How to start a cult – no religion required.
When I was growing up my best friend in the whole world was a world-class liar.
Embarrassingly, it took me 20 years to figure it out.
He was that good.
In fact, he may have been the best liar I ever met.
And he was totally self taught – an autodidact.
What made him so good was that he would tell lies that made you feel good.
Not flattery.
Flattery is what you say when you want someone to like you.
It is something you do when you are trying to seduce a woman.
“Someone divorced YOU?!”
“Wow, if I was your husband I would treat you like the princess that you are!”
or
“No Gladys, your eyes are not too close together”
“Your nose is prolific, an exotic type of beauty.”
My friend had an expanded flattery system.
He would lie ABOUT you to OTHER PEOPLE.
But in a good way.
He would relate a story and make you seem braver and smarter than you really were. He would either exaggerate or completely fabricate amusing, clever things that you did together. He could do this on the fly. He was a master story teller.
By doing this he obligated us to nod in agreement and we would go along with his lies.
He created what we would call today a false narrative.
Then he would repeat the fable so often we memorized it and when he forgot certain details we would naturally remember them because they were about us.
He created a complete parallel fantasy life for us where we were the heroes.
Nobody else ever did this for me.
By doing so he made us like him… no we loved him.
We liked just being around him, basking in his presence, living in a fantasy world where we were the stars of the movie instead of nobody special.
He had a natural charisma and it grew as he wove these mythologies about our own overlooked greatness.
We knew he was lying but it made us feel more adequate so we didn’t try to stop him.
What he had done was created a de facto cult.
There was no doctrine, no ceremonies. We just gravitated toward him because we wanted to.
For example, he would convince us that the girl didn’t want to date us, not because we were dorks or unsophisticated or not handsome but because she was spoiled from a family of assholes or she was a slut. Or she was just shallow and couldn’t see how great we were.
It worked like magic.
Because reality was inconsistent with this fantasy world. There were obvious conflicts when the 2 worlds came into contact. In the real world we were proven to be dorks.
So we gravitated back to him and his parallel world. It was narcotic.
This is how heroin addiction works.
This is how cult leaders weave their webs.
This is how clever politicians spin the message to their respective cults.
This is how communists recruit.
This is why people join Antifa, Black Lives Matter, Q Anon, KKK, and [insert name of church here].
This is why logic cannot convince someone to leave.
The fantasy is so seductive you don’t want to leave – even if you know it is a fantasy.
A lie doesn’t have to be clever; it just has to be wanted.
It is a different type of fear that keeps you from running away like you should. It is the fear of being dispossessed from the fantasy world you love.
Delusion: a false belief or judgment about external reality, held despite incontrovertible evidence to the contrary, occurring especially in mental conditions.
