Max Cutler - Cults: Inside the Worlds Most Notorious Groups and Understanding the People Who Joined Them

Cults

Inside the Worlds Most Notorious Groups and Understanding the People Who Joined Them

Parcasts

Max Cutler with Kevin Conley

Based on the Acclaimed Podcast Cults

Everyone wants to believe in something or someone: a higher ideal, a god on Earth, a voice from heaven, an intelligence beyond our own. When this appetite for belief combines with the need to belong, great things can happen: nations are born, temples and cathedrals rise, astronauts land on the moon. The need to belong is a powerful instinct. Its part of our DNA as social creatures who depend on each other to survive, and the organizing principle that keeps religion and politics going. Belief and belonging can be intoxicating when acting in unison, along with the feelings they inspire when amplified by community.

But what about those rare moments when the dark side of human nature takes hold?

At Parcast, our focus from inception has been on the small subset of these close societies of dedicated believers known as cults and the frighteningly charismatic figures who lead them. We released our first Cults podcast in September 2017, and from that premiere episodewhich debuted at number one on Apples podcast chartsand every week since, weve been surprised by the intense response to these histories, with more than 55 million downloads over the past four years, with no sign of letting up. That outpouring of interest has kept us searching in the annals of extreme beliefs for the cults that will satisfy this fascination, week after week. Its not unusual, at the conclusion of one report, to think that weve finally discovered the worst that cults can offer, only to be rocked to our core by something far worse.

Thanks to our weekly podcasts, we have a catalog of case studies at our fingertips. From the beginning, weve not just looked at the raw data of cult leaders lives and that of their followers but also examined their psychologies and motivations (although we are not psychologists). We take the time to step back and look at the types of manipulation they employed and pay close attention to the unconscious drives that have led so many to the outer limits of behavior, whether serial murder, sexual deviance, or mass suicide.

In the chapters that follow, readers will see similarities in the ways the cult leaders of every era have attracted and seduced their followers how their near-total command over others drove them to test the limits of such control, and theneither out of boredom or sadistic curiosity, or because they, too, had begun to believe their own fantasiesto go beyond that to claim a godlike power over life and death.

The cult leaders detailed in this book would stand out in any lineup. Each has some trait that sets them apart: ruthlessness, childhood shame, repressed sexuality, a grandiose belief in personal genius, the sense of pleasure derived by inciting terror in their intimates. Almost all share three distinguishing traitswhat is known as the dark triad of malevolent narcissism: lack of empathy, a manipulative attitude, and excessive self-love. In each case, it is impossible to say whether they arrived at these characteristics by nature or nurture. But nearly every figure highlights evidence of the forces that shut off their capacity for empathy.

Although the arc of their lives is known and the facts of their misdeeds are almost entirely settled, there is still a mystery in every one. The more closely readers look, the harder it is to settle this central question: Did these people, with their extraordinary capacities to charm, lie, manipulate, seduce, and fabricate alternate realities, come to their core malevolence at birth, or did the circumstances of their lives somehow turn them into monsters? Did they have a choice? If they did not feel regret about the worst of their choices, what did they actually feel?

We begin with Charles Manson, who in 1969 masterminded six murders in Hollywood from a distance, just weeks after Neil Armstrong first stepped foot on the moon. The Cuban American Adolfo de Jess Constanzo, trained in the rituals of animal sacrifice, perverted those practices to serve his own needs, creating a campaign of terror, drug trafficking, and slaughter as the bloodthirsty head of the Narcosatanists in Mexico City.

Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh had undeniable gifts and spiritual insights, but used these talents as a smoke screen to hide his appetites for drugs and sex and multiple Rolls-Royces, and disguised his dark intentions, allowing his followers to release a biological agent on American soil in the 1980s. Nine years after Mansons Helter Skelter murder spree, Jim Jones shocked the world with the mass suicide that he oversaw in the jungle camp he called Jonestown in Guyana. Claude Vorilhon, or Ral, born in Vichy, France, after the Second World War, gave up a career as a caf musician turned race car driver before finally settling on the role of founder of the UFO religion Ralism, based on an alien visitation he claimed occurred in December 1973, expanding his space-based beliefs over the years to include lifetime sexual servitude.

Sexual deviance is a common thread, perhaps an inevitable by-product of the combination of ego, power, and lack of feeling that is the hallmark of cult leaders. Roch Thriault, the leader of a Canadian back-to-the-land cult, called himself Moses and fashioned himself as the prophet who could lead his followers, dubbed the Ant Hill Kids, into the wilderness, avoid the end of the world, and help them live in equality and happiness, free of sin. In practice, he inaugurated a reign of brutality that included beatings, surgery without anesthesia, toes amputated with wire cutters, starvation, sleep deprivation, slavery, sexual abuse, the torching of genitals, and other barbaric practices. David Koresh shared this mixture of megalomania and priapic appetites as he took over a sect of the Seventh-day Adventist Church called the Branch Davidians, establishing himself as a messianic figure and fathering children with multiple women in the sect before leading them all to their deaths in April 1993 after a fifty-one-day siege on their compound by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.

Many of the life stories of cult leaders collected here also end all too predictably in a variety of violent deaths, but a few have passed on from natural causes, long after the dissolution of the cults that made them infamous. Keith Raniere, founder of NXIVM and the mastermind of a group of sex slaves who were branded with his initials, still survives in a federal penitentiary specializing in the incarceration of sex offenders and pedophiles, where the sixty-two-year-old will have plenty of time for remorse and introspection120 years, to be precise.

When a leader dies with the rest of the cult, as Jim Jones did, it may seem like retroactive proof of sincerity. But in one of the deadliest tragedies on record, Credonia Mwerinde, the founder of the Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God, did not appear among the bodies of the deadclose to a thousand in all. Most of the followers, who gave their worldly possessions to the Movement as soon as they joined, died after they were locked inside a wooden church. After the exits were nailed shut, the building was set on fire. Mwerinde, whose purported vision of the Virgin Mary inspired the Movement, disappeared, and neither she nor the money that the cult had amassed has ever been seen since.