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Lynne D. Feldman, Esq. is an educator, author, attorney and member of the US Supreme Court Bar. She has been published and presented nationally on the contemptuous behavior of pseudo-law adherents within the sovereign citizen movement and overall attacks on the rule of law. She worked with Ken Wilber for three years as part of Integral Institute; received local and national awards as an educator; and published a book on her dual cancers entitled Integral Healing. She is widowed and lives with her attorney-daughter, son-in-law and grandson in New Jersey.

The Pandemic of Cults

How Institutional Decline Impaired
Our Collective Immune Systems

Lynne D. Feldman

ABSTRACT: In 1992 demographers Strauss and Howe identified pendular and diagonal movements of American generational cohort types with distinct subgroupings that were born in twenty-year cycles (Generations). During the lifetime of the fourth subgroup, a major secular crisis such as war or depression would occur, and the eighty-year cycle would repeat with its four cohort subgroupings. They called these major movements “turnings” with past crises such as the Revolutionary War, Civil War, Great Depression and world wars.
Today American society is seeing the safety net created after World War II dissolve, absurd wealth disparities occur, and trust in public and spiritual institutions fail. Simultaneously, religious and secular beliefs and practices that had been considered unorthodox or extreme have entered the mainstream.
Beginning in 2020, a social/political/economic crisis aligned with the COVID 19 virus further stressed an already vulnerable American system. As of 2025, there has been a fundamental reshaping of federal government policies across various sectors, including social safety nets, civil rights, and environmental protection. There are fears the vulnerable may be negatively impacted and stressed. Although any increase in the number of cults appears impossible to quantify, it is acknowledged that at times of serious societal stress, such individuals may seek out alternative and fringe movements with which to align. The move from more difficult means of in-person exposure to a cult to today's wide swath of social media exposure gives the appearance that cults proliferate as if traveling along the same covert routes as a virus.
This paper explores the predicted crisis, its effect on our traditional beliefs, institutions and democratic practices, and how cults attempt to substitute for the faltering communal ties within the country while infecting generational cohorts differently, much as a virus affects a vulnerable host. To offer as wide a view on these complex situations, Strauss' and Howe's approach, the seminal work on cults by Dr. Steven Hassan, cults' metaphorical analogies to attacks by malignant viruses as suggested by van der Linden, and the recent work by Dr. Leor Zmigrod, political neuroscientist, will be integrated. The topic also encourages analyses via Integral theory.

Key Words: cult, virus, Strauss and Howe, Fourth Turning, Dr. Steven Hassan, BITE Model of Influence Continuum of Authoritarian Control, Dr. Leor Zmigrod

Cults

A cult is an organization that espouses an explicit religious, political, philosophical or psychotherapeutic mission. Although membership is difficult to ascertain, there are an estimated 10,000 cults active in the United States today. Randomly categorizing a group as a “cult” has become, in the words of cult expert Dr. Steven Hassan, too loose, as it has filtered into a colloquial context as any group disliked by another. His “Influence Continuum of Authoritarian Control” (Table 1) and his BITE Model (below) are excellent content-neutral, bias-restricted methods by which to assess whether a group is engaged in healthy constructive behavior, freedom to access information, thought and emotional control, or destructive and unhealthy involvement.

Although cults may appear to be based on some variation of religion, not all cults are religious. However, "the cults which have the greatest potential for creating health problems for their members are usually religious in nature." The members of a cult generally follow a living leader who is usually a dominant, paternal figure. Occasionally, there is a pair or "family" of leaders, and today there are numerous leaderless cults such as QAnon and the sovereign citizen movement. Authoritarian cults have the covert mission to accumulate wealth and/or power to benefit its leadership via authoritarian and destructive means. There is often an inability to freely exit the cult as the Moonies, Scientology, NXIVM and The Children of God

Christopher Lasch's The Culture of Narcissism (1991) explored the rise of self-absorption and the decline of community in modern American culture which had previously promoted communal progress and action. This confluence may well have set the stage for the emergence of more deleterious cults in all aspects of American life, from politics to religion and spirituality, to self-help, to health advice, and even to the encouragement of criminal behaviors.

The BITE Model and Influence Continuum In Brief:

Download the BITE Model of Authoritarian Control^TM

Discerning differences between benign and authoritarian cults has not occupied much space in scholarly literature. Authors often find it difficult to distinguish between a mainstream religion and a cult, and between different types of cults. After observing the often arbitrary or overbroad categorization of cult classification, Hassan provides two means by which such distinctions might be determined. The first is known by the acronym BITE:

1. Examine the Behavior of the participants: Demands of loyalty, obedience to “the script”; shun anyone who rejects their interpretations; insult them in crude ways; some advocate violence, and law enforcement personnel as well as adherents have been killed; they display superiority and malignant narcissism by attempting to “re-educate” others; requirements to attend expensive seminars and buy their self-published books.

2. Examine the accuracy of the Information being shared, sold, and regurgitated.

3. Examine the tight control over Thoughts permitted; sources that are critical will be banned and judged to be satanic, ungodly; members are taught to spy on others and report any remarks counter to the established doctrine.

4. There is a tight hold on adherents' Emotions; the leaders and converts consider themselves superior, special, more knowledgeable, have secret information that places them above the law; they use emotionally “loaded language” when dealing with non-adherents to place them on the defensive.

Hassan next creates a continuum for further distinctions between constructive and destructive cults:

Hassan limits negative labeling to any group adopting controlling, unduly influential, and authoritarian treatment of members. By doing so, focus can be trained on the structure and measuring of control, thereby protecting freedom of mind. Cults that do not engage in authoritarian mind control have true informed consent, applaud diversity, have checks and balances within the leadership and membership, engage in flexible thinking, and empowers members.

Virus as Metaphor

The complexity surrounding joining an authoritarian cult can be simplified by substituting a metaphor for the dynamic process of authoritarian cult membership and deep affiliation; the metaphor that appears most apt is that of a virus. Sander van der Linden introduced the public to “viruses of the mind” in his 2023 book, Foolproof: “How do our brains decide what to believe, what 'feels' true, what information to remember and process as undeniable facts and evidence, and what just sounds like a pile of rubbish?” (van der Linden, 13). In an Enlightenment-influenced world humans would be expected to update toward reliable evidence. But this appears to have morphed into a “post-truth” world and disabused the notion that humans are ultimate fact-checkers (van der Linden, 30). Psychologists as well as advertisers have discovered that repetition of false claims makes it easier for them to be digested (van der Linden, 27). Pascal commented, “People almost invariably arrive at their beliefs not on the basis of proof but on the basis of what they find attractive.” (Pascal, On the Art of Persuasion as quoted by van der Landen, 28).

With the understanding that the virus metaphor is no direct equivalence for authoritarian cult entry, viruses act as perfect parasites that can infect human hosts much as cult dogma becomes affixed to the initiate. Each exposure to an authoritarian cult may be considered a subatomic particle of a virus. Each particle of the virus is called a virion, which is generally not considered to be alive, although each does contain RNA or DNA. Its small piece of genetic information exists inside of a protective shell called a capsid, while some may exist within an envelope. As they are not made up of cells, they do not have all the equipment that cells do to replicate more copies of themselves. Instead, they carry instructions with them and use a host's cells' own equipment to make more copies of this virus (Zmigrod).

The virus surfs along the fluid surface of a living cell. The membrane of the virus must find a pathway such as a pore on the host cell by which to enter. Once a pore or other vulnerable part of the host cell is discovered, the virus can bind itself to receptor molecules on the cell membrane. The virus then inserts its DNA into the host cell's proteins and genetic material, where the host reads the viral DNA as if it were its own instructions. Thus, the host's DNA is reassembled and relocated to replicate the virus's particles. The two are now fused. Once the genetic material of the virus has invaded the cell through the barrier of its membrane, infection will inevitably follow (Zmigrod). As with harmful cults, the virus hijacks the host's vulnerable cellular process at the pore, to produce a virally encoded protein that will replicate the virus's specific genetic material.

Sounding like the frightening scene from the movie “Alien,” imagine this new virion budding out from an infected host cell, carrying with it any protein that happens to be embedded in the host's membrane at the budding site. Infection can be prevented if fusion of the viral envelope with the cell or membrane can be blocked, as occurred during COVID with the first vaccines designed to prevent or lessen the effects of infection. A virion is one hundred to one thousand times smaller than a human cell, and its machinery is so efficient that each cell infected by even a single virion can produce about a million new virions (Zmigrod). This is the mechanism by which individuals and groups can be infected by cults with social media providing the best routes of infection.

Viruses create variants through random mutations that occur when they replicate, a process that can also be driven by immune pressure from a host's compromised immune system. Adaptive traits can lead to successful mutations such as increased transmissibility, ability to evade vaccines, or a higher chance of spreading within a population. Earlier cults had to find vulnerable hosts via their writings or personal appearances, but once the computer was introduced along with social media, the transmission routes permitted the vulnerable hosts to encounter cults in large numbers.

Viruses, like cults, need to match with their hosts since they are parasites and are mimicking these biological processes. Not every person will be vulnerable to every cult. Via social media, the individual can survey a vast number of seemingly benign groups before exposing their vulnerabilities to the predatory cult. In a sense, the cult may now act as a virion, surfing the Internet and waiting to be approached by a vulnerable host.

Analogizing cults with viruses such as the recent COVID pandemic, we find they both disrupt social equilibrium, produce discomfort, and challenge what is “given”, such as calling into question the efficacy and safety of routine vaccines. At the end of the host's invasion by the virus of a cult, they no longer recall their own independent thoughts that have been replaced by the information from the cult virus. It has carried instructions to the host to invade its agency and instead replicate copies of the cult virus to be carried forward on their specific communication network. The host is henceforth articulating an alternate reality often in contrast to its prior “true self.”

An alternative effective metaphor is “memetic warfare” that wreaks havoc online via state-authorized “troll factories” in countries such as Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, and others. These entities pour misinformation into the digital biosphere and provide countless avenues for infection.

Weakened Defenses

Ironically, Western society began to weaken its defenses against large-scale transmission of harmful groups because of the 18th Century's Enlightenment when culture freed itself from serious economic, political, religious, and scientific constraints. But as something was gained, something was also lost. Normative social religious practices are a common concept for social formation and interpretation of morality in relation to that which is deemed sacred. Humans feel a power superior to themselves, as their feelings and acts stand in apprehension to this divine. Thus, people and this divine are connected. But the Enlightenment instead placed a rational human as sovereign with their own being self-owned and determined. This implied Western culture had to rethink everything in existence. Now only humans were elevated to doing transformative acts. We freed ourselves, imbued ourselves with divine qualities, became omnipotent, all knowing, and all powerful. But we became alone, in a vast empty space (Howe).

In America we became the first great modern experience in collective being, liberal thought, and twined to secular capitalism. What was once communal and public church obedience and attendance suddenly became private and personal. Indeed, our 1st Amendment states Congress cannot make laws that interfere with our private observance and obedience to this divine being, but it does not define what religion is. That power is left to the Internal Revenue Service, since a legal religion is tax exempt, permitting it to create wealth that upholds its beliefs for generations. Removing religion from the public square as an established church, we sent it into the fringes, the private, and stranded the individual on a solo journey for meaning and purpose. Enter cults.

Generational Historiography

It is said history does not repeat, it rhymes. Strauss and Howe in Generations (1992) and recently Howe, in The Fourth Turning Is Here (2023), demonstrated that history acted as a pendulum swinging back and forth between concentrations of agentic drives to the other extreme of communal drives. This oscillation is seen as the cause for the cyclical deterioration of institutional structures and norms. Within living memory such swing can be seen with the Baby Boomers, a large generational cohort that was born around 1945 to 1960, and subsequent swings within the next American generational cohorts. Another analysis can be found in Feldman, “As Above, So Below” (2024). In Strauss' recent book he places America at the fourth time we have experienced the end of a seasonal rotation of agentic-to-communal, then back to agentic, back again to communal, and an expected ending in a serious social crisis. He labels these pendular shifts in orientations as Springs, Summers, Falls, and now Winters.

Imagine three prior times in our nation's history when we spiraled between extremes of generational cohorts' demonstrating individual agency and then reorienting toward collective bonding. Back and forth our nation has cycled, beginning with Spring seasons where parents ascribe great hopes for their children, only for the next cohort to disappoint in Summers of failed promise, back again with protected Fall children fulfilling generational dreams, only to land as a generation experiencing maximum darkness, into the Winter. These are times of great national crises such as our Revolutionary War, Civil War, World Wars, and now a time of low social order.

There is a distinct dynamic, archetypal, pendulum-like, swinging over each of the four stages of a generation between control and chaos, order and disorder. The system is striving for balance. What we are witnessing is a self-adjusting, complex living system that cannot tolerate too much randomness without the system disintegrating, or too much order without the system failing to adapt to new challenges. Unfortunately, but apparently inevitably, we find ourselves in a Winter cycle leading to a major crisis. Once this unknowable great crisis hits us and is hopefully successfully resolved, “America will acquire a new collective identity with a new understanding of income, class, race, nation and empire” (Strauss, 24).

From a cyclical overview of American history, Strauss and Howe traced the motivations that propelled these four types or seasons of generations throughout their lives, how they became influenced by their parental attachment styles, their coming-of-age experiences, their preoccupations as they rose to adulthood, their midlife challenges, and their attitudes upon entering elderhood. This classification explains how each cohort has responded to its solo journey toward meaning-making, and the often-unhealthy substitutes individuals use to fill this significant void.

From a generational perspective, the Silent Generation gave birth to Boomers who were born around 1945 to 1960 (These specific years are disputed amongst historiographers and are flexible estimates). Their parents returned from war seeking stability, safety, and normative conformity. The tv show “Leave It To Beaver” spelled out perfect domestic conduct with the father as head of the household. But with the generational pendulum swaying from community back to agency, the Silent Generation that had won wars by coming together in tight community bore agentic children, the Boomers. Their cycle then saw them sway away from tight communal values back to concerns over personal sovereignty together with overt idealistic underpinnings. Many expressed personal sovereignty by joining communes which may appear counterintuitive, but it was their personal sovereignty that led them to merge with a specific group. Betty Friedan offered females more autonomy by championing domestic role reversals and freeing them from strict cultural standards of behavior.

Meanwhile, a change in 1965 immigration patterns saw South East Asian groups introducing Boomers to alternative wants such as enlightenment and individual thought, personal sovereignty, agency. Their youth crested at Woodstock but was marred by assassinations, governmental scandals such as Watergate, the disputed reasons behind the Viet Nam war, the shock to our national security after 9/11, and the resulting War on Terror and Desert Storm.

These shocks to Boomers' trust in government and social progress permitted the first wave of cult viruses to emerge:

(1) The Hare Krishna movement came to the US in 1966 and has been subsequently categorized as a cult owing to its excessive mind control, fundraising tactics, and reports of misconduct and abuse. It taught the ends justify the means, which led many of its youthful followers down personally harmful paths;

(2) The Moonie cult refers to the Unification Church that believed its founder, Sun Myung Moon, was asked by Jesus to fulfill His failed mission, thus naming Moon the “Lord of the Second Advent”

(3) the Manson Cult which was murderously counter-cultural;

(4) Jim Jones of Jonestown who ordered 900 of his followers to commit suicide;

(5) The leader of Heaven's Gate had 39 of its members commit suicide in 1997;

(6) Branch Davidians headed by David Koresh who became a guru with apocalyptic teachings in 1993 only to see their compound catch fire killing 80 followers ();

(7) and the Children of God in 1968, begun by a pedophile, encouraged members to perform deviant sexual practices such as directing women to lure new members by being “happy hookers for Jesus.”

These Boomer cults were led by charismatic males around religious/counter-cultural yet “idealistic” promises but were limited in large-scale transmission by relying on face-to-face meetings, publications, and complicated organizational structures.

Boomers were followed by Gen X (born between 1961 to 1981), a cohort that rebelled against their Boomer siblings/parents and thus are categorized as “reactive.” Their world felt re-ordered after the Berlin Wall fell and the archenemy of communism appeared defeated; parental divorce and abortion rates surged; and their parents often left them home alone unattended for hours while they became known as “latch-key kids.”

Gen X came through its childhood at a dim time in US history. In 1979 an Iranian mob swarmed the US embassy in Tehran and ushered in a wakeup call that our leaders could not protect us as a Big Power should. Believing the expansive promises of the Boomers' idealism would not come to them, they saw a nihilistic future ahead. Their test scores were historically low, and their generational rates of parental divorce, crime, suicide, and substance abuse were high (Strauss and Howe, 317). Comparisons were made by referring to them as another “Lost Generation” prior to the Depression in a revised form of “adultlike fatalism” (Strauss and Howe, 322). Their immune system challenges stemmed from the “information overload” from current events during their adulthood with no easy “yes or no” answers by which to guide their decisions. This led many to adopt an ethos of “personal determinism” to achieve status, power, belonging, and a sense of meaning. Their “infections” can be seen through their being the first generation exposed to a computer, which permitted adoption of hip-hop, New Wave, Goth, and punk rock music cultures.

Rather than seeking equality for all, they saw success as personally determined, which seemed to mirror the world as it became more complex, diverse, decentralized, hi-tech, and less governed (Strauss, 16). Looking at the world as they matured, they swung toward the more pragmatic Right as many became Reagan voters. There is no discrete group of cults that can be ascribed solely to Gen X, as the internet had not yet influenced their culture. They are perceived as more cynical and independent.

For the Millennial (or Gen Y) generation born around 1981 to 1996, the computer and emerging internet worlds changed the ability and target of the cult virus to infect. Known more for their civic-mindedness, they swung socially and politically toward the center, bonded better in communities, embraced new technology and sought affluence. They had more protective parents which gave rise to the term “helicopter parents” who raised smaller sibling cohorts. In addition to existing religious and cultural cults, clicking “Like” on various affinity online groups bolstered Millennials' sense of group identity and self-worth. Although this could be seen as an act of agency, its effect was to merge the individual with a group. Naming them Millennials gave them a sense of destiny and great hope as the 21st Century arrived. Theie position on the generational ascending spiral shifted their orientations away from hopeless agency back to healthy, wholesome communal values and practices.

Millennials retained an earnest civic-minded belief that companies should care about the environment and other social issues, but they're also the least trusting generation on record. They scored lower than any other generation since the Great Recession of 2008 as they remained scarred by this financial crisis and ongoing tepid recovery.

Gen Z children were born around 1997 to 2012. Their swing makes them a more adaptive group, championing pluralism, expertise, and social justice. As the current crisis has been predicted to commence around 2020, this generation will be impacted during their schooling. Test scores already indicate they have been negatively affected by the shutdown of their schools during COVID, with their intersocial skills being blunted and their turn to on-line socialization making them more vulnerable to nefarious actors. Finally, there is Gen Alpha, with babies being born from 2013 through the mid-2020s. COVID will have impacted them at vulnerable stages of development as well. If they follow the previous three turnings, this group would be a more silent group after witnessing the predicted societal collapse of the 2020s.

Both cohorts have entered a society already torn apart over issues such as political stagnation, climate, obscene wealth inequality, student debt, gender issues, women's reproductive rights, immigration, and isolation from the post WW II world order. Once again, we face a crisis when our people are bereft of national overarching meaning, communal acceptance, and a path of transcendence. Into this void occur cults that have been normalized in podcasts, pop culture, and more.

Types of Cults

Although we cannot be sure if the number of cults is increasing, attention on cults can be detected by noting the number of podcasts and media coverage dedicated to this topic. Dr. Steven Hassan has explored the confusion surrounding categorizing any strange group as a cult. Cults are traditionally structured as a pyramid with the charismatic leader dictating thoughts and behaviors to the supplicants. But today's cults, Hassan explains, also encompass the leaderless cults such as the sovereign citizen movement, and the more fragmented QAnon. His BITE model has helped to identify destructive groups bent on thought control and restriction to a doctrine. Although the number of American cults today cannot be enumerated accurately, Hassan and others attribute increased attention and awareness to the following factors, which align with the Generations model of the Fourth Turning:

(1) a growing sense that our society is in disarray, with existential or real crises leading to an interest in cults, as people seek belonging and answers during these times of uncertainty.

(2) economic grievances have hit all segments —although our national poverty rate is growing, a small group of tech/media/investor elites controls an ever-increasing amount of our natural resources

(3) Americans move more frequently than other nations leading to feelings of estrangement from their culture

(4) the breakdown of “legacy media” and rise of social media silos permits the vulnerable to receive erroneous information without fact-checking.

(5) The proliferation of online platforms opens new avenues to recruitment and community building, especially among vulnerable populations, even among youth and young teens.

(6) the breakdown of traditional religions that had centralized leaders explaining what dogmas were to be entertained, and the more charismatic religions that permit the individual to create their own beliefs and practices. Polls indicate people prefer to categorize themselves as “spiritual but not religious” which opens them up to alternative belief systems and groups.

(7) Cults, criminal groups and new religious movements have moved from the fringes to more mainstream attention and ability to groom vulnerable minors and youth with violent content. The COVID lockdowns also contributed to the digital spread of such groups. Not all fringe groups are harmful, and therefore it is important that we have a map to delineate the healthy from the unhealthy.

(8) projections of vulnerable feelings is placed upon minorities such as illegal aliens, Mexicans, Muslims, the media, WOKE cultural supporters, transsexuals, or in the 1930s, the Jews (Hassan, Combating Cult Mind Control, 9).

Hassan's “Influence Continuum” does not attack a group's content or ideology but rather analyzes it along a continuum. Cults may begin as benign affinity groups, criminal groups, or new religious movements and should be monitored as they moved from the fringes to more mainstream attention and ability to groom vulnerable minors and youth with violent content. The COVID lockdowns also contributed to the digital spread of such groups (Zmigrod). Not all fringe groups are harmful, and therefore it is important that we have a map that can distinguish the healthy from the unhealthy without falling into partisan finger-pointing traps. It is true that most destructive cults have a pyramid structure with the charismatic leader at the top displaying narcissistic or psychopathic behavior; have grandiose and elitist self-beliefs; displays power-hungry moves; is secretive/deceptive; and claims absolute authority. (Ibid, 11).

Along with the virus metaphor, the BITE Model permits assessment of smaller cults and leaderless ones, such as QAnon and the Sovereign Citizen movement. QAnon has experienced a fragmentation of adherents, much as viruses evolve variants, and has divided into smaller groups. The sovereign citizen cult relies on “lone wolf” appearances in courts and at traffic stops to frustrate and undermine the rule of law. Some have murdered law enforcement personnel.

As the vulnerable person is led more deeply into harmful cult dogma, the goal for the host is to become privy to the group's secrets, but to do so they are ordered to isolate from friends and family outside the cult. There is an irresistible lure of feeling like and “being” someone special. Self-correction of factual errors is discouraged and is punished by banishment from the group and further initiation into its “mysteries,” much like a religious or syncretic movement. Once again it is apparent that ne fills missing social, individual, and existential needs of feeling connected to something important that other people don't yet know about (Diresta, Renee (November 13, 2018). "Online Conspiracy Groups Are a Lot Like Cults". Wired. Archived from the original on April 20, 2020. Retrieved April 17, 2020).

The Lure to Join

Nowhere do we see invitations to “Come join our cult!” Rather, the vulnerable lone individual is not offered informed consent as to the underlying implicit nature of the malignant group, and such information will be manipulated and controlled. Imagine being required to take years of expensive classes before being informed that the group's ultimate secret involves “Xenu who brought millions of aliens to Earth 75 million years ago.” The seeker desperately wishes to fill the personal void left by the current disintegration of: the governmental structures and functions; trust in the unbiased information dissemination by the legacy media; the top-down structure of religious institutions in favor of “DIY” evangelical movements; obfuscation of political party identities, concerns of the individual voter over those of the billionaire class; and growing dis- trust in the “expert” (Howe).

The malignant cult recruiting process begins as a benign premise: group Bible study; saving sex-trafficked children; enlightenment. Once invited to attend a group meeting, the individual first encounters “love bombing” by the members and observations of how special the prospective member is. The recruit is later introduced to the top-down structure with the leader at the head. Within leaderless cults such as the sovereign citizen movement, the individual is taught the script listing the “hidden legal terms and existence of a $20 million personal trust fund” that exempts them from obeying most legal rules and obligations. In accordance with this secret set of principles, the recruit is informed there are no normative ethical principles that need be followed other than those ordained by the doctrine or leader, and any means toward these aims are permitted (Hassan, Combating Cult Mind Control, 93).

Once attached to the authoritarian cult, the effects of its mind control methodology becomes apparent. They include the obliteration of a follower's true identity for a false cult identity; conditional “love” or “hate” by the leader/group; obedience to a toxic ideology that narrows ability to evolve and learn; atmosphere of solemnity, fear, and guilt imposed on adherents; and requirements for dependency and obedience to the leader and doctrine (Hassan).

It is not only weak, uneducated, gullible people who can be deceived into joining authoritarian cults (Hassan). Current neuroscience coupled with an understanding of consciousness might lead us to see how an individual's “phenomenological experience of the world is colored by their ideological convictions about the world” (Zmigrod, 15). Consider the flooding of an individual's awareness of varying types of events coming from the seven to twelve hours a day tethered to their phones. News of political assassinations to the announcement of celebrity engagements compete for being processed via critical thinking. This is not viable and destroys any “myth of invulnerability” against succumbing to authoritarian cult infection (Hassan).

Hassan points to five main types of unhealthy cults that reflect the desire to fill the void left by the devaluation of previously strong institutional membership:

1. Religious cults: Moonies, New Apostolic Reformation; Heaven's Gate, Christian Nationalism, ISIS, World Mission Society Church of God; Opus Dei, Falun Gong; FLDS; Jehovah's Witnesses, Aum Shinrikyo.

2. Political cults: Aryan Nation, Nazi party, MAGA, Kim Jong Un, QAnon, China under Xi, Russia under Putin.

3. Psychotherapy/Education cults: leaders appear at weekend seminars in hotels, offers of enlightenment.

4. Commercial cults: Amway, Herbalife, NXIVM, Jeffrey Epstein and other human traffickers, sovereign citizen content providers.

5. Personality cults: Often micro cults with only a few members. Recent horrible crimes have been committed under the cult direction of Laurie and Chad Daybell, Ruby Franke and Jodi Hildebrandt.

Possible Genetic Predisposition

There are indications a genetic factor might influence the susceptible to join a cult: the individual's ability for flexible thinking. A rigid, inflexible style of thinking may well steer an individual to specific ideologies that narrow our choices, lasso our flexible thinking, restrict our responses, or trigger people to commit violence. Zmigrod's research tested the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test (https://www.psytoolkit.org/experiment-library/wcst.html) on young students. Their brain patterns of perseverating over an incorrect test response rather than flexibly and creatively seeking alternatives for the correct answer corresponded to mental inflexibility and ideological rigidity (Zmigrod, 21). If this differential is found in young children, there might be a genetic underlay.

Those susceptible to malignant cults may show vulnerability within their brain functioning. A brain engaged in a habit fires differently from that in pursuit of a goal. A habit shows a brain firing away from deliberative organs on the prefrontal cortex and toward deeper and older structures of the brain in the center of the skull (Zmigrod, 100). Cults that require habitual behavior as devotional observance even in the midst of pain in order to instill indoctrination within the brain should be classified as malignant. This is similar to what scientists see within the brains of addicts (Ibid). Profound religious experiences can lead to such synchrony among devotional practices, perceived as meditative, collaborative, or anonymously submitting to something profound (Ibid). Once again, Hassan's chart permits distinguishing healthy from unhealthy group membership. Since certain practices may change the very structure of our consciousness, it is critical that we understand the differences employed by authoritarian versus beneficial groups.

Zmigrod reports discovering brain differentials that control the effect of dopamine regulation. The most cognitively rigid individuals possess specific genes that affect how dopamine is distributed throughout the brain. This genetic predisposition concentrates less dopamine in the prefrontal cortex, while more dopamine occurs in the midbrain structure which favors actions encouraging more rapid, less thoughtful, instincts (Zmigrod, 129).

The gene that regulates dopamine levels has two variations: the Met allele and the Val allele. An individual's particular genotype of these two alleles affects how dopamine is regulated, and those who are cognitively flexible showed more of the Met allele. For those with more rigid cognition, Zmigrod found they had low prefrontal dopamine Val alleles plus other differences. Her research indicated this specific genetic profile might put people at risk for mental rigidity (Zmigrod, 136).

However, this is not a genetic inevitability, since biological markers interact with each other. A person can possess one flexibility-prone genotype and one flexibility-prone genotype, with the inherent plasticity of the brain presiding in the dispute. The individual's environment and life events also play a large part, but her research does invite an “epigenetic study of extremism.”

Individuals cannot function without communication with others, and communication comes from the Latin verb “to share.” With previous systems of sharing having declined, it is understandable that the search for sharing seems to be satisfied within a cult. It offers new rituals that facilitate synchrony (Ibid.), and feelings of union with something greater than oneself. Within a pseudo-religious cult, these feelings of “collective effervescence” (Ibid) can be attributed to “The Divine,” and the feeling of being “seen” by it. Further, these feelings of solidarity are as contagious as the cult virus. As the authoritarian leader/articulator of the group's ideology posits it as perfect and foolproof, the group community digests it without question as does the individual's interior consciousness, subconscious, and brain functions. Anything that stems from this ideology must be the truth, inevitable, irreversible, and clear of any moral excuses (Ibid, 66).

It often confounds observers that counterfactual arguments do not reverse ideological inflexibility. To accept the counterfactual argument is seen by the authoritarian cult member as succumbing to Satan, punished by excommunication from the new community, being held as unenlightened, or any other attack on the new cultic identity.

Effect of Parenting Styles

Childhood is perhaps human's first introduction to cult-like indoctrination. Initial caregivers set the stage for how this new organism processes information about the world as mediated by genetic factors. The three types of parenting styles most often cited would have a direct impact on the child's absorption of demands: (1) authoritarian, which would have high demand and high control over what is acceptable behavior from and thoughts by the child where corporal punishment is often used; (2) authoritative, which might be demanding but is sensitive and responsive to the child's needs and innate personality; and (3) permissive, which does not enforce limits and is sensitive and responsive to the child's needs. Thus, the parental style will have a corresponding impact on the child's flexibility of thought (Zmigrod, 91).

These distinctions correlate with Hassan's Influence Continuum chart from his BITE Model. Together they point to the possibility of inoculating children at early ages against submission to high control and high demand groups. Earlier experiments on children demonstrated that when prejudiced young children were tested against unprejudiced ones, liberally raised children deviated to creative solutions when shown they had erred on math problems. The prejudiced children, on the other hand, showed perseverance and cognitive rigidity. They continued to repeat their errors as if repetition would somehow change the mistake. The less prejudiced children were able to flexibly reevaluate their approaches to solutions, as well as being comfortable with ambiguity, tolerating transitions, and avoiding binary thought (Zmigrod, 103-104).

Rather than applying subjective/partisan criteria when evaluating an ideology/group to be at the fringes and outside of the cultural norm, we might be capable of identifying constructive and healthy groups as distinguished from the destructive and unhealthy groups, especially with the assistance of Hassan's Model (Zmigrod, 13). Further research might enable the creation of a neutral science of ideology, establish guides to self-reflection, means by which to raise flexible-thinking children, and suggest actions and structures that might provide safe paths to the human journey in meaning-making (Zmigrod, 14).

Difficulty in Making Policy Decisions About Cults

If we have determined each individual is sovereign whereby their perceptions of reality are personal and not bound by communal norms, how can we determine the unhealthy from healthy or benign cults/groups? Even the humorous dispute over the validity of viewing a blue or a gold dress online from a few years ago illustrates our current peril in distinguishing different perspectives. The advent of AI and deep fakes adds to this fear.

Our current crisis may come to flashpoints coalescing within the political arena: Are we a pluralistic society or a white-dominant one? Do we admit immigrants with dark skin tones or bar them and exclude those already here? Is sex and gender only binary, or fluid? Can governmental public health officials mandate vaccines for the public good, or is that slavery? Can individuals claim they are “sovereign citizens” not affected by laws or statutes?

The question arises as to how we communicate with the more rigid thinkers politically and offer them impartial, credible evidence that might change their perceptions. Zmigrod conducted research on this topic and came to the following: Conservative, dogmatic thinkers are slower to accumulate evidence, prone to sudden choices, emotionally disregulated that impaired their ability to evaluate any information. Other researchers found that dogmatic and radical thinkers struggled to judge their own mental processes accurately, as they tended to be overconfident about the accuracy of their decisions (Zmigrod, 169). It might be necessary to create political neuroscience so we might decode how rigidity or flexibility of brain structure and function underpin political tensions. This is indeed a complex and fascinating area of research, but with caveats.

Then there is the crisis of adolescence. It is widely understood that the prefrontal cortex does not become fully functional until the age of twenty-five. Teens are therefore more vulnerable to recruitment by authoritarian cults based on stages of their brain development: “It is a sensitive time for brain development and the evaluation of risk, conformity, flexibility, and the crystallization of identity. Ideologies often work on and through the young. Every nationalist movement has a youth chapter… Almost every political movement that calls for a dismantling, a revolution that upends everything, recruits its earliest members from the ranks of adolescents… prone to impulsive crises” (Zmigrod, 224).

She warns the adolescent brain is the most susceptible to ideological dogmas as it is hypersensitive to understand its world and to be understood back (Zmigrod, 225). One does not have to search for current instabilities in society where this cohort has been susceptible to ideological infection, even from the online games they play incessantly. In 1995 the Aum Shinrikyo cult in Japan set off deadly sarin gas in the subway system. It initially experimented with video games as a way for teens to become enlightened only to morph into a deadly cult.

In the mid-2000s, Steve Bannon, a political consultant, reportedly became fascinated by the “hidden world” of online communities populated by “intense young men.” He felt they held the “monster power” to form a pipeline from the privacy of their gaming rooms and chat boards into becoming an army of political activists and trolls for partisan election success. “His experience helping players navigate made-up realities, where all the news is fake and all the facts are alternative, helped him create a campaign that upended and rewrote reality” (The Wrap).

This “gaming-as-cult” has created many harmful variants such as Spawnism, and is an area that deserves serious attention. “Children are being convinced that performing rituals around a symbol or sigil from the Roblox game Forsaken are giving them powers of reincarnation. Some are posting images after having carved the sigil into their skin and there have been unconfirmed rumours of suicides linked to the craze” (Ibid).

We have examined multiple factors enveloping America today. Infections by cults that offer “truth, surety, belonging, meaning” are, and will proliferate, in this time of vulnerable personal and societal immune systems. “Come to me, the all-knowing leader, who has the one true truth, the answer to your existential questions, and substitute for the family with which you may no longer associate.” “Home” becomes the cult in which the lonely individual can nest to fill the void. Once they perceive protection, security, answers and belonging are scarce, this feeling of scarcity causes neurobiological changes (Zmigrod, 215). As the individual steps into the cult miasma, “Being immersed in the ideology changes the believer; it changes their explicit and implicit beliefs but also their broader cognition, intellectual responses, physiology, and brain. Predispositions and ideological communities reinforce each other, leading to the expression and accentuation of certain traits and the overriding of others” (Zmigrod, 203).

Hassan provides approaches to the issue of cult susceptibility that might assist policy decisions. If the individual feels humiliated, faced with scarcity of any human need, they are vulnerable to joining and staying in a cult. He advises one-to-one contact with the captive by someone trusted in their past who can recollect past times prior to the infection that hijacked their critical thinking ability. The captive can be immersed in recalling when they did feel embedded in a secure family and environment that offered structure, meaning, and answers to existential questions.

He advises against attacking the cult which has proven to be counterproductive. Zmigrod offers, “A well-resourced environment buffers against risky psychological states and friendship groups” (Zmigrod, 220). Yet today's America does not afford a well-resourced environment, especially online.

There is no easy answer to this question, as we are in the midst of a generational crisis that might eclipse earlier crises with its complexity and implications for our national and world order. For that we return to The Fourth Turning Is Here. The generation that will feel the full impact of this crisis will be the Millennials, born 1982-2005, and often known as “Generation Nice” (Strauss, 365). They will recall their older siblings, members of Generation X, as the failures, their siblings affected by high divorce and less embracing parenting styles. The first Millennials who entered the job market were hit with the dot.com bust and 9/11. Many have not succeeded as did Gen X or their Boomer parents, and 55% remain living with their parents. (Strauss, 369) Meanwhile, recent job postings in late August, 2025, showed a minimum of new jobs created (https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/empsit.pdf).

If indeed we dip into a catastrophic crisis, the worldviews of Gen Y and Gen Z will be compromised at their most vulnerable developmental stages. Their susceptibility to authoritarian cults will be heightened, while healthy paths forward will be narrowed. It is little wonder that a recent Talker Research poll of 2,000 US adults, evenly split by generation, finds seven in 10 base major decisions on nontraditional cues such as intuition (36 percent), prayer (29 percent), and general vibes (19 percent) (https://dailyvoice.com/new-jersey/northernhighlands).

Conclusion

According to generational historiography, we have entered a dire time domestically and internationally. Political and economic experts wonder if we are heading for another civil war or depression (Howe). Red states are warring with Blue states for control over voting and representation. Respect for governmental institutions is at an all-time nadir, and some states are questioning secession. The center does not seem able to hold.

The first step in addressing the issue of cults is to understand the context in which people find them to be attractive. Only after we resolve (or fail to do so) our current generational crisis will we be able to address institutional decline and ineffectiveness. Next, we need to consider the continuum within which they operate and concentrate in somehow regulating or blunting the activities of the harmful cults. More research must clarify genetic susceptibility to joining a harmful cult.

There is a path forward. Neuroscientists, psychiatrists, and others may be able to formulate therapies or treatments to buffer the vulnerable individual's dive into self-harm. Zmigrod has identified two on-line tests that can be administered to young children to identify rigid thinkers. Educators might then include strategies to ease the young into more flexible thinking. School personnel might identify youngsters encountering harsh disciplinary parenting styles and offer the children safe spaces to discuss their challenges. Health curricula for the 17 through 21 age group might include lessons on identification and indoctrination methods utilized by authoritarian cults.

Indications of large-scale barriers to entering or exiting harmful cults do not seem legally or personally viable. Research does indicate those who may be more vulnerable to entering an authoritarian cult, which may place their loved ones on alert. Hassan's invaluable “Influence Continuum” from his BITE Model could inform individuals and their families as to when or how they might be flirting with danger. Hearing stories of slippery slopes by those who became infected by authoritarian high control groups could alert the curious to beware.

Once a loved one has been infected by harmful cult, however, families find it difficult to seek a remedy from the courts. Hassan suggests one-to-one involvement by loved ones to be the only viable path toward extraction from cults. This method appears to be supported by research, which puts responsibility on the cult member's family or associative healthy group members. Not to be forgotten are the family and loved ones who also need support as they have indeed lost someone close to them.

Legislation does not appear to be a viable means to protect the vulnerable. Without Hassan's “Influence Continuum” as a guide, anyone involved in a Heaven's Gate-type suicide group to a devoted Taylor Swift fan could find their associative agency curtailed by government overreach.

Since this topic is intractably linked across many elements of our lived experience today, it seems best positioned within content-neutral maps such as Hassan's. In addressing our personal interior subjective awareness, we have investigated how cults can distort thoughts, emotions, memories, perceptions and states of mind. Teasing these manifestations apart from the totality of the infected individual's worldview offers greater clarity, rigor, and expertise to assist in reorienting their awareness.

As for the individual's interior objective awareness of self, Zmigrod handed researchers avenues to pursue and eliminate any accusation of pseudoscience from the findings. The individual's collective interior intersubjective awareness has been explored by Hassan and such YouTube offerings as “Cults To Consciousness,” where cult survivors relate their stories as to how they came within the cult's narrow worldview and how they escaped. As for the structures and functions of society's exterior interior objective awareness, numerous sources have examined these systems and networks of infection, as well as how ineffective many of the systems have been in curbing or mediating the harm done by the worst cults.

Van der Linden offers “Fake News Antigens” in his book which can be adapted by a wide range of stakeholders seeking preventive approaches to authoritarian cults: (1) Make the truth more fluent; (2) Elicit accuracy-driven motivations; (3) Identify and resist the seven traits of conspiratorial thinking; (4) Minimize the continued influence of misinformation; (5) Limit the viral spread of fake news on social media; (6) Avoid the echo chamber and don't feed the algorithm; (7) Identify and resist micro-targeting attempts; (8) Inoculate against misinformation; (9) Inoculate against the techniques of misinformation; (10) Psychological herd immunity; and (11) Inoculate your friends and family.

This paper offers no simple answers. Instead, it provides maps and charts by which this situation might best be studied.

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