Episode Two: From Charisma to Control: Understanding Cult Leaders

Cults and the Culting of America

In this episode of "Cults and the Culting of America," hosts Scot Loyd and Daniella Mestyanek Young delve into the concept of charismatic leadership within cults. They begin by discussing how the idea of a charismatic leader is often associated with cults, highlighting that many of these leaders are typically perceived as white males. Daniella explains that while cults have been largely defined by white western academics, the underlying structure of patriarchy predates even white supremacy and capitalism, making it a fundamental aspect of coercive control in cults.

The conversation touches on notable examples of charismatic leaders, including Keith Raniere, David Berg, and Jim Jones, as well as Elizabeth Holmes and Adam Neumann. Daniella emphasizes that charismatic authority is not just about charm but involves qualities that make people grant these leaders extraordinary influence. She discusses how these leaders often transition from being charismatic figures to being deified by their followers, creating a system where their personal mythology becomes integral to the group's identity.

Scot and Daniella explore the psychological and social mechanisms that make individuals susceptible to charismatic leaders. They discuss the concept of "front-of-the-room advantage," where the mere act of being in a position of authority can make a person seem more credible and likable. They also highlight the role of rhetoric and persuasive communication in enhancing a leader's influence, noting how leaders use techniques like "trance talk" to captivate and manipulate their audience.

The episode concludes with a discussion on the importance of critical thinking and diverse social connections in protecting oneself from falling prey to cult-like influence. Daniella shares her "guru gotcha" checklist, a tool she developed to help identify potential red flags in leaders and groups. Both hosts stress the need for self-awareness and skepticism, encouraging listeners to examine the charismatic leaders in their lives critically. They also preview upcoming episodes, including an exploration of the role of the "skinny white woman" in cult dynamics and the broader impact of group psychology on individual behavior.

Links:

• Daniella Mestyanek Young's book: From Bookshop.org
• A Signed Copy of Uncultured:
• The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Disagree About Religion and Politics by Jonathan Haidt
• Influence: The Power of Persuasion by Dr. Robert Cialdini
• Scarred by Sarah Edmondson
• Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari
• Dr. Janja Lalich's work and resources on cults and coercive control
• Connect with Daniella on social media
  • TikTok, Patreon, Instagram
  • Youtube
• Connect with Scot Loyd's social media (TikTok)
• Daniella's other podcast: Hey White Women

**Keywords**: cult, cult leader, people, charismatic leader, leader, purity, call, Daniella, woman, rhetoric, groups, skinny, idea, charisma, religion, white, followers, book, white male, life

Transcript:

**Speaker 1**: This is Cults and the Culting of America, a podcast with scholar of cults, extreme groups, and extremely bad leadership, Daniella Mestyanek Young.

**Scot Loyd**: Welcome to Cults and the Culting of America podcast. I'm Scot Loyd, along with my friend Daniella Mestyanek Young. Daniella, how are you today?

**Daniella**: Doing good! I'm excited to talk about charismatic leadership because everybody gets confused by this one.

**Scot**: Did I get "Mestyanek" right this time?

**Daniella**: Yes, you did. Very good.

**Scot**: You were telling me during your time in the army that there were some gentlemen who were actually afraid to mispronounce it.

**Daniella**: Yeah, I always joke that people thought I was so scary because, in the army, that's how you have to present yourself if you're a woman. People were so scared of me that everyone just learned how to pronounce Mestyanek. It wasn't until my very last unit that people started calling me Captain M, which would be more normal in the US military when you have a complicated name.

**Scot**: Nice. My name is Scot Loyd, a little less complicated—one T and one L. I like to joke that my family couldn't afford the extra consonants. But here we are today, and I'm thrilled that all of you are along for the ride. Last time we were together, Daniella, we unpacked a little bit about your 10 characteristics of a cult. The first one on that list is something that, if you asked people what they associate with a cult or a cult group, they would come up with: the charismatic leader. So, what do we need to understand about the charismatic leader's role in a cult? And am I wrong to assume that most of these charismatic leaders are white males?

**Daniella**: First of all, the acknowledgment that cults have been largely defined by white academics, white western academics. When we actually start looking at what we're really talking about—when individuals come under the coercive control of a group—those leaders can look like a lot of things. But the OG cult system, even before white supremacy and capitalism, is patriarchy. Coercive control, the way we see it in our world, is tacked right along patriarchy. We'll talk about this in next week's episode on the "skinny white woman" who's in parentheses next to the cult leader in white-led American cults. When women are the cult leaders, as happened in my cult, Children of God, they still have to fight patriarchy, so they have to fight harder, and society celebrates more when they go down.

In my charismatic leader chapter in my forthcoming book, *The Culting of America*, we are looking at your typical white male cult leaders you think of—Keith Raniere, David Berg of Children of God, Jim Jones of Jonestown. We're also looking at Elizabeth Holmes of Theranos, David Petraeus of the military, and Adam Neumann of WeWork. Elizabeth Holmes is an example of someone who still had to fight harder to build her cult and maintain control than a man would have. She had to have a man next to her giving her validity, and society really celebrates much harder when she goes down and demands justice in ways they don't for men like Adam Neumann, who walked away with billions of dollars while she walked away with a jail sentence.

**Scot**: And that's interesting when we talk about the idea of charisma, especially in the context of the United States. For a large part of my career, I served as a communications professor. One of the subjects I taught every semester was group dynamics and leadership, where we looked at how a group develops. What do we look at when we define the term leadership? In a cult or cultish-like group, these characteristics become magnified and are leveraged to manipulate others for harm. How do we define charisma? For a long time in the United States, if you were taller than everyone else, that was defined as charisma. Think of Abraham Lincoln, right?

**Daniella**: The first problem is there are two things that charisma means, and we only think of one of them. We almost always think charisma equals charming, and also tall. It is true that more CEOs are tall. Taylor Swift is very tall. People always tell me I have tall energy when they realize I'm only five-five. I think it's this larger-than-life thing. But the reality is, when we are saying charismatic leader, we're talking about charismatic authority. Max Weber defined this concept. He secularized something he saw from religion: we give people authority over us due to some qualities, some extra-human, extraordinary qualities they have. He defines two types of authority: power and violence authority, and charismatic authority.

In any situation where you are given power because of qualities about you, that job, that degree, you are in a position of charismatic authority. It's not just charm. Cult leaders often are not charming. A lot of times, they're bumbling idiots, but they're good at traits we associate with charm and charisma in our minds. For example, something called trance talk—saying a bunch of interesting-sounding, smart-sounding things, jumping from topic to topic. In *The Vow*, you see Keith Raniere doing this. People don't catch on. By the way, ask me what my secret was when I didn't know how to answer essay questions in college. My secret was to write three more paragraphs. The professor will forget you didn't actually answer the question. That's what cult leaders do. They eventually start turning themselves from charismatic leaders into gods. That's when we see people emulating their qualities, celebrating their birthdays like a holiday.

**Scot**: And it's a very predictable road to deification as well. I'm laughing because that was common for me growing up in the United Pentecostal Church. The leader of the church, our pastor, who was exclusively a white male, was always venerated. His birthday was celebrated, any special days for the pastoral family. Evangelicals even have Pastor Appreciation Month in October. If you were a good parishioner, you were supposed to laud all these accolades, gifts, money, and vacations on your leader.

**Daniella**: We also see the mythologizing of the leader's origin story or the group's origin story. For example, I have two college degrees, and at no point did I know who the president of the university was until I had to meet him because I was the valedictorian. Why do you need to know who the leader of Bob Jones University is? When you start seeing pictures of the leader everywhere—US military looking right at you—that's part of deification and the weapon of likability and familiarity. We are friendlier towards people we are familiar with. When you walk in every morning and see your commander's face on the wall, they become more charismatic to you, and you are more likely to feel warmly toward them when you actually see them. It's why we think it's appropriate to walk up to an actress or actor in real life and introduce ourselves. We feel like we know them and love them because of that familiarity. These patterns are not original. Dr. Janja Lalich says they all went to the same Messiah school.

**Scot**: You bring up exceptionalism. Not only does the leader think they are exceptional, but cult leaders play with terms like destiny and fate. Destiny has a wonderful connotation; everyone wants to embrace their destiny and avoid their fate. Cult leaders create a negative fate like hell or some version of hell—poverty, unpopularity, loneliness. They create their version of heaven and say, "Follow me, and you'll fulfill your destiny and avoid this fate."

**Daniella**: Yes, and with the destiny thing, they always blame individuals for systemic problems. If anything good happens, it's the cult or the leader. If anything bad happens, it's you. This trains you to think this way. I realized that cult leaders often promise something in another life, world, plane, body, or state. You can't reach enlightenment because it's a con. The cult leader knows it's a con. It's significant that Jim Jones didn't drink the Kool-Aid; he died from a bullet to the head. Cult leaders get caught up in their own hullabaloo, but their followers believe in the ends justifying the means. The cult leader knows the whole time. When we look back at all those cult leaders, we can see that since childhood, they are manipulating, building their worldview, and trying to build something with a following.

**Scot**: Cult leaders exploit the need within all of us to think of ourselves as exceptional, to think our lives have meaning and purpose. The loudest and most bold among us are often the most insecure. Human nature makes us follow loud, bold people, especially if they promise purpose and meaning. They also have the stick of punishment—eternal damnation, poverty, loneliness. Follow them, and you'll avoid this fate.

**Daniella**: Right, I call it the front-of-the-room advantage. When you're in an audience and hear someone introduced as the speaker, you think they're impressive. I teach veterans in my networking classes to put themselves in front of the mic as often as they can. People will believe someone put them there. If nobody else is questioning around you, that's social proof. Cult leaders rely on this heavily. They'll flabbergast you and

keep going. If nobody else is saying anything, you think it must be okay. When we started studying cults, we believed humans were much more rational than they are. "I think, therefore I am," like René Descartes really screws us over a bit. Humans are not rational; we hardly ever make decisions based on logic. We make most of our decisions based on recency bias and social proof. What worked for us most recently or what everyone else around us is doing. These evolutionary drives keep you alive. This comes into play with the charismatic leader. Some bigger cults have been through a thing called routinization. Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses will say, "We're not a cult; no charismatic leader." If you have to use a loophole to get out of the definition of a cult, we have an answer now, and it's called charisma by proxy. We now know large groups of people can go down illogical paths without calling each other out on it.

**Scot**: There's a good resource that unpacks that further—*The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Disagree About Religion and Politics* by Jonathan Haidt, a moral psychologist. One of the best books I’ve read on this. In public speaking, I tell my students, "With great power comes great responsibility." Public speaking is the number one fear in America. Seinfeld joked people would rather be in the box at a funeral than give the eulogy. But if you manage that apprehension, you set yourself apart. For our listeners, to make students less susceptible to cults, get them involved in debate. It’s a great activity. You can't rely solely on charismatic skills; logic is involved. It takes you out of the binary world and helps you see all possibilities. High control groups want you locked into binary thinking—"my way or hell."

**Daniella**: The first thing anyone will say if you call a group they love a cult is, "Not a cult, free to leave anytime." That line is both loaded language and a thought-stopping cliché. It's not true. Cults have high entrance and exit costs—not always money. It's anything you lose if you're not in the group. In both the cult and the military I grew up in, leaders would say, "This is not a democracy." You are reminded everything you have can be gone if you disagree. People say, "Oh, you're free to leave anytime." I say, "Do you love everything about your job? No? Why don't you just leave?"

**Scot**: Exactly. When we talk about charisma and the charismatic leader, I thought about good questions to ask if evaluating whether a leader is a cult leader. These are good questions for any leader. One is, what platform of privilege are they speaking from that gives them this advantage? In our society, patriarchy and white supremacy give white males a place of status. The system was produced by people like me, a white male, for my benefit. It's important to acknowledge that. If your leader isn’t doing that, maybe that’s a problem.

**Daniella**: Social media has been good for cult leaders. It helps people get into and out of cults. I say that in the 60s and 70s, when my grandfather joined the Children of God, if you wanted to isolate an American citizen, you had to take them away to your compound in Texas or Brazil because we all watched the same TV shows, listened to the same news. Even if you were on polar opposite sides of an issue, you shared this reality. These days, isolation can just be in your bedroom on a computer, and you can totally be in a cult. It has shifted things.

I built a "guru gotcha" checklist to keep myself in check. Anybody who knows a lot about cult leaders and bad guys is dangerous. People say, "Should we be scared of you?" Yes, if I invite you to my compound, maybe say no. I fought the social media thing because I don't like the concept of influencers. I make sure 50% of my content comes from others. I want people to see that. Here's the "guru gotcha" checklist:

1. Heavy focus on your own uniqueness.

2. Intense come-here-go-away behavior to keep you off balance.

3. Always asking you to prove your loyalty.

4. Lack of intellectual humility or willingness to learn from others.

5. Constantly blurring the edges of their expertise.

6. Trance talk.

7. Asking followers to pay for their essence, presence, or energy.

8. Handing out life advice they are not qualified to give.

9. Some form of purity from their followers.

10. Intense appearance and attitude control of followers.

11. Talking poorly about other leaders in their industry.

12. Blaming systemic failures on individual action.

13. Blurred sexual boundaries or using young women or men to entice followers.

14. Requesting followers to leave their jobs and follow them.

15. Threatens you when you leave or speak poorly of them.

**Scot**: That’s a lot to talk about. Let's return to purity and power. Growing up in the United Pentecostal Church, purity and power were hallmarks. Policing behavior, dress, and hairstyles of women were emphasized. It was steeped in white supremacy. The skinny white woman was the ideal image. Purity was about maintaining the look of the 1930s and 1940s—no jewelry, no makeup, no cutting hair. This was preached as giving power and authority with angels and God.

**Daniella**: Purity requirements are in every situation of coercive control. They’re not just sexual purity but any black-and-white rule. I explain it like this: I don't eat wheat because I'm allergic to it, so it's a black-and-white rule but not a purity requirement. Groups that don't eat gluten for health are under purity. Purity requirements are crucial because they make people police each other and themselves. They are impossible because humans are bad at being perfect and pure. Cult leaders themselves never follow purity requirements. They are for everyone else. They turn you into your own jailer. Purity requirements are usually time-consuming and keep you busy. Skinny is a powerful purity requirement in our society. It’s a visual presentation of sacrifice.

**Scot**: Speaking of purity culture, in the United Pentecostal Church, there was a big emphasis on women's behavior and bodies. There wasn’t that emphasis for men. You shared part of your story in *Uncultured*—a sex cult. How did the leaders reconcile purity culture?

**Daniella**: In the Children of God, the purity requirement was you couldn’t say no. You were not trusting God if you said no. You were letting your individuality and desires interfere. There was a comic called "The Girl Who Wouldn’t" training us from a young age. Outside the cult, I didn’t know how to say no. Purity requirements in the Children of God involved no underwear while sleeping, women not wearing bras. Skinny is one of the most powerful purity requirements. Cult leaders want to keep you isolated, tired, busy, skinny, pregnant, and hungry. Sometimes it’s the opposite of skinny. Scientology forced abortions. Heaven’s Gate had no sex, no children. It’s about controlling sex, not purity. Any organization telling consenting adults who they can and can’t sleep with is controlling.

**Scot**: I appreciate you sharing that. Let’s return to the idea of rhetoric. Charismatic leaders harness rhetoric's power. Hitler is a classic example, although his style of speaking seems like just yelling. Symbolic Convergence Theory by Ernest Bormann from the University of Minnesota theorizes that people develop and move forward around ideas communicated effectively by leaders. These rhetorical visions organize and control civilization. How is a rhetorical vision cast in cults, and how do we insulate ourselves from falling prey?

**Daniella**: I love *Sapiens* by Yuval Noah Harari. Religions, corporations, organizations—all these groups are stories we tell ourselves. Religions are stories societies craft to explain things. Cults are not religions; they are cons from day one. Elizabeth Holmes knew she wasn’t transforming blood testing. Cults are about the leader’s control. Religions aim for society to work; cults don’t. Religions are not comparable to cults. Religions are useful to cult leaders because they require faith, which can be manipulated.

**Scot**: Manipulation vs. motivation is a key difference. Motivation is mutually beneficial; manipulation benefits only the leader. Consensual sales involve providing actual products that help people. Manipulations involve false promises. Understanding this helps identify manipulation.

**Daniella**: Anyone who knows about cult leaders can become one. Wake up every day and choose to use your rhetorical skills for good, not to manipulate. Jim Jones could have been remembered as an early civil rights leader if he died in the 1950s. Instead, he chose to use his skills for evil. Charismatic leaders must choose daily to use their influence for good.

**Scot**: Engaging in competitive debate helps build critical thinking. It challenges prevailing assumptions and teaches you to look at other positions. If you’re in a space where everyone agrees with you, you’re susceptible to harm. Ideas must be challenged to avoid trauma.

**Daniella**: Social connections are crucial. Make sure your children have diverse social connections that don’t overlap. High exit costs make leaving hard. Cancel culture isn’t real; it’s consequence culture. Diversifying connections helps navigate challenges. Understanding your own biases and staying agnostic about being the good guy is crucial. Cults thrive on binary thinking.

**Scot**: In our concluding episodes, we’ll talk about the importance of groups and community. Next episode, we'll explore the role of the "skinny white woman" next

to the charismatic leader.

**Daniella**: Thanks for listening with open minds. Think about the charismatic leaders in your life. It’s not about labeling but learning to navigate groups and systems. Find us on social media. We’ll be doing this podcast every week.

**Scot**: Thank you. Like, subscribe, and share the podcast to help us reach more people. For Daniella Mestyanek Young, I’m Scot Loyd. See you on the next episode of Cults and the Culting of America.

**Outro**: Thank you for joining us for this episode of Cults and the Culting of America. Follow Daniella on social media and subscribe to her Patreon for exclusive content. Pick up her book *Uncultured*. Until next time, I’m Scot Loyd for Daniella Mestyanek Young.