What’s the deal with cults, anyway? The question sounds like a lead-in to a stand-up comedy routine. When queried along those lines about their own following, at least three high-profile individuals responded with the exact same phrase: “I am not a cult.”
The phraseology is worth pausing on. Notice the juxtaposition of individual (“I”) and group (“a cult”). This quick and undeniably factual side-step could only be exploited by cults with individual leaders and was done so identically, decades apart, by these three wholly unrelated nabobs. The three charismatic figures in question — Ayn Rand (philosopher-novelist), David Koresh (Christian sect leader), and Jerry Seinfeld (an entertainer with an extraordinarily large and devoted fanbase) — motivate this analysis of the phrase’s significance and of the individual-versus-collective paradigm in cults.
What’s a cult?
Definitions of cults are numerous and varied, often focusing on the religious subtype. A common, if unofficial, definition in Silicon Valley startups abstracts religion and other specifics, yielding a useful working definition along the lines of:
A cult is a subgroup that differs systematically from mainstream culture in ways the larger society may find strange or distasteful.12
This definition is flexible enough to describe a business, personality, religious, or social cult equally well. Sports and entertainment celebrities, or even non-human entities like films and books, similarly, can be said to have a “cult following” if their devotees are devoted to the point of seeming “weird” to others.
Not all cults are dangerous, although there have been many cults to fail famously, sometimes even resulting in criminal prosecution or suicides. Such is more often the case when the cult is also a high control group, in which the organization exerts significant power over followers through intrusions into personal relationships or beliefs, information control, or the erosion of individuality.3
As our society becomes more globalized and interconnected, the prevalence of high-control business and social collectives has risen, whereas “personality cults” and other individualist-style cults have become taboo and are often pressured to dissolve or assimilate into the collectivist culture. Is individualistic leadership the hallmark of a high-control group? Could the “I am not a cult” gimmick be a method their leaders use to evade social control and continue their self-glorification at the expense of followers?