Berkeley Voices: As crises escalate, so does our fascination with cults

Anne Brice (intro): This is Berkeley Voices, a UC Berkeley News podcast. I’m Anne Brice.

Poulomi Saha: The most common phrase around cults is: Nobody joins a cult. And it’s true. Nobody joins a cult. People join a really good thing.

(Music: “Coulis Coulis” by Blue Dot Sessions)

Anne Brice: Poulomi Saha is a UC Berkeley professor of English and co-director of the Program in Critical Theory. Saha says when it comes to cults, narrative is everything.

Poulomi Saha: And the narrative that leads us to a cult is a story about people that go seeking something. They find it in an unexpected place. Often there’s a charismatic leader. Often they find themselves immersed in a group where other people feel a shared experience with this charismatic leader. They feel themselves changed, and that change is inexplicable to other people in their life.

There becomes a wall between the experience inside this group and the experience outside this group, and the inability to translate that experience is really what gives rise to the idea of the cult.

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The cult is not just, as the dictionary will tell us, systems of belief. That’s the dictionary definition. But a cult is not just systems of belief. A cult is something that fundamentally troubles our understanding of how we can exist in the world. And it’s a name we give to an organization or a set of beliefs when they have brushed up against the limits of society. So we call it a cult when it has gone bad. And it goes bad, often in spectacular ways, in ways that we want to tune in and watch.

Anne Brice: During the COVID-19 pandemic, Saha, like millions of other Americans, watched a lot of docuseries about cults, like Love Has Won: The Cult of Mother God and Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple. The more Saha watched, the more they felt a kind of change happen within themself.

Poulomi Saha: I was absolutely enthralled. It became a kind of social companion. And at some point, I looked around and realized I wasn’t alone, and that something inside of me had sort of changed my own expectations of how I would react to these accounts of scandal, often, accounts of seemingly outlandish belief.

(Music: “An Easier Mind” by Blue Dot Sessions)

I will avow that I have long been committed to the idea of being a skeptic. There are kinds of people, and I think living in northern California we’re maybe more familiar with them than elsewhere, but there are kinds of people who I think are open to the world. They’re porous to experiences that are transformative, that may be outside the norm. I’ve never wanted to be outside the norm.

My reaction no longer fit that old script, the script that I had internalized. I wasn’t just having a passing interest. I wasn’t sort of mildly terrified. I was thinking, “Oh, wow, that makes good sense. Oh, I didn’t know you could want that. I didn’t know we could do that.”

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And so in the strange space of being locked in my house, I was suddenly imagining radically new ways of living and believing.

And the fact that I wasn’t alone in it meant that I suddenly wanted to very much understand what was going on, and what better way to do it than to ask several hundred Berkeley undergraduates to be test subjects.

Anne Brice: So in 2022, Saha started a course, called Cults in Popular Culture. Every week in the class, Saha asks their students to listen to or watch one episode of a podcast or docuseries about cults, from Wild Wild Country about the Rajneeshpuram community in Oregon to Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief.

Poulomi Saha: And every week, without fail, I’d come back and say, “How many of you binged the whole thing?” Every hand, 500 hands, go up because they don’t want to not be obsessed and enthralled. They love that feeling. And they’re willing to talk about why it is.

The brilliance of Berkeley students is that they have not just books smarts, they actually have a pretty remarkable emotional intelligence and a willingness to be intellectually vulnerable, to think about how a feeling, let’s say, of loneliness or isolation, which is fairly common to young people, fairly common especially when you arrive at a large university like Berkeley. They can take that feeling of loneliness and actually understand how that experience makes them empathetic to an account within a docuseries about a cult, where people join because they’re looking for belonging.

But they don’t just stop there. They then actually have the ability to say, “But what’s the difference between me and this person?” So they’re willing to think about their own embeddedness in a way that is quite revelatory.

(Music: “Erben Plains” by Blue Dot Sessions)

Anne Brice: Saha says that people weren’t always able to talk about cults in this way. Cults were on the fringe of society and efinitely not part of mainstream media, as they are today. To be fascinated by cults was taboo. Today, however, Saha says that we are more open than ever to the idea of cults and how appealing they can seem.

To help their students understand why a person would join a cult, Saha has them design their own intentional communities, as they call these groups in the class.

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Poulomi Saha: And that’s the word that we use for all the groups that we study during the semester, after a week or two. We don’t use the word cult anymore because that story we have about cults is just so all-encompassing. It keeps us from asking much more interesting questions.

When I first suggested this, I thought, “What’s the worst that can happen?” I don’t yet know what the very worst is, but here’s what I’ll say: They are terrifyingly good at doing this. Terrifyingly good.

Their intentional communities at the end of the semester, every semester, blow me away because they have figured out how to reverse engineer this effect. They start with what it is they want and need in their own lives that’s missing. To a person, this is where these groups start, because they understand that’s really the power and the draw of the cult. Cults offer something that we cannot have in our normal everyday lives. That’s what makes them so appealing. It’s what makes them so dangerous. That’s why they’re often identified as legal threats or social threats.

Anne Brice: Saha has found that a lot of their intentional communities are designed with the lives of Berkeley students in mind. One community offered a kind of holistic life plan that scheduled out every minute of the day. They had a service that delivered food and built-in social gatherings.

Poulomi Saha: They’re understanding that people are kind of exhausted by all the things that they have to do, all the decisions you have to make being a student, and on top of that, trying to have your emotional and social needs met. So they designed groups like this.

Some of them get quite dark. You know, I’ve had a couple of groups design apocalyptic cults, where they recognize that for some people, it’s not about solving the problems of this life, it is about imagining the end of these problems. And I’m not suggesting that they want to imagine the apocalypse, but they do understand that it’s an incredibly compelling thing for some people.

(Music: “Baroque” by Blue Dot Sessions)

Anne Brice: Our fascination with cults isn’t a new phenomenon, says Saha. Rather, it’s a renewed interest in a countercultural movement that emerged in the U.S. in the 1960s after World War II.

Poulomi Saha: Because by the 1960s, America is in this remarkable moment of economic prosperity after the war. American empire and militarism abroad is actually very good for economic conditions, largely, in America at this moment. You also have things like the GI Bill, which is allowing more and more Americans who served in the armed forces to go to college. So college is becoming more available to a growing middle class of America.

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You have strong unions, so you have people who have started to establish intergenerational wealth through union labor. People are buying houses on a 30-year mortgage so that when they retire, that house is paid off and their children inherit the house.

Anne Brice: The fantasy of the American dream felt like a possibility to so many more people, says Saha. But not to everybody. Only to a very particular kind of American people: those who were white, heterosexual, college-educated and largely middle-class.

Poulomi Saha: And so those on the outside of that, one, are resisting the kind of enclosure of prosperity in this way. And then you also have people who are looking at the world out there — the war, student protests and the demand for conformity to produce economic prosperity — and they’re thinking, “This doesn’t make sense. Why is it that we’re valuing this while the world burns?”

Anne Brice: All kinds of social movements began to gain momentum — student movements, antiwar movements, the civil rights movement. Feminist and sexual liberation movements. They were all pushing against society’s demands for a kind of conformity and normativity of the 1950s.

Poulomi Saha: So you have, especially young people, but not only, but especially young people who start to refuse these demands for conformity. They start to say, “You know what? I don’t want to live in the suburbs, in a house that looks exactly like every other house and have 2.3 children and one American-made automobile, and all these appliances and a life that is just so normal.

You have people who, suddenly, despite Cold War anxieties about communism, who say, “Communal living makes a lot of sense. What if I don’t want to be married to one person and have children and do chores? What if I want to live in a shared household with a whole range of people and redistribute all of our needs, our economic needs, we share the work, our social needs. We care for one another. We take care of children together. What if I want to live in a radically different way?”

(Music: “Sprig Leaf” by Blue Dot Sessions)

So you have these alternate imaginations that emerge in response to what is supposed to be America’s great moment of prosperity. You can see how it produces a lot of anxiety. You can see how mainstream America would very much want to limit the legitimacy of these alternate imaginations. You can see how hard American society might want to make it so the idea of living in a commune is unthinkable during America’s fight against communism.

Anne Brice: In response, says Saha, the U.S. government weaponized the Internal Revenue Service, or IRS, to keep cults from gaining legitimacy.

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Poulomi Saha: One of the academic definitions of cult is a new religious movement. That is something that is not yet old enough to just be a religion. And I think it’s important to remember, because the way that we use cult as this kind of term of pathology, a problem, is not actually its true definition. Its true definition is about a system of belief that is incredibly powerful to those who believe it.

In America, however, because religion is a protected category, the work to get into that category often requires groups to try and fit a very narrow mold. And I say this because it’s a protected category, not just by the Constitution, which it is, by the First Amendment, but actually by the IRS.

So why is the IRS the true arbiter of cults in America? It’s because they’re the ones who can designate to churches tax-exempt status. To be a church is to be identified by the IRS as a nonprofit entity, and you are tax exempt and any donations given to you are tax-exempt. There’s a lot of draw to that. What religious or philosophical or spiritual group wouldn’t want to be able to accumulate money and not have to pay taxes?

Anne Brice: Scientology, Saha says, is a classic case. It has faced all of the accusations of being a cult that we’re familiar with, like harmful secret behavior, disappearing followers and going to enormous lengths to silence opponents.

Poulomi Saha: None of that necessarily has to do with the belief system. And this is another thing I’m very invested in. The problem is not what people believe. That Scientology is based on a story about UFOs is not the problem. Most belief, especially religious belief, is supernatural and extraordinary. That’s the nature of religion. So it doesn’t quite matter what they believe.

The problem is the practices, right? So these practices are about insularity, about potential, real, material harms. Scientologists faced all of them. And in almost every case, you’ve had people who sought out how to make Scientology less legitimate. And so many people have filed complaints with the IRS.

But what Scientology has done in its relatively short time as a new religious movement is built an enormous cachet of money to fight these lawsuits. And so it has won every single suit filed to strip its tax-exempt status. The reason that Scientology is a religion is because no one has been able to convince the IRS it shouldn’t be. That’s what it comes down to.

(Music: “McCarthy” by Blue Dot Sessions)

So in some ways, the story of cults is way less sexy than outlandish beliefs or messiahs or UFOs. It’s really about whether or not you can convince the IRS that someone should pay taxes on the money donated to them.

Anne Brice: In the decades that followed the 1960s, Americans’ collective interest in cults faded.

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Several high-profile groups, like the Manson Family, increased public awareness and, in turn, increased negative perceptions of cults, and the social and cultural climate that gave rise to them began to shift.

But today, says Saha, our fascination is back and is stronger than ever.

Poulomi Saha: Now, you have young people who see before them what most scholars would call late capitalism, the dying gasps of capitalism, in many ways. You see wage stagnation, debt immiseration. The average student at Berkeley is worried about things like paying their student loans, getting a job that pays enough wage for them to live, especially in the Bay Area.

Our students are looking at the world around them, just economically, and seeing fairly limited possibilities. On top of that, they are looking at the real crisis of climate change. They’re looking at the scourge of war and mass civilian casualty. And they, like the generation in the 1960s, are thinking, “It doesn’t have to be this way. I don’t want the world to be this way.”

But where in the 1960s, there’s a little bit of a tug of economic possibility that might hold them back, that might say, “Sure, I want that, but I should go and be a good citizen and live a particular kind of capitalist-economic life,” our students now are saying, “I don’t want the world to look like this, and the promises of capitalism are already broken.” So they’re much more willing to take risks, to avow different imaginations.

Now, I’m not saying that they’re going to go out and join these groups, but they’re really unfettered from many of the things that were used to hold people inside the mainstream. The promises of that are just so limited for so many of our students, and ours are some of the more remarkable, talented students in the world. So if they don’t see a ton of possibility for them out there, and they’re willing to imagine radical alternatives, we have to see this as a kind of tipping point.

(Music: “The Kishner Method” by Blue Dot Sessions)

Anne Brice: Saha says our growing interest in cults is important to study because it tells us something about the unmet needs in Americans’ lives. There are many groups, Saha says, that could be considered cults, but are accepted by most people as having a positive effect on society.

Poulomi Saha: One example of this, and this is slightly controversial, but I stand by it, is if you think about the phenomenon of yoga in America right now, how mainstream it is. It’s a multibillion-dollar industry, and it is entirely socially acceptable and incredibly lucrative to avow an obsessive attachment to yoga, to have it be a thing that transforms all aspects of your life. Yes, your body, your mind, your spirit, but also your social life, what you wear, what you eat, how you walk through the world.

If I were to tell you that the story of yoga could be rewritten as a story of a cult, I’m sure you’d have lots of listeners who would be up in arms, and for good reason, right? It immediately suggests that what is giving them meaning and structure and happiness is bad. I’m not interested in diagnosing people’s pathology or their misidentified desire. I think people act toward their own happiness and their own desire, often in very constrained circumstances. And I don’t want to limit the access that people have to seeking it.

My concern is always harm. When and how is someone being harmed? And when you have insular communities that often get called cults, where there is so much secrecy, maybe partly because there’s a fear of social backlash, a fear of judgment. But it’s totally insular. Inside those insular communities, and if there’s a very powerful, charismatic leader who seems to have a kind of singular access to truth, bad things can happen. Harms can go unchecked. That, I’m deeply concerned about.

But the story we have of cults doesn’t really get us there. It can sort of point us to a place to look, but it doesn’t actually help us understand, one, people want, and two, how these harms get enacted, how they’re allowed to flourish, and what other ways we might have to understand that movement from, “Nobody joins a cult. Everybody joins a good thing. Then, it goes bad.”

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Anne Brice: So then, what should we do if a person we love joins what they see as a good thing, where they begin to experience a deep personal change that we don’t understand? What is actually happening during this transformation? And can we reach them before we lose them?

Poulomi Saha: A lot of people having been using the phrase, “The cult of Trump,” and I think it’s a really good example to think about the question of transformation, because if you think about after Jan. 6, and during the trials of people who were involved in the Jan. 6 insurrection, one of the things that happened is you had all of these interviews with family members. And I was really struck by how often these interviews followed a fairly common script, which was, “This person I loved changed.”

Something about hearing Trump speak changed them. It wasn’t just that they agreed with his beliefs; they began to feel a kind of intensity of loyalty to this person. They began to seek out more and more immersion. Sometimes, they joined online communities — 4Chan or Reddit. Sometimes, they actually went to community groups in the world, and when they were in these groups, they started to build these shared beliefs.

Anne Brice: Like others in similar situations, they felt transformed, illuminated, gifted with a second sight, says Saha. They’d come home and tell their loved ones about their new ways of thinking. And they were met with shock and rejection of their new beliefs. So they began to withdraw.

Poulomi Saha: On the outside, you see friends and family saying, “You’ve changed. You’ve become crazy.” That translation, or the impossibility of that translation — “You’ve become crazy” vs. “I am enlightened” — shows us, one, the incredible draw of existing in these insular communities. Who wants to be told, “You’re crazy,” if everybody else can tell you you’re enlightened?

But also, that transformation is never just one thing. One person’s experience of transformation will, to another person, tell a very different story of change. Some of that change may be bad. Some of that transformation may be extraordinary. But if we can’t translate between it, it produces a kind of crisis. It leaves us in this moment where we say, “How do I get through to you?”

(Music: “Greycase” by Blue Dot Sessions)

I am part of, I think, a growing cohort of scholars who are trying to understand this, and I think one of the things that we have to do is actually drop our expectations of what we think is right and true. I think, actually, the problem becomes not being willing to see and hear somebody’s account of their own transformation. It is, in some ways, the fact that many of us want to imagine that there is an absolute rubicon that we can’t cross.

And what would happen if actually we tried to listen and understand, even if we didn’t agree with those radical beliefs? If we tried to understand, actually, the remarkable feeling of being transformed that someone is experiencing, even if we don’t agree with what they’re being transformed into?

I think we have to start there. We actually have to start, again, by unlearning really simple narratives and making room for much more complicated ones, in which potentially we’re not right anymore. We’re not the smart ones anymore. Maybe there are other truths that we don’t agree with, but we’re going to have to find a way to think with them.

Anne Brice (outro): I’m Anne Brice, and this is Berkeley Voices, a UC Berkeley News podcast from the Office of Communications and Public Affairs at UC Berkeley. This was the second episode of our eight-part series on transformation.

If you like what we do, consider telling a friend about the show and leaving us a review on Apple Podcasts. New episodes of the series come out on the last Monday of each month.

We also have another show, Berkeley Talks, that features lectures and conversations at UC Berkeley. You can find all of our podcast episodes with transcripts and photos on UC Berkeley News at news.berkeley.edu/podcasts.

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