That was the top search that brought folks to this site yesterday, for some reason. Maybe it’s because of the ol’ Fellowship of Friends thing (my encounters recounted here and here, plus some cult musings here and here). Pretty good question. My knee-jerk answer is, well, yes. Of course, cults feel like family, at least they have to at first in able to attract new members. Often, these are people looking for a sense of home, of real connection and real community who seem not to see it or find it in their regular life. And yeah, that kind of person can be any of us at any time in our lives. In the cult, the leader is the seemingly ideal dad or mom in that ideal family that doesn’t really exist anywhere.
Here’s where I stopped because my mind wandered to a question that’s more provocative to me:
Do families feel like cults? In what ways? In what ways do they feel different?
And to (seemingly) drop the vague and subjective feeling talk, here’s another question even more provocative than that:
Are families themselves cults?
There’s something in most sociological definitions of cults about how they isolate you from the larger society and how they slowly cut you off from outside influences and friends, etc. Seems like some very strong, tightly-knit families do just that. So are they cults? Is it only a cult if the results of this kind of intense bonding and separation is coercive or leads to violence, theft or the like?
What makes the difference between a family and a cult? And what makes a family any way? Is it just people who are blood-related? Seems you could have a cult that’s like that. Just like you could have a family (at least a symbolic one) based in a very closely bonded affinity group. I could be wrong.
What are your knee-jerk and knee-flex impressions? These knees are askin’.
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For more up this alley.
When the Rain Comes: An Encounter with the Fellowship of Friends
Once More with the Fellowship of Friends: An Anticlimax and Prelude
Cult-Sure: Further Thoughts about Society and the Individual…
I believe that Marx or Lenin popularized the saying “Give me a child until he’s seven and I’ll have him for the rest of his life.”.
I think cults and similar groups (political parties, armies, corporations) copy themselves from families. I’m thinking more along the lines of tribal cohesiveness rather than middle class disconnectedness.
It’s rarely conscious, it’s what people do. I’m living in one cult and working in another one right now. It just kind of sneaks up on you.
Julia, Rudolf Steiner said that the first seven years of the child determine what personality they will ultimately have. So Marx or Lenin were certainly on the money.
I think family is a strange word. In many ways my own family (wife and kids) feels like a different family to my “other” family (my mum, dad and brother). Which is a different family again to my aunts and uncles.
Then there is my “family” of friends etc.
I think we need a greater diversity of words for the concept of family. Words which reflect not just the social structure of each family idea - but also our emotional stance towards and with them.
The words we have currently (just a single word isn’t it? “Family”) Rather limit our perspective on something that is very complex. This is unfortunate as we tend to think with “words” rather than ideas. And thus we limit our thoughts.
Another consideration then; Is language a cult?
Are families cults? Yes, I think they can be a type of cult. An extreme example is an organized-crime family (which I have no experience with — as far as I know). But in a crime family there’s supposedly blind loyalty, fear, group think, a definite set of rules, a leader who determines who stays and who “goes,” a sense that the ends justify the means, a close bond between members of the family, and sense of “us against them.”
The Fellowship of Friends — a cult in Oregon House, California run by Robert Burton — definitely fits into all the above.
Another question is whether corporations are cults. I think Julia (above) is referring to that. Companies are not cults in quite the same way as families can be. But it’s become a common phrase in offices everywhere that such-and-such employees are “drinking the kool-aid,” and so on.
Another question, imo, is how to determine when things get out of control and unhealthy for anyone within the family or corporation. When that happens, maybe that’s when we can be more sure that it’s a “cult.”