Building Instructions for a Cult

A manual in nine steps, with a counter-check for each. Whoever knows the components recognises the building, whether it calls itself a church, a seminar, a movement, a sales team or a family.

Preliminary note

In 1729 Jonathan Swift published “a modest proposal” for making the children of the poor in Ireland useful: by selling them to the rich as food. The text is written in a completely matter-of-fact tone, with calculations and recipes. Precisely for that reason it described the conditions better than any indictment.

The following manual is written with the same intention. It describes step by step how to bind people to oneself, relieve them of their money, time and judgement, and make them grateful for it. Each step is followed by the counter-check: how to notice that this very step is being carried out on oneself. The components are not products of our imagination. The psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton described them in 1961 from the re-education camps in China, and they have been found again ever since wherever people are exploited.

Step 1: Don’t look for a believer, look for a lack

Nobody joins a cult. People join a community, a course, a team, a movement, because something is missing. Look for people in transition: after a separation, a move, a dismissal, a death, at the beginning of their studies. Loneliness, the feeling of being insignificant, a hurt that no one acknowledges, the fear of a world that has become incomprehensible: this is your raw material. It is inexhaustible and grows back.

The counter-check: Someone knows very precisely what you lack before you have said it yourself, and happens to have exactly that on offer.

Step 2: Give love first, and lots of it

Shower the newcomer with attention. Everyone knows his name, everyone is pleased to see him, everyone listens to him as no one has listened to him for years. The literature calls this “love bombing”. It costs almost nothing and creates a debt that the recipient himself does not notice.

The counter-check: Warmth that does not need to know anything about you in order to be boundless. Real affection grows slowly and has conditions. This kind is there at once and unconditional, until the day you contradict it.

Step 3: Supply a doctrine that explains everything

The doctrine must answer every question, the history of the world as well as your back pain. More important still: it must be unable to fail on anything. If something goes wrong, the world is to blame, the enemies, the individual’s lack of faith. Lifton called this “sacred science”. Whether it invokes God, history, the market or the right mindset makes no difference.

The counter-check: Ask what would refute the doctrine. If the answer is nothing, then it is not true, merely unassailable. This is the subject of “Why I Did Not Become a Leftist”: the Church, the Party and the Watchtower all failed this test.

Step 4: Invent a language of your own

Give things new names. The outside world is called “the system” or “the world”, doubts are called “resistance” or “negative energy”, whoever leaves has “fallen away”, whoever asks is “not ready yet”. Lifton spoke of loading the language with thought-terminating formulas. A single word then replaces the argument. In multi-level marketing it is called “mindset”, in the company “family”, in the movement “lying press”, and on the other side of the political spectrum sometimes “toxic”.

The counter-check: Watch for words after which nobody asks any further. Where a term ends a discussion instead of opening it, someone is working on your thinking.

Step 5: Make him guilty

Set a standard no one can reach: perfect purity, perfect devotion, perfect performance. Then have the followers confess regularly how far they are from it, preferably in public. Whoever is never enough always needs more of what only you can give.

The counter-check: You feel guiltier after every meeting than before, and the solution is the same every time: more commitment, more time, more money.

Step 6: Build a staircase and sell the steps

Divide the path to salvation into stages, degrees, courses and certificates, and charge for each stage. Whoever is at the top earns from those who come after. The principle is the same in a multi-level marketing scheme as in a school of enlightenment. The American organisation NXIVM sold self-improvement seminars for years, with coloured sashes for each rank. Its founder Keith Raniere was sentenced in 2020 to 120 years in prison, among other things for racketeering and sex trafficking.

The counter-check: Ask who earns from your ascent. If the answer is those above you, you are not ascending. You are carrying them.

Step 7: Draw a wall, but an invisible one

Forbid nothing, just make sure no time is left. Meetings in the evening, courses at the weekend, tasks in the community, a group chat that never sleeps. Old friends no longer understand you, the family is sceptical, so you see them less often. In the end the follower’s whole world consists of the group, and whoever leaves it loses everything at once.

The counter-check: Count how many people you still see regularly who do not belong. If the number gets smaller every year, the wall has already been built.

Step 8: Promise fulfilment, but later

The reward always comes tomorrow: after the next stage, after the next course, after the end of the world, after the revolution, after the IPO. By all means name a date. If it passes, it was a test, a misunderstanding or “new light”. How well this works is shown in “The Office of Failure”: 1914, 1918, 1925 and 1975 have passed, and the organisation still exists today.

The counter-check: Count how often fulfilment has already been promised to you and what came instead. A doctrine that reinterprets every failure as confirmation has insured itself against reality.

Step 9: Make the exit expensive

Whoever leaves loses his friends, his deposits, often his work and his reputation. Call him a traitor, an apostate, a failure. Those who remain should see what it costs. Lifton called this the “dispensing of existence”: the group decides who counts and who does not.

The outermost end of this staircase has a name. Jim Jones began in the 1950s as a preacher in Indianapolis who campaigned for equal rights for Black Americans. In 1978 more than 900 people died in his settlement of Jonestown in Guyana, around 300 of them children, most of them from poisoned juice on his orders.

The counter-check: Imagine you leave tomorrow. What would you lose? If the answer frightens you, you have the answer to the question of whether you are free.

The founder’s balance sheet

Whoever completes all nine steps ends up owning the most valuable thing one person can give another: his judgement. Money, work and time follow by themselves. The astonishing thing is how little one has to invent for this. Every step serves a real need, for belonging, meaning, order, hope. The longing is real. It is exploited by others.

That is why intelligence offers no protection either. NXIVM’s followers included actresses and heiresses to billion-dollar fortunes. Nobody is too clever for a community that gives them what they lack.

The vaccination

There is a single touchstone that hits all nine steps at once: compare what is said with what is done. And then follow three currents. Where does the money flow? Where does the time flow? And who makes the decisions about your life?

If all three flow in the same direction, upwards and away from you, it makes no difference whether the building is called church, academy, movement or family. It was built according to these instructions.

Further reading: Central-Power Orientation · The Last Domain · The Machine Without God · Gurus, Ascended Masters and Other Substitute Gods · The Office of Failure · Why I Did Not Become a Leftist · Peter’s Pence