I Almost Joined a Cult, and So Could You

Words by Kiran Patel (he/they)

If you told me that I would join a cult because my pants were too tight, I would’ve laughed and thought you were taking the piss. 

But on one particular Tuesday afternoon, it was the straw (or the inflexible elastic waistband) that finally broke the camel's back.

I managed to keep it together as I dragged myself out of bed on the three hours of sleep my party-heavy neighbours allowed me. The violent Wellington winds whipped me across the city to finish an ungodly amount of uni work, anxiety and stress coursing through every cell in my body. I dug my nails into my palm as I trudged up the steep steps from Boulcott Street to The Terrace, battling the sideways rain, threatening to throw me back down the hill. I extinguished the anger boiling in my chest when I finally reached the foyer and realised that I had forgotten not only my lunch, but my notebook and laptop charger too.  

I persevered with all my might, hanging on the few shreds of motivation I had left to march myself over to the blue zone with the promise of being back in isolation by the end of the day. ”Just finish your stupid readings that you don’t understand, write your stupid presentation on stupid Freud, and finish your stupid thesis that doesn’t make any sense. Then when you’re finished, you can crawl back into bed and watch Indian Matchmaker until your brain melts from the stupidity, and do it all again the next day,” I told myself. 
 
When I finally managed to find a desk and open my laptop, my organs suddenly registered the pain of being crushed by a pair of thrifted Glassons high-waisted pants. I had no way of unbuttoning them without looking like a public menace, so I gave up. I buried my head in my hands and gave up. 

As fake deep as it might sound, the pants were like a physical representation for the magnitude of what I was feeling in that moment. Day after day, it felt like the neoliberalist agenda was killing me softly with its claws. I had been spewing out more productivity and perfectionism than I could possibly muster up on my own, and now this blank, white Google doc was glaring back at me, demanding even more. I realised that somewhere, somehow, my entire worth had been reduced down to how many words filled up the screen. And it was never enough. As I looked across the floor at the myriad of bodies sitting behind partitions busying themselves with the next reading or assignment, I had never felt more alone.

Rather than slumping back home as I planned, I dug up the strength to be proactive and go to a yoga class I had seen advertised. To be honest, the place had always given me slightly culty vibes. It screamed New Age enlightenment and a tinge of white saviorism, things I had always tried to steer clear of. But I was desperate to try something to make me feel better than curling up in bed and wallowing, and cheap yoga during a cost of living crisis seemed like the perfect place to start. Plus, I knew that my critical thinking skills would keep me out of any remotely fishy situation. After all, there’s no way I’d ever be stupid enough to get involved in a cult, right? 

Well, that’s not quite how it works. 

I don’t think anyone that becomes embroiled in a cult does so with the intention of renouncing all their earthly possessions, living on a remote commune, and sacrificing their lives under the belief that a UFO ship will come and carry their souls to heaven. Cult members, as much as we might refuse to believe, start out the same as you and I. They’re messy, flawed, creative people that usually want to better themselves, do good in the world, and somehow make meaning out of the nothingness that is our existence. 

Cults capitalise on the inevitable tough times we’re bound to face in life, dress their dogma up for us, and serve it on a perfect platter of absolutes. They somehow have solutions to our existential crises, the tools to enact radical change, and a built-in sense of community that we all crave. According to sociologist and cult expert Dr Janja Lalich, cults most often prey on idealistic and ambitious young people that are in periods of situational vulnerability. “The desire to improve oneself and/or the world around you is the most commonly shared motivator amongst cult members. People who arrogantly think they are too smart for a cult are often the ones who get sucked in because they don’t have their guard up,” Lalich writes.

The aftermath of pants-gate had caught me off guard. I was physically and emotionally exhausted, struggling under the weight of stress and loneliness. It felt never-ending. Luckily for the yoga group, I was the perfect target. I was greeted at the door with wide smiles and even wider collection boxes, gladly accepting a potent dose of sugary sweet tea that filled me with euphoria before I’d even started exercising. Their team showered me with love from all angles, hurling rapid fire questions at me about my beliefs, my passions, and the life I had beyond materialism. “That’s so interesting,” they repeated every time I spoke. For the first time in days, I felt like a real person, rather than a ChatGPT bot forced to produce endless amounts of prompted information. 

My shy, avoidant personality soaked it up like a sponge. Without making any real effort, I was bathed in a feeling of specialness that I had been starved of all day. I allowed the calming stretches and affirmations to tuck a temporary blanket over all the pain and burnout I had been feeling. As I munched on the free kai they provided after the class, relishing in the warmth and positive energy of the experience that tingled from my head to my toes, they pulled their ultimate trump card on me. “The food at our other classes we do is even better—you should come along.” From there, I was hooked.

I progressively attended more sessions, and began to open myself up to their persuasive spiritual teachings that went beyond the quick fix-yoga sessions. I felt myself nodding along to their beliefs on human consciousness, drawn from seemingly ancient texts, that told me that I was a creature of being, not a creature of doing. I desperately wanted to ascend beyond the physical bounds of my body and abandon the earthly attachments that were apparently doing me more harm than good. These teachings and classes felt like the only way I could reach my highest good, so I anxiously calculated the costs of attending them on a regular basis. 

I sang and clapped along to songs with my brand-new community, the repetitive, unexplained chants vibrating in my body. “Sing louder,” their guru preached, her wide eyes burning into mine, “feel the words wash over your soul!” I sang my tone-deaf little heart out, fingertips away from the higher consciousness they promised I would achieve. 

But just as I seemed to be reaching the apex of spiritual enlightenment, I remembered something that my friend, who joined a New Age group years ago, had told me. “It’s how these groups get you. They inject you full of stimulus, make you feel all good about yourself, and then use you for free labour to the point of absolute exhaustion.” Her words echoed in my head as I slowly turned towards the kitchen. An army of fatigued young people were slumped behind the counter waiting to serve us, staring daggers at all the new recruits. 

With that, the veil had dropped. The chanting lost its encapsulation over me, and I suddenly realised how perfectly controlled the whole environment had been. The warmth of the room, the dim lighting, the excessive food, the emotionally-charged music. The sugar high from their sickly sweet tea was starting to wear off. I recalled a passage from a CHERUB book I had read as a preteen, where a cult pumps its members with sugar to make them more energetic, happy, and open to radical thinking. It dawned on me this was all just a means to make me more susceptible to their teachings. 

As I bade an Irish goodbye and ran for the hills, I tracked back through the classes and noticed all the little tricks they had used to get my buy-in. I remembered how they gave me one of their spiritual books for ‘free’ before doubling down on needing a considerable ‘donation’ for it. I thought about the glazed, disinterested look in their eyes as they piled on more questions about myself that were clearly just attempts to establish a trusting relationship. I felt so stupid for believing their intentions were pure, but I knew that I couldn’t be the only one to pick up on manipulative tactics they used to prey on my weak spots. 

Corporate cult experts Dennis Tourish and Naheed Vatcha identified ‘love bombing’, the act in which prospective members are initially showered with attention and affection, as a key technique of recruitment. “The leader wishes to seduce the new recruit into the organisation’s embrace, slowly habituating them to its strange rituals and complex belief systems.” Similarly, writer Courtney E Smith describes the way that the use of music in cults manipulates “the emotions and feeling of togetherness that group singing and dancing provides, and using it [...] to direct emotional and psychological attention towards a specific ideology.” 

I felt conflicted. On one hand, I could recognise the cultish techniques used to convince me that their beliefs were the right ones and shell out my student allowance to obtain them. But on the other hand, I couldn’t deny how good it felt to be surrounded by a positive, inclusive community that had different perspectives and gassed me up with affirmations and stimulus. 

Dr Bonnie Etherington, a VUW Literary and Creative Communications lecturer, believes these types of initial community-building techniques usually act as a facade for a cult’s darker intentions. “Being in a cult has been described in similar ways to being in an abusive relationship. It starts with being love bombed by charismatic people. You basically just get to participate in a community that’s extremely welcoming, which feels great because everybody wants to belong. It’s not until much later that forms of manipulation become apparent that can make way for different types of abuse to take place,” she said.

In the same way that music, love bombing, and other stimulants were used to bypass any initial resistance I might have had, making people unquestionably believe in your dogma takes playing the long game. Those tools are progressively twisted over time to effectively break down your core beliefs, and build them back up again using only their belief system. “We all use narratives to shape and understand our lives. Cults depend on their narratives being convincing through using secrecy, paranoia, and an ‘us versus them’ mentality that maintains their isolation and control. A key sign of a cult is one that doesn’t allow you to push back on their core beliefs, which could disrupt their entire narrative,” says Dr Etherington.  

I hadn’t stuck around long enough to see whether the organisation was truly a cult. But I’m glad I made a break for it before I had the chance to find out. Dr Lalich believed that once a cult is gradually able to make you override your gut instinct, it creates a cognitive dissonance that “keeps you trapped, as each compromise makes it more painful to admit you’ve been deceived. It uses both formal and informal systems of influence and control to keep members obedient with little tolerance for internal disagreement or external scrutiny.” In a way, you’re brainwashed into becoming complicit with your questionable actions, and that makes rejecting the cult’s narrative much harder than just simply leaving. 

Perhaps you’re thinking I should’ve seen the red flags from the minute I sipped that sweet tea. Perhaps I could’ve deduced that the love bombing was a little too good to be true. Maybe I should’ve just worn different pants and avoided the whole debacle in the first place! But I challenge you to remove your hat of absolute objectivity and think of all the ‘stupid’ decisions you’ve made from a vulnerable place. Deep down, we’re all striving to do our best in a system that demands perfection. We’re all trying to figure out our purpose on this dying rock floating through infinite space and time. We all need community, belonging, and acceptance. In the same way that making questionable decisions in the moment is a means to justify the ends you’ve been slowly brainwashed into believing, who’s to say that rotting at a desk for individualistic accomplishments justifies a degree that might not matter in 20 years?

It’s hard to objectively judge the choices that anyone could make when our lives are anything but objective.