What if I told you I had found a book that could, quite literally, change your life?
What if all the seemingly inscrutable dilemmas of modern existence, all the intractable problems of daily living, all the challenges of establishing financial sustainability along with physical and mental health can be solved with a single insight? And what if I told you that the path to reaching this insight is in your hands right now?
Well, in a sense, it is. This book contains more than just one life-changing secret; it contains hundreds of them. Each product, system of thought, institution of higher learning, medical breakthrough, financial investment, blockchain white paper, diet drink, career coach, spiritual retreat, social media influencer, stoicism course, or hashtag campaign chronicled herein offered the One Truth needed to get from here to there.
All you have to do is believe, buy, click, follow, subscribe, and. most of all, share. For the only certain way of proving your faith and guaranteeing your own success in any system is to enlist others. And that’s why, as the newest member of the Mara Einstein Hoodwinked Society, I am—for a limited time—inviting you to step up, drop in, reach high, join the team, unlock the secret, take the leap, and find yourself in the new reality you always knew was possible and right over the next horizon but always just out of reach. It’s not any longer.
It’s here. You’ve found us. Welcome. Now tell your friends.
Yes, you’ve joined a cult. But the cult of Hoodwinked is no normal cult. It is a meta-cult, exposing the underlying dynamics driving our culture of branded belonging and accompanying disempowerment. The experience of reading about the hundreds of cult recruitment tactics deployed by those who wish to control our beliefs, behaviors, and buying is itself like a spiritual revelation. About that part, I kid you not: coming to recognize the essential, repeating architectures of cult marketing is a bit like putting on those special glasses in John Carpenter’s movie They Live, which allow you to see the coercive messaging embedded in every billboard. I was lost, and now I’m found.
When you have finished this book, every opportunity to achieve “personal growth” will remind you of both the Mormon church and Mindvalley; each invitation to find “community” will smack of WeWork or GaryV; the chance to get in on the next big thing will shout LuLaRoe or NXIVM; the words “wellness” and “spirituality” will trigger the same justified suspicion one applies to Jim Jones or even Deepak Chopra.
Welcome to the cult of those who are willing to see the sticky strings attached to the promises of nearly every invitation to belong, to learn, to improve, or to “wake up.” More often than not, these pleas are to enlist you in something less a club than a war. Whether it’s antitax against the government, supplement against medicine, crypto against cash, Mac against PC, or the Great Awakening against wokeness, “getting in” means learning who is out. For all their promise of belonging, unity, and unconditional acceptance, the cult-inflected brands and organizations described here all demand exclusion, assignment of blame, and the payment of social, spiritual, and monetary dues.
To me, that’s the real crime. If someone wants to sell memberships, products, education, or enlightenment, they’re welcome to use whatever methods of persuasion to convince us of the benefits. Go for it. Caveat emptor. But those who employ the tactics of cults do so by leveraging our healthy and essential social and emotional needs against us. And the more desocialized and emotionally alienated our world becomes, the more vulnerable we are to the painstakingly concocted efforts at answering these needs with false promises and enforced surrender.
What makes this book so crucial at this particular moment in our history is that these techniques are now migrating online. I was one of the early cyberpunks who saw the digital realm as an escape from the forces of commercial and political hoodwinkery, in which we would be able to liberate ourselves from the brand tribes and social castes of American strip mall society and forge new bonds based on genuinely shared interests and values.
As the internet pivoted from a nonprofit-funded commons to an investment pyramid and surveillance marketplace, these new avenues for human social connection were replaced with opportunities to buy and sell our friendships for profit and status. Those who weren’t selling social graphs directly were selling new systems and platforms for monetizing or new systems and platforms for developing platforms and systems for monetizing and so on. Everything went, as Mark Zuckerberg would have it, “Meta.”
Although most of us may recognize a selling scam when it comes from the Bible salesman at the door, we don’t have the same skills to detect such appeals online. We can’t look into the seller’s eyes, evaluate whether he or she is triggering any of our painstakingly evolved social mechanisms for detecting duplicity, or see the personal data and algorithmic processing being used to customize the appeal to our individual psychological profile.
In a landscape characterized less by true human bonding or solidarity than by likes, retweets, and subscriptions, the tactics of cult recruitment don’t seem out of place at all. In the fabricated digital world, they may as well be features of nature.
It’s time we recognize the salespeople, influencers, and algorithms in these spaces for what they are: cult recruitment agents. We must learn to alienate ourselves from these entities so that we may regard them less as preconditions for social interaction and belonging than as impediments to healthy, sustainable social outcomes. The massive success of QAnon online is no more testament to the ingenuity of Incel, Russian, Gamergate, or MAGA hackers than it is to the widespread ignorance of cult recruitment techniques and even more widespread inability to recognize such techniques when they are being used in virtual realms.
It’s not our stupidity that’s to blame, but our longing. Just as legions of high-worth investors could be hoodwinked into losing a combined $8 billion to Sam Bankman-Fried’s crypto Ponzi scheme, we can all be hoodwinked into surrendering our common sense to an appeal too good to be true—especially when that appeal has been crafted for us, individually, by an artificial intelligence that knows more about us than we can remember ourselves and more about our inner workings than our therapists.
The best defense is to learn the fundamental methods for getting people to join these cult-inspired systems, to stay in them, and to recruit others. Only then can we recognize the patterns and stand a chance of identifying them when deployed in the ever-more-automated landscapes in which we are living, working, and making meaning together.
Let this meta-cult of those of us learning from Mara Einstein’s wise experience be the last one you ever need to join.
New York April 2024