Greetings, followers — and settle in, because I’m about to share with you a true story about one of the most zealous cults in the world.

This story takes place on the group’s holiest day. Acolytes arrived at dawn, some having crossed oceans and sacrificed life savings in order to get there. They came bearing handmade offerings inscribed with sacred numbers: 22, 13, 89. But this, my friends, is not the story of an apocalyptic sect on a far-away compound. No — this was a Taylor Swift concert.

I said it. The talismans are friendship bracelets. The biblical books are known as eras. And the charismatic leader is a billionaire pop priestess who, let’s be honest, could probably rule the free world if she really wanted to.

Now, don’t get me wrong — I’m a deep-dyed Red Album girly. I’m not here to call out Swifties as cult followers. No, I wouldn’t dare. But I’m an author and a cultural commentator with a background in linguistics, and I’m here to share how we’re all susceptible to cultish thinking — for better and for worse — and how our everyday vocabularies are evidence of our devotion. I’m here to share what to pay attention to, what to listen for, so that as we move through these inevitably culty times, we can stay both enchanted and empowered.

A Personal Obsession with Cults

My fascination with cults is personal — and that’s because of my dad. As a teenager, he was forced to join Synanon, a 1970s California compound complete with matching overalls and a traumatizing truth-telling ritual called “The Game.” My dad escaped, became a neuroscientist, and raised a nosy kid who became obsessed with understanding how to identify cultish influence in everyday life.

As I got older, I couldn’t help but notice that the same language tactics my dad described in Synanon could be found kind of everywhere — in my high school theater programs, in the wellness industry, on my social media feed. That’s how I came to study the cultish spectrum: degrees of influence that none of which start out with LSD and robes, but instead, sneakily, with words.

Three Cultish Language Tactics

I want to point out three cultish language tactics to listen for in everyday life.

The first is called the thought-terminating cliché, coined in 1961 by the psychiatrist Robert J. Lifton. Thought-terminating clichés are zingy, stackable expressions that are easy to memorize, easy to repeat, and aimed at shutting down independent thinking and questioning. Let’s say you’re a member of a group and there’s a rule you want to push back against. You might get hit with a phrase like “trust the process” or “it’s all in God’s plan” — designed to shut you down. In Synanon, the phrase “act as if” effectively meant: pretend that you believe until you do. Today, in conspiracy-theory-type groups, the phrase “do your research” basically means: stop asking me about mine.

Next, I want to talk about us versus them labels. In Synanon, defectors were called “splitties.” Today, you’ve got your sheeple, your NPCs, your industry plants. When a label makes all of those people seem unilaterally evil and us superior, that’s a red flag.

And thirdly, I want to mention loaded language — corporate synergistic visionaries, wellness, 5D consciousness. At first, emotionally charged buzzwords like these feel like enlightenment. Then one day, you wake up and realize you’ve completely surrendered your ability to talk and think for yourself.

Cognitive Biases and Magical Overthinking

This language works because it plugs straight into our cognitive biases — those deeply ingrained decision-making shortcuts that developed in earlier human brains to help us process information from the world around us, just enough to survive it. But today, mental magic tricks like confirmation bias, the sunk cost fallacy, and the halo effect cause us to believe only the information we already agree with, double down on sketchy choices, and worship mortal human beings we’ve never even met as all-knowing deities.

This clash between our once-useful cognitive biases and the information age is a phenomenon I’ve been calling magical overthinking. And it’s a problem — because studies show that social media has damaged our mental health and our attention spans, all the while making cultish leaders mega-accessible. Who needs compounds when you have comment sections?

How to Stay Cult Literate

Now, I don’t say this to freak anyone out. I’m just here to point out the difference between awe and indoctrination — and to leave you with a few tips to help you do that.

First, when you find yourself in a space — even a digital one — where you feel really emotionally activated, and you’re using a lot of buzzwords that make you feel like you’re part of a tribe, but you can’t define exactly what you’re saying in plain English or why — that’s a sign to take a step back and consult other sources.

Next, pay attention to exit costs. Healthy groups might make leaving feel awkward, but never apocalyptic or earth-shattering.

And finally, we can use cult language for good. Rousing chants, rhyming mantras — they can be used to make true information catchy, too. I’m not here to take away anyone’s friendship bracelets. We need community more now than ever.

So living in what might just be the cultiest era of all time, the goal is not so much to be cult-proof — it’s to be cult literate. You follow?

Thank you. [applause]