I was wondering, do successful cult leaders like Koresh, or Jones frame their narratives in a way that all the pieces fit together nicely? That is to say, they make “sense” from the frame of view of the follower?
I’ve always felt that is what makes them so compelling. But perhaps I’m wrong.
Because Trump’s cult narratives make no sense at all and people still accept it as completely rational. The most obvious example being we rigged the election for Biden but couldn’t be bothered to rig those very same ballots for the Senate or the House.
So do most cult leaders string their various theories together haphazardly like Trump does? Or would that be an anomaly?
Anyway, to answer your question, no, I haven’t found the narratives of cult leaders to fit together worth a damn. Having a narrative that itself was intellectually attractive and elegant would bring in people who find a coherent and convincing explanation appealing. What kind of person would that be? A dubious skeptical person who does their own mental puzzle-piece matching, I’d think.
Most of the cults I’ve studied have a charismatic leader, a social-pressure environment with a lot of warm fuzzy feedback for people saying the right things and agreeing and participating in the Hive Mind, which they withdraw as punishment when you think for yourself or point to the places and times when the emperor is kind of intellectually naked. They preferentially pull in people who are lonely and crave to belong, and/or people who are cut off and don’t have alternative sources of warm fuzzy feedback or sources of social corroboration of their thinking, both of which make folks vulnerable to cult Hive Mind assimilation.
In line with the prior post, it’s always seemed to me that the opposite is true, by “design”. The narratives of cult leaders pointedly don’t hang together. That’s a key element in the hive-mind mentality: We are the only people who see things the way they truly are, thanks to the special god-like power of our leader. The logical inconsistencies are key, as said above, for weeding out critical thinkers from those who will accept the nonsense solely on the authority of the leader.
How do these points not apply to Turmp? His most sycophantic followers truly believe he is the only one that can save them from the impending doom of, well, anyone else, but mostly “Demon-crats.”
It only has to fit together with what the people in the cult already “know” to be true. Anything that doesn’t fit the narrative can be explained away as “fake news” or misinformation by the opposition to “test” the faithful.
It’s like arguing with a Boston native that the NY Yankees are a superior team. Liberals will never convince Trumpists that they are wrong because deep in their heart, Trumpists will disagree with anything they perceive as being “Liberal”. So all Donald Trump has to do is find people like that and keep telling them about how everything wrong with their lives is due to Liberal policies.
For several years, my family and I were in a Christian organization that was semi-cultish. One thing about cults is that they try to make everything make sense in a tidy way and even outlandish things are said with a totally straight face. I don’t think Trump was actually seriously doing cultish stuff like some housebuilder laying the bricks and following a blueprint; he wasn’t clever enough for that. He just stumbled into a crowd that adored him and he more or less kept things going.
I wonder if most cult leaders sort of fall into it. The ones I am most familiar with all have had markedly narcissistic personalities and already felt entitled to the lion’s share of attention. But mere narcissicism isn’t enough to make cult leaders. They still have to find a discipleship population, which is partly an accident of history. Cult leaders are in many ways created out of a specific cultural hole in enough people’s hearts. The Eastern Spirituality gurus of the 70’s, the violent millenarians, the televangelists – they drew upon various desperate needs, one of which is always the warmth of belonging to a big like-minded supportive family. The successful ones find ways to keep feeding those needs. Trump is successful, in that sense.
I’m not sure I’ll be able to articulate this, but cult leaders like Trump seem to offer explanations that only make sense in the moment. They don’t fit with yesterday’s facts and they won’t fit with tomorrow’s, but in the moment they work.
I wouldn’t call David Koresh or Jim Jones “successful”. Successful cult leaders die of old age, surrounded by luxury and devoted followers. OTTOMH I’d Call L Ron Hubbard a very successful cult leader.