#abcdef

Let’s get a quick, short definition out of the way, borrowed from the French Interministerial Mission for the Fight against Drugs and Addictive Behaviors:

"A cult is an organized group or a solitary person whose purpose is to dominate cult members by using psychological manipulation and pressure strategies."

A couple of misconceptions: we are not talking about New Religious Movements (NREs)—at least not exclusively. To begin with, those are not necessarily cults, and more importantly, cults are not exclusively "religious" movements.

From Heaven's Gate to Scientology to for-profit face-to-face canvassing, you cannot rely on the self-description of an organization to accurately describe what it does, and like with NXIVM, it usually isn't the supernatural or religious aspects that are actually problematic.

A cult may never have explicitly supernatural or spiritual aspects; they may define themselves by their strict adherence to materialism, even. Thus, if those are the red flags you're looking for, you're not going to notice when no one is talking about god, reincarnation, or quantum pseudoscience.

Cults are a normal part of modern society, not something only at the fringe.

Considering the likely audience of this, it may be tempting to say, “No gods, no masters,” or “obviously capitalism is a cult.”

But this is a feature that appears within the radical, anticapitalist left as well.

The abusiveness of the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL) or Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), of Bob Avakian's Revolutionary Communist Party USA, or Gazi Kodzo's Black Hammer organization and its rapid turn toward failed Colorado commune and predation of unhoused people in Atlanta — it is not just “those people” who can fall into this. A Maoist transbian polycule with a central node who controls the sex lives of her partners while leading the “self-crit” sessions — this is only tangentially the faults of capitalism.

No one is immune from this, no one is safe. Because while cults can express themselves in all of these various ways, they are not only taking advantage of the weakest or worst of us; they don’t even always take us in our weakest or worst moments.

Cults also will, like a cordyceps fungus, repurpose your strengths and talent to their own ends. Your incredible intelligence and reasoning abilities will be turned to explaining why you should continue to support this particular cult despite all evidence to the contrary. Your empathy will make you care about others still in the cult that leaving it would mean leaving behind. You will convince yourself that reform is possible and you just need to go through the proper channels that the abusers just happen also to control.

To review: a cult can like anything and anyone can find themselves in one.

But most cults by their nature do not lead with the weirdest shit first. Some go as far as to have front companies recruiting people to one thing, then slowly introduce this other thing when a target is thought suitable and their defenses are down.

For most people, there won’t be a clear, sudden indicator because they will be surrounded by others who treat these power dynamics as normal and good. Peer pressure is not just something middle schoolers fall victim to but something all of us experience.

Even if you leave, all that does is reinforce the survivor bias and culture of those who remain, feeding the narratives of exclusivity, elitism, and persecution to keep members cleaved from the outside.

Back to the question: how do you spot that you’re in a cult?

It’s crucial that you actually bother to ask. It’s crucial that you have the humility to assess your surroundings, your choices, and be willing to walk away from stuff you’ve invested in when you realize your mistake, sunk costs be damned.

There are various guides you can use, but a pretty robust if still subjective one is Isaac Bonewits’ Advanced Bonewits Cult Danger Evaluation Frame (ABCDEF), rating 18 categories to score from one-to-10.

There are others. ABCDEF works best for new religious movements; Gwen Snyder taking business cults to task highlighted some issues Bonewits did not.

Certainly, neither person is themself infallible. Consider both nothing more than starting points.

So far, we haven’t talked much about anarchist groups or dynamics, and you may assume that’s because we are not power worshipers, fascists, Marxist-Leninists, so our praxis inoculates us.

That is bunk.

It is true that anarchist critiques of hierarchy apply to cults as well. An anarchist may not always be able to recognize a hierarchy, but we ought to have a good idea of our response when we do.

Yet anarchists are not immune from becoming cult leaders. Those who exploit others this way are not uniquely evil or a different species from us. A cult leader may be wholly sincere and actually believe they are just that special, that irreplaceable.

If you are an anarchist, you should always be thinking about and planning for your replacement. You will die one day. You may be disabled before that, or jailed before that, or "canceled"; don't think you are not capable of being an abuser, including in ways that meant almost nothing to you but everything to who you hurt.

Anything you're doing should not rely solely on you to not fail. The group you are part of should not require one person, you or anyone else, who is so essential that others are tempted to give them a pass because the work is so important and they are so valuable to the work.

Having said all this, is the vaccination against hierarchical cult abuses a panacea against all abuses? Clearly not.

A cult is one kind of hierarchy.

It is often starkly hierarchical and dangerous but not the only way for an organization or group dynamics to be abusive. We have to work very hard to guard ourselves against these, too; that is anarchism.

We need collective action from non-blood relations willing to work together and help one another. We need to radically re-imagine and embody different ways of living, different possibilities of seeing the world. The taboos of the status quo are not extant always because they serve most of us or benefit any but a few.

And still, attempts to create alternatives to what we have inherited are not guaranteed to be improvements, and in our desperation at the state of the world or just our own lives, we can pursue groups—usually new groups—that lack the protective guardrails erected by necessity to keep a collective functioning since, without them, the group implodes.

How do you spot you're in a cult?

Think about what power is and who has it, and never stop looking or talking to other people about what you see.