Amanda Montel

People, even kids, had to participate, would gather in a circle and be forced to malign one another with vicious interpersonal criticism.

And this ritual and the cult of Sinanon in general ended up laying the foundation for what would later become the troubled teen industry, the horrible conglomerate of abusive wilderness programs.

You get sent out to the wilderness, yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

And so I grew up on these stories that my dad would tell me that were so enrapturing and spooky.

And, you know, because I've always been a loquacious and language-oriented kid long before I knew what the field of linguistics was, the most fascinating part of my dad's stories to me was always the special language, you know, the buzzwords and

us versus them labels and special terminology that Synanon members would use to, you know, shut down members' critical thinking, to divide people into insiders and outsiders, to, you know, build solidarity.

And I grew up and came of age and noticed that some of those same linguistic strategies could be found in places that weren't as bad as Synanon, but definitely seemed culty to some degree.

Yeah.

I mean, this is why I describe the cultish spectrum, right?

Because we as human beings are a social species.

We need community and connection and belonging.

It's who we are.

It only starts to become dangerous when, you know, power hungry, nefarious figures start to take advantage of our deeply human and beautiful drives for those very things.

And

And so growing up in the United States, which has a distinctly consistent relationship to cults and cultishness for a number of reasons, from our American dream ideology, the meritocracy myth that thrives here, to, you know, our...

or dearth of some of the social programs and government services that allow a lot of advanced nations and cultures to thrive.

You know, we feel kind of existentially unmoored in this country a lot of the time, which is

paves the way for potentially pernicious figures to come in and say, oh, the government isn't taking care of you.