Cultist, actually
So far, no one has clearly defined what one is
Since the 1960s, and especially since the Jonestown massacre, a lot of work has gone into the questions, “What is a cult?” and, “What is a cultist?”
But this work was largely instigated by the CIA, believe it or not.
[NOTE: I use the terms “cult”, “cultists”, and “cultism” non-pejoratively. I think the pejoration of the terms is baseless and bogus, and that sanitizing them (e.g., “closed, high-demand group”) is misguided, because it implies yet another category rather than a relabeling of the same category—the inevitable result of euphemization.]
After the Korean War, American POWs returned home as committed communists, alarming U.S. authorities, especially their intelligence agencies. The CIA covertly funded academic research into Chinese “thought reform” methods through front organizations like the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology. Robert Jay Lifton received such funding for his research (1954-1961), documented in Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism, which analyzed how systematic environmental control and confession sessions dismantled individual autonomy.
Lifton’s framework inspired clinical psychologists like Margaret Singer and Louis Jolyon West to apply coercive persuasion models to new religious movements in the 1970s-1980s, leading to “cultic studies”, cult interventions, and deprogramming practices. However, academic sociologists and religious studies scholars—including Eileen Barker, J. Gordon Melton, and James Richardson—rejected these “brainwashing” models as empirically unsupported. Instead, they characterized cult participation as voluntary conversion driven by social bonds and ideological commitment.
By the 1990s-2000s, this academic counter-position became institutionally dominant in peer-reviewed scholarship, even as Lifton-based frameworks remained prevalent in clinical practice and popular understanding. Significantly, both documented cult operations and CIA behavioral control experiments had operationalized Lifton’s methods—not the voluntary conversion models favored by academics.
Cultist, really?
Here is a definition of “cultist” that a Lifton-leaning researcher would likely relate to:
Cultist: An individual whose autonomy and fundamental personality functioning have been systematically dismantled through undue influence—kept unaware of the transformation agenda while their environment, time, and social connections are controlled. They undergo behavioral modification via manipulated rewards/punishments and thought-stopping techniques that inhibit their former identity while promoting group ideology. This creates powerlessness, primitive psychological defenses, and strict obedience enforced through fear and guilt, all within a closed authoritarian system that permits no feedback and offers no perceived exit.
On the other hand, here’s one that would be more acceptable to the academics in relevant fields:
Cultist: An individual who has voluntarily adopted membership in a high-demand religious or ideological movement characterized by: strict behavioral expectations, totalistic worldview, strong boundary maintenance between insiders/outsiders, and centralized charismatic or institutional authority. The member finds meaning, identity, and community through adherence to group norms, which may involve significant lifestyle changes, resource commitment, and adoption of the group’s interpretive framework for understanding reality. Membership is maintained through a combination of belief commitment, social bonds, sunk costs, and perceived benefits that outweigh alternatives, within a system the member views as legitimate and beneficial despite external observers characterizing it as restrictive or authoritarian.
I think we can do better. I think we must do better.
Notice that both definitions are strictly behavioral—outside-looking-in—which is all well and good for strictly behavioral concerns, of course. But those are not remotely the concerns of the cultist, nor those who care about the cultist—nor any of us, for that matter, when it comes to living our lives. We’re concerned with understanding reality well enough to live a good life: a categorically inside-looking-out view. Behavioral views do not frame the cult phenomenon in a way conducive to understanding living-life concerns, which are the concerns we need to address if we’re to deal with cultism where it matters and, frankly, where it manifests: in the individual.
The uber-behavioral bent in academia has made us neglect the far more important view—and that has cleared the crux of the cult phenomenon right off the table.
If you take the cultist out of the cult, the cultism remains in the cultist. If you take the cultism out of the cultist, you have prevented cultism itself.
Since the early 2010s when I got involved with the International Cultic Studies Association (ICSA), the question has dogged me: why did attempts at identifying and defining cults seem so abstract and foreign to the realities of their presence and actual operations—especially from the perspective of an individual cult member?
I found the answer to that question. It’s not unique to cultic studies or interventions. The reason lies in the goal orientation of psychology as we’ve known it for the last 150 years—which you’ll see corresponds strictly to its behavioristic framing.
Blinders on
Historically, psychology has operated under two contrasting disciplinary orientations: one focused on fixing behavioral dysfunction as defined sociologically, enabling people to adjust and function in their society; and the other focused on enriching individuals’ subjective experience and sense of personal meaning and fulfillment.
Notice that the first orientation tends to prioritize group over individual, while the second prioritizes oppositely, aiming for happy, fulfilled people who have made their own sense and meaning of the world as the foundation for groups—if any—that are not cultic.
What I “discovered” was that happiness is not something that happens. It is not the result of good fortune or random chance. It is not something that money can buy or power command. It does not depend on outside events, but, rather, on how we interpret them. Happiness, in fact, is a condition that must be prepared for, cultivated, and defended privately by each person. People who learn to control inner experience will be able to determine the quality of their lives, which is as close as any of us can come to being happy.
— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow : the psychology of optimal experience, Harper Perennial, 1990, p. 2
The field of psychology has been gravely biased against subjective enrichment in favor of social conformity and functionality. My guess would be 95% dysfunction/adjustment-focused vs. 5% subjective enrichment through the 1980s. Csikszentmihalyi and Diener’s work on flow and subjective well-being in the late 1980s-early 1990s made the study of subjective enrichment empirically credible—shifting it from 5% to 15% (at best) of the field as a whole. Seligman later formalized and branded it “positive psychology” during his 1998 APA presidency.
This bias towards social adjustment over subjective enrichment is evident in funding decisions, diagnostic frameworks, and publication patterns. The DSM, insurance reimbursement structures, and government research grants all require identification of dysfunction. Academic journals through the 1980s published almost exclusively on pathology, disorders, and social maladjustment.
These and other structural incentives reflected the predominating agenda common to all civilizations: create and sustain a stable, profitable class of human resources. Those who pay for psychology—governments, insurers, institutions, and the power echelon they serve—want productive citizens, compliant patients, adjusted individuals. They fund what serves that goal.
Cultic studies have largely conformed to this mold, especially in research and theoretical work. It’s high time they broke from psychology’s traditional, predominantly outside-in orientation (prioritizing social adjustment) and adopted an inside-out orientation that honors how life is actually lived, making individual subjective well-being primary across its goals, theories, methods, and practices—a fundamental epistemic shift from normative primacy to experiential primacy. Given that cultism involves an extreme form of individual negation and imposed conformism under the dominance of the group-as-micro-society, cultic studies need to make this shift even more urgently than psychology as a whole.
It would be premature to argue the merits of such a “flip”. Far more work would need to be done under the experience-primary orientation before we’d be informed enough to compare and rate these orientations. For now, it’s enough to acknowledge experiential primacy and recognize its merits and potential advantages. Meanwhile, it should be obvious that experiential primacy is the best fit for the questions I’m exclusively interested in:
How can we gain an understanding of as-lived cultic experience with an eye to making real contact with cult members and engaging in honest, substantive communication with them; and
How can we provide credible avenues for escape not only from a cult, but from the psychopathologies that essentially constitute cult participation as a form of addiction?
My particular rabbit hole
Having been a member of the Brunstad Christian Church from 1978 through 1993—known as “Smith’s Friends” at the time—I know what it is to be a cultist, although I didn’t consider it a cult even after I left. While it checked all but one box on most “cult characteristics” checklists, that exception was a big one.
From ICSA’s own list, “Characteristics associated with cultic groups”: “The group is preoccupied with making money”. That simply wasn’t true of the organization prior to the 90s—at least not in North American chapters, which were notoriously poor and uneducated, proudly displaying their “humble” state like a badge of honor.
But in Norway, the organization’s base—with Oslo its “Mecca” and “Brunstad” its “Medina” (renamed the Oslofjord Convention Center)—the impact of North Sea oil on Norwegian living standards in the 80s had already set in motion a makeover that would splash big in the mid-90s, reinventing “The Church” as a kind of quasi-denomination vying for state recognition and sporting what its leaders over the previous near-century would have considered a gross display of “worldliness”, “love of money”, and “religious harlotry”.
As you can see from their websites, there is nothing poor about BCC now—and the stories I could tell about their coercive fundraising efforts… HOLY MOLY! They even had a drive to sell tickets for the “train to heaven” which, much like other Bible-based cults, has only 144,000 seats available. 😖🤢😶😃😆🤣
By the time I’d been “out” a few years and saw their new direction, (they excommunicated me in 1994,) BCC’s money-raising preoccupation box had been squarely and solidly checked.
BCC qualifies as a cult by every credible measure I know of.
So what? What real difference does designating it as a cult actually make, and to whom?
Good luck trying to convince BCC members that it’s a cult.
Just a reference for how deep and strong their cultism goes, I have family remaining in the group who, more than 30 years later, still refuse to have anything to do with me.
CODEPENDENCE: Seedbed of cultism
To date, cultic studies have produced amazing clinical work from practitioners like Lalich, Giambalvo, Hassan, and Tobias, who engage cultists’ lived experience directly. But this individual-experiential clinical work has lacked a cogent non-behavioral framework for understanding what fundamentally drives cultism. Meanwhile, the field’s academic output offers value for legal and social efforts seeking to curb harmful cult practices and programs and create protections for those affected by them, but remain underweight when it comes to addressing cultism where it actually manifests: in individuals.
We must do better.
The addiction recovery movement got it right when they identified “codependence” in the 1980s—they recognized real patterns in families affected by substance abusers. Its psychological roots, though, are more fundamental and pervasive.
Codependence is an artificial overlay we construct to override our own consciousness.
That’s a big pill—let’s do some work to swallow it.
We each have a consciousness that begins aligned with a naturally evolved Homo sapiens psychological design, grounded in neurological substrate, capable of perceiving and testing reality directly… but it requires years—decades, in fact—to develop and mature. This emergent design enabled the Homo genus to survive and thrive. All our experience and the development it drives originate from personal, embodied interaction with the universe and everyone in it, including ourselves.
Even narrative is encountered and processed as experienced interaction imprinted in our neurological substrate. These imprints constrain and channel subsequent experience—perception and initial sorting—forming the context and limitations for consciousness itself, serving as a kind of psychoactive paradigm: our basic psychology demands coherence, pulling for consistency and closure while repelled by dissonance.
Consciousness depends on two tethering operations to function properly.
First: substrate integration—consciousness must map coherently to the embodied imprints in our neurological substrate, maintaining internal alignment between what we experienced and what consciousness registers.
Second: grounding—once consciousness is integrated with substrate, it can then test itself against the physical universe, comparing its coherently-mapped understanding to external reality.
Substrate integration is prerequisite to grounding. You cannot reality-test if consciousness is severed from its substrate where direct experience gets recorded.
Codependence disrupts both operations.
But under certain conditions—primarily childhood trauma by trusted authorities, and deliberate, dehumanizing grooming by institutions (church, state, education, medicine, and parenting)—we learn to survive by dissociation, mimetism, and self-substitution: displacing ourselves with hallucinations that reflect the “person” others expect. So, we construct fantasy personas and pretend they’re us—the genesis of ego. We fall into the incoherent—supplanting ourselves and our embodied wisdom, erecting authorities and their narratives as definers, interpreters, and determiners of reality—truth arbiters—in our place.
This isn’t a “mode of consciousness” or an alternative way of being conscious. It’s not consciousness at all. It’s a counterfeit—a performance we generate and maintain in order to avoid the terror of standing solely responsible for our part—our grasp of reality from our unique position, our judgments, our choices, our actions—with no authority to scapegoat. We’re both creating a simulation and acting in it in lieu of engaging as interactors solely responsible for making ourselves who we are, choosing and doing what we do—standing on our own, honest and authentic.
We’re simulating infantile dependency: the childhood state where we actually needed others to tell us what’s real, who we are, whether we’re safe, what to think, and what to do. Children depend, appropriately, on trusted authorities as truth arbiters because they haven’t yet developed the capacity for independent reality assessment. Extended into adulthood, this same dependence—healthy and necessary during childhood—turns pathological.
In cults, this pathology—simulated infantile dependency—reaches its most concentrated and explicit form. The group becomes the singular authority, the guru or leader becomes the ultimate parent-substitute, and members actively cultivate and perform this dependency as spiritual virtue or ideological commitment.
Codependence is that pathology. It is delusional—but not as a passive state or condition. It is a performance, or more precisely, a simulation we generate and—when we feel it’s necessary—use to overrule our actual consciousness, which continues to function underneath. We uncritically internalize contrived pseudo-reality, -identity, and -meaning acquired from external sources (authority narratives) rather than rely on our own experientially-imprinted neurological substrate.
We outsource truth determination to avoid the terror of standing in self-reliance on our own embodied wisdom.
The psychosis: This simulation is psychotic in the literal sense: experience severed from reality. Consciousness knows what the substrate registers—what we directly experienced, what our bodies know—but the simulation overrules it with authority narrative. When these conflict, we experience cognitive dissonance. When the simulation dominates, we lose access to substrate truth. The tension between consciousness trying to assert itself and simulation suppressing it creates existential anxiety.
The terror: What makes simulated codependence so perversely persistent is solity—the position of standing alone as the final judge, relying on our own substrate-grounded consciousness without external authorization. No one else gets the final word about what is real and how to interpret it. This does not imply that we reject all other input merely because it came from a source other than us—only that final judgment remains ours.
This terror isn’t abstract. It’s as personal as it gets. Confronting solity feels like impending annihilation. Were you to accept your solity, your codependence simulation would literally and completely collapse. Codependence is your defense against the terror of solity. Your roles would die and take “ego” with them, since “ego” would have nothing left to do. What would remain is just you, the real person with your consciousness, your embodied wisdom which you dared not trust, your experiences and memories—which are psychologically sacrosanct. You never needed the simulation in the first place.
Solity terror manifests in observable, measurable ways. People in simulated codependence exhibit visceral panic at questions that imply absence of authority, like, “What would we do without leaders?” Their invariable response to “What would happen if we had no government?” is some version of, “Chaos would ensue!” For codependents, these aren’t rhetorical questions or hypotheticals, and their reactions to them are expressions of genuine existential dread. They undergo immediate, involuntary attitude shifts when entering settings that convey authority’s demand for alignment—government office buildings, courthouses, mosques and churches and synagogues and temples, corporate boardrooms, fraternal organization headquarters—where their posture, speech patterns, and emotional states change reflexively. Without authorities to lead, protect, and punish them, the unknown represents danger, even evil. They have no one to tell them it’s bedtime and look under the bed to assure them no monsters lurk there.
These markers intensify and exaggerate for cultists: the cult’s scriptures become inerrant, the cult leader’s word becomes the voice of God, the group’s interpretation becomes the only real “reality”, and any suggestion of life outside the group triggers the full force of solity terror.
The stakes: We cling to simulated codependence with desperate intensity because the prospect of dropping it makes us feel like we’ll go insane or die. The authorities we depend on for reality-assessment, identity-definition, and existential validation seem absolutely necessary for our survival and sane functioning. “What would we do without leaders?” isn’t a hypothetical question to be considered and discussed openly, honestly, and rationally—it triggers instant aversion bias, if not dread. Not only does an authority-free world seem dangerous and/or evil, but we’re viscerally certain—despite our utter ignorance of any such world—that it must be.
The mechanism: Authority narratives—believed to be real, even experienced as real, not abstract—create their own substrate imprints. These authority-molded experiences compete with direct experiences, and thanks to grooming (ritual, ceremony, obeisance protocols, architecture, repetition, abjectly uncritical states of receptivity—just look at faces in an audience listening to the Pope or a faith healer)—and the authority imprints usually win. We learn to privilege the simulation over consciousness, the narrative over the substrate, the derived over the original. Authorities insert their narratives at the consciousness level, blocking substrate integration. Consciousness cannot map coherently to substrate imprints when authority’s interpretation overrides them. Without substrate integration, grounding becomes impossible; consciousness severed from embodied truth cannot reality-test against the physical universe.
The cultivation: This isn’t accidental. Institutions actively maintain simulated codependence through:
Ritual and ceremony that induce receptive states
Architecture and symbols that dwarf individuals
Credentialing systems that monopolize legitimacy
Punishment of substrate-grounded knowing (you’re “crazy,” “non-compliant,” “lacking insight”)
Reward for simulation-compliance (good patient, good citizen, good believer)
Cultivated ignorance (also referred to as “motivated ignorance”) through information control—censorship, taboos on outside input, demonization of criticism, suspicion and outright rejection of questioning
That last point reveals something crucial: codependence requires ignorance. The cultist must not know what lies outside the simulation. Every cult’s information manipulation serves this single purpose—maintaining the ignorance that keeps the simulation viable. The moment genuine alternatives become visible and credible, the simulation begins to crack.
The scope: Simulated codependence can operate—and usually does—in every kind of relationship in every kind of setting at every scale—between parent and child, doctor and patient, pastor and congregant, expert and layperson, state and citizen. It structures psychology, medicine, law, education, religion, politics. Civilization runs on it. Institutions don’t just contain codependent relationships—they are codependent structures, requiring subjects to maintain the simulation for the institution’s existence as the authority. Cults represent this structure in its clearest, most concentrated form—where other institutions may allow partial autonomy in some domains, cults demand codependent simulation across all domains of life.
The mutual aspect: Codependence is thoroughly but asymmetrically mutual. Authorities depend on their subjects remaining in simulated codependence—not merely to constitute their power, but for their very existence as authorities. An authority’s identity and apparent realness require subjects that consider the authority’s reality-determining and -interpreting power credible. Without self-subordinated followers, “authority” has no meaning, the authority figure has no one to command and lead, annihilating their identity as authorities. Subjects depend on authorities to provide truth arbitration so they can avoid solity terror—they need authorities to tell them what’s real, who they are, whether they’re safe, what to think, and what to do. Each validates the other’s simulation. Neither stands on actual ground. Both are locked in mutual identity-fantasizing: the authority needs subjects to be authority, subjects need authority to avoid being sole judge. In cults, this mutual dependency becomes explicit doctrine—the leader needs devoted followers to manifest divine will or revolutionary truth, followers need the leader to access salvation or enlightenment. Each relegates the other to a pseudo-existence.
The compartmentalization: Most people operate from native, unimpaired consciousness in some domains (work, hobbies, practical matters, personal relationships)—as long as they feel competent to do so—while maintaining simulated codependence in high-importance, existential-impact situations where they feel at a loss, e.g., medical authority, state power, religious doctrine, expert opinion, emergencies. This gives the impression that adult competence and infantile dependence coexist, but instead they flip-flop, compartmentalized by context. Cultists typically collapse this compartmentalization—the simulation expands to override consciousness across all or nearly all life domains, which is why cults appear so totalistic compared to broader society where codependence remains domain-specific.
This compartmentalization reveals something critical. The fact that we can switch out of the overlaid codependence simulation proves we have the capacity to operate from unimpaired consciousness in contexts where we feel safe and competent to do so. The effort required to construct and maintain the overlay in the face of clashes between it and genuine experience demonstrates active commitment to sustaining the simulation. Our terror of solity is real, but it’s not triggered by solity itself—it’s triggered by a hallucinated prospect of losing touch with reality. We have so thoroughly identified with the authority narrative we’re embedded in, we’ve taken it for reality itself.
Solity actually confronts us with the prospect of losing touch with the artificial, manipulatory reality-grounding we get from the authority and its acolytes, i.e., the cult. Ironically, we fear losing the delusion that the cult connects us to reality, when accepting solity is what would actually do that—freeing us from a lie to realize that we’d been living in a purple haze and our genuine consciousness never actually lost that connection.
The alternative: Maturation means dismantling the simulation and accepting our solity—standing alone in substrate-grounded consciousness, self-as-sole-judge, based on our embodied wisdom. This doesn’t mean isolation or rejecting others’ perspectives. It means our own consciousness is primary, with others providing additional data that we accept, assess, judge, and integrate with our own, including our assessment of the reliability of its source, without deferring to authorities that determine what we’re allowed to know.
Consider the many metaphors that run through different religions concerning escape from evil into good, darkness into light, etc:
Light vs. Darkness: Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, Zoroastrianism, Gnosticism
Awakening/Enlightenment: Buddhism, Hinduism, Jainism
Being Born Again: Christianity, Hinduism (dvija)
Liberation/Moksha/Nirvana: Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, Sikhism
Salvation/Redemption: Christianity, Islam, Judaism
Ascension/Rising to Heaven: Christianity, Islam, Hinduism
Crossing Over: Buddhism, Christianity, Ancient Egyptian
Opening of Eyes/Third Eye: Hinduism, Buddhism, Esoteric traditions
Resurrection: Christianity, Islam, Zoroastrianism
Path/Way out of the Cave/Matrix/Maya: Plato (influenced Gnosticism/Christianity), Hinduism (Maya), Buddhism
All of these entail embracing solity and abandoning the codependence simulation. In fact, I would argue that religions are the result of hijacking embodied wisdom, the knowledge of solity vs. codependence (good vs. evil?) and reframing them into authoritarian paradigms—but that’s a whole different discussion.
Transitioning into solity requires restoring the two tethering operations: first, allowing consciousness to reintegrate with substrate—reclaiming the primacy of what we actually experienced, what our body knows, what our imprints record—and second, reestablishing grounding by testing our substrate-integrated consciousness against physical reality directly rather than through authority’s truth arbitration.
For cultists specifically, this transition often begins with momentary cracks in the simulation—witnessing the leader’s hypocrisy, facing punishment for substrate-grounded truth-telling, confronting undeniable evidence contradicting group narrative, threatened with expulsion for refusing to “humble yourself, repent, and submit” in the absence of specific transgression. Often, it takes literal banishment by family, friends, or the entire community before the cultist’s codependence simulation cracks deeply enough to free them to restore confidence in their own judgment and embodied wisdom, bringing these out from under its domination. Otherwise, the simulation reasserts control.
In essence: Codependence is the artificial overlay we use to overrule our own consciousness, simulating infantile dependency on external authorities for reality-assessment and sensemaking, because the alternative—solity, standing on our own with only our substrate-grounded embodied wisdom—triggers such profound terror that it feels like facing insanity or death itself.
Not only did we never need codependence simulations, they’re patently dysfunctional. Consciousness never needed overruling. The simulation is derivative, counterfeit, parasitic—induced by authority narrative, a mockery of consciousness generated by consciousness to compete with consciousness in what amounts to an incessant struggle with itself. Letting it operate guarantees incessant, fundamental psychic dissonance which drives pathological compensation and, in the extreme, psychopathy.
Is it any wonder that the world, for the most part—but especially geopolitically, internationally, and within the monopolies on legitimated violence known as “States”—operates as if run by psychotics that expect to realize: peace by means of violence; life by means of sacrifice and bloodshed and death; and human advancement by the deliberate retardation of human development?
If you’re doubtful about that last one, see Land’s presentation of his work on genius:
Codependence is the basis for social psychosis, of which Matthias Desmet’s theory of “mass formation” is but a special-condition formulation.
Codependence is Plato’s cave, in which we interact not with reality but the shadows of authority narratives.
Codependence is the sole critical, constitutive element for authoritarian groups, organizations, institutions, nations, and civilizations. Where the codependent carcasses are, there the vultures—rulers and priests and masters—will gather.
What we popularly call “cults”, for the most part, are just one type of notorious, closed, high-demand group where codependence shows its face: the outlier religious and so-called spiritual organizations and institutions we love to pathologize. But the same codependence manifests and operates in the medical priesthood, demanding faith in their pronouncements; in obligation and obedience to the state, requiring belief in its necessity and supremacy; in the academy, insisting on deference to credentialed expertise; and in many other domains. We’ve reserved the term “cult” for the fringes while the same structure and dynamics characterize the center. Every authoritarian system, secular or sacred, runs on codependence. The differences are merely contextual—different costumes for the same performance, different scripts for the same simulation.
We have a choice: either cults are codependent phenomena we’ve arbitrarily defined as largely confined to the extremes of religious experience, or they’re one expression of a common, underlying psycho-social condition that expresses under different masks in different contexts and social sectors.
Either way, I’ve identified codependence as the seedbed for them all.