Realize that you can’t convince someone to leave in the course of a conversation, but that you can make the little crack that opens up years later.
The loss of the guy at the center of a cult of personality can quickly disperse the cult. Very rarely, they’re able to transition into a cult of an idea rather than a personality. That’s a difficult transition to pull off, and there’s usually planning ahead of time.
There’s not a lot of quick solutions otherwise.
So… remove the personality.
Kool-aid has a good track record of handling it.
Individual level, educate yourself and learn compassion:
https://youarenotsosmart.com/2022/06/27/yanss-236-how-minds-change/
https://www.streetepistemology.com/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Read_a_Book because we have a lot of people who really think they know more about things than they do, based purely on social media posts and sensationalized news. “bAn ALl ReLIGIOnS” is such a highschool tier take that speaks to incredibly poor understanding of human culture, society, philosophy and psychology. Religion is just organized and political spirituality. And we need things that spirituality can offer, and materialism (capitalism) has nearly robbed us of it. And spiritual does NOT have to fucking mean believing in some skydaddy, it can just mean being able to STOP and be with all of life, as it is, within any given moment. You can frame it with the awe of quantum fucking mechanics if you want. Go watch Carl Sagan at the very least. Christianity had one fucking job and they couldn’t have failed more catastrophically… But I digress… Though understanding the difference between RELIGION and SPIRITUALITY (and what NEEDS spirituality fulfills) would go a long way in guarding against cults.
A lot of the time dealing with cults or cult-like communities requires you to do things that go against your every impulse.
Respect your own boundaries but keep a door open provided your boundaries are respected.
Do not belittle the people in the cult. Do not demonize. I CANNOT emphasize that part enough. If you can’t stop yourself, you best avoid these situations because you will only make it worse.
Actively seek to understand what the person is getting out of the cult (usually it’s basic social acceptance - which is exactly why vilifying cult members only works in the cult’s favor - see MAGA). If they believe they are getting some spiritual need fulfilled, you better have really good understanding of what that need is before you try to talk about it. Read the relevant philosophy and so on. There are no ideas in the world that can’t be twisted into a cult rhetoric.
Cults chiefly work by predating on people who feel like they aren’t HEARD or SEEN by others. Their experiences are dismissed or straight up ridiculed. This seems to be an impossible pill for some people to swallow and they seem to legitimately think that calling people idiots will surely make them feel bad and get back in the route of sanity Spoilers: it just makes them run right into the welcoming arms of the cult’s spokespeople who shower them with (seemingly) unconditional love and validation.
Once the cult is their only social circle, it’s basically impossible to extract them. Unless you are willing to see them COMPASSIONATELY as basic humans whose behavior is ultimately dictated by very basic needs for human connection, you will have no hope of reaching them.
Most people make the mistake of thinking that if they can just communicate some very smart and clever narrative to the people in the cult, they will be able to change their minds. But what that tends to accomplish is that you just put the person on the defensive. It’s actually even worse if you manage to get through to their intellectual faculty because then you have effectively demolished some faith-based thing that they have but you are offering nothing in return. Instead all they have now is feeling like they are an idiot and YOU know it. But they can still run back to the cult and stick around on principle. So all you did was make them dig their heels in, because now they KNOW all the rest of the world is able to prove that they are stupid and nobody wants to feel that. Basically in the cult they will have all their social contacts, support network, possibly even their financial security. Few people are going to choose feeling stupid, alone and destitute over that.
Unfortunately most people will jump at the chance to tell another person that their beliefs are stupid. And even more so they will jump at the chance to tell another person that they are morally inferior.
I was raised in a cult like religion and escaped it. I must now coexist with some of its believers or it will inevitably result in my homelessness and death.
The only two ways to combat dogmatic tribalism are either from within by infiltration, gaining trust, and leading, or by stimulating general curiosity and self growth in individuals. As a person grows, they will naturally question dogma.
Dogma is totally blind to all information sources from outside of the tribe. No amount of logic or emotions will override the tribal barriers of this collective dogma. In fact, opposition of any kind is a form of caring and serves to reinforce the tribal validity.
The opposite of both love and hate is indifference. If you are anything but indifferent, you are actually making the tribe and individual’s dogma stronger.
You must not care, or openly show resistance. This generally allows you to coexist with the individual outside of their tribal partition. Within this space, you may be able to stimulate a general curiosity that encourages self growth.
No one is able to force another human to learn or grow. Growth only comes from within.
You must also be open to tangibly supporting these people within your personal social support network. The cult’s primary authority comes from the mutually exclusive social support network. Even those that are more open to exiting the cult, are unable to do so as long as they are at a major evolutionary disadvantage of abandoning their personal mutually exclusive social support network.
Fuck Facebook, Twitter.
…That’s the big one. Folks will always get in cults, but never has it been so supercharged and weaponized by algorithmic machines that will, literally, hook into peoples’ brains to make a penny on mis/disinformation: https://www.reuters.com/investigations/meta-is-earning-fortune-deluge-fraudulent-ads-documents-show-2025-11-06/
Individual level:
Societal level: I have no idea, but I imagine media (movies, tv shows, the news, Tik Tok, etc) all have some influence there. Mostly in bad ways, unfortunately.
We don’t, that’s what freedom of religion means. If it gets overly militant or political, then there are already mechanisms that come and raid and disband them, which we have seen many times in the history of America
Sorry, hard disagree.
I also don’t want to argue. So feel free to say what you like about this, but I won’t respond. I’ll just drop some thoughts for consideration.
- Cults don’t have to be religious, and even then there’s a difference
- Harm doesn’t just come from being militant or political
- The mechanisms of disbanding suck as much as the criminal justice system and states in general do
- This isn’t just about the US
Jehovas Witnesses, Moonies, Scientology and so many more are still ongoing. Cult mechanism are literally some of closest stuff to brainwashing there is. They are malign. The followers are victims, and collectively this absolutely should be addressed.
Also, I am not offering any kind of solution here, I.e. to just go after the cults and disband them. As others have said it’s nuanced.
FWIW, being an ex-JW, I’ve very rarely heard any other ex-JW suggest banning them outright. Besides moral concerns, nobody really thinks it would work. By all means, come down on them for specific crimes (like hiding pedophiles), but blanket bans are a no.
What about in the case of the aforementioned Rajneeshpuram (prior to the mass food poisoning) where they politically overtook a town and armed themselves? They effectively seized the mechanisms you mentioned on a local level, and it wasn’t until people got directly and clearly hurt by them that a larger governing body interfered in a way which did eliminate their presence.
Yeah, the situation got resolved when harm came in. You gotta commit an actual crime to be punished right? I’m familiar with the documentary and actually have friends who continue to be followers of Osho’s teachings. It’s not all bad, there was a lot of very good outcomes for some people’s health and wellness there too, the documentary frames it as a situation where the second in command basically drugged him and became an egomaniac. Shit happens. When evaluating cults, which are basically just small religions, the best criteria is about how much they help their constituents and community vs how much do they demand from them. It’s worth noting that many of the cults of America’s past were more Christian branded and became gigantic, with some mix of outcomes. But the alternative of not allowing people to express the freedoms of religion and speech would be much worse in my opinion
Yeah, the situation got resolved when harm came in. You gotta commit an actual crime to be punished right?
I was meaning more so addressing the beliefs in absurdities before they result in committing atrocities, to paraphrase Voltaire.
Yeah you can’t do a thought police
I can’t do a thought police, but that is categorically what cults do. It’s not thought policing to advise people to be wary of thought policing or to promote scientific literacy and empathy.
If we wanted to protect people from cults we would ban all orginized religion.
Today, the government has banned all organized religion in order to curtail the fomenting of radical ideas in the isolation of cults throughout the country.
Feel free to calmly and scientifically, of your own free will, help us usher in a new era of rationlism and skeptical inquiry.
To this end, all entities receiving government funds will be reviewed for spiritual and dogmatic thinking. School library indexes will be purged of media containing unscientific themes which could lead to disorders of thought, titles include Harry Potter and The Very Hungry Caterpillar.
Additionally, the department of rational authority has banned the following archetypes of delusion:
Churches
Ashrams
Corporate wellness retreats
Reiki practices
Yoga studios
And any organization that uses the following words: Self care, hollistic, and manifesting.
How do you suggest we go about doing that?
It’s exactly what it sounds like.
No official places of worship.
If you want to have a connection with god then read your book and have your connection at home.
You don’t need a community to worship, and they shouldn’t be allowed to form religious communities that then fuck with our societies.
So we throw out freedom of assembly, freedom of association, freedom of speech and freedom of religion? Easy!
Sounds like “you can have freedom but only the way I want you to!” Which I assume leaning towards fascism.
Is freedom of religion truly discarded with their solution though? Anyways this is unenforceable on a political level unless you want to change the freedom of speech.
It’s a myth that “anyone” can get wrapped up in a cult. Their are many “filters” to joining a cult. Such as unusual dress, complicated social hierarchies, and tons of jargon. And they hit you with this stuff right up front; it’s not gradual. People who are not looking for community and meaning will be repelled.
So they’re filtering people who are not in a particularly credulous mental state. People who are not in a “joining” mentality. I’m not saying that educated, sophisticated, and intelligent people are immune. This all has to do with adjustment, maturity, and emotional stability.
So anyway, to mitigate the reach of cults, society should be organized to minimize alienation and isolation, while a multitude of sources of community and meaning should be encouraged. Check on the people you care about and make sure they’re getting on. Crush capitalism.
Anyone can get wrapped up in a cult, because just about everyone goes through a phase in their life when they would be primed for that mindset. Such as loss of a job with nowhere to go, or loss of a loved one.
It’s a myth that “anyone” can get wrapped up in a cult […] unusual dress, complicated social hierarchies, and tons of jargon
Red hats? Is MTG “in-group” sill? What is “Groyper”?
As of March 2025, about 36% of registered voters identified as MAGA.
Don’t pretend for a second this can’t happen to otherwise intelligent, educated people that you know. It can. It probably has. Those people are credulous, not stupid, and they found an identity.
This is a real and existential problem. Don’t minimize it.
