Former Cult Member Answers Cult Questions From Twitter | Tech Support | WIRED

who has experienced escaping from a cult well at hams 007 many people have escaped from Cults and I'm happy to say that I'm one of them hi I'm Dr yanic I was once in a cult now I'm a sociologist who studies and writes about cults today I'm here to answer your questions on Twitter this is cult [Music] support at Ary the fairy asked how did Charles Manson even get a cult like ew well at ARA the fairy here he is Charles Manson and he was a very successful cult leader because at the time which was

the hippie days of the 60s and 70s you know people were exploring they were doing new things they were living in the streets Charles could come along and he had a very sangali charismatic appeal he would look in your eyes and he would draw you in and also what's important about what Manson did was that he used drugs he would often you know give one of the girls LSD and she would believe that she had some kind of you know enlightened spiritual experience in that way she felt even more bonded to Charles but that is

unusual most Cults do not use drugs they don't need to use drugs they're using basic social psychology at my opinions man asks what's a movie about cults that in your opinion is a mustat working on something regarding Cults and movies and I'm trying to grab every last Hidden Gem at my opinions man I would say say in my opinion the best movie about cults is the master with hin Phoenix it's one of the best depictions of the relationship between the charismatic leader and the True Believer and it's a very tightly knit relationship that has an

imbalance of power because the one with Charisma has power over you and that's the rub so that person can pretty much get you to do anything so that you get to the point where you think you can't even live without that person and of course is doubly interesting because walking Phoenix himself grew up in a cult at well R wife asks be honest with me before I get sucked in is lulao a cult are we just spying our cute cult uniforms lulao is quite a questionable retail organization at this point and I don't think you

want to wear that uniform at beanie blover asks why do cult leaders always have to be weirdo freaks that abuse their members when will we see a cult leader who's really just a chill guy cult leaders are not going to be chill cult leaders are power hungry individuals who are typically narcissists who believe that the world revolves around them they aren't necessarily weirdo freaks some of them may look like a classy businessman remember the leader of Heaven's Gate this is what he looked like when we saw him on those video clips the night before they

all committed suicide but this is not what Marshall Applewhite looked like when he was recruiting followers he kind of had that professorial look or like your your nice Uncle the cult leader might become a little demented might start using too many drugs might start looking really weird but they certainly don't start out that way because who would follow a weirdo at Marina sea asks I'm intrigued by the Heaven's Gate cult why the Nike shoes there was a complete lack of individuality in the Heaven's Gate cult people had to dress in a way that they were

completely androgynous so they wore what they considered was their uniformed everyone had the same patch on their sleeve they all went out and bought these Nike shoes it was just part of their outfit there was certainly no special meaning to it but again it was a way to make them all be exactly the same so that they all went along with the idea that they would drink that poisonous potion put the bag over their head and and go to their Homeland they didn't believe they were committing suicide they thought they were choosing life in fact

let me read you from this is one of their books it's called Ruffles snacks for thinkers this book was given to me by dick Joselyn who was one of the longtime members of the group it's dated July 7th 1979 and they all contributed little sayings to this book life is not a time to prepare for death death is a a time to prepare for life life is a time for learning to live like the one who came to show us how they believed that they were going to be picked up by a spaceship and taken

to what they called the level above human where they were going to live forever in a paradise and the rest of the the world and the Earth was just going to be shattered and destroyed at tone booy asks Neighbors on our street are trying to barricade themselves in are the branch dividian still a thing if so do they have a Twitter account or do I go straight to the FBI we have kind of a policy in our country of not paying too much attention to what the neighbors do and one of the fallouts of that

is sometimes we do have a cult next door there are still people who believe in David Kesh and who actually think he's coming back I don't think those are your neighbors maybe your neighbors are just trying to get away from the world maybe they don't like you three forms our power house asks who who are the Moonies the Moonies are the moon organization that was founded by Reverend s yyang Moon back in the 70s and had a very huge following all around the world they were probably best known for those Mass weddings that they would

have like in Madison Square Garden he has since passed away and now there are three Splinter groups started by his wife and the three sons and some of those groups are quite active especially the one in America that's run by Shawn Moon and he wears a crown of bullets as do some of the other followers Reverend moon was quite friendly with George Bush daddy Bush and his wife who used to attend uh some of their Gatherings at Boomer bats asked I wonder do cult members join when they are at the brink of insanity or are

they already mentally ill or are they perfectly functioning humans that were casually looking for a new set of beliefs to follow and later on lost their sanity in the process oh at Boomer bats I get this question so often you know people have the idea that the people who get into Cults have some kind of mental problems and that's absolutely not the case first of all cults want to recruit high functioning individuals they want people with money and they want people with connections they want you to be a good worker they want you to work

very hard cult leaders don't work very much they're usually pretty lazy so everyone else has to keep the show going you know Cults aren't going to take care of you you're there to take care of them so they're looking for the kind of person who can perform for them who can bring in good contacts that will lend legitimacy to the group now while you're in the cult you may develop all kinds of anxiety and panic attacks because of the the stress of what you're living under but it's good idealistic people who get into Cults they

think they're going to change the world or or do something important in life and then they're taking advantage of at Sarah is sky blue asks what defines a Cults pretty sure you could call anything a Cults first of all we have the leader who is charismatic and usually a narcissist second we have what I call the Transcendent belief system that gives you the answer to everything third are what I call systems of control things like what you should wear what you should eat who you can marry how many kids you should have or shouldn't have

and fourth is the systems of influence the cult will be playing on fear love grief you know whatever your emotions are to get you to comply and conform at Leon nakz asks how do you leave a cult asking for a friend well Leo nakos here's what I think you should tell your friend it's not easy to leave a cult it's one of the hardest things someone's everever going to do and the most important thing is for those of us on the outside to be that safe haven let the person know that you're a place that

they can come to whenever they want they can sleep if they want to sleep they don't have to talk so it's just a matter of having some resources on the outside that may help you to build a new life at onsider asks what types of Cults are illegal according to US law it's not the Cults per se that are illegal it's what they do so in order to hold some group accountable you have to have enough evidence of some kind of criminal activity so that law enforcement might get involved many Cults will become a religion

and hope that they can hide behind the First Amendment at lexual asks I couldn't help but wonder when does a cult become a religion and when does a religion become a cult first of all not every religion becomes a cult and not every cult becomes a religion Cults can be any type of belief system it doesn't have anything to do with religion at all it can be new age it can be some kind of philosophy a religion may have guidelines for you to live by like be a good person be kind to your neighbor don't

use contraception but in most cases people from that religion aren't coming into your bedroom at night to see if you're using contraception so that's one of the main differences between a cult and a religion in a religion you should have freedom and independent thinking at hams 007 asks who has experienced escaping from a Cults well at hams 007 many people have escaped from Cults and I'm happy to say that I'm one of them I was in a political cult it was left-wing and we were planning and hoping to make the revolution we actually didn't think

it would happen in our lifetime we saw ourselves as Martyrs for the cause but what happened is after about 10 and a half years everyone was so burned out some of us uh in leadership realized how corrupt the leader was and just taking advantage us so we called together everybody and we told them what was going on and we had a vote and we unanimously voted to expel her and to dissolve the organization and so everyone got out it was wonderful that's absolutely not a common scenario I can think of maybe one perhaps two other

groups that ended in that way atj X asks how do Cults even happen like people really be letting themselves be brainwashed like that so at jsx let me explain how this works we all have days when we don't feel so great or maybe we just moved to a new town or maybe we just got divorced or maybe our dog just died and at that point we hear a person up there who's giving us some kind of pitch that's going to change your life now that pitch has to appeal to you it's not going to appeal

to everybody you know I always say I never would have joined a meditation group because I can't sit still that long but a political group that was going to change the world well that sounded fantastic to me right and then you make that commitment and often that commitment is made in front of other people in my group we had to stand up and make a pledge that we were going to do this for the rest of our life people don't get brainwashed overnight this is a resocialization process it's changing you to be the person that

they want you to be to be the good conforming complying cult member who will go out and recruit other people and do the work for the cult at Nick Lore asks why do Cults always have everyone wear the same outfit well at Nick Lore not every cult does that the Raj Niche cult uh back in the day where everyone had to wear orange some shade of orange here for example is a group where everyone's dressed the same the the reason they do that is to break down your sense of self if everyone looks alike there's

no individuality among you and it's an easy way to get you to conform and comply to the demands of the group at Clover du asked why were Cults so big in the 70s y'all I'll never get it the 70s of course were a very special time New Age ideas were taking hold and of course that was a time when there were many communes and so people were living together and that can be a breeding ground for a cult to take hold if you have someone who wants power and takes advantage of that environment the 70s

was also a time when there were a lot of political Cults it was the the end of the Vietnam War era and so people on the left were looking for something to do and a lot of these little groups got started you may remember this one Patricia Hurst who was kidnapped by The symbionese Liberation Army this is her after her indoctrination where she took the name Tanya and went along to Rob some banks including the hiberia bank in San Francisco at mob mom asks how did Jim Jones even establish Jonestown it seems unreal here we

have Jim Jones who was a pastor who had a huge following so Jones had a very Lively quite large Church in San Francisco where he did Faith healing and other things and and had very loyal followers one of the local newspapers was going to write an expose about him and so he had already been sort of planning for this and had already bought land land in Guana so he told all his followers to go there and so everyone went there 900 and some people and that's where the tragedy happened he took away their passports so

even if you wanted to leave you couldn't leave the children were brutally punished sometimes hung upside down in Wells so people were afraid they were afraid for their life and they were there they were in the middle of nowhere eventually an investigation was called and a congressman from California came to investigate Jones had them murdered The Poisoned flavor Aid which is commonly called Kool-Aid now was made and and people were forced to take that the children were injected first and in the end there was the mass suicide murder that happened of 913 people died and

over 200 children at Comm mandatory asks why does pelaton feel like a cult it may feel like a cult because you're sweating so much but also there's a sense of accomplishment a sense of belonging you're with other people who are also doing pellaton and that feels really good of course it's important to recognize that the fitness industry has quite a few groups that are quite cult-like so it's important to check out what you're doing and be a good consumer at user bits asks how did # Nexium become a cult imagine hoping to buy a time

share or brush up your personal skills and getting sucked into sex trafficking well Keith reri was a con artist and he was skilled at setting up sort of pyramid schemes Nexium started out as as a kind of multi-level marketing program where people would take these courses and then be expected to recruit other people into these courses some of them were encouraged to move to Albany New York where the headquarters was and people set up centers in different cities around the country Keith of course was a pedophile and a sadist so he set up kind of

a cult within the cult which was called Das where each woman had a certain number of people below her they were to recruit other people into this but the real purpose of it was to feed women to to reri for sex the other part of it was that he liked really skinny women and so's women were told to be on a 500 calor a day diet and they were just becoming completely emaciated they were no longer having their menstrual periods their hair was falling out it was absolutely brutal fortunately some people worked very hard to

blow the whistle on this and happily Keith reri is now in prison for 120 years at Matt Griffith asks what kind of Cults are people who sell hair products on Instagram a part of I'm not sure what you're specifically referring to Matt Griffith but there are certainly a lot of Cults and cult-like groups within the wellness industry selling all kinds of products and potions and things to make you feel better at Jessica Evans asks serious question how many people does it take to form a cult can a cult be just two people yes Jessica Evans

a cult can be just two people and I call those one-on-one Cults and we see a great deal of those these days people are becoming more aware of practices like gaslighting and what happens when a person has that kind of control over you so a cult can be any size from thousands of members to just two an uncovering the truth asks when do cult members realize they're in a cult well this of course is what I always hope for that someone will realize they're in a cult and then try to figure out how to get

out I think everyone in a cult has doubts and those doubts you know they're not able to express them so people have these doubts and the way I see it is they kind of put them on a shelf in the back of their head right and that shelf gets heavier and heavier and hopefully at one point the Shelf gets heavy enough that it breaks and at that moment they'll realize that something's wrong they may not identify it as a cult but they think that this is not a group that's in their best interest and they

probably should think about leaving at true Reflections asks is it just me or were Cults more prevalent pre- internet social media # People magazine investigates yes there have always been Cults we can go back in history to Roman Empire to the ases uh to the days of Jesus it's a social human phenomenon that's always been with us there's certainly were a lot of Cults pre- internet but of course as we see today there are many many Cults that that are operating on the internet certainly we saw this with qanon and all the other kinds of

conspiracy theories so yes they're Cults before and there will be Cults again and there are always Cults at Old normality asks what do cult members do when the cult collapses all that dedication to for absolutely nothing when the cult collapses it's often quite tragic for the Believers because now they their whole life has just Fallen apart so they have to figure out what do I do now people may Drift Away Splinter groups may start someone may try to take over and Rise as the leader and in some circumstances there may have been a violent ending

as as we saw with the branch devidians in Waco but again that kind of thing is usually the exception and not every group is going to end that way at L Wayne asks do cult leaders know that their cult leaders probably 99% are con artists and they know exactly what they're doing some of them may eventually become delusional because they get away with so much for so long so they kind of get carried away and actually think that they're God but it's really a combination of that narcissism and then perhaps they have a bit of

sociopathy or psychopathy but I think most of them are sitting back and laughing at their followers so those are all the questions for today and I hope that if you know someone in a cult you'll have some tools now to be able to help them get out I hope that if you're in a cult you'll find a way to get out and go through the kind of recovery that's needed to get on with your life life thanks for watching cult support