook. If “It’s all the media’s fault” is burned into your brain, you quickly learn to use the media as a scapegoat and not consider any other causes for your suffering. If raising too many questions means you simply don’t have the gift of recognition, then eventually you’re going to stop asking, because the gift of recognition is what you want more than anything in the world. In the most oppressive cultish environments, even if followers pick up on these tactics and want to speak out against them, there are strategies in place to make sure they are silenced. Both Applewhite and Jones kept their followers from conversing not only with the outside world but also with each other. It didn’t take long after settling in Jonestown for Peoples Templers to notice that this Promised Land was a sham. But bonding over their shared misery? Not allowed. Jones enforced a “quiet rule,” so whenever his voice played over the camp PA system (which was often), no one was allowed to talk. In Heaven’s Gate, too, followers’ speech was heavily monitored. Frank Lyford remembers that everyone was expected to speak at a low volume, or not at all, so that they wouldn’t disturb other members.

• From The Historical Jesus (Great Courses) (2000)

  Scope: We have better documentation for Jesus’ final week than for any other period of his life. He left Galilee for the capital of Jerusalem, Judea, to celebrate the Passover feast. It appears that he did not go to the festival as a pilgrim, but as an apocalyptic prophet to deliver his message of imminent destruction and salvation to the heart of Israel, the Temple of Jerusalem, to urge people to repent before it was too late. This lecture will discuss what happened when Jesus entered the Temple and caused a disturbance, an action probably meant as a parable, demonstrating in a small way the kind of destruction that would occur when the Son of Man arrived— the Temple itself would be destroyed. We will observe Jesus preaching his message and acquiring greater numbers of listeners frightening the local authorities, who feared riots among the crowds. They arranged to have Jesus removed quietly from the public eye. Before he was arrested, Jesus realized that his time was up and had a last meal with his disciples in which he may have informed them that his enemies were about to make their move against him. Outline I. We must draw a connection between the content of Jesus’ apocalyptic message and the reason for his death. A. Some hypotheses of what Jesus ultimately stood for run aground on this connection. They sound completely plausible in reconstructing what Jesus said and did, but they can’t make sense of his execution by the Romans. 1. If Jesus is to be understood as a Jewish rabbi who taught that everyone should love God and be good to one another, then why did the Romans crucify him? 2. If Jesus was mainly interested in opposing the materialistic world that he found himself in, urging his followers to give up their possessions and live simple, natural lives, apart from the trappings of society, why would he have been sentenced to death? B. Let me explain how I understand the connection between Jesus’ life and death. In this lecture and the next, I’ll go into some of the details. 1. At the end of his life, Jesus brought his apocalyptic message of the coming judgment to Jerusalem. This judgment would be inflicted by the Son of Man, who would destroy all those opposed to God before establishing his kingdom. 2. Those who refused to accept this message would be condemned — even if they, like the Pharisees, followed the Torah of God exactly, 36 ©2000 The Teaching Company Limited Partnership or maintained the purity regulations of the Essenes, or remained faithful to the sacrificial cult of the Temple as the Sadducees did. 3. Religious leaders among these various groups, and the institutions they represented, would be destroyed by the Son of Man. So, too, would the Temple be destroyed.

• From Cultish (2021)

  So he gathered everyone in the main pavilion and told them the enemy was on their way to ambush them. “They’ll shoot some of our innocent babies. . . . They’ll torture our people. They’ll torture our seniors. We cannot have this,” he announced. It was too late to escape: “We can’t go back. They won’t leave us alone. They’re now going back to tell more lies, which means more congressmen. And there’s no way, no way we can survive.” Then he made known his wish: “My opinion is that we be kind to children and be kind to seniors and take the potion like they used to take in ancient Greece, and step over quietly because we are not committing suicide. It’s a revolutionary act.” The words were smooth, as they had always been, but surrounded by armed guards, residents were presented with two options: die by poison* or be shot trying to escape. This is what every leader of the half dozen “suicide cults” in history have done: Taking an apocalyptic stance on the universe, with them at its center, they believe their imminent demise means everyone else must go down, too. For them, followers’ lives are chips on the table—and if they’re going to lose either way, they might as well go all in. But hands-on killing is a dirty job. They’re in the business of opportunism and manipulation, not murder. So as soon as they feel their grasp on power start to slip, they bear down on forecasts that the world is coming to a gruesome, unstoppable end. The only solution, the leader preaches, is suicide, which, if conducted in a specific way at a certain time, will at the very least render you a martyr and at most literally transport you to the kingdom of God. Their loyalists back them up, echoing their words, pressuring any doubters to follow along. A few gutsy Peoples Templers tried to argue with Jones that day. One of them was Christine Mille r, a Black senior member who frequently stood up to Jones. A poor Texas girl who grew up to become a successful LA County clerk, Christine had opened her purse countless times for Jones, in whom she placed ardent faith. But her willingness to compromise with him had limits. By the time she reached Guyana, where members were supposed to live simply and communally, sixty-year-old Christine refused to give up wearing the jewelry and furs she’d worked so hard for. Known for her unyielding frankness, she and Jones had a love-hate relationship that often turned tense. At one meeting, Jones became so exasperated by Christine’s opposition that he pulled a gun on her. “You can shoot me, but you are going to have to respect me first,” she retorted—and he backed down. If there were a time for Jones to heed Christine again, it’d be on November 18, 1978.

• From A Way of Being (1980)

  the teacher constantly supervising and checking on them. The students’ distrust of the teacher is more diffuse—a lack of trust in the teacher’s motives, honesty, fairness, competence. There may be a real rapport between an entertaining lecturer and those who are being entertained; there may be admiration for the instructor, but mutual trust is not a noticeable ingredient. 6. The subjects (the students) are best governed by being kept in an intermittent or constant state of fear. Today, there is not much physical punishment, but public criticism and ridicule and the students’ constant fear of failure are even more potent. In my experience this state of fear appears to increase as we go up the educational ladder, because the student has more to lose. In elementary school, the individual may be an object of scorn or be regarded as a dolt. In high school, there is added to this the fear of failure to graduate, with its vocational, economic, and educational disadvantages. In college, all these consequences are magnified and intensified. In graduate school, sponsorship by one professor offers even greater opportunities for extreme punishment due to some autocratic whim. Many graduate students have failed to receive their degrees because they have refused to obey, or to conform to every wish of, their major professor. Their position is analogous to that of a slave, subject to the life-and-death power of the master. 7. Democracy and its values are ignored and scorned in practice. Students do not participate in choosing their individual goals, curricula, or manner of working. They are chosen for them. Students have no part in the choice of teaching personnel nor any voice in educational policy. Likewise, the teachers often have no choice in choosing their administrative officers. Teachers, too, often have no participation in forming educational policy. All this is in striking contrast to all the teaching about the virtues of democracy, the importance of the “free world,” and the like. The political practices of the school are in the most striking contrast to what is taught. While being taught that freedom and responsibility are the glorious features of “our democracy,” the students are experiencing themselves as powerless, as having little freedom, and as having almost no opportunity to exercise choice or carry responsibility. 8. There is no place for whole persons in the educational system, only for their intellects. In elementary school, the bursting curiosity and the excess of physical energy characteristic of the normal child are curbed and, if possible, stifled. In junior high and high school, the one overriding interest of all the students—sex and the emotional and physical relationships it involves—is almost totally ignored, and certainly not regarded as a major area for learning. There is very little place for emotions in the secondary school. In college, the situation is even more extreme—it is only the mind that is welcomed.

• From A Way of Being (1980)

  Multiphasic Personality Inventory (Rogers et al., 1967, p. 85). This suggests that the sensitive understanding by another may have been the most potent element in bringing the schizophrenics out of their estrangement, and into the world of relatedness. Carl Jung has said that schizophrenics cease to be schizophrenic when they meet other persons by whom they feel understood. Our study provides empirical evidence in support of that statement. Other studies, both of schizophrenics and of counseling center clients, show that a low level of empathy is related to a slight worsening in adjustment and pathology. Here, too, the findings make sense. It is as though the individual concludes: “If no one understands me, if no one can grasp what these experiences are like, then I am indeed in a bad way—more abnormal than I thought.” One of R. D. Laing’s patients states this, feeling vividly in describing earlier contacts with psychiatrists: It’s a most terrifying feeling to realize that the doctor can’t see the real you, that he can’t understand what you feel and that he’s just going ahead with his own ideas. I would start to feel that I was invisible or maybe not there at all. (Laing, 1965, p. 166) A second consequence of empathic understanding is that the recipient feels valued, cared for, accepted as the person that he or she is. It might seem that we have here stepped into another area, and that we are no longer speaking of empathy. But this is not so. It is impossible to accurately sense the perceptual world of another person unless you value that person and his or her world— unless you, in some sense, care. Hence, the message comes through to the recipient that “this other individual trusts me, thinks I’m worthwhile. Perhaps I am worth something. Perhaps I could value myself. Perhaps I could care for myself.” A vivid example of this comes from a young man who has been a recipient of much sensitive understanding and who is now in the later stages of his therapy: CLIENT I could even conceive of it as a possibility that I could have a kind of tender concern for me. Still, how could I be tender, be concerned for myself, when they’re one and the same thing? But yet I can feel it so clearly—you know, like taking care of a child. You want to give it this and give it that. I can kind of clearly see the purposes for somebody else, but I can never see them for myself, that I could do this for me, you know. Is it possible that I can really want to take care of myself, and make that a major purpose of my life? That means I’d have to deal with the whole world as if I were guardian of the most cherished and

• From Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble (2014)

  Pictures of my kids could be floating around in pedophile forums, along with our home address and the name and address of their school. Unless someone from HubSpot or its board of directors called and explained to me exactly what happened, for the rest of my life I would have to assume that all of these things had happened. Hackers might have started out just trying to get a copy of a book manuscript, but in the end they might have done much more damage, not just to me but to my family as well. I’ve grown used to the call from my credit card company telling me that my card has been compromised and they’re sending me a new one. But this felt different. This was targeted and personal. The people who did this were people who knew me. This wasn’t the same as getting rounded up in a massive hack where bad guys steal millions of credit card numbers and yours just happens to be one of them. Once, when I was in high school, our house was burglarized. One Sunday night we came home from our weekly dinner at my grandmother’s house to find a door broken open, rooms ransacked, jewelry missing. Someone had studied us, learned our routine, and then hit the house when they knew we would be out. We suspected a kid in the neighborhood, but the police could not prove anything. The worst part wasn’t that things were stolen. It was the feeling we had afterward. It was as if until then we had gone through life believing that the locks on our doors and windows could protect us, that danger was something abstract and far away, something that happened to other people but not in our sleepy neighborhood in a tiny town in New England. After the robbery I wondered if we would ever feel safe again. As the Russian author Anton Chekhov wrote, “However happy [one] might be, life will sooner or later show its claws.” HubSpot had shown me its claws. This company was not just a wacky frat house with Cinco de Mayo margarita bashes and sales bros puking in the men’s room and a bunch of clueless twenty-something managers. The people who ran the place were not just a pack of bullshit-slinging charlatans, but something more sinister. It seemed to me that maybe their intent all along had been not only to get hold of the book but to send me a message: You think you can make fun of us? Just look at what we can do to you. The day after HubSpot announced Volpe’s termination, a former executive at HubSpot asked me to meet him in a town outside Boston. I thought he knew what had happened and wanted to tell me.

• From Cultish (2021)

  And I couldn’t let them take us to that next room. So I stood up. I said, “NO THANK YOU. WE ARE NOT YOUR TARGET AUDIENCE. PLEASE LET US GO. MANI, WE’RE LEAVING.” Spray Tan made eye contact with Mr. Blue Suit, exhaled, and gestured toward the door. I grabbed Mani by the hand, and we ran—properly sprinted—out of the classroom, through the museum hall, across the lobby, and out the door, then swooped into my Civic and sped away, never to turn down L. Ron Hubbard Way again. “Kidnapped” might be a smidge over the top in describing my interaction with the Scientologists . . . but I wouldn’t put it past them to engage in such activities. Years later, I would learn that if I had let them take it one step further by agreeing to purchase one of those courses, I would’ve been led into a movie theater and shown a Scientology welcome video, with the door locked behind me. If I had continued on with Scientology from there, signed up for more courses and one-on-one sessions, I would have sunk thousands of dollars, if not millions, whatever I had, into my churchly commitment. Because my ultimate goal as a Scientologist would be to “go clear”—to ascend to L. Ron Hubbard’s highest level of enlightenment. The church dangles this ambition above all its members, but its convoluted hierarchy of levels— which secretly go on forever—ensures that going clear is not actually possible. After Cathy had spent a few years in Scientology, she made it to a level called Dianetic Clear, which, to her knowledge, was the finish line. “I thought, ‘Oh my gosh, this is great. I’m clear, I have no more reactive mind, I’m going to go out into the world with this newfound awareness,’” she recounted. But in Scientology, as soon as you arrive at what you’ve been led to believe is the top, they reveal that there’s more. This is just the beginning, actually, because now you’ve opened up a whole other spiritual can of worms. Now you have no choice but to climb to the next level, then the next. And whereas before it might have cost $5,000 or $10,000 to level up, now it could be $100,000 or more. As I continued to traverse Scientology’s Bridge to Total Freedom (the path to going clear), I’d come to learn about supernatural concepts like Xenu the galactic overlord and invisible “body thetans” (spirits of ancient aliens that cling to humans and cause destruction). It would have been lunacy. But I’d have to keep going. The sunk cost fallacy and loss aversion would tell me I can’t quit. Not this far in. Plus, my superiors would insist, if I leave right now in the middle of an upper level of auditing, I could pull in misfortune. I could pull in disease, even death.

• From Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble (2014)

  “Go find a time that works and send me a calendar invite.” At the appointed date and time, we set out for Starbucks but end up taking a long walk around a little canal near the office. Trotsky tells me he’s unhappy at HubSpot. Cranium is riding him, hard. The IPO is looking like a bust. He only took this job because he wanted to make a score on the stock. Word is that HubSpot is trying to price the shares in the range of $19 to $21. That’s above the strike price that Trotsky and I both have—our options are priced at $13. But Trotsky says it’s not enough. “Unless the stock gets to $40, it’s not even worth it for me to stay here,” he says. We go to Starbucks and get our coffee. We walk back to HubSpot and sit down on the couches in the lobby on the first floor. At last I ask why he seems so angry at me. “I feel like something must have happened, and I don’t know what it is,” I say. “If I did something to piss you off, I just want to know, so I can apologize and make things right.” I’m hoping he’ll soften up a bit and remember that we’re friends. But unfortunately that doesn’t happen. Trotsky sticks to his guns. He says that he is angry at me, and that I’m doing a shitty job, and I have a shitty attitude. I’m not showing enough team spirit, and I don’t respect him enough. “I’m the only person here who gives a shit about you,” he says, practically seething. “I don’t think you realize this, but I’m the only reason that you still have a job here at all. If it weren’t for me, they would have fired you a long time ago.” “How would they fire me?” I say. “Fire me for what?” “They’d call it an experiment that didn’t work out. They hired a journalist, but it wasn’t a good fit.” “Jesus. So Cranium wants to fire me?” “You’ve shown me no gratitude, and no respect. I’ve gone out of my way to help you. Over and over, I’ve tried to help you. I wanted to help you. But frankly, right now, I’m a lot less inclined to help you anymore. That’s just the truth.” He gets up. I get up too. We walk to the elevators and share an awkward, uncomfortable ride up to the fourth floor and back to our desks. I write to my friend, the C-level executive, and tell her that her suggestion about going out for coffee didn’t work out as well as I’d hoped. It turns out the abuse from Trotsky has only begun. From this point on he will be looking for any possible reason to tell me that I’ve done something wrong. One day I have a lunch set up with a local tech CEO, a guy who might be a good guest for the podcast.

• From Cultish (2021)

  Jones referred to the macabre reality as “the transition” or, during his more manic moods, “the Great Translation.” On the Death Tape, he calls dying a minor matter of “stepping over quietly to the next plane.” Applewhite never used the words “dying” or “suicide,” either—instead, he referred to these matters as “exiting your vehicle,” “graduation,” “a completion of the changeover,” or “overcoming containers to inherit next-level bodies.” These terms were conditioning tools—invoked to make followers cozy up to the idea of death, to dismiss their ingrained fears of it. There’s a companion tool to loaded language that can be found in every cultish leader’s repertoire: It’s called the thought-terminating cliché. Coined in 1961 by the psychiatrist Robert J. Lifton, this term refers to catchphrases aimed at halting an argument from moving forward by discouraging critical thought. Ever since I learned of the concept, I now hear it everywhere—in political debates, in the hashtag wisdom that clogs my Instagram feed. Cultish leaders often call on thought-terminating clichés, also known as semantic stop signs, to hastily dismiss dissent or rationalize flawed reasoning. In his book Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism , Lifton writes that with these stock saying s, “the most far-reaching and complex of human problems are compressed into brief, highly selective, definitive-sounding phrases, easily memorized and easily expressed. They become the start and finish of any ideological analysis.” So while loaded language is a cue to intensify emotions, semantic stop signs are a cue to discontinue thought. To put it most simply, when used in conjunction, a follower’s body screams “Do whatever the leader says,” while their brain whispers “Don’t think about what might happen next”—and that’s a deadly coercive combination. Thought-terminating clichés are by no means exclusive to “cults.” Ironically, calling someone “brainwashed ” can even serve as a semantic stop sign. You can’t engage in a dialogue with someone who says, “That person is brainwashed” or “You’re in a cult.” It’s just not effective. I know this because every time I witness it happen on social media, the argument comes to a standstill. Once these phrases are invoked, they choke the conversation, leaving no hope of figuring out what’s behind the drastic rift in belief. Contentious debates aside, thought-terminating clichés also pervade our everyday conversations: Expressions like “It is what it is,” “Boys will be boys,” “Everything happens for a reason,” “It’s all God’s plan,” and certainly “Don’t think about it too hard” are all common examples. Among New Age types, I’ve also heard semantic stop signs come in the form of wily maxims like “Truth is a construct,” “None of this matters on a cosmic level,” “I hold space for multiple realities,” “Don’t let yourself be ruled by fear,” and dismissing any anxieties or doubts as “limiting beliefs.” (We’ll discuss more of this rhetoric in part 6 .) These pithy mottos are effective because they alleviate cognitive dissonance, the uncomfortable discord one experiences when they hold two conflicting beliefs at the same time.