Yep, the only way to form a cult that amasses wealth and draws hot groupies is though fear and hate rhetoric.
Idk about that. There have been a number of very successful cults that amassed wealth and hot groupies through excess affection and utopianism. In fact, one popular form of recruiting cult members is Love Bombing which typically involves existing members bombarding an individual with attention, affection, and romantic advances. While this is often paired with techniques for isolating the individual from the outside world, it is extremely effective on people who already feel alienated and isolated.
If you get into the weeds of how all sorts of groups from QAnon to Cutco to church youth groups operate, they inevitably involve providing these intense positive emotional experiences to new prospective members. Hell, look at the Lakewood Church in Houston or the Baha’i temple. Their entire model is based around these lukewarm vibes sessions, very reminiscent of 60s-era charisma cults.
Some people do start benign NRMs based on mild virtues like kindness, compassion, mercy and generosity, but those aren’t the ones that get huge and go nationwide
Lots of MLMs are structured around the idea that these businesses are a surrogate family and that participating in the sales campaigns is a kind of good deed that you’re doing for others. Amway, Mary Kay, and NXIVM all got big doing these ostensibly social and charitable projects to gin up membership, before exploiting folks who put their trust in them.
Billionaire philanthropy groups follow similar patterns, with individuals drawn in on the idea that the Ford Foundation or the Hoover Institute or the Carnegie Foundation or the Bill And Melinda Gates Foundation are doing legitimate good deeds. Only in hindsight do you realize you’re being chewed up and spit out - manipulated to provide lots of cheap/free labor, to take on legally/morally dubious tasks, to generate positive PR while submitting to abusive bosses - by a core of organization insiders who see you as a useful idiot.
Love Bombing and the like are recruitment tactics, which is how you get lonely or angry people to look at and engage with the movement. Much the way there’s some sound personal advice in Dianetics the point is to get the layperson interested in becoming an initiate. This is one of the cult orgy spots, since yes, some movements encouraged their recruiters to engage sexually with with their marks, not approved by the mainstream since it runs contrary with the anti-free-love themes of Christianity. (Most NRMs by far identify as Christian, though that’s its own deep dive.)
(The other cult orgy spot comes in the harems or proclivities of the movement leaders, who often will draw an endless supply of groupies much like athletes, politicians or actors. Or, as per the case of Jim Bakker and Jessica Hahn, can extort attractive workers for sex with low risk of consequence, which seems to run congruous with executive branches of large businesses. The Rajneeshpuram in Wasco County, Oregon, a Tau Buddhist commune is a rare special case for the US, but the local population and the state freaked out not because too much sex was happening, but because it was insufficiently Christian for the 1980s US.)
Once someone is a novice or a practicing disciple, then the movement needs mechanisms to get them willing to labor long hours on cheap food and minimal medical care (sometimes dealing with supply scarcity and disease), and that’s when the promise of a big payoff soon comes.
In the cases of MLMs, the promise is you’ll get rich too when you are selling AMWAY products to customers, or the next iteration of resellers down the line. This is why doomsdays are popular among NRMs, which have to be imminent. This year. Preferably a month away. Then they know they only have to work a few weeks until the rapture, and it will all be worth it. It’s also why the doomsday cult story doesn’t end but gets really scary after the doomsday comes and goes without any exciting events. A friend of mine was an AMWAY seller for some time, and had a regular buddy that would show up in a super-fancy suit to come and coach her on selling. In retrospect, it was pretty creepy.
Then the movement’s prognosticators may reschedule the apocalypse, usually justifying it with a misreading or new information or whatever, but their service force gets increasingly restless with each one, and something needs to happen. This is the point when special God’s Chosen mischief squads are deployed to engage in terrorism, or assassinate government officials or whatever, and if they don’t already have the attention of law enforcement, they’re now regarded as a clear and present danger. Stand offs and mass suicides follow.
The Millerite Great Disappointment when the second advent failed to manifest between 1831 and 1844 enshrines into US history that life goes on and that your flock of loyal followers get disillusioned and restless if the show fails to start at the designated time, too many times. Thankfully, mass suicides are rare, but it means we can’t yet trace a consistent path from the cult building intentional communities and giant statues to when they’re shooting at officials and drinking the flavor-aid.
Idk about that. There have been a number of very successful cults that amassed wealth and hot groupies through excess affection and utopianism. In fact, one popular form of recruiting cult members is Love Bombing which typically involves existing members bombarding an individual with attention, affection, and romantic advances. While this is often paired with techniques for isolating the individual from the outside world, it is extremely effective on people who already feel alienated and isolated.
If you get into the weeds of how all sorts of groups from QAnon to Cutco to church youth groups operate, they inevitably involve providing these intense positive emotional experiences to new prospective members. Hell, look at the Lakewood Church in Houston or the Baha’i temple. Their entire model is based around these lukewarm vibes sessions, very reminiscent of 60s-era charisma cults.
Lots of MLMs are structured around the idea that these businesses are a surrogate family and that participating in the sales campaigns is a kind of good deed that you’re doing for others. Amway, Mary Kay, and NXIVM all got big doing these ostensibly social and charitable projects to gin up membership, before exploiting folks who put their trust in them.
Billionaire philanthropy groups follow similar patterns, with individuals drawn in on the idea that the Ford Foundation or the Hoover Institute or the Carnegie Foundation or the Bill And Melinda Gates Foundation are doing legitimate good deeds. Only in hindsight do you realize you’re being chewed up and spit out - manipulated to provide lots of cheap/free labor, to take on legally/morally dubious tasks, to generate positive PR while submitting to abusive bosses - by a core of organization insiders who see you as a useful idiot.
Love Bombing and the like are recruitment tactics, which is how you get lonely or angry people to look at and engage with the movement. Much the way there’s some sound personal advice in Dianetics the point is to get the layperson interested in becoming an initiate. This is one of the cult orgy spots, since yes, some movements encouraged their recruiters to engage sexually with with their marks, not approved by the mainstream since it runs contrary with the anti-free-love themes of Christianity. (Most NRMs by far identify as Christian, though that’s its own deep dive.)
(The other cult orgy spot comes in the harems or proclivities of the movement leaders, who often will draw an endless supply of groupies much like athletes, politicians or actors. Or, as per the case of Jim Bakker and Jessica Hahn, can extort attractive workers for sex with low risk of consequence, which seems to run congruous with executive branches of large businesses. The Rajneeshpuram in Wasco County, Oregon, a Tau Buddhist commune is a rare special case for the US, but the local population and the state freaked out not because too much sex was happening, but because it was insufficiently Christian for the 1980s US.)
Once someone is a novice or a practicing disciple, then the movement needs mechanisms to get them willing to labor long hours on cheap food and minimal medical care (sometimes dealing with supply scarcity and disease), and that’s when the promise of a big payoff soon comes.
In the cases of MLMs, the promise is you’ll get rich too when you are selling AMWAY products to customers, or the next iteration of resellers down the line. This is why doomsdays are popular among NRMs, which have to be imminent. This year. Preferably a month away. Then they know they only have to work a few weeks until the rapture, and it will all be worth it. It’s also why the doomsday cult story doesn’t end but gets really scary after the doomsday comes and goes without any exciting events. A friend of mine was an AMWAY seller for some time, and had a regular buddy that would show up in a super-fancy suit to come and coach her on selling. In retrospect, it was pretty creepy.
Then the movement’s prognosticators may reschedule the apocalypse, usually justifying it with a misreading or new information or whatever, but their service force gets increasingly restless with each one, and something needs to happen. This is the point when special God’s Chosen mischief squads are deployed to engage in terrorism, or assassinate government officials or whatever, and if they don’t already have the attention of law enforcement, they’re now regarded as a clear and present danger. Stand offs and mass suicides follow.
The Millerite Great Disappointment when the second advent failed to manifest between 1831 and 1844 enshrines into US history that life goes on and that your flock of loyal followers get disillusioned and restless if the show fails to start at the designated time, too many times. Thankfully, mass suicides are rare, but it means we can’t yet trace a consistent path from the cult building intentional communities and giant statues to when they’re shooting at officials and drinking the flavor-aid.