Aliens, boss babes, and other bad ideas
Apr. 22nd, 2024 03:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bloodygranuaileFor book club (which I ended up missing) we read Amanda Montell’s Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism, which is about… well, it’s about a range of things. Nominally it is about cult linguistics; functionally this means it is about manipulative language and marketing. There’s a section about actual full-blown “suicide” cults, like Jonestown and Heaven’s Gate, and some primers on some other cults that are definitely cults, like Scientology and Synanon (the cult the author’s dad was raised in), and then there are some explorations of areas of American culture that are much more mainstream but also very culty, like MLMs and some of the more over-the-top boutique fitness brands.
A lot of the stuff about language itself was fairly familiar to me; the language of being full of shit is a special interest of mine and has been for many years now, although my focus has more often been in politics and activist spaces, as well as the everpresent evil of advertising. Both of these do appear to have some overlap with full-blown cults, sadly. The language part of the book is a good refresher (or primer, if you don’t already know all these things) about manipulative techniques such as thought-terminating cliches, us-vs-them language, lovebombing, all that stuff.
I kept myself entertained through those parts by trying to pay attention to when the author was using dubious language tricks on the reader. The most common offense here was overselling the premise, which then had to be backtracked when we got to the part where she was giving us real information. There was just way too much fluff about how language is THE ULTIMATE TOOL and the SOURCE OF ALL POWER for culty gurus and like, look, I am also a professional language user and believe that language is very important, but some of this wording was so over-the-top that, especially when combined with the fact that we were talking about politics-adjacent stuff, it seemed to tip into one of my current pet peeves about modern political life, which is the belief held by many well-educated liberals that words are the only real and legitimate and powerful thing in life and everything else is base nonsense and probably not even real. I’m not saying Montell is one of those posters-who-think-they’re-activists for whom “micro” is the highest level of aggression, but sometimes she sounds a little like them, because she sounds like the internet and the internet is overrun with those types of people.
The most egregious example of Montell using the tricks she’s teaching us about on us is in the chapter on the Jonestown massacre, when she interviews a bunch of people on why they don’t like the phrase “drink the Kool-Aid.” These people are not, however, described as people who are of a different opinion about the inappropriateness of the phrase; they are instead described as “a select few who grasp its gravity.” And if you read the rest of the paragraph, you too can become part of this select few! I think this rubbed me the wrong way because “Actually the phrase ‘drink the Kool-Aid’ is about murder and you shouldn’t use it and it wasn’t Kool-Aid anyway” was, for me, the sum total of things I knew about the Jonestown massacre–I didn’t know what country it had happened in, or what decade, or how many people died, or what the cult’s shtick was outside the murder part, or anything. I only knew that “drink the Kool-Aid” was a phrase you could use on the Internet if you wished to provide people an opportunity to yell at you. Anyway, now I also know that the Jonestown massacre took place in Guyana, and not in the US!
Complaints about the overblown framing aside, this was a fun foray into a somewhat random assembly of medium-to-high-control groups and how they function. The book focuses pretty much exclusively on American groups, with a little research into what in American culture and history makes it so prone to alternative spiritualities, snake-oil salesmen,pyramid schemes three-dimensional-triangle-shaped business models in which everyone is their own boss and also the boss of other people who are their own boss, and “secular churches” of various sizes and levels of nefariousness. I was unsurprised to learn that a lot of this had to do with capitalism and a hyper-individualistic culture that leaves lots of people starving for community but also basically unable to consciously figure that out and search for it in a way that is healthy (a lot of the culty communities examined here use the language of intense individualism and personal specialness, especially the brands).
Overall I like this book more when I think of it is as a book about media literacy and dodgy advertising than if I try to think of it as a book about the linguistics of cults, because it meets the bar for the first handily but for the second it seems a bit of a stretch. Don’t get sucked into a suicide cult about aliens or scammed into overpaying for skin cream, kids.
A lot of the stuff about language itself was fairly familiar to me; the language of being full of shit is a special interest of mine and has been for many years now, although my focus has more often been in politics and activist spaces, as well as the everpresent evil of advertising. Both of these do appear to have some overlap with full-blown cults, sadly. The language part of the book is a good refresher (or primer, if you don’t already know all these things) about manipulative techniques such as thought-terminating cliches, us-vs-them language, lovebombing, all that stuff.
I kept myself entertained through those parts by trying to pay attention to when the author was using dubious language tricks on the reader. The most common offense here was overselling the premise, which then had to be backtracked when we got to the part where she was giving us real information. There was just way too much fluff about how language is THE ULTIMATE TOOL and the SOURCE OF ALL POWER for culty gurus and like, look, I am also a professional language user and believe that language is very important, but some of this wording was so over-the-top that, especially when combined with the fact that we were talking about politics-adjacent stuff, it seemed to tip into one of my current pet peeves about modern political life, which is the belief held by many well-educated liberals that words are the only real and legitimate and powerful thing in life and everything else is base nonsense and probably not even real. I’m not saying Montell is one of those posters-who-think-they’re-activists for whom “micro” is the highest level of aggression, but sometimes she sounds a little like them, because she sounds like the internet and the internet is overrun with those types of people.
The most egregious example of Montell using the tricks she’s teaching us about on us is in the chapter on the Jonestown massacre, when she interviews a bunch of people on why they don’t like the phrase “drink the Kool-Aid.” These people are not, however, described as people who are of a different opinion about the inappropriateness of the phrase; they are instead described as “a select few who grasp its gravity.” And if you read the rest of the paragraph, you too can become part of this select few! I think this rubbed me the wrong way because “Actually the phrase ‘drink the Kool-Aid’ is about murder and you shouldn’t use it and it wasn’t Kool-Aid anyway” was, for me, the sum total of things I knew about the Jonestown massacre–I didn’t know what country it had happened in, or what decade, or how many people died, or what the cult’s shtick was outside the murder part, or anything. I only knew that “drink the Kool-Aid” was a phrase you could use on the Internet if you wished to provide people an opportunity to yell at you. Anyway, now I also know that the Jonestown massacre took place in Guyana, and not in the US!
Complaints about the overblown framing aside, this was a fun foray into a somewhat random assembly of medium-to-high-control groups and how they function. The book focuses pretty much exclusively on American groups, with a little research into what in American culture and history makes it so prone to alternative spiritualities, snake-oil salesmen,
Overall I like this book more when I think of it is as a book about media literacy and dodgy advertising than if I try to think of it as a book about the linguistics of cults, because it meets the bar for the first handily but for the second it seems a bit of a stretch. Don’t get sucked into a suicide cult about aliens or scammed into overpaying for skin cream, kids.