I want to go back to the “abusive relationship” parallel because it might also be useful to reverse this: to think, rather, of what we call cults" as “abusive/toxic/coercive group relationships.”
I think sometimes words can actually obscure rather than clarify, if we’re not careful, and I think this case is important because the problem we’re talking about here is not “a group of people have a joint belief in a kooky thing or even behave in ways that are different from other groups of people”.
It’s the BITE Model stuff. It’s control and coercion backed up with threats of social isolation and other consequences. It’s group-based abuse and yes, it can end up with a weird fucked up lateral mutual abuse where everyone is reinforcing this dynamic on everyone else, but the important part is it’s that stuff that’s evil, bad, poison.
And I think pulling this out is useful because if you’re in a group of humans where this is happening, it literally doesn’t matter how mainstream/normal the bases of your beliefs or group-ness are. This is how social justice social-circles get “culty” and what we mean by that is this stuff; this is what we mean when wellness stuff gets “culty”, and what we mean is this.
What makes Scientology a dangerous cult is not that they believe we’re all trapped and anguished souls of long dead aliens. That’s not that much weirder to believe than that an omnipotent cosmic being made us out of dust; just because the one has been around for several thousand years and the other comes from a few decades back doesn’t actually change the character of the story except to make one more or less respectable.
The dangerous cultyiness is the control and coercion and isolation and, more than anything else, the punishment and retaliation for leaving the fold. It’s because this is a toxic, abusive group relationship.
And yes, this means you’re going to abruptly discover many groups of Respectable Religions are culty as hell, and that’s gonna feel all kinds of uncomfortable. (It also means you’re gonna find groups of other belief-based things - philosophy, politics, nationalistic stuff, whatever - that is likewise, and is likewise gonna be uncomfortable, and some of them are going to be on “your” side).
It means you might even find yourself perpetuating some culty behaviours, because this shit actually doesn’t arise necessarily out of Nefarious Purpose but a lot of the time just from the fact that human social behaviour REALLY inclines us to want everyone to Act Right and Understand Right otherwise it’s Dangerous, and our monkey brains aren’t helpful.
At which point one has to go ooookay self are we being a shitty control freak about this? Are we narrowing what people are “allowed” to do and feel into a rigid norm we’re comfortable with? Is that reasonable in this situation? And so on.
Because toxic groups come from humans, too, not just from ideologies, and we’re all human.
It’s just … really worth drilling down to: yes, these are parallel to the signs of abusive relationships. Because they ARE a kind of abusive relationship. Because abusive behaviours and toxic interpersonal systems arise out of human tendencies, not out of specific definitions either of the ideologies followed, or the makeup of the relationship.
