How to stop cult-like thinking with Jane Borden
A Q&A with the author of "Cults Like Us: Why Doomsday Thinking Drives America"
Connect with Jane: Buy the Book | Website | Instagram | TikTok | Substack
Your new book is called Cults Like Us: Why Doomsday Thinking Drives America. How did this book idea come to you?
I started reporting on cults for Vanity Fair in 2017. Also around that time, I became preoccupied with the division in our country. How can people with so much in common feel so opposed? Then, I started seeing the same cult dynamics I was researching show up in American culture, entertainment, and politics. I thought, That's strange. So I began investigating some of those dynamics. Where does our knee-jerk anti-intellectualism come from? Why have there been so many perfectionist movements in American history? And of course, what’s the deal with the whole chosen-people/chosen-nation thing?
I pulled the threads all the way back to the Puritans. That's when I realized the Puritans were kind of a cult. And their doomsday ideology didn't go away but became the foundation of American culture. I wondered if this is why we are especially vulnerable to con artists, salespeople, and demagogues. The answer is yes. My book has two goals: to point out the magic trick so we stopped falling for the con, and to help bridge our current cultural and political division, because division fuels cult-like thinking at the societal level.
You've said the Puritans were a high-control doomsday group. Can you explain that further?
A high-control group is one that controls belief, behavior, and information intake, all with high pressure to conform. The Puritans were a close-knit community with a specific and strict belief system. They thought doomsday was around the corner—there were several specific predictions—and wanted to ensure they did nothing to hinder Jesus’ return or jeopardize their potential salvation when he arrived. It was illegal to disagree with the minister. And they encouraged residents to inform on one another if they heard anyone disagreeing with the ministers. Over time, church magistrates became corrupted by power, as the leaders of isolated groups always do. They held the reins ever tighter, making it harder to gain entry into the church, banishing even more people, nixing the questions and comments sessions following sermons, and disallowing towns from taking in strangers until those strangers had been vetted.
The effects of high control groups are typically hardest on children born into a group. Scholars who have pored over the diaries of the second and third generation of Puritans living in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, found significant increases in melancholy, pathological abnormalities, nervous breakdowns, suicide, and depression.
If we see the world in terms of good and evil, how is that making it harder to mitigate cruelty?
Good-versus-evil thinking increases cruelty because it gives people a reason to stomach violence. Anyone craving power needs only to manufacture a threat (we're seeing that right now with anti-immigrant rhetoric and the efforts to turn DEI into a bogeyman). Once we believe a threat exists, our us-versus-them thinking is triggered.
We evolved in distinct groups that were always either under attack from outside groups or executing attack against outside groups. We evolved to fear and judge outsiders. And once that fear is triggered, we are easily controlled, can be activated to behave in ways that benefit the person who manufactured the threat in the first place. That of course, is the reason why the threat was manufactured: to control us.
There is brain chemistry behind the process of dehumanization. It involves oxytocin, the amygdala, and the theory of mind network. The TL;DR is that when a group of people is dehumanized, our empathy toward them drastically decreases, allowing us to stomach violence inflicted upon the scapegoats.
What has writing this book meant to you, personally?
It's completely changed my life. First, understanding the origins of human violence has brought me peace. Understanding where it comes from makes it less scary, and easier to diminish. Similarly, now that I understand cult leaders and demagogues and how they operate, they don't seem like all powerful wizards. They seem like childish narcissists, who are, again, easier to combat.
Second, I am so much more fulfilled by my career now that it is more specifically in service of the change I'd like to see in the world.
We're so overwhelmed by darkness right now. How will your book help readers to find hope?
The antidote to us-versus-them thinking is already in everyone's back pocket, and is easy to enact. It only requires that we turn toward one another. Cults—and cult-like thinking at the societal level, which is currently flaring in America—fuels division and simultaneously feeds off of division. We can make it stop by seeing one another. We can stop tacitly condoning scapegoating simply by actually seeing the people being scapegoated. This is not just me being a Pollyanna. This is how it works. Following World War II, researchers looked into the profiles of gentiles in Germany, who had helped Jewish residents in one way or another. They were trying to find a profile, commonalities. But the helpers defied categorization: they were old and young, rich and poor, professionals and working class, men and women, etc. The only commonality researchers found among them is that each had known a Jewish person prior to the war. Perhaps in the workplace, or through their child's school. You can't dehumanize someone you've already seen as human.
Seeing each other is the answer. And it's very easy to do. There are other ways to mitigate division: by making ourselves whole as individuals, rather than falling prey to the supposed distinction between the mind and body. And by becoming one with nature again, rather than seeing it as a resource to be extracted. But turning toward one another is an excellent place to start.
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Superb. Thank you.
Thank you, Shannon, for sharing my work but mostly for all of your own work: 🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥