We Are All Cult Members. Bear with me
The other day I came across a photograph of myself on my wedding day, almost twenty years ago. I was twenty-one when I met him - a student, bright-eyed and entirely convinced I knew what I was doing. The relationship lasted seventeen years. Looking at that photograph now, I can barely recognise myself in her - that young woman in the dress, so certain, so formed, so unaware of how thoroughly she had already been shaped.
What I could see, looking at that photograph, with a clarity that took me by surprise, was the architecture of it. My parents, my upbringing, the cultures I grew up moving between. The books I’d read, the films I’d absorbed, the songs I’d sung along to without questioning a word. The social grammar that told me, in a thousand small and not-so-small ways, what a successful woman looked like, what a good partnership looked like, what it meant to be loved - and what I had to do to deserve that love. I had been programmed so carefully. I hadn’t even noticed there were instructions.
Last week a friend of mine went on a deep dive into cults - what makes them possible, what keeps people inside them long after something has started to feel wrong. As we talked and read and followed the threads, I found something was needling me.
How different, really, was what had been done to me - to all of us, men and women - from what cults do to their members?
Bear with me.
The word cult tends to conjure something extreme - Jonestown, Waco, people in matching trainers waiting for a comet. But it’s too easy to dismiss these people as insane or unhinged. These cultures are obviously offering something that their members, on some level, yearn for, and they exist on a spectrum. I’m not really interested in the spectacle. What interests me is what researchers agree defines a cult.
A cult is an organisation that sells you something it cannot or will not deliver. It extracts labour and devotion. It isolates you - gradually, plausibly - from the people and perspectives that might offer a different view. It offers you a mould to step into - an identity, a set of answers, a version of yourself that will be accepted within the group - in place of the longer, harder work of embodying your own unique self. It makes the cost of leaving feel unsurvivable. And it regulates behaviour through a system of implicit and explicit rewards and punishments: belong correctly and you are held; step out of line and you are cast out.
That’s when I started to feel the needle. Because this was not a blueprint for something exotic and far-fetched.
It felt familiar.
Does it feel familiar to you too? It should. Because the society and the families we are born into do all of this too.
I see it everywhere. In the way we have accepted, without much question, that human beings are fundamentally selfish - that competition is natural and cooperation is naïve, despite what researchers like Elinor Ostrom have shown us. In the way we treat the relentless pursuit of economic growth as though it were a law of nature rather than a choice imposed by a canny few. In the way we are constantly told that art is a nice-to-have rather than a necessity - despite everything we know about what it does to and for the human spirit. In the assumption that men are less emotional than women, as though that were biology rather than conditioning. These are not truths. They are narratives that we allow to shape our lives. And like all the best cult narratives, they have been repeated so often, by so many, that questioning them feels not just difficult but somehow dangerous - like pulling a thread that might unravel everything.
I see my teenage son coming home from school some days with his nervous system in a tizzy. I’m not talking about the usual ups and downs of his age. He comes home holding anxiety that doesn’t belong to him, because someone has stood in front of his class and told them that their next exams will define their future. They imply that the trajectory of their entire life hinges on what they produce in the next few weeks. I watch him absorb this, and I recognise it - the tightening, the sudden narrowing of what life is allowed to mean. This is not education. This is conditioning. Belong correctly - perform, achieve - and you will be held. Fall short and you will be shunned as a failure. It is a system that directs the focus of impressionable minds onto what it needs to sustain itself. Who even decided what success looks like? But that is an argument for another essay.
I spent most of my adult life as a musician. And what I watched happening all around me, over and over again, was our creativity being exploited – briefly celebrated, yes, but also captured and commodified. Art as a commodity. The lives and labour of artists exploited to create a product. The people who control the means of distribution grow wealthy. The artists, with rare exception, struggle. We are told that if we are talented enough, dedicated enough, willing to sacrifice enough, it will come. It almost never does. The promise is the point. Keep the artist hungry and hopeful and they will keep producing. The promise that will never be delivered.
Let me come back to the young woman in that photograph. She spent the first part of her adult life trying to fit the mould - not one mould, but like many women, several of them stacked on top of one another. The good girl. The good wife. The violinist who walked onto the stage and taught and created and built, all while keeping a beautiful home and always having a home-cooked meal ready for her husband at the end of the day. I feel awe when I think of all she did, and how much love she put into everything. Behaviours shaped by inherited archetypes, so thoroughly absorbed that she had no idea she was performing them.
What I didn’t see - couldn’t see - was that none of what I brought to that marriage was valued. Not by my husband, and not even by me. Not the creativity or the love, not the homemaking or the cooking, or the intentional raising of our children. None of it, you see, can be monetised. And so in the logic of a system built on women’s exploitation and value exclusively expressed in terms of money, none of it counted. I found this out with devastating clarity in the family courts - a system that not only failed to recognise what I had contributed, but told me, in the language of the law, exactly where my value as a woman and a mother was supposed to lie, and what it was meant to consist of, according to its own prescriptive rules. That was the moment I saw the extent to which I had been brainwashed, how little I had questioned the roles I had stepped into or the structures I had operated within. And so I became its victim.
Why does this matter? Because these systems persist only because we keep performing them. The moment we choose differently, something moves. The moment we can see the conditioning, we are no longer entirely inside it. We can begin to embody something more than what the programming allows. That gap - however small, however uncomfortable - is where possibilities emerge. It is destabilising, at first. The ego resists. It has, after all, been carefully constructed around these narratives, and dismantling even one of them can feel like a threat to the whole structure. And it is. But that is precisely the point. Learning to dance with that discomfort is the way to inner peace and to true freedom. No longer shackled by the narratives that keep us endlessly acting out a play we never wrote, we begin to experience life as an endless unfolding. Some call it surrender. I feel it as something larger than my conditioned self moving through me. This is not a small thing. This is where agency lives.
It is not an easy path. It requires constantly questioning our thoughts and emotions, recognising and letting go of those that don’t truly belong to us. It requires going against received wisdom and learning to surrender rather than control. It demands taking responsibility in a deep way, and showing up - minute to minute - with an open mind and heart, ready to dance with what is, whether it be pleasant or not.
I believe it is the ultimate subversive act.
I would be lying if I claimed that I have completely deconditioned myself. I have, however, developed a set of simple practices that are my compass - my needle pointing north. They help me access a sense of purpose which is both inside me and larger than me. They keep me from falling prey to the thoughts, emotions and behaviours that offer superficial validation - the comfortable trance of the familiar. Instead, I am learning to embrace that feeling of jumping off the diving board - that exhilarating, terrifying, and utterly joyful sense of being alive.
It is peace - not as an absence of fear or difficulty, but as a ground that holds regardless of what is happening on the outside. I access it in meditation. I have touched it in other, more unexpected places. It helps me recognise every reactive thought, every anxiety loop, every burst of outrage for what it is - a pull back to the comfortable and limiting firmness of the diving board.
I often find myself asking three simple questions, whether it be about an idea, a thought or an emotion: is this true? Is it mine, or has it been handed to me? And what do I want to do with it?
These questions give me a chance to choose how I want to show up. They allow me to act from something truer than the received wisdom. To meet what is actually there, rather than what I have been told to expect.
We are all, in some sense, unwitting cult members. But a cult only holds power over those who cannot see it. And once you see it, you cannot unsee it.
The current state of things - and increasingly, our behaviours - serves fewer and fewer of us. And yet we keep performing the play, following the instructions, fitting the moulds. What if we didn’t? Every time you refuse the narrative - every time you parent differently, question what you have been told to accept, refuse to believe that this is simply “how things are” - you are participating in a revolution. You know that feeling at the end of the diving board - that exhilarating, terrifying, utterly joyful moment before the jump? That is what freedom feels like. And whether you meet the water with a splash or a ripple, I can guarantee you’ll want to do it again.
