Cultish review – the seductive language of fanaticism

Cultish: The Language of Fanatacism by Amanda Montell (HarperCollins, £20).

What do CrossFit, Amway and Jonestown all have in common? One is a fitness class, the other is a multi-level marketing company selling beauty and lifestyle products, and the last is a remote settlement in Guyana where almost a thousand people lived and died in a mass-suicide under the cult leadership of a man named Jim Jones.

The answer, of course, is that all three are referred to as “cults” in modern parlance, be it satirically or seriously. Grouping a gym class with an American tragedy might seem hyperbolic. Yet, the concept of “cult” can no longer be explored without reference to both cult communities and the “cult-like” companies, groups and trends that make up our popular culture. This intersection is where linguist Amanda Montell comes in. 

What defines and drives a cult, Montell argues is not the iconography that films and fiction use in their archetyping of the cult, but the linguistic tools used to attract and maintain followers and supporters: “Language is the key means by which all degrees of cultlike influence occur,” she writes. To fully understand and explore the wide range of meanings of “cult” in today’s society, Montell coins the language of Cultish (like Spanish, English etc.) and sets out to unpack this language of fanaticism in her new book.

For Montell, her interest in the “cult-ish” is personal. Her father grew up in a cult called Synanon in San Francisco in the 1970s, sneaking off the settlement to attend high school and leaving the cult as soon as possible to become a scientist. The personal anecdotes and insight into a cult’s inner workings matched with Montell’s NYU degree in linguistics and a notably “millenial” writing style create an interesting and unique insight into cults and our deep fascination with them.

Montell begins her book, Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism by investigating how and why cults are such a popular fixture in films, books and television, particularly in America. She concludes that behind our fascination with cults, be it QAnon or the Manson’s, is less a deep innate human attraction to darkness and more a fixation on the unanswerable questions the existence of cults poses: Is everyone susceptible to cultish influence? Could it happen to me?

Montell also takes the time to unpack why we see a sudden spike in interest in cults in popular culture (Tarantino’s Once Upon A Time in Hollywood, Louis Theroux’s Scientology documentary, Bikram: Yogi, Guru, Predator on Netflix, to name but a few). The answer, the author believes is that humans are cultish by nature and our behaviour is driven by a desire for purpose and belonging. 

In 2019, Forbes declared loneliness an “epidemic”, and traditional religions are slowly but surely losing popularity. Meanwhile, cultish groups and communities provide that sense of belonging our twenty-first-century lives are lacking. Exercise classes such as CrossFit and Soul Cycle, Montell explains, are “giving America’s youth a modern religious identity”. 

Then there’s the multitude of choices globalisation and technology have provided us in how to live our lives, something the human brain perhaps hasn’t fully adjusted to. Following a cult or cultish leader removes a sense of responsibility from decision making. Instead, one simply asks themself “what would the group or leader do?”. This kind of intentional loss of autonomy is more common in everyday life than we realise, whether it is the “girl boss” in which employees happily blur personal and work identities or people whose whole lives become dictated by an exercise class obsession. 

Two of the critical terms Montell identifies and extrapolates across cultish forms are “love-bombing” and “thought terminating clichés”. “Love-bombing” involves intense validation later traded for control, and “thought terminating clichés” are phrases like “everything happens for a reason”, designed the quelch curiosity or questions that undermine control. But each cultish group typically has its own vocabulary too. This can range from Scientology’s two dictionaries made up of over 3,000 redefined or shortened everyday phrases (e.g. “cognition” becomes “cog” and “Clear” means “a person who has completed the Clearing Course) to Alcoholics Anonymous more benign usage of acronyms such as “HALT”, meaning hungry, angry, lonely and tired. 

This terminology is present in exercise classes and multi-level marketing companies too. In CrossFit, the gym becomes “the Box”, your Workout of the Day is your “WoD”, and founder Greg Glassman is the “WoDFather”. In MLM company Amway, typically female recruits are told to avoid “stinkin’ thinkin’” (negativity), and the company enforces a “toxically positive rhetoric”, using flowery language laced with ominous undertones. 

Montell’s most original ideas are presented in the chapter “Follow for Follow”, where she investigates how cultish language and behaviour overlaps with tech giant marketing. Montell notes how Instagram uses the phrase “followers” over “friends” and how social media, in general, encourages the formation of echo chambers or “cultish groups”. “No “cult leader” takes advantage of our psychological drives quite like The Algorithm,” writes Montell, “sending us down rabbit holes, so we never even come across rhetoric we don’t agree with unless we actively search for it.” 

Cultish sets out to find “a less judgy way to discuss non-mainstream spiritual communities” and succeeds. The book identifies how often we encounter and fall for cultish language and considers how these language techniques can be used for good and evil. 

Many might consider the popularity of “cults” to be a phenomenon contained mainly in the 1960s and 1970s but Montell makes a good case for modern capitalism having tapped into cultish influence, creating MLMs and CrossFit-like exercise classes. Above all, Montell’s examination of cults and the language of fanaticism proves that cultish language is now a fixed part of our lives and lexicons. After all, you can’t spell culture without cult.