Swimming in Different Waters

Why everyone is a little bit culty, including you and me

I have been listening to A Little Bit Culty for years. I have watched most of the cult documentaries on Netflix, Max, and Amazon. And I have examined nearly every group I have ever belonged to, wondering whether I was in one.

That last habit is not idle curiosity. I have held leadership roles for most of my adult life, and anyone in that position can create unhealthy dynamics without meaning to. Good intentions offer no protection. So I keep studying these groups as reference points for what to avoid.

I am not a survivor of cultic abuse. I was not raised in anything most people would call a cult. What I have instead is a long habit of dismantling my own beliefs, which has left me standing outside most rooms I walk into. From out here, cults look less like rare birds to be spotted and catalogued and more like projections of ordinary human needs. Take that for what it is worth.

So here is the uncomfortable version. Everyone is in a cult. You, me, everyone. The one we all belong to is hiding in plain sight, and it is called culture.

I once heard someone say the difference between a cult and a culture is the number of people involved. I have never been able to attribute the line properly, and I know it is too tidy. Coercion, exit costs, and exploitation are real distinctions that headcount does not capture. But the line still does useful work. It points at the fact that we grade every group on a scale we never think to apply to the one we are standing in.

There is a third word this conversation needs: paradigm. Beliefs change fairly easily. Cultural practices drift over generations. A paradigm is a different animal. It is the whole framework, with its own assumptions, its own vocabulary, and its own rules about what counts as evidence. When people talk about breaking free of their conditioning, this is the thing they are actually up against.

I started to understand how fiercely we defend these frameworks through Internal Family Systems, a therapeutic model developed by Richard Schwartz and best explored with a trained practitioner. In IFS, protector parts form early to shield us from experiences we could not process at the time. One of mine shows up specifically when a foundational framework gets challenged. I call it the Paradigm Protector.

It has a tell. My logic gets sharper. I used to take that as evidence I was thinking clearly. Now I read it as an alarm. When I am not being run by a protector, I am considerably less rational and more heart oriented, and my arguments come out worse and truer at the same time.

Not everyone’s protector works this way. Some people retreat into magical thinking when their core beliefs get poked. Mine reaches for a legal brief. That pattern seems common among lawyers, academics, and anyone who has built an identity around being analytical. A knowing wink to my people.

I met this part of myself most clearly around the question of contagion. The idea that people pass illness to one another is about as settled as an idea gets. When I first heard it questioned years ago, I did not evaluate the argument. I dismissed it before it finished. Of course illness is contagious. Viruses exist. Next.

What interests me now is not whether I was right. It is how fast I moved. I skimmed the counterargument for the weakest piece I could find, knocked that piece down, and considered the job done. That is not thinking. That is a security system.

Which leads to the advice I give most often. Swallow the red pills slowly. There is no prize for demolishing your reality in a weekend. Some people are built for radical reorientation and find it energizing. Others are better served keeping the framework they have, and that is a legitimate choice. The goal was never to have no paradigm. It is to hold the one you have with an open hand.

There is a line, usually credited to William James though nobody has ever located it in his writing, about how a great many people think they are thinking when they are only rearranging their prejudices. Whoever said it named the distinction that matters. Changing what you think is ordinary. Changing how you think is rare.

I watch this play out constantly in alternative health. People take in new information at a remarkable rate and run all of it through the framework they already had. The conclusion is set before the evidence arrives. They end up rejecting ideas they never actually encountered, because the framework had nowhere to put them.

David Foster Wallace made this point better than I can, in his 2005 commencement address at Kenyon College, later published as This Is Water. His observation was that the most obvious and important realities tend to be the hardest ones to see and talk about. We swim in our paradigms the way fish swim in water, which is to say without noticing.

This is why brainwashing is such a slippery word. It suggests force. In practice, once a new framework is installed it simply becomes the water. You cannot see it, because seeing it requires standing somewhere else. By that definition all of us are brainwashed, and the only real question is whether we have ever tried to look.

The podcast that started all this is a good example. Sarah Edmondson and Anthony Ames host A Little Bit Culty, and they came to the subject as survivors of NXIVM, which gives their work a weight that commentary alone does not carry. They are sharp on the tactics. Word salad. Thought terminating clichés. The logical fallacies that let a group close a question without answering it.

And then, in certain episodes, they reach for those same tools. People who question vaccination or the dominant model of infectious disease get sorted into culty, misguided, or uninformed, and the sorting does the work that an argument would otherwise have to do. Ah, I think, there it is. I do not say this to score a point. I say it because I recognize the move, having made it many times myself.

I hear the same thing in podcasts made by friends I respect who examine alternative health claims. Their concerns are often valid. But guilt by association shows up. So does focusing on the character of a framework’s founder rather than the framework. So does restating a core concept in its least defensible form, which makes it easy to knock over and guarantees you never met it. What I notice most is the tone. There is a particular sound a voice makes when something load bearing is being pushed on. I know it because I have heard it come out of my own mouth.

So I started doing something my family finds strange. I go looking for the paradigms that produce my strongest reflexive no, and I stay in them a while. Recent trips include the sovereign citizen world, where the claim is that taxation and government authority rest on a legal fiction a person can opt out of, and the globe skeptics, better known as flat earthers.

When I went deep into the flat earth material, the people around me got nervous. I kept explaining that I was not trying to become one, only to understand the framework from the inside. This reassured nobody.

No, I did not come out a flat earther. I came out with a clear picture of how the evidence looks from inside that framework, and a much less flattering picture of how quickly I dismiss things. Most of what passes for refutation, mine included, is a fallacy delivered with confidence. A number of the people doing that research are careful thinkers reasoning consistently from different starting assumptions.

The obvious objection is that holding beliefs loosely leaves you easy to recruit. Is the Paradigm Protector not there for a reason?

My experience says otherwise, with a caveat I will get to. In the Amazon I watched Western seekers dissolve into the framework completely, some taking Shipibo names as their own. I loved the teachings and kept my footing. The same pattern showed up in plant medicine circles, in alternative health communities, and in yoga lineages, all of them called cults at some point for holding unusual views or for having a magnetic teacher at the center.

Here is the caveat. Everyone believes they are the discerning one. That belief is standard issue in every group I just described, and my own report on myself is not worth much as evidence. What I can claim is narrower. Understanding how frameworks install themselves gave me something to notice with. Noticing is not immunity.

None of this lets us off the hook about actual abuse. Survivors deserve to be believed, and the record is often not ambiguous. The independent investigation into Yogi Bhajan, published in 2020, found the sexual abuse allegations against him credible, in a lineage where thousands of people had trained for decades. Cult accusations have to be taken seriously.

They also have to mean something. When the label gets applied to any group with unusual views, it stops functioning as an accusation and becomes a way to end a conversation. Which is, in the exact technical sense, a thought terminating cliché.

I do not have a clean ending for this. The line between cult and culture may really be mostly a matter of headcount, and if it is, then what keeps us upright is not the strength of our convictions but our willingness to keep testing them. That is not a comfortable place to stand and it does not compress into advice.

What I can tell you is that I am still in water I cannot see. So are you. The best either of us can do is swim with our eyes open, and stay aware that there is water we have not been in yet.