I’ve been watching scientology documentaries and out of curiosity I started looking at other cults. They always seem to gloss over the actual beginning of them with a vague handwave of “the leader was charismatic and knew ro target this specific group of people”
I’ve just been struggling to imagine the group leaders of things like Heaven’s Gate starting a shitty self help seminar in a community center to actually get the first few members
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People believe whatever a charasmatic person says, charasmatic person starts to take advantage of that testing what people will believe etc, and it’s a slow build up from there until the charasmatic person is surrounded by yes people who are completely indoctrinated by them. See Scientology, Mormonism etc
The short answer is that a cult develops quite naturally from a regular abusive relationship. You just need to add more people. It’s merely a question of targetting the right kind of vulnerable people. I don’t think charisma is a key factor.
One of the main things is that a cult leader has to convince their followers to cut connections with everyone outside the cult and preferably become completely financially dependent on the cult. Once that’s done they will be even more dependent on the cult for validation.
I think the media generally glosses over most of the important details about how cult’s work. Maybe bc if people understood how they worked they would realize many organization’s around them are in fact highly successful cults.
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