Good Cults?

Some thoughts about NXIVM, the human potential movement in general, and a natural tendency to certain kinds of religious formation.

Going into winter break this year, I knew I wanted to write something about the idea of “good cults.” (That is, before I stated writing this post, at which point I realized that you could probably title this entire Substack, “In Search of Good Cults.”) With that mission in mind, I’d planned to re-visit the HBO series The Vow, which explores the rise and fall of the NXIVM organization.

I’d planned to re-watch the show, mind you, not to get obsessed. In the past week, I’ve consumed Sarah Edmondson’s memoir about NXIVM, and India Oxenberg’s. Catherine Oxenberg’s memoir is in my queue, and so is Toni Natalie’s. I’m about halfway through Sarah Berman’s Don’t Call It a Cult, which is a journalistic study of NXIVM, and I just finished Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism by Amanda Montell, which is a general study of cults — and which I recommend.

I’m going to use the term “cult” pretty liberally here. Let’s say the working definition is something like, “any intensive subgroup formed around an ideology and/or personally or collectively transformative goals.” (Worth noting that, pre-20th-century, this is more or less what it meant.) If you start there, I think you’d want to quickly make a distinction between “good cults,” and “bad cults.” And in so doing, I think you might actually end up rearranging any traditional filing system a bit.

Founded in the late ‘90s and boasting tens of thousands of program participants, NXIVM collapsed between 2017 and 2019 when it came out that a group of about 100 women had gathered into a master-slave hierarchy called DOS (Dominus Obsequious Sororium), secretly orchestrated by NXIVM’s founder, Keith Reniere. According to Edmondson, Oxenberg, and others, “masters” collected incriminating “collateral” from their submissives and, with the general threat of its release hanging in the background, commanded the women to perform a range of tasks. In the name of personal growth, they restricted their slaves’ sleep and the number of calories they consumed. Deviations from the rules required arduous “penances.”

Ultimately, it seems to me that one of the primary aims of DOS was to create a network of women who were sexually submissive to Reniere. As a personal growth challenge, masters in DOS assigned their slaves the task of seducing the NXIVM founder, and the nature of the DOS group was perhaps most dramatically illustrated by a strikingly sacred “branding ritual” in which women received a mark they believed to represent the four elements, but which (it’s been plausibly argued) was actually a graphic of Reniere’s initials. In the end, six high-ranking members of NXIVM were indicted, mainly on racketeering charges (some were charged with human trafficking and sex trafficking). All but Reniere — notably, all women — pleaded guilty and received comparatively short sentences, up to a few years of jail or probation. At age 60, Keith Reniere was sentenced to 120 years in jail.

With this viewing of The Vow, one of the things that stood out to me the most was the arcs of four of the series’ protagonists: Sarah Edmondson and her husband “Nippy” Ames, and Mark Vicente and his wife Bonnie Piesse, all of whom had been deeply involved in NXIVM for years, and all of whom left the organization as more details about DOS emerged. I’m mindful of how hard it is to see into the nuance of real people’s lives at a distance, particularly through the inevitably warping lens of the media. But it seems to me that these folks broke up a nexus of abuse, saved people from dark fates — and, along the way, vindicated those who had tried to do the same before them and had failed. I think they were careful, reflective, and discerning as they went. When I think about how they all originally got involved in NXIVM out of a desire to reach their highest potential — and out of a sincere vulnerability about their human shortcomings, and the heartfelt desire to transcend them — I’m moved to tears by how heroic they seem to me. (I recommend The Vow; it’s great.)

I think I feel particularly connected with these stories because NXIVM appears to have borrowed some of its curricular DNA from Landmark Education (the precipitate of Werner Erhard’s “EST” seminars). I did some of the Landmark coursework in college, and its lingo was common parlance between me and some of my closest friends back then. Also, Landmark training undergirded another spiritual group I was part of in the late ‘90s (which eventually led me to a two-and-a-half-year turn with some crazy yogis).

I’ve done number of multi-day-intensive style courses over the course of my life, actually. None of the organizations that I’ve explored in this genre have been worshipfully organized around the founder the way NXIVM was. But having perused some the NXIVM curriculum in one of the numerous patent applications filed by Keith Reniere, I feel like it’s possible to identify some clear similarities in the vibe — particularly between NXIVM and Landmark. The structure of the intensives is similar. Content-wise, one of the key ideas of Landmark is that humans are meaning-making machines, and that owning this principle is key to identifying the scope of one’s agency in life — and to identifying the ways one forfeits agency through limiting beliefs, limiting self-talk, and complaint without action. NXIVM uses this term “meaning-making machines” verbatim, and also borrows a similar terms from Scientology: “at cause” — which, as I understand it, basically means that you’re taking responsibility for your life by seeing it in terms of your own choices. The similarities to Landmark (and to Scientology, which is a whole other can of worms) continue from there.

If you Google “NXIVM,” most of the top hits will call it a cult. Several of the top hits will call it a “sex cult.” And it seems clear to me — and to many former NXIVM members, and to a jury in the Eastern District of New York — that some very dark acts took place within the organization. But also, as Amanda Montell satisfyingly explores in her far-ranging book, the word “cult” gets tossed around pretty casually. There’s no academic definition for the term, one of Montell’s interviewees informs us, because it’s so inherently pejorative. In the broadest sense, the word “cult” might be applied any ideology that the utterer finds intensive and distasteful.

The practices of NXIVM’s DOS group seem to have been fairly uncontroversially destructive, but I think it’s worth noticing that these practices were on the farthest end of a gradient that ran through the organization in various shades and hues. Parts of the organization were unmistakably dark, and parts were, perhaps, lighter. There’s a lot going on there. NXIVM co-founder Nancy Salzman (who, for the sake of the whole picture, pleaded guilty to racketeering and served two years in federal prison) claims that 17,000 people took NXIVM coursework, and benefited. One devoted participant, Mark Elliot, convincingly claims NXIVM cured him of Tourette’s Syndrome. (Elliot tells his story in this TEDx talk, which highlights some of NXIVM’s ideas.)

In retrospect, both Sarah Edmondson and India Oxenberg felt like even the earliest iterations of NXIVM’s ESP curriculum were grooming participants to abdicate their own sense of self-judgment, funneling them toward its darker foci — even as those foci developed and evolved over time. In their respective memoirs, they each expressed the feeling that the radical responsibility approach was inherently caustic, disabling, and a prelude to deeper forms of manipulation. I don’t doubt them. But as with many things, I wonder whether there isn’t an ideologically interesting baby in the adverse bathwater — and whether it isn’t a constant task to separate the two.

I was twenty-one when I did the Landmark Forum. I was genuinely drawn to the human potential, somewhat Tony-Robbins-style vibe, and the coursework was highly formative for me. It gave me useful tools and, perhaps more importantly, it was a major launching point for a quest for wisdom that, for better or worse, has almost entirely defined my life (notwithstanding a nonzero amount of dithering and indolence over the short and long term). Recalling the Landmark ideology of radical honesty and radical accountability, I realize there are things that I miss about it, to be honest.

I had trouble staying with Landmark because the courses cost a lot of money, because I was a lot younger than most of the other people involved, and because I felt like a lot of the conversation was directed at lives that were unlike mine — in ways that, seemed unlikely to ever converge. Also, even then, I felt like the organization was lacking some of the perspicacious quality that I’ve been giving the somewhat comically snooty term, ortho-antilipsi (“right seeing” — I guess I’ll use that term until I learn a better one). Landmark’s “distinctions,” as they were called, were useful, but the way people used them felt a little rigid to me. The distinctions broke apart old dogmas, but ultimately it seemed to me that folks were turning those new tools into new dogma to some extent. If I had stayed in the organization longer, I wonder if I wouldn’t have found this orthodox tendency corrosive to my sense of self-sovereignty, the way Sarah Edmondson and India Oxenberg did with NXIVM.

I think we live in a culture that has (and is perhaps is emerging from?) a profoundly limited spiritual literacy. Amanda Montell’s book really drove this home for me. She talks about the evolution of religious ideological systems from the 19th century (when the term “cult” still had a more neutral connotation, like “sect” does in America), through the ideological exodus from traditional religions in the 20th century, into what some people consider to be the “Fourth Great Awakening” beginning in the 1970s or so — when people became increasingly involved in new, “startup” ideological groups like EST, the Unification Church, and others.

I think it’s hard to overstate how monumental — and consequential — this ideological shift has been. Even in the 19th century and earlier, under a monolithic Judeo-Christian narrative, I feel like the general spiritual literacy may have been higher than it is now, in some ways. The exodus from belief systems in the latter half of the twentieth century certainly seemed to many people like a process of enlightenment, but I don’t think we’ve entirely counted the cost.

In the 1970s and 1980s, for instance, it was possible to see traditional religions as side rooms off the much larger open space of an ambient, secular cultural “normalcy.” Cult-like groups like the the Unification Church, the Church of Scientology, and EST and then Landmark were even smaller, weirder rooms. Why go in those weird rooms when you could be in the big, “normal” room? You’d only do it if there was something wrong with you, right?

Except, it turns out that secular “normalcy” was itself a form of ideological enclosure — and that few of has had really walked all the way to its far wall yet. The promises fade as you go. The philosophy becomes soulless and vacuous, as do many of its high arts. The temples are commercial, the pleasures not so much lowbrow as synthetic.

I think it’s worth considering that cult and culture are not binaries of “yes” and “no,” but rather gradients of scale and intensity. It turns out that the so-called “normal” world is itself, arguably, a sort of large, alternative cult of commercialized, media-sculpted quasi-being. And, if so, to be passive about the idea of cult is not to be immune, but rather to participate to an unknown degree, with limited reflection, in any number of formative ideological movements.

In a way, it’s as though in the nineteenth and twentieth century we exited an old ideological order like goldfish being transported from one aquarium to another. Here we are, in little twist-tied plastic baggies, air running out, waiting to be poured into a new tank. But where is it? Where’s the new tank?

I dunno. Maybe these metaphors are a little claustrophobic. The idea is to be out in the open air, isn’t it? But what is the open air? I think the tendency to try to get organized, just for the sake of getting to the “open air,” is unmistakable. And I can’t help but notice how natural that more readily-identified “cultish” tendency is. You need only take a cursory glance at Swifties, or Star Trek fans, or the MAGA movement — or, increasingly, the Democratic party — to see how proto-religious structures emerge even where they weren’t explicitly intended. Philosophy is natural. Worship is surprisingly natural. Intentional group formation around shared values, and the articulation of shared practices is surprisingly natural, as is the tendency to define or articulate group identity. Bees make hives, and corals form reefs; it seem like humans make religions with similarly inherent drive.

I think it’s important to consider that “bad cults” may often be dysfunctional but preliminary attempts to perform what may in fact be vital, and perhaps essential functions. In one particularly poignant scene in The Vow, Catherine Oxenberg (initially very enthusiastic about NXIVM herself) laughs at the absurdity of the penance practices, until Mark Vicente stops her and observes that his wife, Bonnie, is being re-traumatized by the conversation. “We didn’t join a cult!” he exclaims (referring to all three of them). “Nobody joins a cult! They join a good thing. And then they realize they were fucked!”

Amanda Montell highlights research indicating that the people who are most drawn into “cult-like” religious groups — including groups like the People’s Temple (the Jonestown group) and Heaven's Gate — aren’t notably weak or susceptible, but are more notably idealistic, prone to hope, and galvanized by the hopeful claims of the group. (That dogged idealism is certainly evident in the radiant work that Sarah, Nippy, Mark, Bonnie, and Catherine undertook after they were alienated by NXIVM’s DOS program — again, if you haven’t seen The Vow, I recommend it.)

To me, Montell is making a huge point, and it underscores a basic principle of inter-being: that in order to fulfill our highest potential, we need each other. There’s a definite need to filter a signal from the noise. There’s value in gathering for transformative purpose. And if you ask me, there’s definitely something to the spirit of intensive, radically honest inquiry; the spirit of possibility, inspiration, and mutual empowerment that characterizes the human potential movement.

In its iterations to date it is, perhaps, hard to cleanly separate this “human potential” spirit from certain coercive habits. But does that have to be the case?

In the end, Amanda Montell suggests that the solution is twofold: to trust your gut when deciding which groups to explore; and to practice a certain omnivorousness, leaving some of the identity conditioning at the door of the establishment when you leave. I think there’s a lot of wisdom in this.

Also, I wonder if there doesn’t remain an further invitation for those who want to purse a more intense path. Is there more work that can be done to reinforce the “goodness” of “good cults?” What is a “good cult?” How can you tell whether a group is good or bad? Harmfully cultish or harmlessly? And if it’s a good group, what can be done to help keep it that way?

I don’t have the Truth. But more thoughts to follow.