Book Review : Sarah Berman - Don't Call It A Cult (2021)
The idea of cult in collective consciousness comes with certain signifiers: robes, chants, group sex, ritual sacrifice and other erratic behaviors most often observed in horror movies. That’s why it freaks people out whenever a news story about a real life cult emerges. Because they associate cult involvement to the signifiers. If your neighbor Jim is into a cult, it’s because he wants to wear robes, participate in sessions of group sex with the elderly and kill people.
But it doesn’t work like that.
Your neighbor Jim didn’t give a fuck about group sex a year ago. He just felt empty and dehumanized by adult existence when he met someone who promised him meaning and fulfillment. Cults in the internet age are almost exclusively personality driven and not lifestyle driven. They are based on relationships, like businesses. NXIVM founder Keith Raniere understood that. If you offer someone direction without destination, you can lead them anywhere you want.
I’m fascinated with NXIVM because they’ve always struck me as a different kind of cult. They were not a cult masquerading as a personal development company, they were a personal development company who’s founder exploited the cultish loopholes in professional culture in order to brainwash women into sheepish submission and ultimately group sex.
That’s why I picked up Sarah Berman’s book Don’t Call It A Cult. I wanted to better understand what NXIVM meant to our culture. I was not disappointed.
The part about the book
I, like most breathing people last Fall, have watched the HBO documentary series about NXIVM called The Vow. If you’re wondering whether Don’t Call It A Cult overlaps with it, don’t even ask yourself the question. It doesn’t. While the show follows high-ranking NXIVM executives Mark Vincente and Sarah Edmondson’s traumatic exit from the company, Sarah Berman’s book paints a much broader and objective portrait of NXIVM’s troublesome history.
One thing that stood out was Berman’s earnest attempt to understand the underpinnings of Keith Raniere’s manipulation. At one point, she follows a NXIVM course lead by Sarah Edmondson and her husband Anthony Ames in order to better understand the actual value it brought to people’s lives. Although it doesn’t really work, it leads Ames to explain how isolation and conformity played a role in NXIVM’s indoctrination. That what drags you into a cult a combination of rational, empirical factors and emotional, unmeasurable ones. I found it enlightening.
Berman also cuts deep into Keith Raniere’s claim that he is the smartest man in the world, dedicating an entire chapter to investigating it. I found it crucial in anchoring the book’s credibility, because Raniere based all his social interactions on that idea. He always was the “smartest man in the room”, therefore he was always right. He was also “too smart” for conventional society to understand, which he used to justify both failure and animosity towards him.
Don’t Call It A Cult is great at explaining extreme manipulation and its consequences. There are horrible chapters that treat topics that were never even discussed in The Vow. Sarah Berman’s sweeping portrait helped me understand how endemic abuse was in NXIVM. The Dominus Obsequious Sorororium stuff was the company’s most extreme ideation, but it got up to this point because they already knew a thing or two about being extreme.
The part that’s not about the book
But what does it mean for us? Is NXIVM an aberration of a predatory culture or is there something to learn from its reign of terror? It is always tempting to believe cults just stumble upon patches of gullible people and that it can’t ever happen to you, but this is exactly why it keeps happening again and again. What makes NXVIUM so fascinating and terrifying is that it’s a natural, twenty-first century mutation of an ages old phenomenon.
The entire curriculum of NXIVM lied on a simple concept: you’re responsible for everything you experience in your life. You’re feeling empty? It’s because you never committed to anything. You’re feeling heartbroken? It’s because you’re wallowing in your own self-pity when you should move on. Sad? Your attachment issues are keeping you from enlightenment. It is a very seducing and fallacious idea meant to make you feel empowered.
It is not because it’s sometimes true that it always is.
The genius of using this rhetoric is that it isn’t unique to NXIVM. It is pervasive to how we live in contemporary society. We want to feel empowered and in control. But that feeling comes with a burden of responsibility that is very easy for outside parties to turn against us. You don’t want to work extra hours? Well, you should get over your laziness and focus on your goal. You don’t want to fuck Vanguard? Get over your pride and get fucking naked.
I believe the story of NXIVM is so utterly terrorizing because it is a funhouse mirror reflection of tweny-first century professional culture. There are millions of people who work way too hard for what they’re paid. They are way too many bosses to responsabilizing rhetoric in order to squeeze extra efforts from overworked employees. There are way too fucking many assholes at the top of the food chain that use their subordinates desire for success in order to sexually abuse them.
NXIVM is disturbing because is systematized that thinking. The abuse was what it was about. It was a company that groomed people for abuse and charged them for it.
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Don’t Call It A Cult is a fantastic read. It is not only a great journalistic piece about a twenty-first century cult, but it also is a powerful cautionary tale about the commodification of basic human longing. I understand my own fascination with NXIVM a lot better now, thanks to Sarah Berman. Don’t Call It A Cult really is the ultimate resource for people who want to understand NXIVM or simply why the fuck self-help never seems to make them happy.
