Name: How Cults Use Language to Control | Otherwords
Uploaded: 2024-06-28T02:47:18.000Z
Duration: 11 min 14 s
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What do Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., and Hitler have in common?

Advanced passive voice

They were all obsessively studied by Jim Jones, the cult leader who convinced and coerced some 900 members of his People's Temple to drink poison flavor aid in 1978 in what came to be called the Jonestown Massacre.

Relative clauses (Restrictive vs. nonrestrictive)

All these figures are known as charismatic leaders, people who inspire intense devotion or emotional attachment in their followers through their communication skills.

While Jones had little in common with these men spiritually or philosophically, he was fascinated with their ability to sway people.

Even from a young age, he exhibited a desire to control, and he knew that the best tool for the job was language.

I'm Dr. Erika Brzozowski, and this is Otherwords.

Men have so dastardly distorted what my spirit is.

You can't go against that culture because going against that culture...

My father gave me, long before this seminar...

If there's one thing that cult leaders do, it's talk.

Like Jim Jones, Heavensgate's Marshall Applewhite, or NXIVM's Keith Raniere, the traditional image of a cult leader is a person, usually but not always male, orating for hours on end while a congregation hangs on his every word.

While there are common linguistic features of cult leader speech, which we'll get to in a bit, the quantity of words seems to matter as well.

For decades, researchers have been testing the Babel hypothesis, which proposes that leaders are chosen for how much they speak rather than the quality of their ideas.

Since the 1950s, scientists and psychologists have been questioning the theory's credibility, but in 2020, the most thorough tests ever conducted had surprising results.

Diverse groups of people with varying personalities and skill sets were tasked to solve challenging strategy games as a team.

Each member's total speaking time was carefully measured, as well as the substance of their utterances.

Afterwards, the subjects were all asked to nominate other group members for leadership positions.

Speaking time had by far the highest correlation with leadership emergence, beating out intelligence, agreeableness, game proficiency, and even extroversion.

The only other factor that came close was gender.

While the study doesn't purport to explain the psychological factors behind it, it seems likely that humans use quantity of speech as a mental shortcut to determine who would make a good leader.

If everyone else is listening to this guy, maybe I should too.

In her book Cultished, linguist Amanda Montell seeks to tease out some common linguistic features of the men and women who run so-called destructive cults, authoritarian groups that exploit or otherwise cause harm to their members.

And one of the most common is loaded language.

Loaded language is a general term for words or phrases that have deep emotional associations for the listener, like genocide, patriot, toxic, or vermin.

Cult leaders will craft their loaded language to have specific connotations.

David Koresh used the phrase New Light to cast his teachings as divine inspiration.

Charles Manson repurposed the Beatles song lyric Helter Skelter to refer to an imminent race war.

And Jim Jones borrowed the term revolutionary suicide from Black Panther activists to equate his plan for mass suicide with resistance to authoritarian state power.

Through repetition, these leaders ingrain an intense emotional association in their followers' psyche so that eventually, just invoking a short phrase can instantly summon powerful feelings of beauty, love, fear, or hatred.

It's like creating linguistic buttons that can be pushed to generate an immediate response.

Another trick in the cult leader's language toolkit is the thought-terminating cliche.

These are sayings that end uncomfortable conversations or trains of thoughts.

They shut down argument and critical thinking, which is why they're so handy to authoritarians who don't like to be questioned.

Charles Manson countered any rational objections to his ravings by saying,

Tian Dou, the leaders of the Heaven's Gate cult, would tell skeptical listeners that they didn't have the gift of recognition.

And Warren Jeffs, leader of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, admonished dissatisfied female congregants to keep sweet.

Thought-terminating cliches are a two-way street.

They allow the leader to avoid threatening questions, while giving followers permission to ignore their cognitive dissonance.

Not sure whether you're doing the right thing?

Well, it's out of our hands, as Jim Jones would say.

You might be thinking that these traits aren't exclusive to cults.

After all, mainstream religions are full of loaded language like heaven and hell and thought-terminating cliches like God works in mysterious ways.

A linguistic study from 2021 analyzed the speeches of destructive cult leaders like

Jim Jones and Marshall Applewhite and compared them to those of mainstream religious leaders like Billy Graham and Rick Warren.

And while there were some similarities, there were also some stark differences.

For one, cult leader speech tends to be highly elaborative, using words like that, which, would, and because, to create novel worlds full of complex rules and causalities.

Mainstream preachers, by contrast, don't have to explain new systems of morality and spiritualism, but instead work from those their audiences are already familiar with.

They also found that cult leaders favored the pronouns us and them, while mainstream religious leaders preferred you.

This is consistent with cults' tendency to reinforce in-group, out-group dynamics through language.

Believers of Heaven's Gate believed themselves to be evolved and next-level, while outsiders were stuck on the human level.

Nixxiom labeled unbelievers suppressives, and Scientology uses the derogatory wogs to refer to non-Scientologists.

Perhaps the most efficient linguistic tactic for reinforcing an us-versus-them mentality is the use of jargon.

While specialized vocabularies are necessary in many professions, cults use them for a secondary social purpose—to determine who is a trusted part of the family and who is an outsider to be avoided.

Members of Heaven's Gate called their bodies vehicles, and their group the Classroom.

They didn't say Kitchen or Laundry Room, but Neutralab and Fiberlab.

Nixxiom, the multi-level marketing company-turned-sex-trafficking cult, performed integrations to rid members of their mental dysfunctions, known as disintegrations.

And the jargon of Scientology can quite literally fill a 300-page dictionary, which members were forced to study for hours on end.

A 2020 study by researchers from Columbia University and USC examined the relationship between jargon and self-perception.

They analyzed the writings of a broad spectrum of graduate students and found that the lower the ranking of the university the student attended, the higher the frequency of unnecessary jargon.

Students from high-status schools tended to communicate more simply and clearly.

They also invited business school students to pitch ideas to a panel of experts, Shark

Tank style, but manipulated their feelings of status beforehand.

Some were told that their competitors were successful entrepreneurs, while others were told they were competing against high school kids.

Those that had been made to feel inferior were more likely to use jargon in their pitches.

The researchers concluded that jargon can function as a kind of linguistic conspicuous consumption, advertising a higher status using words.

Many ex-members of cults support this hypothesis, recollecting the early thrill of learning a mysterious terminology.

Like kids sharing a secret code in a clubhouse, it made them feel part of an exclusive group which gave them a sense of superiority.

In her book, Montel offers evidence that these linguistic tactics have seeped out from cults and into wider society.

Propelled by capitalist demands and the reach of social media, the language of cults, she says, is now everywhere.

If you question the business model of a multi-level marketing scheme, well that's just stinkin' thinkin', a thought-terminating cliché popular with MLMs like Amway.

Similarly, when the predictions of QAnon and other conspiracy theorists don't come to pass, followers on social media are told to trust the plan.

Corporations employ mantras full of loaded language to enforce obedience, like Jeff Bezos' leadership principles, which include think big and dive deep.

Politics is rife with us-versus-them terminology, so that everyone is either a patriot or a traitor.

And fitness centers like SoulCycle or CrossFit use jargon like box, swan, tap backs, or doms to make membership feel exclusive.

Montel argues that as traditional institutions like churches, clubs, and unions have declined in popularity, people are desperate for new ways to feel a sense of belonging, and the majority turn to social media.

Online wellness gurus like Teal Swan and Bentino Massaro have been accused of cult-like behavior, though they deny it.

Technology has vastly lowered the bar, allowing them to influence an infinite number of followers from the comfort of their own homes.

Say what you want about Jim Jones, the guy could talk for hours IRL without editing.

Meanwhile, TikTokers are competing to coin the next trendy phrase like polywork, microtreating, or 75 cozy.

This online jargon has little functional purpose, other than to create a sense of community amongst the people who know it, and confer status, in the form of viral views, to the ones who can successfully get others to adopt it.

In a widely read essay in The Cut, financial columnist Charlotte Cowles explained in detail how she was talked into handing a box of $50,000 in cash to a stranger.

The linguistic tactics the scammers used were compared to how police may coerce a false confession from a suspect, but could just as well apply to cult indoctrination.

They do it incrementally, in a series of small steps that take you farther and farther from what you know to be true.

It's not about breaking the will, they were altering the sense of reality.

Montel cites the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who stated that language was "...our element as water is the element of fish."

Your perception of reality depends less on the physical things you see than the words you hear.

Language empowers cult leaders to create a mini-universe, as Montel puts it, around their followers.

The defense of that is not to block out language, but to hear more of it from as many sources as possible.

That way, no one person has the power to shape your reality.

 Nixxiom, the multi-level marketing company turned sex trafficking cult, performed integrations to rid members of their mental dysfunction.