Wild Wild Country. Escaping NXIVM. The Path. Holy Hell. That’s just a few of the vast and growing collection of documentaries, podcasts, docuseries exploring the history and legacy of cults. What explains this explosion of interest? Associate professor of English and resident cult expert Poulomi Saha joins Editor-in-Chief Pat Joseph live onstage to discuss America’s long enthrallment with—and participation in—cults.
Further reading:
- Watch the full live conversation with Poulomi Saha on YouTube
- Buy your tickets for “Alone in the Algorithm: Human Connection in the Age of AI” with Berkeley Professor Jodi Halpern and technologist Jaron Lanier on March 26
This episode was produced by Coby McDonald.
Special thanks to Alex Filippenko, Pat Joseph, and Nat Alcantara. Art by Michiko Toki and original music by Mogli Maureal. Additional music from Blue Dot Sessions.
Transcript:
LEAH WORTHINGTON:
Wild Wild Country. Escaping NXIVM. The Path. Holy Hell. Heaven’s Gate. The list goes on and on. That’s just a tiny fraction of the vast and growing collection of documentaries, podcasts, docuseries exploring the history and legacy of cults that have captivated audiences in recent years. But it’s not just the closed-door rituals and charismatic leaders. So, what’s to explain our endless appetite for the drama and scandal of cults? And what does this cultural phenomenon reveal about ourselves?
That’s where Berkeley’s resident cult expert Poulomi Saha comes in. An associate professor of English, Poulomi teaches the highly in-demand course “Cults in Popular Culture” and is currently working on their next book titled Enthralled, about America’s long obsession with, as they describe it, “communities and philosophies that offer total belief and total enthrallment.”
Last spring, Poulomi joined our Editor-in-Chief Pat Joseph onstage at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive as part of our ongoing lecture series, “CaliforniaLive!” In this episode of The Edge, we’re revisiting that conversation—a timely and disturbing dive into the world of cults.
So, enjoy! And don’t forget to mark your calendars for our next California Live! event on Thursday, March 26. Pat will be talking about human connection in the age of AI with Berkeley Professor Jodi Halpern and technologist Jaron Lanier. Link in the show notes. Ok, here’s the episode.
[MUSIC OUT]
PAT JOSEPH:
Welcome to California Live! I’m Pat Joseph, editor of California magazine, editorially independent publication of the Cal Alumni Association. On behalf of the Association and our co-hosts the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. I’d like to welcome you to tonight’s discussion. So we’re very honored to have as our guest this evening Dr. Poulomi Saha, Associate Professor of English, and co-director of the program in critical theory at UC Berkeley, scholar of Asian American literature, post colonial studies and queer and feminist theory. They are the author of An Empire of Touch: Women’s Political labor and the fabrication of East Bengal, which won the Harry Levin Prize for Best First Book from the American Comparative Literature Association. Poulomi is currently working on their next book about America’s abiding obsession with cults. The working title is enthralled, which is, of course, where we got tonight’s title from. And with that, let’s get started. Folks, please join me in welcoming Dr palomi Saha to the stage.
POULOMI SAHA:
Thank you. I’m delighted to be here.
PAT:
So let’s, let’s jump into the definitional question. So what is it we’re talking about when we talk about cults?
POULOMI:
That is a great question, and one to which I’m going to give you a terrible answer, because there is a definition for cult. If you look it up in the dictionary, it will say a system of worship directed at an idol or deity. That’s not what you want me to say. We would not be here if that was actually what we thought when we said, what is a cult? So the definition semantically isn’t very useful, because I think a cult is not a thing so much as a story. It’s a kind of automatic narrative that gets unfurled the minute we say that word. It’s something that is so immediate and so unconscious now that we take for granted all of the underlying questions that, what does a cult entail? So when you say, what is a cult? You think charismatic leader, someone whose power is so palpable to some people and totally obscure to everyone else. You think insular communities, where the people who feel the power of that leader are drawn in. They find connections with each other, they find shared world views, and they find themselves ever more distant from the world outside, partly because inside the cult, what happens is the sense of a secret that is unlocked, where once you realize that you share this attachment to this figure, you share some common beliefs, it’s like a cipher has been given to you, and the entire world looks different, and that world cannot be translated back outside. Yeah, then you think catastrophe, because every good cult story has to have the big, catastrophic end. That’s where all the cult documentaries begin. It’s how we get interested. It’s how the news appears. That story in that containment we consume all the time. I would say there’s one more piece to that story, which is why we’re here, that is, even after the catastrophe, why are we still so obsessed? We saw the whole arc. We saw the strange, wild leader, we saw the transformation. We saw the catastrophe. Why are we still so obsessed? So the I think the final part of what is a cult is our obsession, our collective obsession, for the thing that we will say we would not do, we would not join, we do not believe, and yet we can’t stop watching. So it’s not a thing, it’s a lot of things, but that get pushed into this one tiny word that the minute you say it, we all think we know what we’re talking about.
PAT:
Yeah. Well, one thing that was curious about, or seems curious to me about your involvement in this subject, is that you’re not and not to harp on what you’re not, but you’re not a sociologist, you’re not a comparative religion scholar, you’re not a behavioral psychologist, an anthropologist, those are the people I think should be studying culture. Are you out of your lane as a literature professor?
POULOMI:
I don’t know. Pat, you invited me.
PAT:
It’s a softball. Come on.
POULOMI:
I am absolutely out of my lane, but I’m going to claim that the whole world is my lane for two reasons. One, for all the Cal alums, you know that the Berkeley English department is prestigious and quite storied, but it’s also massive. We’ve taken over all kinds of disciplines. So contained in the study of English now is the study of culture. So I am trained as a cultural theorist, and so anything that appears in culture is sort of in my lane. But also because cults are so embedded in so many aspects of our lives, we find them in literature, we find them in movies, we find them in art, but they also now structure our language and how we see the world. So that becomes very much the purview of anyone who’s invested in understanding the relationship between art, reality, our imagination, and also, now more and more the political world,
PAT:
yeah, I should quickly say, not only was I an English major, but I’m a journalist, I’m always out of my lane, so that’s what journalists all trespassing. But thank you for that so well, let me ask you also a critical theorist, which has gotten a lot of attention and been a real lightning rod this critical theory come into play in your study of cults. And what does it look what is? What is that lens?
POULOMI:
So critical theory is a commitment to thinking about how to understand the world with an eye to changing it. So that’s why it’s different than other forms of theory. And so I think critical theory is especially useful when we think about cults, because we are interested fundamentally in what it is that drives people to these unorthodox beliefs. And I am pretty compelled by a single thing, which is that people go looking for what is missing in their life, what is absent in their home lives, sometimes, but certainly absent in society, absent in politics. And until we understand those absences, and maybe think about how we might resurrect corrections to them, we can’t really understand cults, so I think critical theory is an essential part of this, to not simply diagnose the failings of people who have unorthodox beliefs or who choose to take enormous risks by following paths that society doesn’t believe are viable, but we also need to think about what drives them there, what it is that we all Feel the ways in which we live our safe lives and watch these people on TV, but maybe feel ourselves lonely, incomplete, seeking, and that is a matter of a kind of real moment of societal intervention, I think.
PAT:
And did your did your interest in the topic and the development of the course. Did it have a Genesis? Was there a moment when you realized I want to pursue this?
POULOMI:
Yeah, there are probably two beginnings. The more recent beginning is the pandemic. I like. I think probably a lot of people in the room March 2025, years ago, almost to the week, found myself locked out of life, like every normal feature of life was suddenly over, and I was told, let’s see. I didn’t know how to regulate my days. Time wasn’t normal, and what I found regulating my days and time was Netflix. And the kind of auto stream of the Netflix series, and there were all of these incredibly beautiful, lush, engrossing series on cults, and hours would just tick by, and they became the kind of organizing logic of my life, and I found myself a normally rational person, rather uptight frankly, suddenly thinking, huh, that’s not so weird. Maybe I could join a sex commune in Oregon, and it took me by. I was like, Oh, how did that happen? How did I suddenly become a person who thinks that that makes sense. And so I was thinking about that. I was also spending so much time talking to other people about these cult documentaries, that’s at some point how many you know, what else did you talk about? So it was, it became this social thing that we were talking about why people believe this, and how someone could do this. And it was, it became this kind of weird social experiment, and I began to wonder if other people, besides, you know, my partner and friends, also were engrossed. And so I thought I would test it with my favorite test subject, which is a Berkeley class. And so I pitched a very small class that spring, and it is called cults in popular culture, but it’s a philosophy class. It’s a great bait and switch. I bring them in, thinking we’re going to talk about fallacious details, and they read Durkheim and Freud and it, you know, they’re unbelievable. Berkeley undergrads are just exceptional because they’re smart, they do the reading, they’re diligent, but they’re such canny understanders of society and culture, and they have a kind of vulnerability to being able to think about themselves as in society. And so this class of 25 sort of took off, and I think at last count, so I’ve taught it now over five years, a bunch of semesters, I think a little over 3000 students. So it is, it’s five years. Over those five years, the class is quite large now. So it goes between 200-400 in the semesters that I teach it. And so it’s taken on its own life, which is weird to be like thinking about cults while in what sometimes feels like a slightly cultish phenomenon. So there’s that’s the kind of local history. And there is a longer history of my own reason and rationality and my decades long commitment to it, that for the vast majority of my life, like many academics, I shored myself up with reason and with a kind of skepticism of people who seemed willing to believe strange things, sure, but also act in weird ways in public. You know, I had built this real kind of capacity to kind of tighten myself up around people like that, and it was clearly keeping me from seeing the world. And I had a early moment when I was a teenager that was like a crack in that that I kept coming back to where I was. And I always say it this way, I was accidentally hugged by this person who’s called the hugging saint. She is a South Indian woman who, for the last 40 years, maybe a little bit longer, has been doing these marathon hugging sessions, and she has a global following people now wait days sometimes in line to be hugged by her. Her name is Amma, which means mother, that’s what they call her. And when I was like, 15 or 16, she accidentally hugged me, or she meant to hug me, I was accidentally hugged by her. But I, you know, a friend had asked me to come meet them somewhere, and I thought we were going to do something fun. In, and we showed up in this small college in Rhode Island during the summer that this group had rented out, and we were in like a cafeteria, and she was on a stage like this, and I walked in, and everyone was like smiling and sort of like noodle dancing, I call it. And they had that look, you know, the look, that look. And I say that because, again, when I say cult and I say that look, you’re all like, Yes, I know. And I was a judgy teenager, and I was like, this is the cult with all of the certainty that you have when you’re a teenager.
This was Rhode Island where I’d grown up. Everyone in that auditorium was white, except for me and Amma on stage. Again. That’s why I was like, this is a cult, you know, and the little kids were carrying rag dolls in her image, and everyone was wearing Indian clothes. And again, I was already uptight, but if I had could have gotten any more uptight, I would have. And my friend was like, just, just get a hug. How, how bad could it be? And I was like, Stranger danger could be very, very, very bad, but I agreed. And that whole time you wait, I just kept, like, looking at them, being like, they’re not me. I’m not like that. And she had me, and nothing happened to me. All these other people had burst into tears and laughed and talked about like just revelations and miracles. She hugged me and absolutely nothing happened. I felt that she had hugged me with a kind of effortfulness that I was surprised by and it was incredibly intimate, but she hugs, she holds you for like, a few seconds, and then you kind of get spit out, and there’s an attendant on the other side who hands you a Hershey’s Kiss. So you get a hug and a kiss, and you get pushed off of stage. And so I was walking off stage being like, okay, nothing happened. And I was feeling weirdly disappointed. And I couldn’t quite understand why I was disappointed until this kid walked into the auditorium and I thought, Oh, that’s a person like me. In fact, in my memory, we are dressed identically. I don’t know that we actually were and he didn’t get in line, but he walked up to the base of the stage, sat down cross legged, looked up at her, and just started to weep, and all I could think was nothing happened to me, and something happened to him and I, it was like something like cracked me open, good for like, a very short period of time, because Then I spent decades closing myself back up. But I I’ve been thinking for decades about that, how something happened to him, and I will never know what happened to him, but for all of my doubt, I still wanted to know, and for and for all of my doubt, I still wished somewhere it had happened to me. So that tension between wanting to know and feel and wanting to preserve your doubt, I think, really shapes so many of our relationships to the idea of cults. We’re fascinated not because we’re grossed out or fearful. We’re fascinated because somewhere we wish it had happened to us too.
PAT:
So what you’re what you’re describing, suddenly it makes a lot of sense that you weren’t able to join in that moment and have a moment. Then during covid, you’re watching Wild, Wild Country and other Docuseries, and now you can have a vicarious experience of the cult safely at home. Take it at your own pace, and you found yourself, I think you’ve you’ve described your emotional reaction as enthralled. And for all that, I looked it up to make sure I understood every dimension of enthralled. But you know, it means to be captured by the fascination of something. It can also mean the archaic meaning is is enslaved. And I think that gets I’m jumping ahead a little bit, but that gets to my fear, and so many of our fears about cults, right? That this idea that you’re going to lose yourself and I think probably your teenage self didn’t want to go there, right? You’re going to you’re going to lose yourself and lose your rational faculties and surrender your will to a master, right? And as a parent, right? That’s the scariest thing, the idea that someone would capture your child and their. Mind, and you know, so you had this vicarious experience, and you translated that experience into or you explore that experience through this course. So tell us a little bit about the a little more about the curriculum of the course and how it runs.
POULOMI:
Yeah, I think the question of enthralment is really important, because so much of media right now around cults is streaming, and the way that streaming works is, unless you stop it, you’re just going to get the next episode. It is actually designed to enthrall you. It is designed to stop the critical faculty that stops and starts. It just happens. And anyone who’s binged seasons of something, you’re like, how did that happen? Where did I go? And I think that that’s a really important feature of cult media today, that it is so immersive, it is so esthetically beautiful. It is designed to be enthralling. So what does it mean to take a subject that we fear for its enthralment and produce it in a media that is designed to be enthralling, that is something that is like a really important tension, and one of the things that we spend a lot of time in the class talking about, right, how there’s this fantasy that happens in the perpetual streaming that you can just be engrossed. It’s just pleasure. It’s sometimes salacious, sometimes it’s moving, but you’re just watching TV. What’s happening to you, actually, though, that feeling that I had, that I suspect other people had as they fell into these immersive, streaming experiences of suddenly being like, Huh, you know, I could do that. Never thought I could. That transformation is an effect of the immersion that you’re the wet, what you’re able to believe and want is being shifted as you’re being held in this state of a kind of enthralled viewing. It’s also true of podcasts, and I mean the idea that cults now stream into our homes, but also into our ears. As people walk through the streets of Berkeley, as they maybe cross the street to avoid the Hare Krishnas on Telegraph they’re very happy to be listening to my favorite cult as a podcast. So there’s this way in which we’ve tried to cordon off media around cults, as though it is something totally separate, it’s totally safe, and it allows us to be somehow these perfect viewers, still fully reasoned, enclosed in ourselves, and we don’t have to account for the Ways in which we’re changed. So this is, I think, the part of what makes this moment so interesting. We’re now, I would say, solidly, almost a decade into this boom of cult media. So we’ve had a lot of time to be changed by it, and I think we’re seeing the material effects of that change in all kinds of ways
PAT:
expand on that.
POULOMI:
Well, I mean, you sort of hinted at it. We could talk about the ways in which we are now talking about a political movement in the language of cult, and whether or not Maga is a cult, we could discuss. But I do think that it’s not a coincidence that the boom in cult media coincided with the first Trump administration and then the rise of a kind of resurgent Maga before the second one. I think that it’s partly about seeking a kind of escapism into utopian possibility, but also this fantasy that you’re watching, where it all works out, right? Because cult media begins at the end. It begins with the catastrophe. So you know, no matter how good it is, at some point in the middle, they’re going to get punished. They’re going to the scales will drop from their eyes. They will, once the charismatic leader is killed or defanged or sent to prison, the followers will kind of step out, bleary eyed into the light and beg for forgiveness. That fantasy is really structuring how we inhabit this political moment. I think the language of cult and Maga isn’t just about people’s potential brainwashing. It’s also about our fantasy that it can be corrected. We just need to get rid of the charismatic leader, because that’s what cult media also does. It spends a lot of. Time fixating on the leader, as though that is the thing that makes the cult. Whereas, if for all of us who’ve watched, we know that actually people maybe come first for the Guru, the Messiah, the kind of great thinker, but they stay for each other. They stay for something that happens much more horizontally. So, you know, we were, we’re such good students of cult media, but we haven’t quite fully, like brought those lessons into real life yet.
PAT:
Yeah, because I was gonna say the way I experience cult media, I like to think, is as cautionary tale as something that I’m going to learn from. What to avoid. You know, this is dangerous. I can see the pathology here, and I know to stay away from that. But it sounds like you’re saying, Actually, our defense is maybe weakened, if that’s even the right metaphor, and that we are actually just as susceptible to this as ever, or more so, to the idea of joining and the idea of Utopia, the idea of finding alternative answers.
POULOMI:
The secret, yeah. I mean, I think we’ve always been susceptible, but we are probably more susceptible now than we’ve been in a long time as a nation. If you think about the kind of first cult boom, which we think of the 1960s and the counter cultural moment, why was it that you had so many young, educated Americans, turning their back on normative culture, turning their back on capitalism, on nuclear families, on American Empire and the war, and turning towards communal living and free love and all sorts of things, like, I’ll call it a cult. They saw a world in crisis, and the status quo could only reproduce that crisis. And as smart young people, they were like, I don’t want that. I don’t want to participate in that. I want something else. The crisis pushed them out. We are in, I dare say, a worse crisis now than the 1960s at least more acute in all kinds of ways. And a lot of those fissures never got fixed anyway. So in this moment, is it so strange that we would be looking for radical alternatives, that we would be thinking, you know, we it was a good run. Normativity. We tried it for a while. Capitalism, the nuclear family, Leave It to Beaver and its long kind of imagination. It didn’t work out for many of us the way that we had hoped. Maybe some of us made money, maybe some of us had really happy home lives, maybe we had successful careers, but a lot of us are still lonely, searching for meaning, feeling isolated, wondering about what happens after this world is over, there are lots of things to to find ourselves seeking, and cult media offers it to us, and it offers it to us again, designed to make us porous to it. I don’t it’s a we are already susceptible, and then the form makes us more susceptible. And cult media learned how to do it from an earlier form. It picks up in part, from true crime, right, which is its other kind of great boom in the true crime podcast and documentary series, but also from what we call now prestige TV, that in the late 90s, early 2000s you had all of these cable channels that commissioned glossy, kind of as an English professor, I think, just like narratively dense and rich stories over many Seasons of flawed characters, right? Really flawed characters. Prestige TV took aesthetics, took just extraordinary acting, beautiful cinematography, a kind of careful, lush storytelling, and made us sympathize with mobsters. Fall in love with serial killers. Wish that we live we joined gangs in Baltimore. I mean, it really, it shift. It made us align ourselves with figures that society would say repudiate. You know, so if you can have a favorite serial killer and mobster, it’s not that hard to have a favorite cult. Like there’s. Way in which that that kind of practice of immersion and beauty and storytelling transforms what you believe you can love.
PAT:
Yeah, that’s so interesting. Well, I still want to be a mobster in both.
POULOMI:
I mean, I think Tony Soprano made you that.
PAT:
So in your course, if I’m not mistaken, you, you have your students as an assignment, create a cult, but you don’t like the word cult, and we should back up, right? Let’s talk about that first.
POULOMI:
For two reasons. One, I don’t think after the first week of the class, we don’t use the word cult anymore because it’s not that useful, right? What is a cult only gets us so far. We should ask more interesting questions that are embedded in there. So we don’t call it a cult, but also for legal reasons. So they they work in intentional communities all semester, these large classes break off into five or six person intentional communities, and they do all kinds of normal school work together, but they build towards this final assignment where they design their own intentional community, and I will share this with a group of Berkeley alums. They are terrifyingly brilliant, and I mean, terrifyingly brilliant. Over the last five years, I have seen designed some of the most extraordinary visions of alternate life. Netflix has nothing on the Berkeley undergrad imagination, and it’s not just an idea. They are able to do something so savvy, because they begin first with what we want, they identify really basic things, because that’s actually what drives our cult obsession, that these cults, however spectacular they appear to be, often speak to really basic, universal desires, things that are missing in probably all of our lives, or even if we have them, we could have them with a little more abundance. So the students start there. They start with things like isolation, loneliness or simply being overwhelmed. And then they’re able to think about how they could meet those needs if they did not have to abide by the everyday rules of their life. What are the ways in which they can build communities designed to meet this specific need? So they produce these remarkable visions, and you know, a lot of them are utopian. They’re truly kind of transformative, and they give you hope about what it is possible for the future to look like. It’s also worth saying that sometimes they’re not. There have definitely been a couple of apocalyptic cults that they’ve designed, because it’s worth us actually also reckoning with the fact that sometimes we’re imagining what is to come and what we need. For some people, it is the end of everything, right? We have to sort of account for that too. But they build these beautiful things and then again, savvy esthetic imagination, they advertise them. So they’ve now learned that you can’t just have an object. You have to have a story behind it. You have to have a kind of marketing principle behind it. So they do websites. They have, like they established, year long social media profiles. I don’t actually know how they do this. They have social media profiles that seem to started before they enrolled in the class, one of them recently did a video where they manipulated through like a deep fake Chris. Chris Pine the Berkeley, yeah, they had it. They had manipulated a video of Chris Pine to make it look like he had joined this group and he was gathering followers. So they also understand that there you have to draw followers, you have to actually bring people in. You have to give people a reason to stay. And so they design these kind of perfect instantiations of the thing that they’re fascinated with.
PAT:
Are you worried about a lab leak
POULOMI:
Every day of my life. I mean, it’s yeah, there every so often I fear that, like a Netflix Docu series is one day gonna start in dwinelle, in the auditorium I teach it as, like a kind of 15 years ago, yeah, I was taking a course, but one, this is a purely theoretical exercise, not a critical theory exercise, just theoretical and we can’t I mean, I guess that’s all I will say. I say this also because I feel like there are lawyers in the room where I’m not getting them to to actually make cults.
PAT:
Yeah. No. Forget. Bad Idea fiction. I’ll pause for a second if you have questions that you’ve written out and you would like me to consider them here, if you get past them, to your left, my right, how to think about that? And the ushers will give it to my assistants, and then I’ll entertain those that’d be great. So yeah. I mean, I think I, in my intro, I sort of promised that I would steer us in the direction of of what I think really is cult of personality around Donald Trump and and I, I think I came to that conclusion reluctantly, because I also don’t like the idea of overusing this label cult and even cultivating I was thinking they might just but then, when I saw the White House page with really no images of the White House anymore, just images of Donald Trump and Trump’s name, you know, in bold letters and everything suggested it was like Mao’s face on on, you know, think we crossed a border. And of course, there were a lot of signs that we were headed there when Donald Trump said, I can stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot someone and I won’t lose any votes. He’s the only person who could say something like that, and and so I wonder. So, I guess one of the questions I have is about cult leaders in general, whether we think they’re setting out to design a cult, or whether they just it just happens organically, and maybe both things are possible. And I don’t know also whether these are even interesting questions.
POULOMI:
It’s a totally interesting question, probably both. I think it’s always important for us to disaggregate the thing that we focus on, the cult leader, from the people who find meaning and community and all sorts of other things in that group, because what people come seeking for and what a person seems to do to keep followers, often are very, very different. So I think we’ve seen in the last 60 years a range of people who have been the leaders of groups that get called cults. Some of them clearly set themselves out to do so. A good example is someone like David Koresh of the Branch Davidians, who worked incredibly hard to build a mythology of himself as the Messiah, right? So if you want to be the Messiah, the only thing you can do is be the leader of a group, right? He’s actually there, leaning on the classic definition of cult, right? Forms of worship designed and directed at like a single deity. So David Koresh cultivated himself as a cult leader. I think other people fall into it. And it’s not surprising, perhaps, that when you’re in the middle of a group that has between itself such an intense connection and solidarity and commitment to each other that is funneled through you, that something goes to your head that you begin to think of yourself as a different kind of person, a person capable of bringing people together in this way that you begin to think of yourself as a kind of magical or supernatural force, almost so that self imagination also is important, because part of what we’re also interested in when we talk about groups as cults is the kind of spectacle, right? And a good leader trying to hold together an insular community has to offer a little bit of drama, whether that drama is like I know the day the world is going to end, and here are the rituals that will prepare us. Here is what’s going to happen. Here is how I’m going to lead you to the next day, or the Donald Trump model, which is, I think, like taken straight from the WWF playbook, right? The kind of wrestling of you have the heel, who is as beloved as the hero, and it is all about spectacle, that that spectacle is really important for one, keeping our attention, and two, giving us a sense that there is a drama to our I think we all want a little drama in our lives, and that drama. Especially when it’s the good is towards the internal group, and often the aggression is outwards. Can be really fortifying, right where you feel as though there is a collective enemy outside and inside. The spectacle is for you. It’s for your benefit. It it’s really compelling. And you see this in things like especially in the first Trump administration, his sort of four years of rallies while he was president, I think that was an interesting model of sustaining a particular kind of persona as leader. I will leave the C word out of it for now that what he was doing was kind of constantly promoting the spectacle he wasn’t doing, like faith healings, but there was an element of that feeling. It really goes back to like American revivalist traditions, that in America, there is a long standing both investment and in and a repudiation of like spectacular forms of religion. Our sense that religion in America is always deeply private and rational is is not wrong, is not right, right. And if you think about how powerful the revivalist movement was, that people would go and it wouldn’t matter what you believed, whether you were faithful or rational, because something would happen to you. It would happen against your will. Your body would react. You would be lifted out of yourself. And that would be the kind of conversion experience that produces real followers, if you can take someone who’s like, I don’t like you, I don’t believe you, and I am never going to stop you, know, being doubtful, and they suddenly feel this kind of upsurge in your presence that’s so powerful, and you need spectacle to do that.
PAT:
Yeah, I was talking to a former colleague of mine who, during the last elections was she was covering, she went to USA Today, and she was covering some of the Trump rallies and and I was sort of expressing some sympathy for her. She said, Pat, these are so much fun. You know, there’s people are really happy. It’s like a carnival, like atmosphere. And I was like, Yeah, but you’re the enemy of the people there. And she said, Yeah, but not really, you know, they, they maybe when the cameras are on us, right, then they’ll then again, spectacle. So I think I’ve always had this line about how I don’t think Donald Trump ever left reality TV. He just sucked the rest of us into it. I mean, he really knows how to be good television, yeah, and good spectacle. And I think WWF is right. He knows also how to almost have that PT Barnum sort of over the top spectacle that he can provide,
POULOMI:
Yes, which America has always loved? Yeah, right. I mean, America, I think, has a particular fascination with cults for lots of reasons, and it’s deeply tied one to like our sense of ourselves as reasonable and contained good, but also our love of spectacle. Yeah? I mean, the you know, whether it’s PT Barnum or the long history of kind of showmen who develop these unbelievably powerful followings, you know, we really are taken by a particular kind of spectacle. And Trump is very good at it.
PAT:
Yeah, it begs the question, though, why we don’t see any anything, why that isn’t every politician? Why isn’t every politician playing the same game? And is it because he has a certain talent, or maybe a certain shamelessness or a certain level of narcissism that makes it possible for him to do it again? I feel immune to his charisma. I don’t see it. Maybe I haven’t gotten close enough to it, but, but it’s curious that he is able to channel and I think you hit on something that maybe you mentioned Emil Durkheim, and I was reading, I don’t know where I saw it, but something about the collective effervescence, I think, is his term, that a Trump rally inspires and that, you know, it’s the people energizing Donald Trump giving him this. So then it’s the flip side of this question, like, what is what is it the people need from him that makes them willing to energize him make him a totem?
POULOMI:
Well, I think that actually, though it’s less the I think a good politician can do a good rally. I don’t think that that’s his specialty. I think actually. Where there is maybe an alignment between how we talk about cults and how we talk about Trump is the idea of the unorthodox that if people go looking for these groups that we call cults because of things that are missing in their lives. That’s what Trump has actually hit upon. And we can agree or disagree with his sense of the world, but he articulates a vision of the world that says you feel wrong right in your life, you aren’t making enough money. People think you’re stupid, you’re you know, they’re all these immigrants coming and taking your jobs you can’t get ahead. He speaks to them, and he says, and, you know, it’s not gonna you’re not gonna have any of those things solved by the normal means. You’ve tried it. You’ve tried it the good way. You tried working a job and being respectable and, you know, voting and hoping that like that would be enough, and it hasn’t right. The world has passed you by. One, it’s not your fault. Really important for people to hear, it’s not your fault. And two, if you come here with me, if you leave the normal, the respectable, the acceptable, if you are willing to burn it to the ground behind you inside, you will have everything you’ve ever wanted, and the first thing you’ll get is that people will stop telling you You’re wrong, right? When you are amongst his followers, it doesn’t matter if two people are saying diametrically opposed things, they will turn to each other and be like, yes, absolutely. Again, not because they’re dumb or or or or out of touch with reality, but that is the logic of being in a group like this, that space, once you’re inside of it, it is all Affirmative. In that space, you are not wrong. So the more that people outside that space shout, you’re wrong, you’re dumb, come back out here, the more it reinforces the fact that it didn’t work inside, even if egg prices don’t go down, at least you’re not dumb and wrong anymore. At least you’re not the problem anymore. It’s incredibly compelling. It’s not at all surprising that this would speak to so many people who have been who had been left behind.
PAT:
Yeah, and I think I’ll just give Arlie hochschild’s Books A shout out for if you want to understand how the deep story, as she calls it, that people have about their own disaffection and dissatisfaction, and I highly recommend them strangers in their own land and stolen pride. So I should probably take those questions if, if not, you have them.
POULOMI:
Also, for anyone who’s read Hillbilly Elegy, arley’s books are the apotheosis of what that book should be. They’re really the best version.
PAT:
Yeah, it’s interesting. The the there’s even a parallel there, but yeah, and they came out at the same time, I think the strangers in their own land. And I Okay, this is a good place to start. I listened to the Berkeley podcast episode that featured you. Not sure which one that is, but the top comment was, Berkeley is a cult. And many, many commenters agreed.
POULOMI:
That’s a very good question. There are two versions of Berkeley, I think, embedded in that question and in that comment, the cult like attachment that Berkeley alums and students have to the university, I think, is a good thing. It is a highly insular place with its own culture and rituals. I don’t necessarily think it makes it a cult, but is Berkeley, California and Northern California in particular, a hotbed of what we call cult historically? Yes, and do those two things shade into each other in interesting ways, absolutely. But again, I’ll point out the strange conflict between thinking that you see Berkeley as a cult, and the lengths to which students, but I would imagine all of you who live locally go to not walk right by the person peddling their. Or doomsday text on one corner, and, you know, chanting on the other corner and shouting bible verses on a megaphone in the other corner, right? You actively avoid those sites, even as you participate in this kind of sense of Berkeley as having a cult like attachment. So it is a place where lots of alternative imaginations have thrived, and it’s also a place that does not claim them as central to what it is.
PAT:
Okay? Does cult media cut both ways? That is drive polarization? And this discussion is criticism. This discussion feels a bit like only Maga is a cult like contemporary phenomenon. So I’ll have to read that again. This cult media cut both ways. That is drive polarization. This discussion feels a bit like only Maga is a cult like contemporary phenomenon.
POULOMI:
I think it is possible that cult media may increase polarization, and I think there’s a recent example that’s telling many of you may have heard of this group that they’re calling the zizians, which is a group that has a Berkeley connection. And I was doing all of this media. I was doing TV interviews around it, because Google Berkeley and cult. And unfortunately, my face comes up quickly. And it was interesting to me how often the comments were split between either ha Berkeley as a cult, the first one, and people being like, Oh, those people are Trump supporters, or those people are Democrats like and this kind of desire in just the comments on like Tiktok around the zizions to ascribe political designations as cults to them. So I think that there is the term cult. We right now we’ve been talking about whether or not Maga is a cult, but I do think that there are people on the right who believe that the Democratic Party has its own cult like effect. And so the fact that now we talk about political parties in the language of cult, I think begs the question of what we mean by cult. What is it that we’re actually getting at when we ask that question? Because I don’t think we’re just asking about charismatic leaders. My suspicion, my hope, is that we’re asking what happens after is this forever where there will be people in a totally different reality from me, and I can only feel a kind of fascination but disgust and disdain for them. I think somewhere there is a kind of hope that, like, okay, all cults end, whether on the right or the left, and then what happens? And that is, I think, the most potent political question right now, not some kumbaya reconciliation, but how do we actually account for a future in which we’re not simply envisioning totally, radically different realities, and the hope that people will be broken from their spell by something catastrophic, right? That, I think, is so much now a feature of our political imaginations that we have that the cult is we’re still talking about as a cult, because we’re like, at least the bad thing hasn’t happened yet, but it’s going to, I hope it does, but it hasn’t happened yet, and we don’t have a way of thinking about what happens though we have all this cult. Media tells us a story, right? Of what happens when a charismatic leader falls. The one version of the story is, yes, some of the followers repent. Say, actually. Now in their absence, I see that it was all a farce, but far more often, people just have enormous grief at the loss of that thing, the loss of that feeling of being right, that loss of connection to all these people, that loss of being in the world, and we don’t have a language socially for how to grapple with that, and with little groups, the ones we watch on Netflix, it’s easy. We’re like, Okay, that’s a problem of 10 or 15 people. Whether you make it in the world afterwards, is not my problem. You gave me good TV. I can move on. We’re talking about millions of people on either side. That is a much bigger. Question. It’s a much bigger problem, and I don’t think it’s one that’s readily solved, especially by a fantasy that there will be like Cataclysm and repentance.
PAT:
Yeah, one in one feature of cults that I think is most frightening is the inevitability that you were, you’re forming an enemy, that there’s an there’s an other that is is alien and a threat and almost subhuman. You were in the cult. You’re enlightened. Everybody else is less so, or in the dark, even though you’re inviting people in, right? There’s the benighted masses who will never understand the secret that you are privy to. We do this in tribes and nations, and so it’s not only a feature of cults, but okay, this question, I am fascinated by how people get into a cult and continue following it. I get that cult leaders prey on certain types of people, but they they all can’t be the same type of person, right? Is it a feeling of community? Is it a need for attention, love? I am in search of all those things. Yeah.
POULOMI:
I promise you you’re not alone. We have inherited a false story about people who joined cults. It was a story that was really important to an earlier cultural understanding of cults, when cults were just a bad thing, a bad thing, that we read about in newspapers when the cataclysm happened. But we’re not a feature of our everyday lives. We’re not a thing that we found ourselves strangely moved by, and that earlier story made us believe that only someone who was kind of mentally feeble or particularly vulnerable or so lost, only those people would join cults which shores up The fantasy that not us, right, only them, not us. That has never been true. It has never been the case that people who join these groups are singularly losers who don’t even have their own sense of self to lose anyway. Historically, if you look and I’m, you know, I I’m not a sociologist, and I don’t really, I’m not that interested in the particular demographics of like, how many cults or who joins them. But if you, if you watch general trends, people who join these groups tend to be very well educated, middle to upper middle class. Often have highly successful careers or on track to them. People join these groups because often they’ve hit all of these markers of success, all the things they were told would make them happy and fulfill them, and they still feel empty. They joined these groups because they did all the right things, and it still wasn’t enough. So that is actually the story of who joins cults, which means all of us are susceptible. Now that doesn’t mean that we all go out and join many things keep us tethered to our lives. One of them is a fear, a fear of losing safety. It is an incredible risk to avow and act on believing something totally unorthodox. It’s not just that you pack up and go to a commune. I mean, in fact, that’s not really the model anymore. But what if what you stood to lose was your family, your friends, your sense of yourself, your job? That’s a lot. We work really hard to maintain these things, to maintain ourselves as normal, so we’re all susceptible. Many of us choose safe lives, so we can’t really be blamed for spending so much time watching people play out the choices that we cannot bring ourselves to make. Yeah.
PAT:
Okay, one last question, then we should break and a lot of people have a version of this question. So couldn’t you argue that religion, any religion, current or ancient, is a cult, and if so, how do we reconcile the power dynamics of current religion that shape almost every facet of. Real World?
POULOMI:
That’s a great question. And there is an academic definition of cults, which calls them new religious movements that is not yet old enough to just be a plain religion. And we can see that transformation actually in American history, if you look at the history of the Church of Latter Day Saints just 100 years ago, they were not just socially isolated and called a cult. They were criminalized, right? They people who were who were devout Mormons, were stripped of their jobs. They were run out of towns. They were lynched. They faced enormous violence and repression. It is now a religion. How that happens is actually through a set of very canny negotiations, right about how to make beliefs that were seen as incompatible with mainstream society, less incompatible so it meant that you had splinter groups that believed in polygamy that were kind of forced out as the Church of Latter Day Saints disavowed polygamy as essential to its doctrine, because polygamy is illegal in most states in the United States, so they’re really savvy decisions that groups make in order to get the kind of social approval. But also, it’s worth pointing out that there is only a single arbiter of religion in the United States? Does anyone know what it is? Oh, all right. It used to be my punchline, but now everyone’s got it, yes, the IRS, right. Only the IRS legally determines if something is a religion, because of Section 501(c)(3). The claim to tax exempt status, that is the thing that determines whether something is a religion in America, legally, legally, not the stories we tell, right, not the really rich, beautiful narratives that we have. That’s the interesting part, right? That’s the part. That’s the long negotiation between whether something is a cult or just a strange belief that you love or just your yoga class that you’re going to now twice a day. It’s a story we tell. It’s not the thing itself. It is the way you make sense of it to yourself, the way you make sense of it to other people, the way it makes you feel inside that you’re willing to admit and what you are unwilling to say out loud.
PAT:
Apparently, Frank Zappa said, the difference between a cult and a religion is the religions own more real estate.
POULOMI:
But when it comes to Scientology and the Catholic church, it might be an interesting comparison.
PAT:
Yeah, so we’ll wrap up, but I think people will be curious to know about your book, and when we might see it. I know it’s in the early stages, and I’m not trying to put pressure on you, but you might want to, might want to write a chapter tonight.
POULOMI:
Okay, I’m working on it, but hopefully in the next year. But it is a book that, for those of you who are Berkeley alums, the Berkeley is a character, my students, my class, are a character in a kind of aggregate way, because they are how I understand the world. They are my sense of what people are thinking. But also they are kind of perfect partners to think with, because they tell me so much of what I can’t bear to admit about my own interests. So hopefully, in the next year, year and a half, you can read all about some version of yourself and your own.
PAT:
Excellent. Thank you so much for joining us.
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LEAH: This is The Edge, brought to you by California magazine and the Cal Alumni Association. I’m Leah Worthington. This episode was produced by Coby McDonald, with support from Pat Joseph and Nat Alcantara. Special thanks to Poulomi Saha. Original music by Mogli Maureal.
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