Here is how a cult can start, even when everyone involved has good intentions:
§1. There is a dysfunction in the broader culture. Most notably in our secular times, people feel alienated from any sense of greater meaning, and the broader culture is not just unable to provide it, but is directly antagonistic to any attempt to connect to such meaning.
§2. Someone recognizes that a container 1 needs to be provided to heal that dysfunction, because individual change can only go so far. Or it can also occur from people spontaneously finding one another because they look for meaning and community, and end up converging towards certain common interests.
§3. Because of the homogenizing dynamics of the broader culture, 2 the container needs some way to isolate itself from the mainstream for people to meaningfully change and be isolated from its dysfunctions, otherwise it would just recapitulate the same problems. Thus it necessarily appears divergent from the mainstream, either too woo or too rational. Change always comes from the fringes.
§3b. This leads to specialized language specific to the container, or in-group jokes and references, certain load-bearing concepts and myths, certain patterns in attention and thinking, sometimes a certain aesthetics (human beings are ritualistic and are thus much more affected by visuals and rituals than we'd like to admit), and even a sort of need to be special—we have a real Eastern guru in our container! All of those make it appear particularly jarring to the outside.
§3c. This self-isolation doesn't have to emerge from a top-down dynamic, a guru telling you you need to spend months away from your family, it can naturally arise from people feeling more comfortable with people in the container than most other people, precisely because they get the thing that is missing from the broader culture, typically: meaning and community, which are especially rare together 3, and the fact that outsiders find the container to be too weird for them.
§3d. People who claim that they can solve the problem of nihilism in our world, or any similar deep societal problem, are automatically seen as cult leaders by the broader culture, and thus they have to retreat into pockets of society where they are more readily accepted, or at the very least not immediately rejected.
§4. Over time, this self-concealment of the container, necessary to its survival, leads to an echo chamber dynamic, because everyone has been repeating similar ideas and stories with one another for such a long time that they start taking them from granted. It's not even just the ideas which are being taken for granted, it's also the general relationship to reality, human beings, society, and how people use their attention which ends up defining the group. Again, every group, mainstream or not, needs a homogenizing mechanism to maintain itself.
§5. The container, which is now quite isolated from the broader culture, naturally develops power dynamics, because some people will be organizing it more than others, because it needs money to maintain itself and that is intrinsically linked with power, and because the early members who started the container are probably more committed to developing whatever it is that the container is aligned with (more spiritually developed, etc).
§5b. Power dynamics also arise because spiritual development often involves a form of surrender, or a form of "faith" (as in, a leap of faith towards some unknown, not necessarily the faith in God) in the teachers or the container at the very least. Because the teachers are also human, with their inevitable vices and shadows, it's difficult to imagine that this student-teacher relationship would be clean most of the time.
§5c. There is also the fact that many people who start cults have genuine psychological and spiritual gifts that are rare in the world. It's not just the generic charisma that many people report about cult leaders, which is of course true because it's hard to imagine people wanting to listen to a complete nobody. But it's also the fact that many people turn to these types of containers seeking for help, usually deep psychological, emotional or physiological issues, and they do receive help from them, otherwise they would have left them rather quickly. Dismissing that those to-be cults have nothing of value to provide to people, and that only stupid people fall for them, opens you to the very type of delusion that makes you the perfect prey for toxic cults to lure you in.
§6. Ultimately, these power dynamics very often lead to abuse, which is made worse by the fact that the container is isolated from the rest of society, meaning it is hard to get help about this problem (and personal abuse is notoriously difficult to get justice about). And there you have it: a cult which has arisen from good intentions, changing people in response to a dysfunction in society, and which is now known for sex scandals.
Credits due to this video by Michael Smith (also known as Morphenius) for describing the mechanism of how cults arise, and which I relate here.
Not everything in the world grips our attention equally. Some patterns of ideas and behavior spread better than others, which leads to the field of memetics, the study of how those patterns spread from people to people, which ones end up influencing the culture we live in, and ultimately influence our lives.
It is not a coincidence that the type of cults that end up becoming big are either essentially apocalyptic in nature—the world is going to end and only us, the enlightened ones, can understand it and do something about it—or therapeutic ones, where you must confess how broken you are as an individual, so that you may find your path towards salvation/peace/perfection/enlightenment.
Both of those patterns are incredibly potent ways to acquire meaning in our secular times: fixing society, or working on yourself. Nothing inherently wrong with either of those things of course, but by themselves, they lead to dysfunctions at an individual level, and atrocities at a collective level.
Every monster for instance had a vision of fixing society in their own way, whether it was Hitler or Stalin in the past, or the people shaping our world currently. 4 At a smaller scale, the noble desire to work on yourself can transform into an obsession with perpetual self-improvement: the guys so obsessed with going to the gym that they no longer spend time with their partner, or the people who feel a constant sense of guilt for not being productive enough.
What we should not forget from those patterns is that they are attempts to get meaning from life which have mutated into something else entirely. Because those people are dependent on those structures to get meaning in their lives, you should of course expect them to ardently defend their own cause.
People who want to fix society without resorting to violence, whether regular activists versus effective altruists (EAs), or rationalist versus spiritualist types, or whatever form you can think of, will very often see themselves as the ones doing the real work, sacrificing themselves for the rest of mankind so as to propel it into a new golden age. That is their source of meaning, which incidentally means that if those problems were to stop existing, they would either look for new problems to solve, or look for ways to maintain the current problems they are working against.
They want to struggle but they don't want to win, whether they admit it or not. They are burned out by their pursuits, but they also don't want to find real peace in their life, 5 because they dare not look at the source of the problem, which is their lack of a sense of meaning in life.
There is so much more to say about everything I've alluded to, the global narrative war, the misguided actions taken up by activists, the counter-intuitive need to slow down while amidst a world that seems to keep accelerating and breaking down, and what we could even do about that.
I am not above it all, far from it. I wouldn't consider myself outside of any cult-like dynamic whatsoever for instance. While I wouldn't say that I am in any cult, 6 because none of the groups I am a part of have the cohesion to really shape people into being this or that way, I can easily imagine an outsider looking at my life and thinking that I am in a few cults.
There are the blatant power dynamics and narcissistic needs to be special that pervade smaller online scenes (I make a distinction between scenes and communities), which are undeniably cult-like. There is the fracturing of niches into sub-niches, with their own in-group jokes and lingo, group chats, activities and gossip. And there is just the general divergence of sensemaking in online spaces: what is even going on in society, what is important and what isn't, and what can we do about it. All of those are either clear signals of cult-like dynamics, or the conditions for bringing about cults, which the inside members end up defending. 7
So I am in important ways involved with cult-like dynamics, or at the very least the inevitable echo chambers that arise from internet interactions. Perhaps the more worrying thing is that modern culture at large feels more and more cultish, which can only be dangerous because it is supposedly the one thing which is supposed to hold all of our interactions.
The obsession with 'AI' for instance has become a sort of cultural black hole, sucking in all the attention and discussions to be focused on it, amplifying a lot of despair and helplessness that people have felt, and replacing it with conversations which, in my mind, will never solve any of the root problems of our society. But I think this is also true for any of the big topics and events that end up grabbing everyone's attention: they are never the important things which one could actually grab onto and interact with to change their life or those around them for the better, they are instead part of a cultural whirlpool which are driving a lot of people into its own momentum, and whose sole 'purpose' is to maintain itself whirling around and around. The wheel of Samsara if you prefer.
To me the main inoculation around cults, and cultural madness in general, is to connect back to the lifeforce of our body. It is a cliché and yet it is also one of the most important tasks in the modern world I would say, which is to re-establish our connection to our body in a world which is so routinely dissociated and scattered in its attention.
Whatever happens in the world, whether you believe society is on its way to building Heaven on Earth, or on the way down towards societal collapse, or anything different or weirder, benefits from more and more people being sane and joyous, being willing to say yes to life and everything that happens. Those will always be welcome qualities, at an individual or large scale, and those can only come from being rooted in the stability and aliveness of the body.
You can bullshit yourself at the level of ideology, but you can't bullshit yourself when it comes to how present, relaxed and alive you feel in your body. It's unfakeable, especially because there is no one to impress in this case. The body is the closest thing we have to Reality, and our relationship with our own largely dictates how we relate to everything else.
Cults can only take roots in people by becoming a mediator between themselves and the life that they want, and intimacy with the body is what allows you to bypass such a need for mediation and be fully present, such that you are life, you are joy, and you are free.
1 Using generic words like "container" because a cult never feels like a cult on the inside.
2 Same thing as in the post about the origin of arrogance.
3 You can go to a sports game and get a sense of community for a bit, but it doesn't feel particularly meaningful, as I discuss here. Or you can do things which are meaningful to you, but it can be difficult to find a community that is aligned with that.
4 Which includes essentially every side in the global narrative war, left or right. Modern feminists, activists, DEI people, critical theorists, and the left by and large, even if they have good intentions, end up shattering individual and collective psyches in their quest to uphold their ideology. Thus, white men are automatically seen as monsters so as to "remedy" the problems of our society, which only creates more division and abuse of power. The right of course does this too, usually in a far more overt and direct way, encouraging further social inequality and cruelty to people in need, which again, only creates more division and problems.
5 I hope it's obvious that I am not advocating defeatism here, when I talk about 'finding peace'. There are many things which I think are perfectly normal to be upset and even outraged about, but on the other hand, if the default mode for doing anything in life comes from a constant and frantic need to fix things, then we are not living life, but are being controlled by external circumstances. This is not the way to a better world, because incidentally, it also tends to promote the control of other people the same way, which is why activism has a large component of shame and subtle coercion built into it, (making people feel bad for how badly we are treating the planet) because their very own members use those same tactics as their source of motivation.
6 Though every cult member believes that of course.
7 There is someone that I know who has been a victim of sexual abuse in a scene I am adjacent to (or part of? there is never anything official with these), but it is her story to tell and not mine. Moreover, the person in that scene has been outed and expelled, and he was far from a core member to begin with, but the remnants of that are still pretty messy.
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Cults Nihilism Void Activism Substack
2026-04-28