Cultish
The language cults use
Description
In November 1978, more than nine hundred people died at Jonestown in Guyana, most of them by drinking a cyanide-laced grape-flavored drink at the instruction of Jim Jones. The phrase that outlived them — "drinking the Kool-Aid" — is still thrown around in meetings and group chats to mean someone who has swallowed the party line. We say it lightly. Amanda Montell, a linguist by training, noticed that we almost never stop to ask the obvious question underneath the joke: how does anyone talk another person into something that extreme, one sentence at a time?
That question is the engine of her 2021 book, Cultish. Montell's wager is that the force holding coercive groups together isn't hypnosis, drugs, or some special weakness in the people who join. It's language — a specific, learnable toolkit of words, phrases, chants, and labels that does the actual work of binding members, redrawing their sense of reality, and making the exits feel unthinkable. She grew up partly inside this material: her father spent his teenage years in Synanon, a drug-rehab community that curdled into something far darker, and his stories gave her an ear for how the talk itself operates.
What makes her approach unsettling is the range she gives it. Montell refuses to quarantine "cultish" language to Jonestown and Heaven's Gate. She hears the same mechanics in places that would be horrified by the comparison — and insists the difference is one of degree, not of kind. The point isn't to flatten everything into a conspiracy. It's to notice the machinery while it's running, in daylight, in rooms we walk into willingly.
The question we’re asking : How does language — not force or brainwashing — actually do the work of pulling people in and keeping them there?What we’ll see : How a handful of ordinary-sounding verbal devices build belonging, shut down doubt, and draw the line between us and them — and where else those same devices turn up.
Table of contents
01 Chapter 1 — The word that should have been a warning sign
Montell starts by dismantling the comforting story we tell ourselves about who joins cults. The cliché is that followers are gullible, broken, or stupid — people unlike us. The research she leans on says the opposite. The ones most susceptible tend to be curious, idealistic, often above-average in intelligence, frequently at a transitional moment: a move, a loss, a graduation, a breakup. In other words, people looking for meaning and community at the exact moment they're most open to a story that offers both. That's not a character flaw. It's being human on a hard day.
If anyone could be recruited, then the recruiting can't rely on finding the weak. It has to rely on something that works on the strong too. Montell's answer is that the lever is almost always linguistic. Before a group changes what you believe, it changes how you speak — and changing how you speak quietly changes what you can think. She draws on the long-running idea in linguistics that language shapes perception: give people a new vocabulary and you've handed them a new set of lenses, often without their noticing they've put them on.
02 Chapter 2 — Thought-terminating clichés and the art of the shutdown
The most quietly powerful device in Montell's catalog is one she borrows from the psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton, who studied Chinese thought reform in the 1950s: the thought-terminating cliché. It's a stock phrase, deployed to shut down debate, soothe discomfort, and foreclose questions before they can be fully asked. It sounds like wisdom. It functions like a door closing. "It is what it is." "Everything happens for a reason." "Don't let the devil get a foothold." The phrase arrives exactly when a doubt is forming, and it dissolves the doubt without ever addressing it.
What makes these phrases effective is that they feel like answers. A member starts to wonder why a promised reward never came, or why the leader's rules keep changing, and the cliché is right there, pre-loaded, ready to be spoken by the member themselves. That's the elegant, horrible part: the group doesn't have to censor you if you've internalized the phrases that do the censoring for you. You police your own mind, in the group's borrowed words, and experience it as peace rather than as suppression.
03 Chapter 3 — Loaded language and the us-against-them vocabulary
Alongside the shutdown phrases, Montell maps a second family of devices, also drawn partly from Lifton: loaded language. This is the practice of packing enormous, unexamined meaning into a few insider words, so that a single term carries a whole ideology without ever having to argue for it. A group doesn't say "people who disagree with our leader"; it has a word — often a dehumanizing one — that does the dismissing automatically. To use the word is to accept the judgment folded inside it.
The sharpest edge of this vocabulary is the line it draws between insiders and outsiders. Montell notes how reliably coercive groups invent a term for the world beyond the group — the unenlightened, the normies, the systemites, the worldly. The label makes outsiders into a category rather than individuals, and it makes leaving unthinkable, because to leave is to become one of them. The vocabulary builds the wall; members just learn to name the people on the far side of it.
04 Chapter 4 — The same scripts, in open-plan offices
Where Montell's book earns its discomfort is in refusing to stop at the obvious targets. Having built her toolkit on Jonestown and Heaven's Gate, she turns it on the places we file under "normal": multilevel marketing companies, boutique fitness studios, wellness brands, and the startup economy. The claim is not that your spin class is Jim Jones. It's that the same devices — the insider lexicon, the thought-terminating cliché, the us-and-them labels, the ritual repetition — run through all of them, doing gentler work for lower stakes.
Multilevel marketing is her clearest case. Recruits are handed a vocabulary ("bosses," "hun," "opportunity," "abundance mindset") that reframes a losing financial proposition as empowerment, and a set of clichés ("you just have to believe," "are you coachable?") that turn a recruit's doubt into a personal failing rather than a flaw in the business. Fitness brands build chants and insider names and a fierce distinction between members and everyone else. Startups talk in missions, change-the-world language, and the quiet implication that questioning the hustle means you're not a believer.
05 Conclusion
We started with a grape-flavored drink and a phrase that turned mass death into an office quip. Montell's point, arrived at the long way, is that the quip is closer to the truth than we think — not because we're all one step from a compound, but because the machinery that led to Jonestown is made of ordinary parts. Private words, stock phrases that end arguments, labels that sort the world into us and them, chants that feel like love. These aren't rare ingredients. They're lying around in every community that wants to hold itself together.
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