How the Logic of Cults Is Taking Over Modern Life

Several years ago, I told some friends that I had an idea for a second book. It would be called Everything Is a Cult. I’d noticed that in an age of declining religiosity, capitalism was filling the god-shaped hole left by the demise of organized religion with companies and services and products that were amassing a cultlike following in media, entertainment, and marketing. I never ended up writing the book. But last week, Sean Illing of The Gray Area podcast with Vox asked me to come on his show to talk about my thoughts on cults, identity, and the history of news media. Today, we’re running that conversation on this feed in a rare example of me getting interviewed on my own show. Enjoy!

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In the following excerpt, Derek explains his theory of cult-ification to Sean Illing, including how a monoculture arose and how it has since shattered.

Sean Illing: Derek Thompson, welcome to the show.

Derek Thompson: It’s great to be here. Thank you.

Illing: So we are going to do a deep dive, obviously, into all of this, but I want to start by just having you lay out, as generally as you can, your cult-ification thesis, which I love.

Thompson: I’m not sure that I’ve ever been able to go deep on it. I’m very interested in, and I’ve always been very interested in, culture, which I suppose is worth defining. Culture is the way that we think about the world and the way that we influence each other’s thoughts about the world. And that can be through entertainment, it can be through religion, it can be through fashion and clothes, but it’s the memes and ideas and the ideologies that not only influence our own sense of reality, but other people’s sense of reality. And I’ve always been interested in how people’s sense of reality comes to be. So you can start with the late 19th century, when the concept of a national reality was first possible, at least in America. You had technologies like the telephone and the telegraph that allowed newspapers to share information and report on information that truly was national. It allowed information to travel much faster than it had ever traveled before.

So suddenly, in the late 19th century, we had the possibility of a national, and even international, somewhat real-time shared reality. And that shared reality might have come to its fullest expression in the middle of the 20th century with the rise of television technology. You had just a handful of channels that were reaching tens of millions of people. And at the same time, you also had the rise of national newspapers and maybe the apogee of national newspapers in terms of their ability to monopolize local advertising revenue and become just enormous machines for getting tens of millions of Americans to read about a shared reality. And so you move from the 19th century with sort of the birth of this possibility of a shared reality [to] the 20th century, where you really have the rise of a kind of monoculture, which was never really possible for the vast majority of human history.

And what I’m interested in is the possibility that the internet has forever shattered that reality. That we are, in a way, going back to the pre-20th century, where culture is actually just a bunch of cults stacked on top of each other, a bunch of mini local realities stacked on top of each other, and that we maybe will never have anything like monoculture ever again. Because the internet, in a weird way, thrusts us back into the 19th century. And there are all sorts of fascinating things that can unspool from the fact that monoculture and shared reality, as we briefly came to understand it, is dead.

Illing: Yeah, I think basically all of that is right, and I’m going to try to resist the temptation to start chewing on too much of it because I don’t want to get ahead of ourselves here. I think it would be helpful first to also define another term that we’re going to throw around a lot here, and it deserves to be defined clearly so that people know what we’re talking about. And that term is “cult.” How do you define a cult?

Thompson: I think of a cult as a nascent movement outside the mainstream that often criticizes the mainstream and organizes itself around the idea that the mainstream is bad or broken in some way. So I suppose when I think about a cult, I’m not just thinking about a small movement with a lot of people who believe something fiercely. I’m also interested, especially, in the modern idea of cults being oriented against the mainstream. That is, when they form, they form as a criticism of what the people in that cult understand to be the mainstream. And cults, especially when we talk about them in religion, tend to be extreme, tend to be radical, tend to have really high social costs to belonging to them.

You, today, especially in the media and entertainment space, have this really interesting popularity of new influencers or new media makers adapting, as their core personality, the idea that the mainstream is broken, that news is broken, that mass institutions are broken, that the elite are in some way broken, and elite institutions are broken. The fragmentation of media that we’re seeing and the rise of this sort of anti-institutional, somewhat paranoid style of understanding reality, I see these things as rising together in a way that I find very interesting.

This excerpt was edited for clarity. Listen to the rest of the episode here and follow the Plain English feed on Spotify.

Host: Derek Thompson
Guest: Sean Illing
Producer: Devon Baroldi

Subscribe: Spotify