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PORTSIDE CULTURE

SAY THE WORD  
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Olivia Gerber
November 26, 2021
Los Angeles Review of Books
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_ Author Montell analyzes the social science of cult influence and
how leaders of cults use language to exercise power. Reviewer Gerber
uses her own childhood cult experience as a window into this complex
topic. _

,

 

_Cultish
The Language of Fanaticism_
Amanda Montell
Harper Perennial
ISBN: 9780062993168

 

I WAS NINE when my mother met the spiritual teacher she believed could
help open her heart. I’m sure that’s a metaphor, but you’d have
to ask her. And he did help, metaphorically. My mother’s rage, which
was both constant and unpredictable, cooled. And when she couldn’t
contain it, I suddenly had someone to run to for protection and
validation, things my father — emotionally and physically absent as
he was — couldn’t provide. By the time I was 12, my parents had
divorced and our mother had moved my older brother and me to the small
town where this teacher lived to be closer to him and his work. We
went gladly.

I’d refer to this man as my godfather when necessary because there
was no more apt word to describe our relationship. What else do you
call the man who has no romantic involvement with your mother but
who’s nevertheless taken on the role of father in the absence of
your biological one? The man who holds himself responsible for your
spiritual upbringing? The man whose way of seeing the world you lean
on as a guide to living? What else do you call that man?

 
I’ve spent much of my life grasping at language to soften the edges
of my experience and make the facts of my life more palatable. When I
was young, I’d describe my godfather’s pseudo-psychology as “the
emotional growth work my mom does.” I’d tell my friends at school
that I spent weekends in “therapy” or “with my family” rather
than in workshops where I learned about my godfather’s theology, or
in one-on-one sessions with a practitioner of his therapeutic method.
The adults who were in those rooms were simply “family friends”
rather than fellow community members and followers. As I got older and
my relationship with this man became more fractured — with him often
threatening never to speak to me again if I didn’t change in the
ways he believed I should — I dropped the term godfather in favor of
the more loosely held “father figure.” When I was 21 and doctors
found a nine-centimeter mass in my chest that this man said was the
physical manifestation of my “inner cunt” and the result of my
unwillingness to let him close, when he said I’d likely die from it,
and that if I did it would be my fault, I called that “tough
love.” These days, when I talk about how I was raised, I might say
there was a lot of “emotional and verbal abuse,” or I’ll talk
amorphously about “trauma,” but I won’t say who perpetrated it
or in what contexts. In fact, these days it’s very rare that I’ll
talk about this man at all.

Although my reasons for doing so have changed over the years, I
perform all these linguistic gymnastics to avoid using one very
loaded, burdensome word. Cult.

¤

Words and their power are at the heart of Amanda Montell’s new book,
_Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism_. Montell uses the title term
both to describe that which is cult-like, or cult-adjacent, as well as
the specific kinds of language spoken in cults to convert, condition,
and coerce their members. Language, Montell says, “is the key means
by which all degrees of cultlike influence occur” — and she means
that as broadly as it sounds. Montell’s book explores and exposes
the linguistic tricks that make a whole range of groups cultish —
from the Peoples Temple, to fitness communities like SoulCycle,
12-step groups, and your everyday Instagram influencer. Though the
stakes of membership vary drastically, the methods used by these
groups’ leaders to build trust, assert power, create community, and
justify behavior are, Montell shows, “uncannily, cultishly
similar.”

I read Montell’s book feverishly, underlining whole paragraphs. It
arrived like divine intervention as I’ve been churning over this
cultural moment, one in which a new docuseries pops up seemingly every
six months exposing the sinister abuses of some fringe group gone
sour. Like the rest of the world, I watched in horror as the events of
Osho’s Rajneeshpuram and Keith Raniere’s NXIVM revealed themselves
over the perfectly plotted episodes of _Wild Wild Country_ (2018) and
_The Vow_ (2020–), respectively. I inhaled Emma Cline’s novel _The
Girls_ (2016) and gawked at the horrors unveiled in the film
_Midsommar_ (2019), fictionalized accounts that pointed to a growing
cultural obsession with the cultic fringe. And throughout these
voyeuristic escapades, I’ve found myself both spellbound and
repulsed. Though I’d been deep in the thrall of such a group myself,
I’m not immune to the morbid curiosity that I imagine draws those
with “normal” childhoods to flock to this genre of entertainment.
I come to these cultumentaries (can I coin that term?) hoping, I
imagine uniquely, to see something that makes me feel less alone,
perhaps even to understand myself and my own experience a bit better.
But inevitably, as the stakes get higher and the extremes to which the
cult members go far surpass my own experience, I end up like everyone
else, curled up under the covers, biting my nails and thinking _this
is fucking crazy_.

And that’s what those who create this kind of media are banking on,
right? When they show footage of naked women gyrating and chanting at
Osho’s behest or flash images of Raniere’s initials branded on the
hips of women coerced into NXIVM’s sex trafficking ring, they’re
hoping to key into the very human part of us that’s titillated by
peeping at the transgressive. Never mind how abusive those
transgressions may be.

This sensationalism is not only perverse, but it also misguidedly
diverts the viewer’s attention away from the cautionary messages we
can glean from these stories of flagrant abuses of power. Because,
really, what’s so unfamiliar about men manipulating good people in
service of their own wealth and influence? What’s so
incomprehensible about sticking around too long when a good situation
turns bad and leaving means losing your community? The story of NXIVM
is the story of America — a society that implicitly trusts the words
of confident white men, that allows the wealthy to behave badly with
impunity, that’s unfazed by the objectification and exploitation of
women, that’s filled with people who crave a sense of purpose and
belonging and will go to great lengths to find it.

“We’re ‘cultish’ by nature,” Montell writes. And it’s
_this _story she’s most interested in telling, the one that
implicates readers and the society in which they live, the one that
forces us to ask better questions — questions that place the onus
for accountability on those who perpetrate abuse rather than on those
who suffer it. Questions like: “What techniques do charismatic
leaders use to exploit people’s fundamental needs for community and
meaning? How do they cultivate that kind of power?”

The answer, Montell tells us, is language. Words.

¤

“No words can explain such a thing,” I wrote in my journal when I
was 16, as I steeled myself for a conversation in which I planned to
explain the community I was raised in to my first long-term boyfriend
(let’s call him “C”). I met C during a year abroad and the end
of the school year had flung us into uncertain long distance, each of
us back with our respective families until he started university in
the fall.

I was having doubts. Our spiritual teacher always said that no
relationship of mine would ever last with someone who didn’t do
their own work, by which of course he meant _his_ work. It was time
for me to suss out how amenable C was to the idea — not now,
necessarily, but someday. If it wasn’t likely to be ever, then what
was the point of being in love and miserably apart? “He’s going to
think I’m crazy,” I continued in my journal. “It sounds like a
cult.”

How do you describe a thing without calling it by its name? It felt
like a macabre party game, a high-stakes version of _Taboo_. There I
was, tap-dancing in the liminal space between knowing and not knowing,
seeing and unseeing. Words were all I had, and they only made things
more difficult.

Interestingly, my very understanding of the word “cult” came from
the leader himself. He’d often launch, apropos of nothing, into
monologues about how _not_ a cult leader he was. _You can leave
whenever you want, and that’s why this isn’t a cult_, he would
say. It was a risky strategy, continuously invoking the very word he
wanted me to reject. But it worked to blunt my fears, or at least to
dissuade me from raising them.

This is what psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton defined as a
“thought-terminating cliché” — a pithy, memorable phrase that
serves to halt arguments and discourage critical thought. These
clichés aren’t unique to cultic groups, though. We hear them all
the time in common language, as Montell points out. Phrases like _boys
will be boys_ and _everything happens for a reason_ aim to set a firm
and poignant limit to a line of thought, reminding the listener that
further investigation is not only unnecessary but pointless. These
clichés also serve to quash feelings of cognitive dissonance, that
“uncomfortable discord one experiences when they hold two
conflicting beliefs at the same time.” If _boys will be boys_, then
suddenly your sense of violation is questionable. Maybe it didn’t
happen as you remember. And by the way, what were you wearing at the
time?

A few lines down in my journal, I continued: “I know these are all
fears I want to use to stop me from having the conversation but they
are such huge fears.” Then the line breaks and suddenly my
handwriting shifts from the clear, rounded sans-serif of a teenage
girl to a rough-hewn and unpracticed cursive, almost as if I’m
trying to obscure what comes next: “Part of me judges me for being
crazy and in a cult.”

Montell describes a linguistic concept called the theory of
performativity, which says that language doesn’t only describe or
reflect who we are — it creates us. I never spoke my fears of being
in a cult out loud. I was surprised even to find them written so
clearly in my journal, nearly obscured by scrawl though they were.
Silence, too, is a form of performativity, a shaping of one’s world
through absence. If I don’t utter the word, if I don’t hear it,
maybe it isn’t so.

¤

The group dissolved rather anticlimactically when I was 23 and away at
college. The leader’s wife finally had enough of his verbal abuse,
and his confidantes for once refused to support him. Word got out and
suddenly his bad behavior was communally undeniable. Others started to
come forward and describe abuses they’d kept hidden. The only thing
that came as a surprise was the fact that everyone had experienced
unspoken doubt. A couple of months before I graduated, I got a call
from my mother: “It’s all over,” she said.

I’ve scoured my journals from the time for the words I penned about
my feelings regarding all this, but there are none. What does exist in
those pages reveals how caught up I was in the busyness of my life —
my final semester at college, organizing my senior thesis and
preparing for what came next. It appears that I thrust myself wholly
into the act of carrying on, choosing simply to commit to the great
task of building a life that felt my own. That’s how I remember it,
too.

There are a few passages that feel telling, though they don’t
explicitly mention what became known among members of the group as
“The Collapse.” In between a summer reading list and scribbled
phone numbers for available rental rooms, I jotted a few lines: “I
am a shifting being / my hands have changed / my face / the horizon is
blank / like a grey sea cast at night.” On later pages, I seemed to
re-up my commitment to journaling with an anxious vehemence: “I’m
going to need to start noticing more if I want to be a writer.” _To
start_, as if I’d spent all my life with my eyes closed, as if
writing were suddenly available to me for the first time.

While what I remember from that time is mostly the sense of flinging
myself into the possible, these entries betray a sense of fear at the
indeterminacy of it all. Simple words reveal the worry — that the
horizon would be “blank” rather than “open,” that the sea
would be “grey” rather than “glistening,” that resolute
note-to-self to wake up, catch up, start noticing _now_.

_I am a shifting being_ — I was free and the horizon was visible,
but I had inevitably lost something too, something whose absence made
that freedom terrifying.

Perhaps the most telling passage comes a few pages later in the form
of someone else’s words, a short quote I transcribed from a Lydia
Davis story: “Our words are so often those of some unknown, alien
being. I don’t believe any speeches anymore. Even the most beautiful
speech contains a worm.”

¤

 
In the wake of The Collapse, I allowed myself to research the term
“cult” for the first time. One of the first definitions I found
went something like this: “A group or movement unified by a shared
commitment to a charismatic leader or ideology.” Though the
Jonestownian imagery associated with that word didn’t track with my
experience, this definition did unequivocally.

I had been raised in a cult. It seemed clear as day, at least
semantically. In part, I felt thrilled to be able to embrace that word
and disregard so many ill-fitting ideologies I’d toted around with
me most of my life. To the degree to which my experience was in fact
very bad, this word and the accompanying diagnosis were liberating.
“I’ve always found comfort in preexisting conditions,” writes
Esmé Weijun Wang. “I like to know that I’m not pioneering an
inexplicable experience.” I tend to agree.

But to the degree to which my experience wasn’t _that bad_ —
wasn’t Jonestown, or Heaven’s Gate, or the Manson family — I
felt nervous about claiming the word. Reckoning with its perceived
severity and what it seemed to say about me felt like a stain. What
would people assume when they heard me say it? How much time would I
have to divert their line of thinking before they got stuck there,
judging me, disrobing me with their gaze, looking for the marks? And
would I have to spend all my life explaining away the things that were
done to me — those things that were horrible and yet not quite so
horrible as they might have been?

A new sort of cognitive dissonance emerged, one in which I felt myself
both cult survivor and not. I both craved the label and shunned it. As
a result, I was no more able to say the word out loud than I was as a
young girl. Six years later, I still struggle to.

¤

As suggested by my anxious focus on noticing the world around me, I
became possessed by a desire to write around the time of The Collapse.
The renewed interest was coincidental, blooming out of a
memoir-writing class I took my final semester of college, but it felt
undeniably kismet — the gaining of storytelling tools just as I
suddenly felt free to tell mine.

High on my new sense of power, I committed the inevitable rookie
mistake of trying to write about it all while still too close to the
events. Within six months I’d started a memoir that should never
have seen the light of day, but because I’d also been admitted to a
respected writing workshop around the same time, the initial
“manuscript” — 22 pages of nonlinear memories and modernist
babble — unfortunately did.

In the middle of the first page, this sentence appears: “I am 23
years old and I grew up in a cult.” Something about that line felt
revelatory to me at the time, having spent so much of my life avoiding
that word and my association with it. To put it so boldly at the start
of a piece of writing made me feel powerful, exposed, free.

I got a great deal of feedback on those pages, but the only bit I
actually remember came from the workshop leader himself: “What if
you wrote the entire thing without ever using that word?” I remember
flushing at the suggestion, as if my attempt at clarity and
decisiveness had instead revealed itself as a grab for attention. My
plainness had read as confessional rather than intellectual. I’d
said too much, which was always my deepest fear.

Looking back on this suggestion six years later, I’m not sure he
meant it the way I took it at the time — that is, literally. Perhaps
he was only inviting me to imagine a story in which the emotional
impact was derived from the telling rather than from provocation.
Perhaps it was more of a what-if exercise designed to get me thinking
about what that word really means.

I’m still asking myself that question. About what it all means.
About what words really offer in terms of understanding and
contextualizing experience. About why we’re all so obsessed with
labels and binaries, and why giving language to phenomena can be so
satisfying.

There isn’t, as it turns out, an academically agreed-upon definition
for the word “cult.” It’s become so sensationalized that most
experts don’t even use it in their work anymore. Us non-academics
have only intuition to go by. “A cult is like pornography,” one
Jonestown survivor told Montell. “You know it when you see it.”

One researcher did provide Montell with a compelling definition of the
structure of cultish groups: “ power imbalance built on members’
devotion, hero worship, and absolute trust, which frequently
facilitates abuse on the part of unaccountable leaders.” I think we
all know this structure better than we’d care to admit.

I like Montell’s research because it makes me feel witnessed without
being judged. It helps me make sense of my past in a way that makes
that past seem almost banal, which is what I spent so much of my
childhood wishing it were. But my interest reveals something humbling,
which is that I still seek truth outside myself. I still don’t know
how to trust myself as the narrator of my own life, to listen to that
little kernel of wisdom in my solar plexus that knows that human
beings are much too complicated to reduce to a single word or one
aspect of our identities. I am, despite myself, still looking
desperately for a way to belong.

I know that one can be both good and damaged, that all of us live in
that uncomfortable in-between, with darkness and light as the
inevitable bookends of our days. That each of us traverses these
seesaws of self, never squarely centered in certainty. And that this
is, in fact, what makes us human.

But in the silence I’ve left open for so many years, a feeling of
shame has grown that’s hardened with time. Remaking myself through
new words has required a simultaneous demolition, a chipping away at
that murky matter I’ve come to recognize as myself, slowly and
daily, until I strike gold. And until that day, I keep searching,
trying to ask myself better questions, trusting that the gold of me
will make itself known, eventually.

I hope I know it when I see it.

OLIVIA GERBER IS A COMPOSER, PERFORMER, AND WRITER LIVING IN LOS
ANGELES. HER ESSAYS HAVE APPEARED IN _GOLD FLAKE PAINT_ AND _HOOK
JOURNAL_. HER DEBUT ALBUM, _ANOTHER PLACE TO NEED_ HAS BEEN FEATURED
ON NPR, _CLASH MAGAZINE_, AND ELSEWHERE.

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