Chasing Power

This podcast explores the techniques that cult leaders use to gain power and influence. It focuses on the linguistic habits of cult leaders such as Jim Jones, Marshall Applewhite, and Charles Manson. The leaders used manipulation, abuse, limited communication, fear, and highly authoritative behaviors to control their followers. Language played a crucial role in their power, as they carefully chose their words to convert, condition, and coerce their followers. Cult leaders used specific language and created their own lingo to further isolate their followers from the outside world. Hello, everyone, and welcome to or welcome back to the Chasing Power podcast with me, your host, Jordan McCammond. If you're new to this podcast, then I'll go ahead and give you a little rundown of what it's all about. In each episode of Chasing Power, I explore different techniques that cult leaders use to become the scarily powerful individuals that they are. In other words, I try to figure out how cult leaders become cult leaders. In this episode, I will be digging into the relationship between cult leaders and their linguistic habits. Before I go into what specific cults slash cult leaders I will be talking about today, I did want to go ahead and give a trigger warning because I will be mentioning topics of abuse and mass suicide. So if those topics are hard for you to listen to, please feel free to not listen to this specific episode. Now let's dig into which cult leaders we will be discussing today. In this episode, we will be examining three different cult leaders and how their linguistic habits helped them achieve their manipulative goals. These leaders are Jim Jones, Marshall Applewhite, and Charles Manson. I decided to focus on these three men because they all had pretty distinct ways in how they would interact with both their followers and people outside of their following. Okay, let's start out with getting some background on Jim Jones. So Jim Jones was the leader of the People's Temple, which later became known as Jonestown. Jones allegedly wanted to create a society that was free of tensions of class and race. However, there was some suspicion around what truly happened in Jones's inner circle, so there was a lot of pressure on the government to do an investigation. In response to this, Jones moved his cult to Guyana to be out of reach from the public eye. During this time, the leaders of the cult became very abusive, both mentally and physically, which caused Congressman Leo Ryan to visit and possibly begin an investigation. As Ryan was ready to leave Jonestown, Jones ordered some of his inner circle to murder Ryan, which led to a shootout and a mass suicide of the rest of the cult members. All right, now let's get into Marshall Applewhite. Marshall Applewhite was the leader of the Heaven's Gate cult. Applewhite mixed both science fiction and religion together in order to create his ideology, which was very different than many other cults at the time. He was basically told his followers that God and Heaven were located in space, and in order to get there, they needed to give up all their human possessions. This included family members, friends, all types of media, and even recreational sports. In order to reach Heaven, Marshall and his followers committed mass suicide in order to escape Earth that they believed was going to be recycled. Okay, now let's get into our third and final cult leader that we'll be focusing on today. Charles Manson was the leader of the Manson family cult. Manson believed that there was an upcoming apocalypse and race war. At first, this cult seemed like your average group of 60s hippies, but it turns out that Manson was telling all of his members, primarily young girls, that he was the reincarnation of Jesus and they were the only ones who would survive the apocalypse, which would lead to Manson taking over the world and becoming the overall master. Manson and some of his followers began to commit racially motivated murders throughout California, which led him and his followers to being sentenced to many lives in prison. Okay, now that we have some background info on each of these cult leaders and what they did with their power, let's dig into understanding how language holds power. Language is the world's main way of communication, and it can be performed in many different ways. Throughout history, and even sometimes in today's world, language fluency was seen as a sign of someone's class rank. Back in the Old and Middle English days, people who were the elite of society were normally the only ones who were taught how to read, providing them a larger position to have more opportunities. An example of this is that court documents used to be written in English or Latin, which only the elite knew how to read. So if a common person was taken to court, they would not be able to read their own documents. This shows how language has been used as a divisive technique within society for decades. Now that we have a bit of understanding about the power language holds, let's examine the social characteristics of cults. The social characteristics that we'll be focusing on today are highly authoritative behaviors, manipulation, abusive, limited communication, and implementing fear. Okay, let's begin with the highly authoritative behaviors that cult leaders tend to show. So cult leaders have the tendency to include a lot of specific rules within their ideologies. This can include excommunication from family members, certain punishments that followers have to endure, all that kind of stuff. This makes them appear as highly authoritative figures to their followers, and it causes them to not want to go out of line with the leaders. Having this type of behavior is a key tool when being a cult leader. Now, this is not me saying this is how to become a cult leader. This is just saying this is how cult leaders do become cult leaders. So highly authoritative behaviors are very common for them. This next characteristic probably seems pretty self-explanatory, but it's manipulation. Cult leaders often use their followers' emotions against them to manipulate them to do certain things. They threaten to take away certain rights that these followers have. They threaten to separate them from their children who were born into the cult. These cult leaders that we're discussing today are pretty ruthless when it comes to manipulation. Okay, a little bit of a trigger warning, but the next characteristic that we're going to be talking about is abuse. In some cases, cult leaders resort to verbal, mental, and even physical abuse to keep their followers in check. This is very much not humane in any way, and it's pretty disgusting once you start to investigate some cults. This next characteristic isn't so much of a characteristic, but it's a very large part of what makes cults cults. So this rule is no communication outside of cult members. So cult leaders don't want their followers to get any ideas from anyone outside of their control. So in order to keep that from happening, they limit their followers' communications to the outside world. The last characteristic that many cult leaders tend to show is that they implement fear into their followers and able to keep control of them. So constantly threatening or warning their followers allows leaders to keep their followers under control because they are too scared of doing wrong by their leader. And you have to keep in mind, to these followers, this leader is everything to them. I mean, they give up their family, their friends, sometimes their children. They give up their own religion because they believe that this leader is the best and the only option for survival. All of these social characteristics are achieved by cult leaders because they very specifically choose their wording to be able to keep their followers believing them. So now let's dig into how language gives these cult leaders power. Cult leaders are very careful with the way that they speak to their followers. For as much as it may seem easy for them while they are preaching to their followers, a lot of work goes into putting together those speeches. They have to be able to know what words or phrases will get their followers to fall into their delusions more and more. In preparation for this podcast, I specifically researched Amanda Montel, who is the author of Cultish, which explores the linguistic patterns that cults and cult-like brands use. So before we get to the brands part, we're just going to focus on the linguistic patterns that cults use. And a quote from her that I really, really liked and I wanted to include in here was that it converts you, it conditions you, and it coerces you. So basically what she means by this is that they use love-bombing to get you in. They condition you to respond a certain way to certain stimulus, and then they coerce you to behave in ways that seem opposite of your former self. Within this model, Montel believes that this is the way, the three key parts that each cult leader uses to begin their cult and start their own small following. And it just grows bigger and bigger and bigger as time goes on because they continue to use these three methods, converting, conditioning, and coercing. Okay, an example of this using one of the cult leaders that I said we were going to focus on today is going to be the lingo that the Heaven's Gate cult or Marshall Applewhite used in order to keep his followers in line and even more separated from the outside world. So they used very specific words for everyday items. So it would make it really hard for someone who wasn't a part of that cult to understand what they were talking about. It's almost like they were creating their own language. So the mansion that they lived in was called The Craft, the kitchen was called The Neutral Lab, and the laundry room was called The Fibre Lab. So all of these word changes relate to the ideology that Heaven and God are in space. And this just made the followers believe more and more and more of what Applewhite was telling them. And so they just kind of fell into the release even more and fell into the cult and couldn't get out. While doing research for this podcast, I also came across Charles Manson's first prison interview, which was conducted by 60 Minutes Australia. And this I found very interesting because this is very fresh off of Manson's arrest. And it was one of his encounters with a person outside of his cult. So I thought it was really interesting for me to get to see that and observe and pick apart his behaviors that he would present to people outside of his cult. And within this interview, I observed that he was talking very sporadically. What he was saying didn't really make sense. And to be fair, he kind of was living in a fantasy world. And I don't think that he was the most mentally stable at the time. So his words weren't really coming together. And it didn't really seem like he was making complete sentences. Another thing that I thought was very interesting in this interview is that Manson wouldn't sit down. He didn't want to be looking up to anyone. That is a direct quote from him during this interview. He didn't want to be looking up at the interviewer like he was worshipping him, which kind of shows that he still has that mentality of he is the reincarnated Jesus and that he is the leader of all and he is going to become this master of everyone, which is just very interesting to see play out unedited. And kind of, even though it's not in person, it kind of feels like you're there in person. He also didn't directly answer questions, which kind of goes along with the sporadic talking. He would try to preach his ideology instead, which also shows that he really wasn't out of that mental state of being a leader and having all of his followers, which to be fair, his followers were still following him. Even the ones who were arrested and the ones who weren't arrested, they were still following him. They believed in him, so he had to keep up this persona of this big almighty cult leader because he knew that this interview was going to go out for all to see and his followers were most likely going to watch it. So maybe even within the sporadic talking that might not make sense to the common viewer, to his followers, it might have made perfect sense. He also just seemed very loud and angry, which he was just put in prison for the rest of his life. So kind of fair to be angry. And he also had this mentality that he was right and no one was understanding him, which causes people to become aggressive. But also using this aggressive tone and angry tone would mainly make people not want to have a conversation with him and back down when it came to having a conversation with him. But the interviewer did great and stayed calm and didn't really give in to any of these tactics he was trying to throw at him. Okay, now that we've heard some examples of how cult leaders use their selective words as power, let's put a name to these linguistic features. From the many observations that I have done on some cult leaders for this podcast, I have come across many different communication styles that they use in order to gain control of their followers. The first communication style that I'm going to be talking about is the uplink style. This is the extensive use of personal pronouns, they, theirs, them, we, are, us, to view groups of people as insiders and outsiders. So oftentimes when cult leaders were talking to their followers as a whole, they would use we to identify them as followers, and them or their to identify outsiders. And they would kind of put an angry tone on them or their to show how they are not welcoming towards outsiders, and they don't like outsiders or people who judge them. And then the leaders would put more of a loving tone on we and are and us to show their followers that they all had this unbreakable bond and connection to each other, which is a pretty manipulative tactic. The next communication style is the intensifying style. So this is seen by being used through boosters, which are words like definitely, totally, clearly, and quantifiers, which are words like all, some, several. And these words are used to increase the meaning and implication of what the leaders were saying at the time. This made them seem more confident in what they were saying, and it kind of gave the followers less room to either debate or question what the leaders were saying. The next communication style is the negating style. So this is the extensive use of negativity or negative words. So words like not, never, nothing, or no have the power to restrain situations or actions that individuals are involved in. So cult leaders telling their followers no was very, very powerful because these followers truly believed, and I can't say this enough, they truly believed that their leaders were pretty much God on earth. They thought that they could do no wrong, and if they followed them, they were golden. They were good for the rest of their lives, and they really thought that they were doing the right thing, and they thought that what they were doing was making them happy and making them feel whole again. So having this extensive use of negativity thrown on them was kind of a big deal to them because they never wanted to be on the bad side of their leader. The last communication style that is seen a lot in cults is the elaborating style. So this is the use of words like because, although, when, while, if, and, but, or. All of those words kind of give the leader more of an add-on to what they're going to say next. They have the opportunity to add on what they're going to say based on the reactions of their followers. So if what the leader said first wasn't going over well with the followers, then they could add in a but, or, and, or, or, and then go off on kind of the opposite tangent to really gain their followers' trust even more. Even though I have mainly seen these types of linguistic features within cult leaders that I've researched or observed or read about, I also believe that these types of habits are finding their way into modern marketing industries. So now we're going to take a slight turn and we're going to see how these linguistic habits have made their way into the marketing industry. One particular area that I find a lot of cult-like linguistic habits is within the marketing industry that focuses on marketing towards young women and teenage girls. The marketing industry has been capitalizing on feminist vernacular to be able to catch the attention of young women everywhere. This includes any type of trendy language like the phrases girl boss and boss babe. Marketing companies know that if they put these phrases on their products or on ads surrounding their products that there will be a higher buying rate. Another group that uses this type of logic to get more customers is the wellness industry. So people who own gyms or who produce workout classes, these types of businesses push the access of community within their product. A lot of young people in today's world have been moving away from communities like churches, so these types of businesses try to use that same type of marketing to reel them in. Churches often accentuate the fact that they are a safe space, a community for people who believe in the same things, and that's what gyms are starting to do. They're saying they're judgment-free zones and that they welcome all body types and that we even have women-only gyms now to make them feel safe, which I think is a great thing personally. But yeah, this type of marketing can seem kind of cultish in a way because they are using specific wording in their advertisements to make us want to purchase these products or these memberships more and more. These types of tactics that the marketing industry uses to get people to either join their businesses or buy their products shows how maybe the outside world is not so different than cults themselves. All right, as we are reaching the end of this episode, I want to talk about why discussing topics like linguistic habits within certain communities is important. As we have learned, language is powerful and it can cause a lot of chaos if allowed. Understanding how we give language power and how it can cause us to do many different things is important because it can help us learn to take back control of ourselves from others. I believe that understanding the power of language can help us live our lives in complete control of ourselves and what we believe is wrong and right. Thank you so much for joining me today for this episode and I hope you'll tune in next week. Bye!