I just finished listening to the chilling podcast series Uncover: Escaping NXIVM, exploring one woman’s defection from a secretive self-help cult whose founder was recently arrested after an explosive exposé in the New York Times. Episode 20 explores my own connection to NXIVM, my fascination with cults, the cult of personality that drew me into filmmaking, and the fear that I might end up in a cult myself one day, or even worse (better?), that I might unintentionally create one of my own. In fact, I actually considered making a documentary about starting a fake cult a few years ago but another filmmaker beat me to the punch with the brilliant and hilarious Kumaré.
The Kumaré character is sort of like Borat meets Osho, the founder and leader of the Rajneesh cult whose you-need-to-see-it-to-believe-it rise and fall is chronicled in the incredible Netflix documentary, Wild Wild Country.
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I think part of what makes cults appealing is the phenomenon I discuss in my shame series called “Foreclosure”. This is caused by the collapse of an old belief system, which leaves a vacuum in your life. When you suddenly let go of a lot of dogma, you are left with… nothing. There’s a gaping void of ambiguity where your ideological sense of purpose and meaning used to be. You realize that you need to redefine virtually everything in your life, a monumental task that could take years!
This is the period that psychologist and shame expert Dr. Alan Downs calls “The Wanderer — the man who journeys from his home seeking something better but not certain of what it is he might find.” Foreclosure is the urge to fill that uncomfortable void with a complete, ready-made ideology, like a cult (or even a new career, life partner, or city).
So Downs urges caution around any desire for sudden, drastic change, like, say, running off to join a commune (like I am seriously considering). As interesting as that sounds, it may only serve to mask one’s shame void without actually resolving the quest for true personal meaning. According to Downs, this stage requires a slow and gradual search that ends at a place of “honest and radical authenticity”.
I recently finished listening to a podcast put out by the CBC called Uncover: Escaping NXIVM. If you don’t already know, NXIVM was a self-help company that many people believed was a cult. It’s been in the news a lot lately because its founder, Keith Raniere, was recently arrested on charges including sex trafficking. I won’t go into all the details because Uncover has already done such a thorough and amazing job in their 7-part series detailing Sarah Edmondson’s escape from the group. Sarah was an actress and high-ranking member and teacher of NXIVM over the last 12 years who recently defected from the group after being physically branded as part of a secret ceremony in a sub-group within NXIVM called DOS.
I’ve actually known about NXIVM for years because it became quite popular in Vancouver, thanks in large part to Sarah Edmondson herself. As you may know from previous episodes of the podcast, I grew up in Vancouver and I was a child actor, and there were numerous people in the local acting community who were either affiliated with NXIVM or had at least taken some NXIVM courses. And I had always viewed NXIVM as a cult. It wasn’t difficult to go online and read about the founder of NXIVM and his previous exploits with multi-level marketing schemes, basically pyramid schemes, and a lot of experts, like Rick Ross, had long labeled NXIVM a cult.
I’ve always been fascinated by cults. I think for two reasons. On the one hand, I can’t help but wonder, who are these people that get suckered into it? What is the psychology where you’re willing to give up everything, give up all your money and your old life and all your attachments in order to follow one person or one ideology? But at the same time, I’m also fascinated by the charismatics leaders. What kind of person becomes a cult leader and how do they wield this kind of control over people?
I can certainly understand the appeal. As I’ve mentioned before, for a long time I was convinced that I needed to be a famous filmmaker in order to prove that I had value as a human being. And I think there’s a certain cult-like quality to being an auteur filmmaker. There’s kind of a cult of personality. For example, with a filmmaker like Stanley Kubrick, people obsess over the tiniest details in his movies and maintain an almost unquestioning enjoyment and championing of his films. And I bought into that. I was a follower in the cult of Stanley Kubrick. When he was alive, he seemed like such a mysterious, powerful, talented artist and I just wanted to worship him and learn from him and be just like him. You see this happen with all kinds of powerful leaders. Steve Jobs is probably the perfect example. Our culture is so fascinated by him and the way he thought and the things he achieved, even though by all accounts he was also a giant asshole. I think part of me always coveted that kind of power, that kind of charisma, that kind of appeal. The people at the top of these organizations or religious groups are literally worshipped by other humans, so it seems like they must have more intrinsic value than the rest of us. That they must be better in some way. That they must literally be at the top of the hierarchy.
At one point, I had an idea to make a documentary that followed me trying to start my own cult to see if I could actually convince anyone to join it. But I abandoned the project when I discovered that another film with the exact same premise had just been made. It was called Kumaré, and it followed a New York film student pretending to be an Indian yogic guru. I’m happy to report that it turned out to be quite a brilliant and hilarious film. The filmmaker actually did succeed in getting a handful of dedicated followers — and I don’t want to ruin it — but at the end, in his own indirect way, he has to come clean and reveal the truth.
It also brings to mind the recent Netflix documentary, Wild Wild Country. For weeks after that documentary was released, every day would text me. “Oh my goodness, you have to watch Wild Wild Country”. But I didn’t want to get addicted to yet another series, so I was putting it off. Then one I was on Twitter reading an interesting quote that someone had re-tweeted by a thinker I’d never heard of named Osho. I was like, who is this Osho character? In my mind, I was picturing a Japanese Zen master. So I went on the internet and I started reading excerpts from all these different books that Osho had written. Eventually, I discovered that Osho is, in fact, the cult leader from the documentary Wild Wild Country. That was the moment I realized that I really need to watch the documentary because here I was about to buy one of his books. To be honest, I thought his ideas sounded really interesting.
As someone who loves self-help and who loves to share what he’s learned with other people, I find these documentaries about cults rather chilling. I’m always worried that I am either going to end up becoming one of the blind followers who gets abused, or becoming one of the abusive gurus who go too far.
In some cases, such as Wild Wild Country, it’s clear that the cult started with a message that the leader truly believed in — a message that was really valuable for a lot of people. Part of what makes Wild Wild Country such a fascinating documentary (one I highly recommend to any self-help seeker or leader), is that you come away uncertain about who to blame exactly. It’s not entirely clear how much of the mayhem and unraveling of the cult was actually Osho’s fault, or the fault of some misguided followers, like his personal secretary. That said, though Osho is portrayed as being largely absent, I think culture always starts at the top. It’s clear that the group grew and grew to the point where they gained so much power and money that lost touch with reality. And as always seems to happen, a hubristic entitlement led them down a path where they started to abuse that power. They started to believe that they were above the law, that they really were gods in their own way.
And I can completely see how that would happen.
My quest into self-help really is about making myself happier, about increasing my wellbeing, and about improving the world and helping other people. Sometimes I feel like I really have connected someone with an idea that has helped them, that has improved their life. And that feels great. It feels amazing. But at the same time, my ego is always lurking behind the scenes, and my ego always wants to get paid.
Anything I do for the sheer good of helping people or from a sense of altruism always ends up feeding into my ego. My ego says, “Well, come on. What’s in it for us?” My ego wants to take every success I feel and package it into something that it can use to bolster my sense of value, my sense of personal worth. My ego really wants to put me on a pedestal. To put me back on the fictional hierarchy of human value. To say, “Look, you’re better than other people!” And I can see why my ego wants to do that. My ego is just trying to protect me. Protect me both physically and psychologically. And part of its schema for protecting me psychologically is to create these illusions of identity that are connected to things like success, respect, and a lot of external validation from other people. My ego builds all of that into a kind of protective fortress that keeps me safe from any sense of being unlovable, worthless, valueless — essentially from shame.
It’s a constant struggle to learn new facts that I think are valuable and to share them with other people, but at the same time to keep my ego in check. Every time I have some kind of success, I have to recognize that it doesn’t make me any better than the people I am trying to help. It doesn’t even make me any better than I was before, per se. Success doesn’t actually change my value in any way. Instead, I try to look at it more as fulfilling my potential. A potential that I always had. A potential that I believe everybody has. A kind of equal potential that we all share in. But a potential that none of us needs to fulfill either. Intellectually, I don’t believe that we actually need to achieve anything in order to be valuable, worthy, lovable human beings. We are already all enough, exactly the way we are. However, my ego and my emotions — which are conditioned by my upbringing in our culture of hierarchy and comparison and shame — tell a different story. They insidiously try to undermine what I intellectually know to be true, which is that we are all of equal value. So emotionally, part of me still wants to feel the rush of being “better than” other people, of being famous, of being the best. But intellectually, I don’t want to want that.
So I can see that the more you succeed at helping people, the greater danger you are in of losing this battle with your ego. The more you surround yourself with people who think that your ideas are brilliant and want to follow you and hold you above themselves, the harder it is to keep your sense of equality.
In some cases though, it doesn’t seem like the cult even begins from a well-meaning place. NXIVM for example. If you look at its founder Keith Raniere, before he started NXIVM he was already running a money-making pyramid scheme. In fact, Keith Raniere has often billed himself as “the smartest man in the world”, with one of the highest IQs, supposedly. It seems that he has always just been looking for a way to elevate himself and make money through yet another multi-level marketing scheme, and self-help was the perfect way to kill two dubious birds with one dubious stone.
I’ve never taken any NXIVM courses, but I would! I would try pretty much any self-help program. I’m open to any crazy personal betterment scheme. I would try it at least once, no matter what it is, because I just want to experience as many different viewpoints as I can. If it’s total bullshit, I hope that I will be able to recognize it as such.
But from what I have read about NXIVM, and heard on the Uncovered podcast, it sounds like Keith cobbled together a bunch of self-help ideas that already existed in other programs (some of which I think are quite good) and created his own doctrine using different names. It doesn’t feel like he gathered these ideas because he really was trying to make the world a better place. It seems like it was always designed to get him rich and to give him the kind of prestige, value, and superiority that he craved.
Another reason I suspect this, is that built right into the core of NXIVM is an inherently hierarchical structure. Right from the very beginning, Keith changed his own name to “Vanguard” to differentiate himself from everyone else and cement his place at the top. I think if you are interested in learning self-help, or interested in teaching self-help, one of the things you should absolutely avoid is changing your name. I know a lot of people do this in Buddhism and other religions, and I understand the appeal of shedding your “old”, “misguided”, or “conditioned” self. But frankly, I think the more you can stay grounded in your totally mundane, pedestrian, imperfect humanity, the less likely it is that you are going to elevate yourself into some kind of prophet or deity.
Another telling example is that NXIVM created outfits, a system of sashes of different colors that people wore to show what rank they had within the fake hierarchy that Keith Raniere had invented. Not only that, but they even taught followers a series of secret handshakes that physically delineated who was of higher and lower rank. All of these things — changing names, creating this colored sash system, and enforcing handshakes — codified hierarchy, superiority and inferiority, power and control right into the very fabric of NXIVM. Just as important as any of Keith’s “ideas”, was the hierarchy he constructed.
That’s always something to look out for when you are getting into self-help or when you are interested in teaching self-help. Any time you create hierarchy, you are in danger of creating a shame environment in which some people appear to have more “value” than others, which inherently undermines equality, fairness, connection, and community. Another thing to look out for is the creation of proprietary language. Any time you take a concept and invent a new term for it, it’s like you’re creating a secret language that widens the divide between you — the inside circle, the chosen people, the smart ones — and everybody else in the world. It’s also a clever tactic to earn revenue. If your teachings use different terms that no one’s heard before, it makes all of the ideas seem new and fresh, as if you had invented them and only you could possibly teach them.
That being said, there’s also a branding angle that makes sense. If you want someone to remember a great life-changing idea, it helps to be able to concoct a very simple way for them to remember it — a buzzword or catchphrase. In fact, I’m already guilty of this. I have been using the phrase “micro-ideologies” (which I think I invented) to describe what is essentially what other people would call a “mental model”. However, in my defense, I like having “ideology” right there in the title so that you know as you say it that it’s just a belief.
I guess “mental model” kind of achieves the same thing. A mental model isn’t saying it’s a truth. It’s just a kind of model with which to filter your thinking through. But for me, calling it a micro-ideology make it just so clear that this is a belief, it isn’t 100% true, and it’s something you are choosing to buy into. And it’s small! It’s not an overarching belief system. It’s just one little idea. That being said, it’s a slippery slope. Maybe I’m going to copyright micro-ideologies™ and come up with a bunch of other buzzwords that really just mean things I’ve stolen from Brené Brown or other smarter people than me and start my own cult…
In a way, it’s about power. It’s about how much power you as a leader or a teacher create for yourself and hoard, and how much power you give to the people that you are trying to teach or to your “followers”. I think the more autonomy and power that you can give to anyone who is coming to you for advice and looking up to you, the more you empower that person and even more important, keep yourself grounded. The problem is that the psychology of some of the people who are following these leaders is not helping to keep them grounded. In a way, I think what makes a cult so appealing is that you don’t have to think. It’s a way to mask the incredible uncertainty of life by deciding that this person is going to lead me and they have all the answers. You’re taking the responsibility off of yourself and essentially allowing yourself to become a kind of child again. I really do think a cult recreates a kind of parent-child relationship. It’s no wonder that many cult leaders are called “father” or “mother” and their followers are often called their “children” because that really is the psychology.
Followers are essentially declaring, “I don’t feel comfortable with having to make decisions in the world because it’s so complicated, it’s so scary, there’s so much uncertainty, there’s so much possibility for mistakes and for wrongdoing, that I would rather abdicate that responsibility to someone else who I believe has more intelligence, more inherent value, and more power than I do”. And so in order for that abdication of power and responsibility to work, in order to feel that child-like sense of safety and comfort, of being taken care of, you have to believe that that person is better than you. And of course, that belief just plays right into the hierarchy and power imbalance that leads to the seemingly inevitable abuse of power in any cult.
I would be wary of any belief system that doesn’t promote free-thinking and personal autonomy. For me, it’s more important to teach people how to think for themselves than it is to teach people what they should be thinking. The further I get on my journey of self-discovery and self-help or personal betterment (whatever you want to call it), the more I realize how totally subjective everything is. So any kind of belief system that claims to have THE answers is something I am inherently skeptical of. With my own message about shame, my real goal is to free people so that they no longer feel pressure to follow the viewpoints of others. So they have the autonomy and freedom to realize that in this world of subjective viewpoints it’s up to them to determine what is true for themselves.
So for me, the only kind of cult that I could really get behind is one that has a plurality of viewpoints. If there’s a cult that helps wake you up from following somebody else’s viewpoint and helps you find your own — even if it is completely at odds with the rest of the cult — that to me would be the only kind of indoctrination that I could get behind. One that frees you to be you, exactly the way you are. Which isn’t to say that you don’t have potential for growth and room to improve and healthy accomplishments and achievements that you could strive for. It just says that all of those things have to come from you. You have to be the driver, the creator, and the auditor of all of those ideas and you can’t abdicate that responsibility to anyone else.
Discovering that you have to take complete responsibility for your own life is scary. You realize that every mistake falls squarely onto you. You can’t blame anyone else. But at the same time, there is this incredible liberation that comes when you realize that the only opinion that really matters about what a “mistake” is, or what’s “right” and what’s “wrong”, is your own! At the end of the day, you are the one who gets to decide what is important to you, what is valuable to you, and how much you value yourself. It’s sort of like a one-person cult. You are both the leader and the follower of that cult, and you try to make rules that actually work. As the leader, you look for wisdom that is true, intelligent, and helpful — ideas that really make sense. And as the follower, you try to follow those rules as best you can, even when they’re difficult. And when you’re able to make great rules that you believe in and actually follow them, that’s when you are living with integrity. That’s when you are living a life of intention. You are no longer being controlled by the ideas or the opinions of other people. And that’s when you are truly outside of shame.