It's very easy to start a cult

I’m drawn to darkness.

I’m drawn to kittens and babies too, but when it comes to reading material, if you give me a choice between a lighthearted story about a plucky underdog who makes it to the Olympic track and field team against the odds, or the cultural history of the funeral industry, I’m going to take the funeral industry book. My morbid streak is deep and wide, and I think “Did you know a casket and a coffin aren’t the same thing1?” is perfectly appropriate small talk.

I’ve also long been fascinated with cults. Not devil-worshipping cults, those are boring. I’m talking about cults in which seemingly ordinary people convince other seemingly ordinary people of the most insane bullshit imaginable. I’m talking about cults in which people give up all of their worldly possessions and abandon their families because some schmuck who read How to Win Friends and Influence People told them to. Did you know that all the men in the Heaven’s Gate cult voluntarily castrated themselves? I mean, holy shit! That’s wild.

Whenever there’s a deep dive into a cult, there’s always someone that insists it’s easier than you think to get sucked into one, no matter how rational you think you are. I don’t think it’d be that easy for me. If someone tells me that they’re God (or a reincarnated Lemurian shaman, or a 20,000 year-old Egyptian prophet), I’m not going to think wow, I’m so blessed to meet this very special being, perhaps I should give them all my money. I’m going to think wow, Ronald Reagan gutting mental health services really sent the United States into the toilet.

So no, I don’t think I could be drawn into a cult. I do think I could start one, though.

Let me be clear, I don’t think I’m particularly charismatic or anything. I just think it’s easy, certainly easier than starting a business or an actual church.

Here’s what it takes to start a church:

1. Create by-laws
2. Establish a structural hierarchy
3. Open a business bank account and obtain an employer identification number from the IRS
4. Apply for tax-exempt status

Here’s what it takes to start a cult:

1. Be white

That’s all. Be white, maybe take a persuasive speaking class or two, but even that’s not necessary. You want to know how easy it is to start a cult? Read anything about NXIVM, the “self-improvement” program turned sex cult started by Keith Raniere, an absolute fuckin’ dweeb who somehow managed to convince thousands of people that he was an expert on “the ethical framework of humankind,” whatever the fuck that means. There was a lot of talk about Raniere’s otherworldly psychological hold on people (especially women), like he was some kind of vampire, but you know why he was good at manipulating people? Because he was a former Amway salesman. Now, I realize that’s terrifying in its own way, but there’s nothing otherworldly or mysterious about it.

I bring all this up because I just finished Leah Sottile’s excellent Blazing Eye Sees All, about the Love Has Won cult. If you’re as fascinated by cults as I am, you may have seen the Love Has Won documentary on HBO a couple years ago. It’s memorable not just for the story itself, but for one of the featured cult members, a man named Jason Castillo, who’s never shown wearing a shirt, and might be the single most repulsive human being I’ve ever seen, and I’ve watched documentaries about pedophiles and serial killers.

Amy Carlson, the now-deceased leader of Love Has Won who referred to herself as “Mother God” (also Divine Mother, Universal Mother, White Buffalo Calf Woman, and a whole bunch of other ridiculous horseshit), is a bit of an enigma. It’s unclear if she was mentally ill, a con artist, or both, but what is clear is that she managed to convince a remarkably large number of people that she was not just God, but the reincarnations of Jesus Christ, Joan of Arc, Cleopatra, Harriet Tubman, Marilyn Monroe, and Gladys Presley, the mother of the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll himself.

That’s one busy lady! How does she do it?? Carlson also claimed that she lived in Lemuria, a made-up “lost world” in the same vein as Atlantis, she could “remotely” perform surgery on people, and would lead her followers to a fifth-dimensional plane of existence, with the help of galactic elder Robin Williams, whom she communicated with on a regular basis2.

If a friend or family member started saying stuff like this, you’d gently (or not so gently) encourage them to seek professional help, no? Well, Amy Carlson turned it into a lucrative career, abandoning her children and creating a robust online presence, spending much of her day babbling about “love vibrations” and achieving world peace, while at the same time peddling the same kind of anti-Semitic and homophobic rhetoric as your typical MAGA voter3. She amassed not just thousands of followers online, but people willing to walk away from their own families to live with Carlson and tend to her needs, referring to her as “Mom.” Second-in-command to Carlson was a series of “Father Gods,” the last of which was the loathsome Jason Castillo.

As happens in virtually every cult, though Love Has Won preached love, unity, and spiritual enlightenment, that image was built on psychological (and often physical) abuse and greed. Love Has Won made their money not through the endless livestreams they ran day in and day out, but through selling useless garbage like “remote healings” and colloidal silver water, which Carlson herself drank so much of that she eventually turned blue and died. As for the abuse, it was the same thing we’ve been hearing about since at least Jonestown, where Carlson’s followers were forced to prove their dedication to her by doing hard labor, and called “cockroaches” and worse if they complained or questioned her.

As Sottile’s scrupulously researched book illustrates, Love Has Won is simply one of many cults started by benign-seeming white women, using a combination of cultural appropriation, new age lingo, and a deep-seated desire to take advantage of spiritually adrift, lonely and gullible people. Their stories are all depressingly similar: they claim to have had a vision, one that left them with a connection to the spiritual realm, and begin to amass followers by providing missives from otherworldly beings (if not God Himself), usually predictions of a grim future unless you give yourself over entirely to St. Germain (or Ramtha, or Robin Williams, or whoever).

In all the examples Sottile provides, while preaching humility and selflessness, all these “spiritual leaders” made very comfortable livings, while at the same time angrily lashing out at anyone who even remotely questioned that they might have been making the whole thing up. They were all also careful to note that “the 144,000” (a completely arbitrary number of people who will ascend to the next astral plane after the end of the world) will only include white Christian heterosexuals. The only thing that makes the Love Has Won story unique is in the bizarre, bleak way it ended, with Carlson dying from anorexia and chronic alcoholism (exacerbated by ingesting large amounts of colloidal silver), and her inner circle being so certain that she was about to ascend to the 5D plane any minute that when she begged to go to a hospital they refused to take her.

My takeaway from reading Blazing Eye Sees All, beyond “Christ, people are really stupid,” is that starting a cult is simply a matter of coming up with a story. It doesn’t even have to be an original story: all the stuff Carlson talked about regarding Lemuria, St. Germain, the 144,000, has been in the new age cult scammer playbook for over a century. I’m fascinated by and know enough about it (without believing a word of any of it) that I could easily come up with a variation on it. I’m a nice white lady with a motherly presence, who wouldn’t buy this garbage from me?

Of course, it’s this useless moral center I have that stops me. I don’t mean to sound like oh I’m just too good of a person to do such a thing. Goodness has nothing to do with it, it’s guilt that’s the issue. A lot of my problems would be solved if I was willing to scam people out of their hard-earned money. You spend enough time online (or just watching the news), and you’ll see that a large population of the world is quite comfortable making up a story to squeeze some dollars out of other people, whether it’s for a non-existent charity, a speculative product that will never be manufactured, a fake illness, or to gain entrance into an astral plane beyond this world. It is, again, very, very easy to do.

I mean, for God’s sake, I still occasionally get emails claiming that a metal box containing $80 million with my name on it was found at an airport, and all I have to do to claim it is enter my banking information at this sketchy-looking link. As the saying goes, scammers wouldn’t keep trying this shit if it didn’t work. Somebody must believe that it really is Keanu Reeves messaging them on Instagram and asking for Apple gift cards to finish making his latest movie. You want an idea of how bad people’s ability to recognize when they’re being lied to is, well, look around you. Consider current events.

But I can’t do it. Maybe I’m the sucker here. Sure, I know bullshit when I see it, but where does that get me, other than angry and depressed? Is it possible to start a cult without the abuse and racism? I might be okay with that. I don’t know. Maybe I should start wearing caftans.