I got a tip from a Facebook friend to listen to this podcast – I don’t remember who it was, but to them I say: thank you for your comment!
I’ve been informing myself – while driving Ensign – about cults. Using the word “sects” in the title is misleading as some of the groups the show focuses on were (or, in some cases, are) not religions at all, being more like New Agers.
It’s a low-budget production not just put together – getting help from others, for example a person to write the theme music – but also narrated by Sarah Steel; her slightly congested, plummy voice and her ethical approach to the subject predominate. The show lags at times and you tend to just get one voice recounting the information. Monotony occasionally leads to your attention slipping, but the payoff in each episode is still strong. The work is evident.
Religion, despite the naysayers, is still a very popular life choice and the show details a wide variety of ways people have found meaning outside work and hobbies. Despite the car-crashes that some of these cults turned into, you can sense a yearning among adherents to discover a better way of life. The aspirational clashes – sometimes wildly – with the farcical and the tragic to form an interesting melange of emotions and feelings while listening.
In some of the episodes – for example the one on an Australian outfit named Kenja Communication – I found that similarities between a cult and an organisational rising before me like a bad dream. I almost felt triggered. Work is an under-examined arena of life (compared to, say, sport or art) but it’s an area of endeavour I have a deep interest in.
Attempts to refashion society, often to the detriment of the individual, are commonplace though most people try to change their consciousness using alcohol or drugs. While religion is broadly considered, today, to be a matter of personal belief and the consensus usually locates it firmly within the domestic arena, for sects it becomes more than this. It becomes a way to order existence. This includes making your own rules to live by – which is where sects often come to grief.
It’s as though a commitment to the irrational were an ingrained part of who we are. I also tend to believe that we need a dominant person to at least symbolically sit at the apex of the communities we form as collectives of individuals. The Westminster system – where the symbolic head and the executive are separated by biology – seems to be the ideal way to organise societies. My father always used to call the USA an “experiment”, but I don’t think he’d the sects in mind when he did.
Politics, like religion, is universal – you cannot escape it. In the absence of a familiar structure defining relations between people something will emerge – and Steel’s use of detail to show how it operated in these small, closed societies oriented around dominant personalities, is entertaining in a kind of doomscrolling way. You just can’t look away often because there’s a crime at the core of the drama. As with work, it’s only when things go pear-shaped that a cult enters our collective consciousness, like the Family (in Australia) or the Branch Davidians (in the USA), so you wonder how many other cults have headed home under the radar, never reported on.
I’ve only listened to a small fraction of the total offerings in this series – by the time the post you’re reading went public four seasons had been recorded and broadcast on the show’s website – but was impressed by Steel’s tenacity and grit. It must’ve taken something in her past that brought her to give such a quantity of time to studying cults. Though an elegant voice guides you through each episode you feel secure she’s done the needed research.
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