Cults are about what happens to perfectly normal brains when certainty starts feeling safer than thinking.1
Which explains a lot of family dinners.
WHAT A CULT ACTUALLY IS
A cult is not a belief you dislike. That’s just the internet being the internet.
A cult is what happens when a group trains your nervous system to believe that belonging matters more than reality.2
Here’s what that looks like when it’s actually happening:
- Certainty becomes a personality trait. You are not just confident, you are correct. Questions feel hostile. Curiosity feels suspicious. You stop asking “Is this true?” and start asking “Are you with us?”3
- Loyalty beats truth. Facts are not evaluated on accuracy, but on usefulness. If a fact threatens the group, the fact is declared biased, fake, or malicious.4 Fake News anybody?
- Doubt becomes moralized. Hesitation is framed as weakness or corruption. If you’re unsure, something must be wrong with you.5
- Outsiders feel dangerous. Not incorrect. Dangerous. Their existence alone feels like a threat.6 Of course it’s easier to identify the threat as Somalian, to say they are eating pet dogs and cats.
- Leaving feels like losing yourself. You’re not just changing your mind. You’re abandoning your identity, your people, and your sense of meaning.7
- Information gets filtered. Confirming news feels obvious. Contradictory news feels evil. Neutral information disappears entirely.8
- The group replaces individuality. Opinions become scripts. Humor dries up. Everyone starts sounding the same.9
This is not about intelligence.
As Oliver Sacks (a British neurologist and writer famous for explaining how real human brains actually work, including their distortions and blind spots) wrote, “The brain is a storytelling organ.”10
Once your brain commits to a story, it protects it like it’s keeping you alive.
Or, as George Carlin (an American stand-up comedian and cultural critic who dissected power, language, and groupthink) put it, “I love individuals. I hate groups.”11
CULT VS RELIGION
This is where people start yelling, so let’s slow it down. Religion can be psychologically healthy when it remembers it is not omniscient.12
Healthy religion usually looks like this:
- Doubt is allowed. You can ask questions without being treated like a threat.13
- Disagreement is tolerated. People can interpret things differently and still belong.
- Mystery is accepted. Not knowing everything is not treated as a failure.
- Exit does not equal exile. You can leave without being socially erased.14
Religion becomes cult-like when control replaces humility:
- Obedience replaces ethics. Doing what you’re told matters more than doing what’s right.15
- Certainty replaces curiosity. Answers are memorized instead of explored.
- Questioning becomes sin. Doubt is framed as decay or danger.16
- Identity replaces conscience. You stop asking “Is this good?” and start asking “Is this us?”
As Richard Rohr (a Franciscan friar and theologian known for writing about humility, psychological maturity, and faith) warned, religion without humility turns into ideology wearing sacred clothing.17
WHY CULTS WORK ON THE BRAIN
Your brain was built for tribes, not algorithmic outrage.18 When people feel threatened, overwhelmed, or chronically stressed, the brain changes priorities:
- The amygdala cranks up threat detection. Everything feels urgent, hostile, and existential.19
- The prefrontal cortex gets tired. Nuance, ambiguity, and “on the other hand” thinking require energy.20
- Dopamine rewards agreement. Being validated feels good. Being challenged feels bad.21
- Oxytocin strengthens in-group bonding. Your people feel safe. Everyone else feels sketchy.22
- Repetition hardens belief. Familiar starts to feel true, even if it isn’t.23
As Robert Sapolsky (an American neuroscientist and primatologist who studies stress, biology, and behavior) has shown, chronic stress pushes the brain toward survival shortcuts.24 Certainty feels calming. Accuracy takes work.
WHAT A CULT OF PERSONALITY IS
A cult of personality is what happens when a human stops being a human and becomes a symbol. At that point, you’re not following a leader. You’re following a feeling.25
- Faces activate trust faster than facts. Your brain reacts emotionally before you think.
- Charisma delivers dopamine. Strong feelings get mistaken for insight.
- Repetition cements the image. Cue: The Big Lie.
- The person starts to feel inevitable.
- Criticism triggers threat responses. Attacking the leader feels like attacking you.
- The leader becomes a shortcut. Thinking gets outsourced.
As Hannah Arendt (a German-Jewish political theorist who analyzed totalitarianism and obedience) warned, ideology replaces thinking with consistency. Or, as Jon Stewart (an American comedian and former host of The Daily Show) put it, “If you abandon your values the moment they’re inconvenient, they weren’t values. They were props.”
IS MAGA A CULT?
This is not a yes-or-no question, which is exactly why people lose their minds about it. MAGA is not one thing. Some people are just voting. But some parts of the movement show cult-like dynamics:
- Loyalty to a person overrides principles. Rules change depending on who breaks them.
- Infallibility narratives appear. Mistakes are reframed as genius.
- Evidence gets dismissed reflexively. Facts feel hostile instead of informative.
- Identity fuses with belief. Criticism feels personal.
- Dissenters get punished. Leaving is framed as betrayal.
What keeps it from being a classic cult: No total isolation. No single enforcement system. Wide variation in involvement. As Steven Hassan (a former cult member turned cult researcher specializing in undue influence) describes it, this looks like a “soft cult environment.” Or as Sarah Silverman (an American comedian known for blunt political commentary) said, “They’re not listening to understand. They’re listening to reload.”
Cults are not about beliefs. They are about control. Brains under threat trade nuance for certainty. As Chris Rock (an American stand-up comedian known for cultural and political commentary) said, “When you’re loyal to stupid, stupid is loyal to you.”
If this made you uncomfortable, good. I read and welcome all comments, including thoughtful disagreement. Curiosity is not betrayal, and asking questions is not weakness. If you’d rather not comment publicly, you can find me at my website. And if you’re in Boulder, Colorado, yes, I’m real, I exist offline, and I do this work with actual humans who sit in actual chairs and change their minds all the time.
Next: Freud and Jung, and why even brilliant ideas become cult-ish when followers stop questioning.
FOOTNOTES
1. Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow, pp. 199–233, 297–310 ↩
2. Robert J. Lifton, Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism, pp. 419–437 ↩
3. Leon Festinger, A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance, pp. 1–31, 92–105 ↩
4. Dan M. Kahan, “Motivated Reasoning,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 40 (2017), pp. 1–16 ↩
5. Irving L. Janis, Groupthink, pp. 9–43, 174–196 ↩
6. Henri Tajfel & John Turner, “An Integrative Theory of Intergroup Conflict,” pp. 33–47 ↩
7. Janet Lalich, Bounded Choice, pp. 15–38, 95–121 ↩
8. Brendan Nyhan & Jason Reifler, “When Corrections Fail,” Political Behavior 32 (2010), pp. 303–330 ↩
9. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, pp. 460–479 ↩
10. Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, pp. 7–15, 110–114 ↩
11. George Carlin, Napalm & Silly Putty, pp. 107–110 ↩
12. Kenneth I. Pargament, The Psychology of Religion and Coping, pp. 3–27, 121–147 ↩
13. James W. Fowler, Stages of Faith, pp. 36–59 ↩
14. Peter L. Berger, The Sacred Canopy, pp. 23–51 ↩
15. Stanley Milgram, Obedience to Authority, pp. 3–19, 123–133 ↩
16. Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom, pp. 141–170 ↩
17. Richard Rohr, Falling Upward, pp. 42–55 ↩
18. Robin Dunbar, Grooming, Gossip and the Evolution of Language, pp. 56–78 ↩
19. Joseph LeDoux, The Emotional Brain, pp. 161–185 ↩
20. Amy F. T. Arnsten, “Stress Signalling Pathways,” Nature Reviews Neuroscience 10 (2009), pp. 410–422 ↩
21. Wolfram Schultz, “Predictive Reward Signal,” Journal of Neurophysiology 80 (1998), pp. 1–27 ↩
22. Carsten K. W. De Dreu et al., “Oxytocin Promotes Human Ethnocentrism,” PNAS 108 (2011), pp. 1262–1266 ↩
23. Robert B. Zajonc, “Attitudinal Effects of Mere Exposure,” JPSP 9 (1968), pp. 1–27 ↩
24. Robert M. Sapolsky, Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers, pp. 245–270 ↩
25. Max Weber, Economy and Society, pp. 241–254 ↩
