Why You Would Be Absolutely Terrible in a Cult
The documentaries make it look intense and dramatic. The actual daily requirements would finish most of us within a week, honestly.
There is a specific moment that happens when you are deep into a cult documentary, like this one about TikTok dancing, usually around episode three, when the former member is describing what the daily schedule looked like, where you realize something about yourself that is simultaneously reassuring and a little embarrassing.
You would not have lasted a month.
Not because you are morally superior to the people who joined. Not because you are smarter or more skeptical or less vulnerable to charismatic authority. But because cults, it turns out, require an extraordinary amount of logistics, physical labor, communal living, and prolonged exposure to other people, and most of us are simply not built for that.
This is the unspoken truth of the cult documentary genre...
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The Operational Reality Nobody Warns You About
Before the ideology gets you, the morning does. Most high-control religious groups and cults run on early wake-ups. Not a reasonable 6:30am with time for coffee. We’re talking 4:30am collective prayer. 5am farm work. Communal breakfast at 6 in a hall with sixty people before you have had a single moment to yourself.
If you are the kind of person whose first conscious act every morning is to lie quietly for an additional eleven minutes past your alarm while doing absolutely nothing, this is already not going to work. Cult membership is not for people who need a transition period between sleeping and functioning. You are expected to be spiritually present at dawn. Your half-awake mumblings about needing a minute are not a valid excuse before God or the leader.
Then there is the manual labor. Cults are overwhelmingly agricultural or construction-heavy in their day-to-day operations. The Heaven’s Gate members were doing IT work, but that is the exception. The rule, from NXIVM to the People’s Temple to the Twelve Tribes, is that everyone farms, builds, cooks, cleans, and repairs. All day. Together.
Together is the word that ends most of us. The cult is never just a belief system. It is a total social environment. You eat with the group. You work with the group. You pray with the group. You process your feelings about your childhood with the group, in a circle, while someone takes notes. The introvert who thought they were joining a spiritual community and finds themselves surrounded by people from 4:30am until 10pm has, at some point around day four, the quiet but overwhelming realization that this is going to kill them.
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The Speeches
Then there are the speeches.
Every cult leader speaks for a very long time. This is documented across virtually every high-control group that has been studied. The sermon is not thirty minutes. It is two hours. Sometimes four. The leader circles back. The leader revisits a point he made in 1987 that is still relevant. The leader becomes emotional. The leader recovers. The leader makes a joke that everyone laughs at because laughing is the correct response.
You are expected to be present, attentive, and visibly receptive for the duration. Not nodding off. Not checking to see if your phone has messages — you do not even have a phone in the first place. Not quietly composing a grocery list in your head. Present. Engaged. Open.
Most of us struggle to remain genuinely attentive through a one-hour meeting with an agenda and a defined end time. The idea of sustaining that same quality of presence through a freeform spiritual address of indeterminate length, delivered by someone who is going to continue until the spirit moves him to stop, is the kind of thing you understand theoretically and collapse under in practice.
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The Togetherness Problem
The deepest incompatibility between modern Nigerian life and cult membership is not the theology. It is the social architecture.
Cults run on radical togetherness. There is no alone time. If you seek alone time, that is a sign that the enemy is trying to separate you from the community, which is a sign that you need more community time, which means someone is assigned to spend time with you until you feel better about spending time with people. The solution to too much togetherness is more togetherness, and there is no exit from this loop.
For anyone who has ever described a perfect weekend as one where they did not see a single person and it was deeply restorative, you would be excommunicated within a week. Possibly sooner. The moment you were caught eating alone by choice, staring at a wall to decompress, or answering a question about how you were feeling with “I’m fine” in a tone that indicated you did not want to discuss it further, someone would flag you for pastoral intervention.
You would not survive pastoral intervention. It involves more people.
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The Rules
Cults have rules about everything. What to eat. What to wear. How to address the leader. When you can speak and when you should be silent. Who you are permitted to be friends with outside the group; which is nobody, eventually. How to structure your thoughts when you have doubts, which involves sharing the doubts with a designated senior member rather than sitting with them privately, because private doubts are the first step toward leaving, and leaving is the worst thing you can do.
Most people who have tried to follow a simple eating plan for three weeks and abandoned it by Wednesday of the second week should be honest with themselves about their capacity for sustained adherence to rules in the absence of any personal benefit. At least a diet has a measurable outcome you chose. Cult rules exist because they exist, and questioning them is itself a violation.
The person who reads a new workplace policy and immediately wants to understand the reasoning behind it before deciding whether to comply would not enjoy being a cult member. There is no reasoning. The leader said so. That is sufficient, and your desire for additional context is something to reflect on.
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The Honest Conclusion
None of this is to minimize the very real harm that cults cause, or the genuine psychological sophistication with which high-control groups recruit and retain members. People who join cults are not stupid or uniquely credulous. They are people who encountered a very skilled system of belonging at a moment when belonging was exactly what they needed.
But the documentary-watching version of yourself, snacks adjacent, judging from the sofa, is also not the person who was recruited. You were recruited at a different moment, in a different state, by a different set of circumstances. The you who watches the documentary would be terrible at this. The question of whether some other version of you, at some other time, would have been less terrible is more complicated.
For now, the sofa is fine. You can stay.
