Author Amanda Montell has never been to the Midwest before. But she’s rectifying that with a visit to the Des Moines Public Library on April 21 to talk about her 2021 release, Cultish: The Language Of Fanatacism. The event begins at 7 p.m., and is a part of the 2022 Authors Visiting in Des Moines (AViD) lineup. I spoke with Montell about her writing process, her upcoming Midwest trip and cults, of course.
You talk about how you decided to write Cultish in the book itself, but for people who haven’t read it yet, what got you interested in cults enough to write a book about them?
Well, a lot of Americans in particular grew up transfixed by cults, tragedies like the Jonestown Massacre and the Heaven’s Gate suicide, the Manson murders — I was always rubbernecking at these events. I was curious to know how a person could affect others in such a manipulative way and that they could end so tragically. And I had a slightly more specific experience with cults because I grew up with a cult survivor in my family.
My dad spent his teenage years against his will, in what would end up being a pretty notorious cult called Synanon, which started out as an alternative drug rehabilitation center, and then grew into a sort of socialist utopian compound outside of San Francisco. And my grandfather was one of those people who wanted to experiment with this way of life. And so he moved my dad onto this compound. And my dad had, up until that point, lived in Manhattan in poverty, and had to sort of fend for himself and think pretty critically throughout his childhood. Some combination of nature and nurture caused him to be an extremely independent person. And so he arrived and immediately clocked a lot of what we would now recognize as the classic red flags of a cult, you know, the conformity and the fact that they would have to engage in these really sort of traumatic unquestioned rituals, the obsessive worshipfulness of the leader, this guy named Chuck Dederich, the fact that nobody was allowed to go to school or work on the outside. But my dad sort of laid low and snuck off the compound everyday, so he could go to a normal school and graduate and matriculate at a university.
Both my parents are research scientists. So I grew up in this household that was pretty disdainful of supernatural belief of any kind. And so I grew up like a lot of people thinking like, “I’m too skeptical, I’m too cynical, like, I would never fall prey to the charms of a pernicious guru.” But when I got the idea to write this book, specifically about the language of cults, because linguistics is what I studied in undergrad, as soon as my research was underway, it became clear that, you know, none of us is spared by these cultish techniques.
Are you ready to get culty with us Des Moines?! Two weeks from today, on Thursday April 21, @amanda_montell, the New York Times bestselling author of Cultish, will be here at Central Library for our third AViD event of 2022. https://t.co/ZlVkrIHhvj pic.twitter.com/Mf3HQ5DwnS
— Des Moines Public Library (@dmpl) April 7, 2022
How long did your research for Cultish take and what was that process like?
I got the idea for the book in early 2018, I was chatting with my best friend who had just started going to AA [Alcoholics Anonymous]. I mentioned this in the book briefly, but she was using all of the vernacular that they use in AA — like, they have so many special terms and acronyms and slogans that help build solidarity and keep people loyal to the group so that they stay sober. And so this was a type of cultish language that was working for good in the context of my friend because it was keeping her healthy and not drinking. But it was undoubtedly cultish. So that’s when the idea occurred to me like I really want to write a book about how cults use language for good and for ill to influence us as humans.
I started out just thinking about all of the different categories of cults that I wanted to cover, because I wanted to write about groups along the cultish spectrum, starting out with the most destructive and working our way toward the, you know, more ethical, albeit cult-y groups: the SoulCycle, the social media groups, some of which are not innocent at all. But that was the original idea. And so it was a massive undertaking, because there were literally countless groups that I wanted to cover, but I knew I would have to narrow it down to just the most interesting, the most salient and that’s how I decided on the six parts of the book.
In terms of the research itself, I contacted an absolute smorgasbord of scholars, linguists, linguists, sociologists, religious studies, scholars, psychologists, as well as cult survivors, people who were in Jonestown, in Heaven’s Gate, in the Children of God, in Scientology. And the funny thing is that I live in Los Angeles, which is sort of a cult hub. And so a lot of my sources I actually just met, like, at parties.
For people who are very uninterested in cults, do you think there’s value in learning about them anyway?
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we’re all susceptible to this type of toxic influence, especially on social media where there are so many people who are taking advantage of sociopolitical tumult and using it to build their own clout to create a cult-like following by claiming that they have the answers regarding everything from, you know, the war in Ukraine to COVID to politics to mental health. Even if we’d like to regard ourselves as someone who would not at all be susceptible to this sort of influence, it is showing up in places you might not otherwise think to look. Including — and this was one of the most humbling discoveries I made during my research for the book — including in one-on-one relationships, which are sometimes called cults of one. [In] abusive relationships with partners, bosses and friends, cult-like techniques and cult-like language really show up in spaces that don’t look like, you know, a bunch of people wearing robes on compounds. The book is in part for people who already have a keen interest in cults, but even more so it’s a book for people who enjoy psychology, cultural criticism and the nexus of those two things.
In the book, you mention briefly how dangerous it can be to talk about cults, specifically Scientology. Have you received any backlash from Cultish since it’s been published?
Well, fortunately, the book was legally vetted by a team of lawyers at my publisher, so we, you know, meticulously combed through for any points that might provoke the infamously litigious Scientologists or anyone else who’s currently at large. I talk about a figure named Teal Swan in the book, sort of a social media guru who has been accused of cultishness in the past. And so you can catch a lot of language that you use in phrases like “allegedly,” “have claimed to,” that sort of thing.
A lot of this analysis is a matter of opinion. And also, it’s cultural criticism with a social science base. So I’m basically using sociolinguistics to make an argument about the influence of cultish language. This is subjective material, because, as I learned very quickly after I started my research, it’s hard to come up with a hard and fast definition of the word “cult” itself in the first place. Everybody has a different interpretation of this word. Even the scholars that I spoke to, you know, nobody could sort of agree on one singular way to interpret this word. And it’s become so subjective, and so loaded with judgment. And so for that reason, you know, I was protected legally from people like the Scientologists. I feel like I’m pretty small potatoes for them; they’ve come under fire by people much more high profile than I am.
But there are, you know, people who identify on the right side of the political spectrum, who thought that the book was more left of center than they would have liked and not objective enough. But it is my book. And I think I critique people across the political spectrum. Of course, there’s always going to be backlash when you’re talking about something controversial.
Are you working on anything new?
I’m reading a lot of nonfiction for my current project, which is called The Age of Magical Overthinking, and I’m in the middle of writing my first draft now. But it’s a book about modern irrationality, and how different cognitive biases manifest in the information age. And my podcast Sounds Like A Cult is ongoing. It’s a sort of light-hearted take on the subject of cults. The tagline is ‘a podcast about the modern-day cults we all follow’ and my co-host, she’s a comedian, and I pick a different fanatical fringe group from the zeitgeist from Instagram therapists to Disney adults, and we sort of discuss it and chat about it and analyze it with the help of guests and games to try to determine if this group sounds like a cult. Is it really and if so, is it a “live your life” or “watch your back” or “get the fuck out” level cult?
Catch Montell at the Central Library in Des Moines on April 21 at 7 pm. Admission is free.