I have to keep telling myself "No one is immune to propoganda and I'm NOT the exception." I wish more folks would adopt that to get through these tactics.
Great comment. I had this one really embarrassing period years ago where I kept getting fed “prepper” content on UA-cam and ended up buying several 50 lb bags of rice and beans to make sure I wouldn’t starve when society inevitably disintegrated in the coming weeks 😅
The most important lesson on the subject. Kumare is a great documentary I think everyone should watch because it shows how easy it is to be misled into nothingness. Positioning in a vulnerable environment. We all have vulnerabilities.
Yeah, kind of off topic, but not fully. That's how I first got suspicious of this little known person Jordan Peterson. He was always attacking the left and cultural neo marxists at that time, but on the other side of his mouth talking about how bad tribalism is. That made me more curious about the other subjects he talked about at that time, to only quickly discover how little he knows and/or how bad and self serving his intentions are.
Been there....got out. Phhewww.. any dialog that doesnt assent to God's Spirit Directed Organisation....is taboo...and then there are the xhanges (new light)...sadly it vacilate.s@tatafromthehood5573
I was raised in a cult. When I woke up (realized it was a cult), I literally felt like a veil was lifted off my face. The world looked different. It was brighter and more real than I'd ever thought
40 years ago my girlfriend joined scientology. She wanted me to join with her so I went to the Pasadena “church”. I went thru the orientation and realized that if they had to have their own dictionary then it must be a load of bullsh!t that they were pitching. Never went back. Since Scientology does not allow their members to date non Scientologist I lost my girlfriend.
Scientology is such a wild ride. These days there are so many former members, and in some cases literal escapees, sharing their stories in books and documentaries and UA-cam livestreams. You didn't just dodge a bullet. You dodged a whole firing squad.
My sister lost her long term boyfriend the same way 10 years ago. He devoted his entire life to them, and wound up moving to California to be at one of their bigger locations. Crazy stuff.
One mantra that sticks in my craw: "Do your research." After spending most of my working life in industrial laboratories, I can assure you there's more to research than browsing your favorite social media platforms for opinions matching your own.
The sheer amount of nonsense on the internet is staggering. The sheer amount of it which can be confidently refuted with just a wiki page even more so.
While I will use social media as one kind of source - it’s useful for finding recorded interviews, individual’s conversations and observations, videos of protests and demonstrations sharing just what’s happening in the moment outside of general news (especially useful when the filmer doesn’t make commentary!) - it’s absolutely not the only source to use. It’s pretty much only valuable for basic facts. Some sites also have articles people post about and discussion on the article, which gets me a good idea of what people are interested in more generally. But that’s just looking into things that will help me find topics and events to talk to other people about. If I do serious research on something I’ll be in libraries for weeks searching catalogs and books, and digging through relevant databases hunting for anything and everything available (or even adjacent) on the topic in question. And it frustrates me that I can debunk almost anything my mom says “do your own research” about in 30 minutes of skimming data sets and running my own calculations on them. And sometimes not even that much is necessary.
I grew in small town Mormon in utah. Here are commons ones. "Outside influence' "Satan's temptations" "Protection of the spirit" "Strength in the youth" "Falling away" "Lost or Looking" "Strength through prayer" "Core of the family" "Power of the preisthood"(male superpower) "Mothers example/obedience"
This is also any sort of religious belief with their own book (including the different Abrahamic religions). Also, the part in the video that said religions tend to use "you" while cults tend to use "us/them"- religions use us/them all the time. It separates and creates a division between us/believers and them/unbelievers. But the "you" language works too because it makes people feel even more significant.
Yea they use a lot of biblical terminology to try to deceive and justify what they're doing. They love to twist the Bible. It is a very powerful book. Cult leaders know this
Of all the things in this, the final line is THE most important. LISTEN TO PEOPLE OUTSIDE YOUR USUAL CIRCLES ONCE IN A WHILE. Reality-check, especially if you're feeling threatened. Sadly the people who need to hear this the most will be the ones refusing to listen :(
I totally agree. I work in an academic setting doing fundraising where most of the people working there including me subscribe to a political ideology. I purposefully subscribe to a fundraising newsletter from a different political ideology to hear ideas that I won't get in my immediate working environment.
Same here 🙋♀️ I deleted all social media years ago. All I have is UA-cam but I set up a time limit on how long to watch. That way I have time for socialising, reading, hobbies and work. Not long ago my passer-by friend asked me if I knew the person in front of me, sitting at the airport. No, I did not. She asked me why was I speaking to him. It seemed like we knew each other and agreeing, disagreeing. I told her "Well, sometimes you need to leave your baby bubble and grow a bigger one. By leaving our comfort zone, thinking and asking people reasonable questions can get you the right answers. It can be economics, technology, comic books, travel, languages, rainwater harvesting or anything, really" She looked confused and began asking me questions. She was finally becoming independent on thought process. ❤ ❤ ❤ ❤ 🧠
@@digital_matt Why not just wear a T-shirt saying “I’m with stupid” with the arrow pointing straight up? This is the dumbest, ‘I’m obviously a victim’ comment UA-cam has ever seen. Just turn off your brain and let the towering intellect of a Grade 8 teacher do all your thinking for you.
The final message is so important. I've seen members of my family completely lost because they don't have any variety in the ideas they consume. If you listen to one group's ideas for long enough, you will lose your sense of reality. Over time you will become more and more agreeable to their ideas.
Absolutely. If one listens or watches only Fox News he will be brainwashed to believe that a narcissist billionaire cares about anyone else if not himself
The "quantity is key" has been known from politicians for long time : they're very good at answering a question in a 15 minutes response which didn't mean anything AND didn't answer the question in any way. By that time, even the inquirer has forgotten what that was all about
I thought I was dumb for not being able to find meaning it. I also blamed my adhd for my short attention span. I think both of these are partially true, but now that you mention it it makes sense. I never thought that it was intentional, and that most people feel that way when listening to politicians.
worked for a guy who offered us to take a communication and management course for training. The course almost reinvented the dictionary. Also had things like "you hard sell because you care." A couple months later, someone finally told me that the course was actually offered by scientology... Funny thing is, through out their training material and what not, there were no mention of the word "scientology". It was only when I googled their founder did I realize it was L Ron Habbard, founder of scientology ^_^||| I bailed after that.
In Mormonism I was always told "we'll have the answer to everything after this life" or "doubt your doubts before you doubt your faith". So glad I escaped that cult.
I always wonder if people who think The LDS church is a cult are just ignorant or being hostile. You can literally leave whenever you want, you can attend meetings and church activities without paying a dime or contributing in any way, you can get help from the various organizations they have and even get help with meals and bills. I understand that some leaders are insensitive and may cause some religious trauma, but the organization as a whole does a huge amount of good across the world.
Yes. People are often distracted by the subject of the words but forget to be critical about the words. A rule of thumb: A clever enemy would tell you who's your enemy.
Doesn't just apply to cults, but any group of people. It might not always be a bad thing, but use of it should always set off some alarm bells in your head. The more you dislike "them", the more wary you should be of "us vs them" narratives. Again, that doesn't mean that any reason you have for disliking "them" is wrong, just that it's possible to go too far off the rails.
@@WanderTheNomad it depends. In case of war of genocide and conquest, or colonization in general, it IS us vs them, and anyone trying to bothside an argument or humanize the invaders should be also seen as the enemy.
This put into words what I was thinking about terms like “woke.” The broader concept is distilled down to where just that word can trigger some people into a rage. The concept of “thought-terminating terms” is fascinating. I’m really bugged by the term “it is what it is” but I also realize it’s a way for people to say “I don’t want to discuss this.”
Controlling words is a powerful thing. Telling people what words they can use and not use or they’ll lose their job was something I never thought I’d ever see in my lifetime, but that’s exactly what I saw for the past 10 years. When you work in tech, HR gets called just for having a Joe Rogan clip play in the background. Glad the culture is shifting.
If I learned anything about escaping a cult it is.. if ANYONE claims you are in a cult... take their words seriously. People tried to get me out but I discredited all their attempts and ignored every red flag.
In the end it's kind of difficult to take the words of religous fanatcis that I would be in a cult because I discredit theirs by my mere existence as "serious".
100%, and they always deny it, and I'm like, "well, whatever, have fun not exploring your dreams b/c some person told you not to for some reason or another that you still don't sit quite right with."
This low key terrifies me. I don't think any of us are immune from these kinds of linguistic weapons and we're exposed to them on practically an hourly basis. I hope that if I fall down a rabbit hole I'll have enough critical thinking to get me out.
It's kinda scary as these linguistic weapons are so common. What i appreciate about this video is how it creates more awareness around the strategies and mechanisms.
Capitalism is a death cult, selling the Earth itself out from underneath the feet of our children, because war and the exploitation of nature is profitable
I once dropped an audio clip of Charles Manson in an audio editor, and was immediately struck by the "beat" visible on the visualizer. He spoke with a consistent rhythm/cadence much like music, it probably had a hypnotic effect. [Edit: Since this comment is generating a lot of interest, I'm pretty sure it was from the Barbara Walters prison interview. It was years ago, but I'm pretty sure that's where it was from.]
Oh man...when it hit me those damn things are indeed cults, it really made other kinds of cult behavior easier to see. And it astounds me that people still get involved with MLMs when it's an open secret what they really are. I don't want to say I'm immune to falling for this kind of crap, but damn...
I guess maybe the silverlining is that when these tactics become widespread they hopefully become less effective, or at least worse recruitment tools for cults. I mean if you don't need to join a cult to use fancy language but can instead just go to the gym then you're probably less likely to join a cult I'd imagine.
A lot of military jargon makes sense in that you're in a world where the technology, organizational structure, and need for conformity is different than the civilian world. It follows that language will be different, too. It's only really disturbing when the language is used to mask horror - "wet work," "soft target," "friendly fire," "collateral damage."
I have to point to the fact that the sentence "let's agree to disagree" is very useful for dealing with people who won't stop yammering until you either agree with them or stop answering. I usually use it in the form "Yes, we seem to have different opinions on that; moving on..."
I think these terms, even "it is what it is" have a good use. I think it can be used to stop people from 'beating a dead horse' when they are talking in circles or questioning things that just have no answer, and no alternative. It can be a useful phrase for conversing with people who have strong personalities, a lot to say, and there are no new points to be made. They definitely can be used to evade being questioned, though. And I feel like if you use those phrases in that way, you have to know it feels wrong... Right?
i mean, even if they can be useful in a good way like that, they dont stop being 'thought terminating cliches'. youre both talking about how theyre useful for getting people to stop talking about something, which is what the purpose of a thought terminating cliche is
This also applies to ordinary everyday peer pressure (at office or at school). In fact, I'll say that provocative language starts at the childhood or peer group level, then percolates to higher levels.
I was in a direct sales company that was run like a cult through language. We were taught to look down on 9-to-5ers and see ourselves as better and more ambitious than them. We were Pavlovian-trained to respond to the phrase "Hey guys!" with "Hey what?" We'd verbally salute each other with the word "J.U.I.C.E" ("Join Us In Creating Excellence"). During our morning meeting, we used to teach each other and hype each other up through on-the-fly 1-to-2-minute lectures called "impacts". On the inside, it did feel like a cool exclusive club. But I was one of the few who always kept one foot outside of the "mini universe" created by my boss. As soon as I left, these people started looking less like members of an exclusive elite club and more like deluded drones living in a fantasy world forced onto them. And yes, I did watch the Slave Circle documentary after leaving. The company I worked for was one of many branches of the exact company in that video.
In the early 90s someone introduced me to future NXIVM leader Keith Raniere when he was operating his original scam, a multilevel marketing company called Consumer Buyline based in the Albany, NY suburb of Clifton Park. Raniere, who was chubby and wore an ill-fitting suit in those days, and who claimed to have the third highest IQ in the US, pitched me on joining as we sat at a cafe table going through his binder of flow charts and diagrams. He used a lot of that same us and them language. He seemed really frustrated in his failure to convince me as I told him that what he's doing was an illegal pyramid. He insisted it was not. A couple of years later the attorneys general of a number of states went after him for millions, and it was probably then that he decided to do the religious cult thing.
wow the thought terminating cliche thing is so interesting! I immediately thought of how often people are shut down when pointing out or trying to address injustice with "life isn't fair" (so we should not even bother addressing it)
Life isn't fair is also a valid observation - but only the user makes it an end of the discussion or not. I can both believe life isn't fair and almost certainly can never be totally fair, but that's no reason for me not to try to fix the wrongs I can. It's basically the serenity prayer.
All of the people whining about social injustice believe in false narratives that when questioned, they start name calling. If you pop their false narrative, they spew out their irrational hatred at you. They are the cult.
another thing abt talking building trust is that alot of ppl associate constantly talking as not keeping or hiding secrets. people generally do not know how to respect boundaries, and they see boundaries as purposefully not letting others in due to skeletons in their closet. as someone who is generally quiet when in big groups, i tend to get accused of being that way a lot. in reality, i just like to listen to ppl share their lives and i have a bad habit of not talking because i have lived my own life and i dont see any point in listening to it again.
My uncle listened to those speeches from Germany in the 1930s, on the radio, at home in England. He said that Hitler was not a particularly good speaker, but more of a ranter, and his broad Austrian accent put many Germans off. The real expert at communication was Josef Goebbels. It was impossible not to be drawn in while Goebbels was speaking. He would have his audience eating out of the palm of the hand as he listed all the wrongs that had been patiently borne by the German nation. They would be gagging for him to tell him how he was going to fight back. Only afterwards, when the spell was broken, would one see what a mass of vicious, ingenious lies he had been spouting.
When there was a crowd and pageantry, Hitler captivated the audience. When those same people heard recordings of the speeches, they were unimpressed. Between Hitler and Goebbels, few people could resist the siren call of dictatorship.
Cults use loaded language Cults use thought-terminating cliches Cults have a strict "us" vs "them" mentality, with special jargon to promote a feeling of exclusivity
Do we not also make an "us vs. them" rhetoric right now when talking about our idea of the free and civilized society (ourselves?) vs. cults and brainwashed masses? Dichotomy isn't inherently bad, context matters Also a lot of people with a cultist/dogmatic mindset don't realize or admit having a cultist/dogmatic mindset, but look down upon the stupider one
I didn't learn what a thought-terminating cliche was until very recently, like the last few years. It is crucial to indoctrination language because it denies a person's natural skepticism and often it's paired with the veiled threat of ostricization or even persecution.
I find it a little creepy that while she gives examples of scientology, q-anon, and corporate buzzwords (which are great examples) she pointedly avoids mentioning anything associated with far-left politics. It used to be that media personalities were terrified of criticizing scientology in public because they were so litigious. Try doing a UA-cam search for What a Democratic Socialist Convention is Like, and see if it doesn't check all the boxes for a cult. All it's missing is the charismatic male leader.
Out of all these cults, I think the one that boggles my mind the most is scientology. How a "religion" created by a second-rate science fiction author caught on is just beyond belief to me
Oh that's the easiest one to explain, he wrote a pretty popular self-help book and there are people who genuinely swear they got more confident and put their life in order with help of Dianetics... SO when his non-fiction took off much better than his books about alien invasions, he doubled down on that to the point of creating a cult. His and later leaders experience and connections in media world helped them promote Scientology and get popular ambassadors. Out of ALL cult stories, this one is the least strange one, like yeah a popular writer with connections to pop culture, no wonder they got off!
@KasumiRINA I had forgotten all about Dianetics, I suppose because I always thought it was nonsense, and any improvement anyone saw was the placebo effect. Thanks for reminding me - you're right. It makes a lot more sense now that people could be taken in by those charlatans
After leaving the Mormon church, I realized how relevant their monotone and endless talking was in keeping control over its members. They have something called general conference by annually and it’s two days long and they sure talk a lot but don’t seem to save very much. Thanks for this video.
The Methodist church also has a general conference. Are they a cult? Listening with actual intent having prayed for understanding makes a huge difference. And you may have noticed that you were able to leave with zero repercussions and you were never told to not talk to people not of our faith or told what you could and couldn't ask. Literally every class on Sundays is an open discussion. It is one of the few churches where everyone gets a regular chance to speak at the pulpit if they so choose. Weird cult that values each individual's contribution. Maybe you had a bad experience or lost your faith, but that doesn't mean it was a cult.
Flat Earthers use words like "perspective", "electromagnetism", and "magnetic declination" to ignore natural phenomena that disprove their "model". There isn't a quantum mystic who wouldn't misuse "energy", "frequency", or "vibration". And creationists love to use "materialism" and "Darwinism" to invoke the feeling that real science is a belief system that can be compared to their own. And yes, I'm a fan of Professor Dave.
@@columbus8myhwthe word itself isn't jargon. The point is it's used as jargon. Same as the other words there. Those are largely all real scientific words, but they become cultish jargon when used by flat earthers
@@columbus8myhw I'm not too familiar either, I'm mostly just pointing out that most of those words are not inherently cultish jargon and that they do have legitimate uses. For instance I remember in a field geology class I took, having to adjust our compasses for the local magnetic declination in order for our maps to be correct. Language is multipurpose
I agree with a lot you said, but have another theory. I am a retired Clinical Psychologist and have been extensively trained in the field of hypnosis. The work of Milton Ericsson explains how many people may be greatly influenced and actually hypnotized into following a leader by the shock techniques used by many political leaders.
I have a masters in leadership and was fascinated to learn about how cult leaders use language and symbolism in their approach. When not used for nefarious purposes they have some interesting tools all leaders can use. However, there is absolutely a line you shouldn't cross.
When I was in college, a female friend of mine told me she was approached by this group calling themselves the "Nuwabians". She showed me their bible written by the leader of their group and I remember telling her this group sounded like a cult just from reading the text. The Nuwabians were an African-American cult who had a compound outside of Atlanta. Their cult leader is currently serving a 135 years in a maximum security prison for child molestation and racketeering. I always wondered if my friend ever joined them. She stopped talking to me after I told her she was dealing with a cult.
Here's a Wikipedia article about them (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuwaubian_Nation#Beliefs) and here's the Wikipedia article about its founder Dwight York (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dwight_York).
I met a girl I was in that cult on a bus once. They adhere to the belief that African-Americans descend from ancient Egyptians. Similar to the ones who think that African-Americans are the true Israelites.
If someone tells you that you are special, they are almost surely lying, and they definitely want to massage your ego. "Thought terminating terminology" +1 👌
This is giving me flashbacks to a cult I was in when my mom dragged me into it when I was 15. They used the verb “to evolve” or the word “evolution” to refer to being a better person or changing for the greater good. It makes my skin crawl to remember that.
@@thefirm4606 no it’s not. Not when an organization that tries to brainwash taints the word and uses it to harm other people. I bet you didn’t catch the part where I said it makes my skin crawl because it is wrong and it’s traumatic. So don’t tell me you think it’s for the greater good because it’s not and it just proofs you are as brainless as a cult member.
Yea, but she said those in Jonestown voluntarily took the cyanide. Though some did, many were forced at gunpoint and the children certainly were unable to consent.
^She never implied some didn’t. She only said that he made people drink it, which is true. Will you people ever cease nitpicking literally every single detail about your favorite pet serial killers? lolll
My co-worker and I were just talking the other day about how it must suck for Kool-Aid's marketing/PR team how "Don't drink the Kool-Aid" is still a common saying to this day and it wasn't even Kool-Aid lol
In Islamic fundamentalism, I was always taught "الله علم" ("God knows"). This cliché would always be used when I found a contradiction that the imam couldn't answer.
That's called a "thought terminating cliché." Almost every ideology has them and even personally we use them. When something unpleasant happens, we say, "It is what it is," or "C'est la vie." It isn't inherently bad. We can't analyze and dissect everything in our lives. We'd be paralyzed. But people or institutions with bad intensions or desire for control absolutely use these for nefarious purposes. Just knowing that it is a tactic used goes a long way to inoculating a person against them.
What you said about jargon is actually a fact I teach my students early on. If you want to use jargon and complicated sentences, than you're basically giving away that you don't know what you're talking about. Or feel insecure. I also deconstruct their answers that way. I hope this teaches them to do the same - and don't automatically trust unnecessary wordy people. Like me 😂
Jargon is a shorthand that is entirely reasonable for specialists to use when talking between each other about their specialism, but it's counterproductive to use when explaining something to a non-specialist. I learned this the hard way decades ago when people would ask me about what I was doing to fix their computer problem. I realised that while some really were curious about how the things worked, most were just looking to chat rather than to stand around in silence. I might have preferred to concentrate on the job at hand, but asking them about, say, a a family photo on their desk was just as good a way to get them to think well of me as was fixing their computer quickly -- and it saved me the hassle of giving a running commentary on my job progress.
@@RichWoods23 That's definitely true. But even then it can slowly creep into your everyday speech, making you incomprehensible to people outside your profession, creating some kind of bubble. In Germany government officials and doctors are best known for this. They are so used to talk to each other within their job that it can become difficult for them to hold a conversation with outsiders. Mostly because they never learned how to scale down their speech. I had a lecturer in university who taught us to keep jargon to a minimum and am also the first one in the family to study, so I had to constantly explain what my words meant. I think this brought me to a good balance between jargon and everyday speech. But as a teacher I see an increasing trend in children being taught jargon for no reason other than them learning fancy words they don't quite understand. Science and especially business should not be about learning vocab alone. Especially if nobody really teaches them the concepts that go along with it. Or worse, teach the concepts out of context, so the students heard the words, think they understand them but are still in lack of knowledge about them.
@@RocketJo86 I'll happily agree that business suffers terribly from that. I was around for the rise of management-speak in the 1990s and I was left with the distinct impression that there was a certain type of manager who was using and inventing jargon entirely due to a jealousy of the technical professions. They wanted people to hold the management profession in the same regard as medicine, law and computer science, much in the same vein as the economists who created a Nobel-sort-of Prize for themselves. One PA I worked with back then would constantly apologise when she sent me documents from her boss for publication. She always spoke impeccable English, with a cut-glass Oxford accent, and was visibly embarrassed at the atrocious abuses of language that she had to type up for him and wasn't allowed to correct.
Knowledgeable people speak swiftly,succinctly and surely. Matter of fact tone and the listener (s) realize, yes that is true ,like my sister in the garden, she knows and reminds me. You have to remember… each other. Don’t forget to remember, children! Grana Rose
Yes! I took an advanced hydrology class in school and the book was written in plain English and we all talked to be understood. Then I took organization theory course and the book was all ten syllable words and compound sentences. Basically, the organization theory people clearly felt insecure if the academic bonafide of their profession and were compensating with garbage jargan.
This reminds of the book 1984 by george orwell, towards the end of the book he talks about how the big brother regime tries to limit the scope of language by dumbing down words, so that people would soon lose the ability to convey more complex political ideas and riot. Both intriguing but terrifiying at the same time
This is how you build a cult with language 1. Speak a lot to assert leadership 2:00 2. Use loaded language to push feelings 3:15 3. Use thought ending cliches to suppress critical thinking 4:00 4. Encourage Us vs Them mentality 5:00 5. Creat a lot of jargons to promote the sense of privilege for "secret knowledge" and again Us vs Them mentality 6:35 6. Alter the target's world view incrementally Am I missing anything?
English male boarding schools have used the terminology of exclusivity for hundreds of years, having a ‘special’ vocabulary for ordinary words that only those who attend/have attended know, thus enhancing their sense of privilege.
That's really more of a sociolect, which serves the function you describe but it develops based on social class and has the express purpose of delineating class and subculture. Most people are actually skilled in multiple sociolects and will switch between them fluently depending on the situation.
Bird-spotting groups have their own jargon, as do molecular geneticists, and prisoners in the Russian penal system have an argot. Your axe, having been ground, is now waving impotently in the air with nary a windmill to be seen.
I'm a Spiritualist and I see many of these things among spiritual preachers. I don't fall easily for them, because I question everything and that's how I started my journey and got rid of institutionalized religion in the first place. But many people are still used to accepting rather than investigating, believing rather than knowing, and that's how the problem starts. Major religions (specially western religions) use these same strategies, with the difference that they're not always inflicting harm or exploiting their followers (although it happens also). When words go beyond functionality and start getting embellished, too pompous and prolix, I automatically feel there's something suspicious. Thankfully today we have informations like the ones in this video to make ourselves conscious of such "subtle" dangers.
Mainly cult leaders attempt to inspire fight or flight in their followers to coerce them by threat of some fear, which is elaborated on by use of the language of conflict, which is used to pass judgement and vilify some thing to allow for easier manipulation.
I saw this first hand when my community helped a group of twenty mothers asking for help. We rescued well over 30 women and children, never vaccinated, never showered, did not understand how the native English language worked or how to form full sentences like the men within the cult. My heart was crying, I was crying. They are doing much better today. And there's a mention of this in the TV show Numb3rs. Everytime it airs on CBS I can't watch it. All those people refusing medical treatment or any form of aid. It makes me angry and sad. Edit: After all this time, you can still see fear in the mother's eyes. They hope that their daughters and few sons are able to live in a freer, more caring world. Something they didn't have growing up.
It’s borderline not even fair when someone not only is aware of these tricks, but knows how to implement them. Not a single one of us is immune to all of it. Even groups fully aware of this will end up using tricks like this internally within their group.
Worked at a used bookstore and a lady brought in $1100 worth of Scientology books. They fit into a small milk crate. Unfortunately we couldn't pay her anything for them.
Sounds like, on the plus side maybe she was “cleaning house” as it were. Good for her! I’ll bet those books cost her a bundle, monetarily and psychologically.
Just when I thought my opinion of Scientology couldn't get any lower, I learn they use a term that is deemed very very racist here in the UK to label outsiders.
Just reading your comment when she got to that bit of the video; I nearly choked on my tea. I was completely not prepared to hear that word said out loud so casually! I assume it doesn't mean the same thing in other countries.
Thank you for sharing this! I've been absorbing content critical of Scientology for years, and I'd somehow never known that that term had a meaning outside of their usage. It's fascinatingly on-brand for Hubbard.
@@davidmylchreest3306 exactly! I never considered it a puzzle piece of any kind, but *with* this info, I feel like the unsettling "vibe" of Scientology (setting aside it's many concerning practices & perspectives) makes much more sense/seems more cohesively unsettling
@@tamaraclare2059 sorry, but what was the word? or at least a timestamp, of where it was typed or said, i don't want to say a slur on accident and i hadn't caught any that i know of.
That last part about listening to more views on reality, if you look at the first 4 commandments of the 10. It basically amounts to a metaphor of “DONT LOOK OUT THE WINDOW AND DONT THINK ABOUT QUESTIONING WHAT YOU SEE OUT THERE”
it's taken me a lifetime to understand these behaviors I grew up in cults and both my mom and her mom were manipulative matriarchs. there are still members of my family, including older members, who are dazzled and fully convinced by this ruse. I think they feel invested and fear being proven wrong or something
The crisis is most always caused by exploitation in some form or another. Progress, but at what cost... and for whom's benefit? It does leave one wondering doesn't it X'D
@@isabelrodriguezsjolund9701 same as it ever was. Since Prometheus first brought the fire of the gods down from Mount Olympus, Man has used that spark to cook food and smelt metals, as well as to raze enemy villages and burn outsiders and heretics like witches and Giordano Bruno. Language is the most prolific and invisible technology in humanity's toolkit; it will be our exultation and our downfall
There's one way out. A little things known as "memes". The DNA of the soul. By spreading awareness of these tactics through culture, we can vaccinate society against cults.
I will say, studying the warning signs and tools of cults helped me to get free of fundamentalist, Evangelical Christianity. I would absolutely not let organized religion off the hook in their language, as I have experienced no greater "us vs them" mentality than in religion.
Oh, yeah, some organized religions can definitely lean into some cultish tactics. I'm an ex-Catholic, and right now the Holy See is creating an "Us & Them" type of narrative. Now I wonder if they've always done this.
This is especially true if the religion requires you to "convert non-believers". There are religions that don't act predatory and tend to have a more complete view of what it is to be human. I'm not about to subscribe to any of them, but they shouldn't all be painted with the same broad brush.
The channel Innuendo Studios did a whole series diving into the stuff she talked about here. Go check it out! The more you know, the better you can fight back.
LOVE that you used the correct drink they used flavoraid instead of what most ppl think it was thanks to the infamous "drinking the kool aid" line idk why but the fact it's flavor aid instead of kool aid is my roman empire
The rule of the cult should be that anyone who offends the ghost of Noah Webster by inserting a letter "u" in the words color, harbor, flavor, favor, honor, and neighbor will suffer death by listening to Weird Al's Word Crimes musical parody continuously until death. 🤪 Limeys, Aussies, Kiwis, and Canucks beware. 🤪 -Dave the Bloody Yank
The rule of the cult should be that anyone who offends the ghost of Noah Webster by inserting a letter "u" in the words color, harbor, flavor, favor, honor, and neighbor will suffer death by listening to Weird Al's Word Crimes musical parody continuously until death. 🤪 Limeys, Aussies, Kiwis, and Canucks beware. 🤪 -Dave the Yank
Using a lot of jargon to seem smarter is very common. You see it when people talk to police or justice. You get sentences like 'I witnessed the individual perform the action' instead of 'I saw them do it.' I laugh every time I witness this action. ;)
Police speak also makes heavy use of passive voice to deflect responsibility. You get odd sentences such as 'the suspect was injured in an officer involved shooting' instead of 'officers shot and injured the suspect'
It’s sad that a lot of people get deceived because they want to be a part of a group that makes them feel superior to others. arrogance is their own undoing
I was invited by someone to go to a meeting once that turned out to be Amway. I’m glad that I went because it was very interesting to see first hand how a cult mentality works. I allowed three of them to visit me in my home to try to get me to join up. When I told them that I didn’t want to treat my family and friends like a resource to be exploited they suggested that I needed new friends….them.
Oh, you know about Teal Swan? I was, for a few months, in with the cult who helped her get her start: Spirit Science. This was more than ten years ago, my dad had cancer, I thought he was going to die, and I was looking for easier, comforting answers. I don't remember exactly HOW I found Spirit Science, but I have to hand it to that kid: he's a spectacular animator. It's one of those New Age "give me your money" cults. He was also really, REALLY good in his hay-day at, ahem, "marketing," shall we say. He's super charismatic, but he's not the handsomest guy on the block, so he went down to Australia and made friends with a sex god who supported him financially--I think--for a while. Guy had an oceanside property, so I'm ASSUMING he had money. Thing was, the Aussie was smart enough to work his way out, and he more or less dropped off the face of the Internet. Smart move. I do hope he's happy: he was actually very nice to me. And there were others besides Teal and Tyler as well, but, uh, sexual assault allegations don't go wonderfully well with maintaining a cult, Jordan. Jordan: he's the guy who runs Spirit Science. Not to mention a real-life astrophysicist named Marty getting his intellectual teeth into the guy and ripping his arguments to bits. Marty was the reason why I finally woke up and went, "Oh, wait, this is BS." Thankfully, I never gave Jordan a CENT of my money.
@@julietfischer5056 , yep. Jordan Duchnycz. He lost his entire original team over being an ass, not to mention...I don't want to SAY "a sexual opportunist," because he could honest-to-Gods be bisexual, but he slept with a girl after she said no, which IS sexual opportunism, and he slept with a guy--not the Aussie hottie, another one--so he could get his hands in his wallet. The guy told me about it personally. And I'm just like, "Damn, dude, you're brave. I'm happy he didn't run you for every penny." The real shame of it is, HOLY CRAP can Jordan animate. He could make a pretty penny, and do so honestly, if he just used his creativity for good things, and not to be a scam artist.
Cults (and culty religions) are experts at finding people who are vulnerable and pulling them in. Some of them go as far as to haunt obituaries and funerals for potential converts. Finding them when you were in that kind of mental space wasn't a coincidence.
"A woman is anyone who identifies as a woman" "Would you rather have a dead son or a trans daughter?" "No uterus, no choice." It goes both ways, you blind dork wads
So is fascist,misogynist,and racist in the 21st century. Those words have been used to unjustly demonize anyone who disagrees with certain sociopolitical groups and ideologies which have become probably the world's largest cult ever at this point.
I have been thinking about the shift in vocabulary US Military veterans use to describe their service. Many WW2 veterans when recounting their war time experience often call the axis powers by their names i.e. the Japanese and Nazi's. While more recent veterans tend to talk about their combat experience in terms of a vague "bad guy" while always talking about their side as "good guys."
It's really sad but it shows how the US sticks its fingers in conflict. We didn't and shouldn't have draft in Vietnam, and I feel like we never should have been in the Middle East
That's probably because our most recent conflicts have been against guerilla forces where it's hard to tell the "good guys" from the "bad guys" as opposed to World War II where all the "bad guys" wore uniforms and operated as an army.
As an autistic who thinks in pictures instead of languge, my perception of reality depends entirely on the physical things I see, which is probably why I hated being made to use a copyrighted corporate jargon at one job.
Yeah! I am also autistic, and find these sorts of "empty words" to be grating, or even telling of hidden intentions. I wonder if there has been research into autistic vs. non-autistic people in how easily they can be influenced into a cult, or if different cult strategies harm either group differently. It is interesting to think about.
@@Moho_braccatus_ autistic people, in general, can be significantly more susceptible to cults and other similar organizations than the rest of the population.
@@Moho_braccatus_That would be such an interesting study because I’m ND (diagnosed with ADD, need to get retested) and I’m hyperaware of predatory corporate jargon and attempts at indoctrination. I wonder if it bleeds into religious beliefs at all too?
To the Babble Hypothesis: do people choose leaders because they talk a lot, or do they *allow* people to talk a lot because they seem competent and charismatic and therefore worth following?
I also have to wonder about that. I'm assuming the recent study likely addresses that, and I'll be hunting it up. But also, anecdotally, I find that people who talk a lot do so because the rest of the party allows or even encourages it, but the people who talk MOST frequently manage that by interrupting and talking over others. At the same time, those usually aren't people I would CHOOSE for leadership. Also wonder how that question was phrased. I'd give very different answers to "Who do you think would make the best leader for this group?" and "Who do you think WAS the leader of this group?" If the latter, then yeah, I might describe the loudmouth as the leader, albeit self-appointed. That twenty-second summary raised more questions than it answered for me. XD
I was thinking a similar thing. Like if you don't have time to talk, well people can't tell how great a leader you are by your ideas. So like maybe the person who talks the most, their ideas on average aren't that good, but they are putting them out there as opposed to other people so probably more likely to be seen as a leader. It's hard to know the exact reason why they chose length of talking as the deciding factor, but that's what makes science fun.
I would have to say the later. When I was younger and in school, I was almost always interrupted. Even when I knew the answer or had a good strategy, I was ran over by some other dude. TBF, I'm one person and shorter than average, but intelligence and calm rarely does well in a team exercise.
I used to own an electronics repair shop. When someone would come in, I would just give them and estimated time of completion. But my tech always had to come out and start talking electronics terms and tech babble to impress the customer how smart he was. He would hijack my conversation with the customer and stand there mouthing off every electronics term he could think of, probably a bit of elitism was involved.
This video was so interesting to watch and I like how you explained cult language in a way that anyone could understand while still explaining what we need to know about them. I’ll have to keep this in mind when I listen to leaders from now on!
The formula to becoming a cult leader is to be brutally honest about the small and inconsequential, while being evasive about nature of a central mission. The trivial is perfectly in focus against the backdrop of an end goal which must always remain blurry.
@@ligondesenuts769 yes, if I say it to myself and I mean it to be acceptance. Vs if someone who needs empathy to shut them up. I got so good at acceptance I stopped listening to what I really want out of life. The dark side of Buddhism. 😂
This misses one of the most important primers: You tear the person down and rebuild them in a way that makes them more amiable to linguistic manipulation. As much as I dislike the police, I don’t think most of them are aware of what they’re doing. This brings us to another thing that was left out: the way memory works. Every time a memory is recalled, it is subject to manipulation. If a police officer keeps interjecting while a person is recalling, those interjections can become a part of the memory during reconsolidation. It can lead to a false confession. To the police officer, it will seem like a breakthrough achieved through hard and diligent work. However, the memory has been manipulated; most interviewers are unlikely to know this.
I wonder if you are following The Behavioural Arts or Martin Decoder. One of them breaks down how memory can be manipulated and harmed by the person interrogating. If not, I definitely recommend them. I've seen other groups use both language and drugs to numb the mind. And insert false information in order to prove that sadly humans can be hacked just like computers. I covered my eyes through the whole process. It gets too much. Their memories were returned to its original temple afterwards. This is important to know especially with how people have been experimenting with strong hallucinogens for decades. And still do and in some cases are left for hours to consume it, and are overdosed. It is not a tin foil type of thinking anymore. It's a fact.
It’s so much worse than people realize-there’s horrific systemic child abuse because they don’t believe in children, they’ve forced sea org members to abort wanted pregnancies, and Shelly Miscavige is STILL missing.
It's a MLM. (And a cult...but they literally only started calling themselves a religion to get the tax exemption.) MLMs and cults in general tend to function similarly anyway, but Scientology is the clearest example of a large group that's actually in both categories.
This is on par with why some people get caught up in the rambling word salads of J. Peterson, the annoyingly fast-paced gish-galloping nonsense spewing of B. Shapiro (his initials are very on point), the incessant shouting and delirious foaming at the mouth of Alex Jones and so many others.
@@mckernan603 I agree with what you say about Vaush but not that he's radical since he's still very much an imperialist hiding behind faux progressivism. A liberal, basically, sure. Can't stand him and his sophistry. The Majority Report could be better, sure, but at least is made by people who actually know what they're talking about, and not really comparable to this.
The damage man voluntarily does to its random fellow man freaks me out. Videos like this make me want to hug a vampire. At least I know why I'm a target to him or her.
3:05 "Fake news," "rigged," "believe me," "strongly," "no one's ever X before," all the dumb nicknames for people, etc. 🤔 These all serve to short-circuit critical thinking.
"Not one person has the power to shape your reality...". Except for you, but you're in for a long and bumpy ride, so kudos to anyone who decides to climb that wagon.
3:41 This crystallized how & why right wing figures use dog whistles and why they talk EXACTLY how they talk. The way he can just bring up words like “Witch hunt” to make people feel immediately passionate/angry is so well explained here!
It is. I learned it in 8th grade English class and it was touched on in social studies in 7th grade. This is in Las vegas, which has been the worst school district for 35+ years. If it was taught here it's taught everywhere. Americans are not fans of being smart, but fans of appearing smart cuz they watch a particular cult leader.
I have to keep telling myself "No one is immune to propoganda and I'm NOT the exception." I wish more folks would adopt that to get through these tactics.
Great comment. I had this one really embarrassing period years ago where I kept getting fed “prepper” content on UA-cam and ended up buying several 50 lb bags of rice and beans to make sure I wouldn’t starve when society inevitably disintegrated in the coming weeks 😅
@@justsomenobody889are you my sister? Lmao. Jk, but this sounds like how her
@@theforce5191no. It’s just some nobody 889
@@Jersonx3000 huh?
The most important lesson on the subject. Kumare is a great documentary I think everyone should watch because it shows how easy it is to be misled into nothingness. Positioning in a vulnerable environment. We all have vulnerabilities.
I grew up in a cult. The "us vs them" analysis is spot on.
Was it jw? Just asking bcs I'm curious
Yeah, kind of off topic, but not fully. That's how I first got suspicious of this little known person Jordan Peterson. He was always attacking the left and cultural neo marxists at that time, but on the other side of his mouth talking about how bad tribalism is. That made me more curious about the other subjects he talked about at that time, to only quickly discover how little he knows and/or how bad and self serving his intentions are.
@@tatafromthehood5573 Upci. I was in a cult that was a faction of a bigger cult
Been there....got out. Phhewww.. any dialog that doesnt assent to God's Spirit Directed Organisation....is taboo...and then there are the xhanges (new light)...sadly it vacilate.s@tatafromthehood5573
"If you don't support gay marriage, you are a homophobic bigot!"
The alphabet cult do it well to gain societal ground.
I was raised in a cult. When I woke up (realized it was a cult), I literally felt like a veil was lifted off my face. The world looked different. It was brighter and more real than I'd ever thought
I get that! My mind feels so clear and I realized I wasn’t as dumb as they were always implying.
@@bluejeanjacket1410 yep, that's what christianty does.
@@Jane-Roe1126no
I departed a major religion. I felt liberated, like I was a kid who knew/realized Santa was fake when all my silly friends believed he was real.
@@Jane-Roe1126churches
40 years ago my girlfriend joined scientology. She wanted me to join with her so I went to the Pasadena “church”. I went thru the orientation and realized that if they had to have their own dictionary then it must be a load of bullsh!t that they were pitching. Never went back. Since Scientology does not allow their members to date non Scientologist I lost my girlfriend.
The fact that you can't date outside of it is in itself a major red flag.
Glad you doged that one, hope your ex is doing OK
Scientology is such a wild ride. These days there are so many former members, and in some cases literal escapees, sharing their stories in books and documentaries and UA-cam livestreams. You didn't just dodge a bullet. You dodged a whole firing squad.
My sister lost her long term boyfriend the same way 10 years ago. He devoted his entire life to them, and wound up moving to California to be at one of their bigger locations. Crazy stuff.
She lost you, man. Best decision ever
Sounds like you were better off without her
One mantra that sticks in my craw: "Do your research." After spending most of my working life in industrial laboratories, I can assure you there's more to research than browsing your favorite social media platforms for opinions matching your own.
"I did my own research" = i watched a couple TikToks that confirmed my existing views
The fact that my wife and children get a lot of their info and news about the world from TikTok is disturbing to me
The sheer amount of nonsense on the internet is staggering.
The sheer amount of it which can be confidently refuted with just a wiki page even more so.
While I will use social media as one kind of source - it’s useful for finding recorded interviews, individual’s conversations and observations, videos of protests and demonstrations sharing just what’s happening in the moment outside of general news (especially useful when the filmer doesn’t make commentary!) - it’s absolutely not the only source to use. It’s pretty much only valuable for basic facts. Some sites also have articles people post about and discussion on the article, which gets me a good idea of what people are interested in more generally. But that’s just looking into things that will help me find topics and events to talk to other people about. If I do serious research on something I’ll be in libraries for weeks searching catalogs and books, and digging through relevant databases hunting for anything and everything available (or even adjacent) on the topic in question. And it frustrates me that I can debunk almost anything my mom says “do your own research” about in 30 minutes of skimming data sets and running my own calculations on them. And sometimes not even that much is necessary.
@@timbocf76 Get them away from it as best you can. The narrative on there is warped to each person's own agendas
I grew in small town Mormon in utah. Here are commons ones.
"Outside influence'
"Satan's temptations"
"Protection of the spirit"
"Strength in the youth"
"Falling away"
"Lost or Looking"
"Strength through prayer"
"Core of the family"
"Power of the preisthood"(male superpower)
"Mothers example/obedience"
This is also any sort of religious belief with their own book (including the different Abrahamic religions). Also, the part in the video that said religions tend to use "you" while cults tend to use "us/them"- religions use us/them all the time. It separates and creates a division between us/believers and them/unbelievers. But the "you" language works too because it makes people feel even more significant.
Yea they use a lot of biblical terminology to try to deceive and justify what they're doing. They love to twist the Bible. It is a very powerful book. Cult leaders know this
Sounds like a variation of the theme Jehovah's witnesses use
Of all the things in this, the final line is THE most important.
LISTEN TO PEOPLE OUTSIDE YOUR USUAL CIRCLES ONCE IN A WHILE.
Reality-check, especially if you're feeling threatened.
Sadly the people who need to hear this the most will be the ones refusing to listen :(
I got off 90% of social media 3 years ago and it was the best decision in my life.
I totally agree. I work in an academic setting doing fundraising where most of the people working there including me subscribe to a political ideology. I purposefully subscribe to a fundraising newsletter from a different political ideology to hear ideas that I won't get in my immediate working environment.
no one who actually needs to hear it will... algorithm😈
Like the political extremes, far right and the left, both sides think their very existence is under threat. Red flag.
Same here 🙋♀️ I deleted all social media years ago. All I have is UA-cam but I set up a time limit on how long to watch. That way I have time for socialising, reading, hobbies and work.
Not long ago my passer-by friend asked me if I knew the person in front of me, sitting at the airport. No, I did not. She asked me why was I speaking to him. It seemed like we knew each other and agreeing, disagreeing. I told her "Well, sometimes you need to leave your baby bubble and grow a bigger one. By leaving our comfort zone, thinking and asking people reasonable questions can get you the right answers. It can be economics, technology, comic books, travel, languages, rainwater harvesting or anything, really" She looked confused and began asking me questions. She was finally becoming independent on thought process. ❤ ❤ ❤ ❤ 🧠
This episode proves why critical thinking should be a mandatory high school class instead of an optional college course.
Yeah, that’s never going to happen.
@@digital_matt Yep. People relying on school for critical thinking. Hope you think on what that means before you have children of your own, OP.
@@digital_matt Why not just wear a T-shirt saying “I’m with stupid” with the arrow pointing straight up?
This is the dumbest, ‘I’m obviously a victim’ comment UA-cam has ever seen.
Just turn off your brain and let the towering intellect of a Grade 8 teacher do all your thinking for you.
Pure irony
Sadly the current testing models make that very difficult. Schools would rather teach kids what to think than how to think.
The final message is so important. I've seen members of my family completely lost because they don't have any variety in the ideas they consume. If you listen to one group's ideas for long enough, you will lose your sense of reality. Over time you will become more and more agreeable to their ideas.
Absolutely. If one listens or watches only Fox News he will be brainwashed to believe that a narcissist billionaire cares about anyone else if not himself
The "quantity is key" has been known from politicians for long time : they're very good at answering a question in a 15 minutes response which didn't mean anything AND didn't answer the question in any way. By that time, even the inquirer has forgotten what that was all about
This is why I quit watching debates
I thought I was dumb for not being able to find meaning it. I also blamed my adhd for my short attention span. I think both of these are partially true, but now that you mention it it makes sense. I never thought that it was intentional, and that most people feel that way when listening to politicians.
True!!! Kamala Harris is a prime example with her word salad.
@@Jane-Roe1126 trump's much worse.
6:50 Scientology having a 300 page dictionary you're forced to study is definitely a thought killing exercise.
That’s a big red flag right there
worked for a guy who offered us to take a communication and management course for training. The course almost reinvented the dictionary. Also had things like "you hard sell because you care." A couple months later, someone finally told me that the course was actually offered by scientology... Funny thing is, through out their training material and what not, there were no mention of the word "scientology". It was only when I googled their founder did I realize it was L Ron Habbard, founder of scientology ^_^||| I bailed after that.
@@ravnjokr What better guy to write a course on good communication and management skills than the one who got lost and shelled Mexico?
@@pretzelbomb6105”he has such a way with words…”
I feel like "thought-replacement exercise" would be more apt.
In Mormonism I was always told "we'll have the answer to everything after this life" or "doubt your doubts before you doubt your faith".
So glad I escaped that cult.
Glad you escaped that !
mormon people are the kindest i have known.
Keep sweet.
@@rizkyadiyanto7922 A lot of cults are very palatable. Mormons, JW, and similar are all very welcoming.
I always wonder if people who think The LDS church is a cult are just ignorant or being hostile. You can literally leave whenever you want, you can attend meetings and church activities without paying a dime or contributing in any way, you can get help from the various organizations they have and even get help with meals and bills. I understand that some leaders are insensitive and may cause some religious trauma, but the organization as a whole does a huge amount of good across the world.
"Us vs. them" language is a huge red flag!😬
Yes. People are often distracted by the subject of the words but forget to be critical about the words.
A rule of thumb: A clever enemy would tell you who's your enemy.
Doesn't just apply to cults, but any group of people. It might not always be a bad thing, but use of it should always set off some alarm bells in your head.
The more you dislike "them", the more wary you should be of "us vs them" narratives. Again, that doesn't mean that any reason you have for disliking "them" is wrong, just that it's possible to go too far off the rails.
not if it's class warfare
And red hat warning.
@@WanderTheNomad it depends. In case of war of genocide and conquest, or colonization in general, it IS us vs them, and anyone trying to bothside an argument or humanize the invaders should be also seen as the enemy.
Thank you for the term “thought terminating cliché.” I have always bristled at those catchy phrases but didn’t know there was a term for them.
And they occur all the time.
I knew there was something about "It is what it is" that bugged me.
I love stuff like this.
Check your privilege
"trans-women are women"
This put into words what I was thinking about terms like “woke.” The broader concept is distilled down to where just that word can trigger some people into a rage. The concept of “thought-terminating terms” is fascinating. I’m really bugged by the term “it is what it is” but I also realize it’s a way for people to say “I don’t want to discuss this.”
Controlling words is a powerful thing. Telling people what words they can use and not use or they’ll lose their job was something I never thought I’d ever see in my lifetime, but that’s exactly what I saw for the past 10 years. When you work in tech, HR gets called just for having a Joe Rogan clip play in the background. Glad the culture is shifting.
If I learned anything about escaping a cult it is.. if ANYONE claims you are in a cult... take their words seriously. People tried to get me out but I discredited all their attempts and ignored every red flag.
you are still in a cult.
@@rizkyadiyanto7922 am I?!?
@@rizkyadiyanto7922 wut you talkin' 'bout Willis?
In the end it's kind of difficult to take the words of religous fanatcis that I would be in a cult because I discredit theirs by my mere existence as "serious".
100%, and they always deny it, and I'm like, "well, whatever, have fun not exploring your dreams b/c some person told you not to for some reason or another that you still don't sit quite right with."
This low key terrifies me. I don't think any of us are immune from these kinds of linguistic weapons and we're exposed to them on practically an hourly basis. I hope that if I fall down a rabbit hole I'll have enough critical thinking to get me out.
It's kinda scary as these linguistic weapons are so common.
What i appreciate about this video is how it creates more awareness around the strategies and mechanisms.
I think I do have a good amount of critical thinking but I still fall for that kind of stuff sometimes 🥲
It's scary, but it's nothing new. These kinds of organizations have been around since long before you were born.
@allendracabal0819 that's true, however, with social media the chances of being exposed is far more likely
bahaha, you were born into it. you’ve not a chance of escaping.
It is frightening how much more of this language has inundated politics
The use of jargon is widespread in corporate team building and business seminars.
And advertising.
"We're a family here."
Capitalism is a death cult, selling the Earth itself out from underneath the feet of our children, because war and the exploitation of nature is profitable
And motivational books like Zig Ziglar.
If you're told that place you're applying for "is like a family" during interviews, gtfo my guy
I once dropped an audio clip of Charles Manson in an audio editor, and was immediately struck by the "beat" visible on the visualizer. He spoke with a consistent rhythm/cadence much like music, it probably had a hypnotic effect.
[Edit: Since this comment is generating a lot of interest, I'm pretty sure it was from the Barbara Walters prison interview. It was years ago, but I'm pretty sure that's where it was from.]
Super interesting
He was a musician and in tune with the entity Abraxas smh 🤦
I agree, very interesting!
@@Kaniala-l7s me too.
@@Kaniala-l7sacting like this is supposed to be common knowledge is crazy
Dr. Brozovsky - thank you for finally giving me the tools to start my own cult! Highly recommended video!
I'm so glad MLMs were brought up because man, do they go all-in on the culty behaviour
Oh man...when it hit me those damn things are indeed cults, it really made other kinds of cult behavior easier to see. And it astounds me that people still get involved with MLMs when it's an open secret what they really are. I don't want to say I'm immune to falling for this kind of crap, but damn...
Shining Path was dangerous, indeed.
And their even more cultish cousin, large group awareness trainings.
Wdym by culty? It is a cult
😂😂facts!
Reminds me of the guy who said "I know words. I have the best words."
Hmmm … and the best word is stupid.
Right
Who is he?
almost as good as his good genes
HaHa!
It is genuinely terrifying how widespread and commonplace these tactics have become.
it really is. its scary how its embedded in social media, the workplace, healthcare, legal system everywhere 😢
Gandhi was also not taking showers (he was using his smells to offend people along with the cult language)
I guess maybe the silverlining is that when these tactics become widespread they hopefully become less effective, or at least worse recruitment tools for cults. I mean if you don't need to join a cult to use fancy language but can instead just go to the gym then you're probably less likely to join a cult I'd imagine.
@@hedgehog3180 they will put it inside your butt
You think they weren't widespread before?
"Babble hypothesis" That somewhat explains a certain presidential candidate's appeal. The military also uses a lot of jargon.
and corporations!
Kamala Harris word salad. There I said it for you.
ok there, botsky
A lot of military jargon makes sense in that you're in a world where the technology, organizational structure, and need for conformity is different than the civilian world. It follows that language will be different, too. It's only really disturbing when the language is used to mask horror - "wet work," "soft target," "friendly fire," "collateral damage."
That's not really the same, because just not understanding something doesn't make it babble.
I have to point to the fact that the sentence "let's agree to disagree" is very useful for dealing with people who won't stop yammering until you either agree with them or stop answering. I usually use it in the form "Yes, we seem to have different opinions on that; moving on..."
I think these terms, even "it is what it is" have a good use. I think it can be used to stop people from 'beating a dead horse' when they are talking in circles or questioning things that just have no answer, and no alternative. It can be a useful phrase for conversing with people who have strong personalities, a lot to say, and there are no new points to be made.
They definitely can be used to evade being questioned, though. And I feel like if you use those phrases in that way, you have to know it feels wrong... Right?
i mean, even if they can be useful in a good way like that, they dont stop being 'thought terminating cliches'. youre both talking about how theyre useful for getting people to stop talking about something, which is what the purpose of a thought terminating cliche is
This also applies to ordinary everyday peer pressure (at office or at school). In fact, I'll say that provocative language starts at the childhood or peer group level, then percolates to higher levels.
I was in a direct sales company that was run like a cult through language.
We were taught to look down on 9-to-5ers and see ourselves as better and more ambitious than them.
We were Pavlovian-trained to respond to the phrase "Hey guys!" with "Hey what?"
We'd verbally salute each other with the word "J.U.I.C.E" ("Join Us In Creating Excellence").
During our morning meeting, we used to teach each other and hype each other up through on-the-fly 1-to-2-minute lectures called "impacts".
On the inside, it did feel like a cool exclusive club. But I was one of the few who always kept one foot outside of the "mini universe" created by my boss. As soon as I left, these people started looking less like members of an exclusive elite club and more like deluded drones living in a fantasy world forced onto them.
And yes, I did watch the Slave Circle documentary after leaving. The company I worked for was one of many branches of the exact company in that video.
Startups often have that exact same cult-like behavior.
In the early 90s someone introduced me to future NXIVM leader Keith Raniere when he was operating his original scam, a multilevel marketing company called Consumer Buyline based in the Albany, NY suburb of Clifton Park. Raniere, who was chubby and wore an ill-fitting suit in those days, and who claimed to have the third highest IQ in the US, pitched me on joining as we sat at a cafe table going through his binder of flow charts and diagrams. He used a lot of that same us and them language. He seemed really frustrated in his failure to convince me as I told him that what he's doing was an illegal pyramid. He insisted it was not. A couple of years later the attorneys general of a number of states went after him for millions, and it was probably then that he decided to do the religious cult thing.
wow the thought terminating cliche thing is so interesting! I immediately thought of how often people are shut down when pointing out or trying to address injustice with "life isn't fair" (so we should not even bother addressing it)
Life isn't fair is also a valid observation - but only the user makes it an end of the discussion or not. I can both believe life isn't fair and almost certainly can never be totally fair, but that's no reason for me not to try to fix the wrongs I can. It's basically the serenity prayer.
we all use these phrases. Sometimes you need to shut down the conversation. It doesn't always help to talk about injustice 24/7.
But you're also right
Great point. This has bothered me for most of my life.
All of the people whining about social injustice believe in false narratives that when questioned, they start name calling. If you pop their false narrative, they spew out their irrational hatred at you. They are the cult.
@@sophiaec2607 it would be sad if people use this as an excuse or justification for unfairness.
Life can be unfair but life can also be fair.
another thing abt talking building trust is that alot of ppl associate constantly talking as not keeping or hiding secrets. people generally do not know how to respect boundaries, and they see boundaries as purposefully not letting others in due to skeletons in their closet. as someone who is generally quiet when in big groups, i tend to get accused of being that way a lot. in reality, i just like to listen to ppl share their lives and i have a bad habit of not talking because i have lived my own life and i dont see any point in listening to it again.
My uncle listened to those speeches from Germany in the 1930s, on the radio, at home in England. He said that Hitler was not a particularly good speaker, but more of a ranter, and his broad Austrian accent put many Germans off. The real expert at communication was Josef Goebbels. It was impossible not to be drawn in while Goebbels was speaking. He would have his audience eating out of the palm of the hand as he listed all the wrongs that had been patiently borne by the German nation. They would be gagging for him to tell him how he was going to fight back. Only afterwards, when the spell was broken, would one see what a mass of vicious, ingenious lies he had been spouting.
When there was a crowd and pageantry, Hitler captivated the audience. When those same people heard recordings of the speeches, they were unimpressed. Between Hitler and Goebbels, few people could resist the siren call of dictatorship.
What lies in particular did Goebbels spout? I think I am seeing a pattern in demagogues
@@julietfischer5056which pagentry?
Tens of thousands of soldiers lined up .
have you ever read his speeches
I feel like I gained insight into the thought process of certain relatives, thank you.
One of the most important and well produced videos on the topic. Thanks so much.
Cults use loaded language
Cults use thought-terminating cliches
Cults have a strict "us" vs "them" mentality, with special jargon to promote a feeling of exclusivity
Sounds legit like every leader, not just cult leaders.
Pizza Hut assistant managers act like this.
Do we not also make an "us vs. them" rhetoric right now when talking about our idea of the free and civilized society (ourselves?) vs. cults and brainwashed masses?
Dichotomy isn't inherently bad, context matters
Also a lot of people with a cultist/dogmatic mindset don't realize or admit having a cultist/dogmatic mindset, but look down upon the stupider one
Once you realize CNN and MSNBC and Fox do the same thing but on a much larger scale you will really understand how bad it is.
I didn't learn what a thought-terminating cliche was until very recently, like the last few years. It is crucial to indoctrination language because it denies a person's natural skepticism and often it's paired with the veiled threat of ostricization or even persecution.
I find it a little creepy that while she gives examples of scientology, q-anon, and corporate buzzwords (which are great examples) she pointedly avoids mentioning anything associated with far-left politics. It used to be that media personalities were terrified of criticizing scientology in public because they were so litigious. Try doing a UA-cam search for What a Democratic Socialist Convention is Like, and see if it doesn't check all the boxes for a cult. All it's missing is the charismatic male leader.
Out of all these cults, I think the one that boggles my mind the most is scientology. How a "religion" created by a second-rate science fiction author caught on is just beyond belief to me
Oh that's the easiest one to explain, he wrote a pretty popular self-help book and there are people who genuinely swear they got more confident and put their life in order with help of Dianetics... SO when his non-fiction took off much better than his books about alien invasions, he doubled down on that to the point of creating a cult. His and later leaders experience and connections in media world helped them promote Scientology and get popular ambassadors.
Out of ALL cult stories, this one is the least strange one, like yeah a popular writer with connections to pop culture, no wonder they got off!
@KasumiRINA I had forgotten all about Dianetics, I suppose because I always thought it was nonsense, and any improvement anyone saw was the placebo effect. Thanks for reminding me - you're right. It makes a lot more sense now that people could be taken in by those charlatans
The Mormon church was created by a convicted con man who took over 30 wives, some as young as 14. It has millions of members.
@@KasumiRINA thanks for the explanation! Do you have any baffling examples of cult creations?
Same as every other religion 🤷🏻♂️ just the modern version
After leaving the Mormon church, I realized how relevant their monotone and endless talking was in keeping control over its members. They have something called general conference by annually and it’s two days long and they sure talk a lot but don’t seem to save very much. Thanks for this video.
That's christianity in a nutshell. Even the bible is like that.
Bi annually?
The Methodist church also has a general conference. Are they a cult? Listening with actual intent having prayed for understanding makes a huge difference. And you may have noticed that you were able to leave with zero repercussions and you were never told to not talk to people not of our faith or told what you could and couldn't ask. Literally every class on Sundays is an open discussion. It is one of the few churches where everyone gets a regular chance to speak at the pulpit if they so choose. Weird cult that values each individual's contribution.
Maybe you had a bad experience or lost your faith, but that doesn't mean it was a cult.
@@archiemack6045 you obviously don't know that much about the Mormon church
@@archiemack6045lol wow u be silllyyyyyy
As a former accounting auditor, I can confirm that there is an inverse relationship between use of jargon and competence.
Flat Earthers use words like "perspective", "electromagnetism", and "magnetic declination" to ignore natural phenomena that disprove their "model". There isn't a quantum mystic who wouldn't misuse "energy", "frequency", or "vibration". And creationists love to use "materialism" and "Darwinism" to invoke the feeling that real science is a belief system that can be compared to their own.
And yes, I'm a fan of Professor Dave.
Not to mention, young-Earth creationists use their own sciencey-sounding terms: polystrate fossils, observational/historical science, etc.
Does "perspective" really count as jargon? It's an everyday thing, even if Flat Earthers misunderstand how it works.
@@columbus8myhwthe word itself isn't jargon. The point is it's used as jargon. Same as the other words there. Those are largely all real scientific words, but they become cultish jargon when used by flat earthers
@@CorbiniteVids Can you elaborate on how? (I'm not so familiar with how Flat Earthers talk.)
@@columbus8myhw I'm not too familiar either, I'm mostly just pointing out that most of those words are not inherently cultish jargon and that they do have legitimate uses. For instance I remember in a field geology class I took, having to adjust our compasses for the local magnetic declination in order for our maps to be correct. Language is multipurpose
I agree with a lot you said, but have another theory. I am a retired Clinical Psychologist and have been extensively trained in the field of hypnosis. The work of Milton Ericsson explains how many people may be greatly influenced and actually hypnotized into following a leader by the shock techniques used by many political leaders.
This channel is gold, Dr. Brozovskhy is a gem stone of humanity, gotta preserve this content!
Wow. A PBS production outright calling Scientology a cult. I predict a new round of 'defund PBS' nonsense by a certain group of egotistical actors...
Exactly what I was thinking. Scientologists have a reputation of suing or otherwise harassing anyone who openly criticizes them.
That is because it is a very wealthy corporation.
@@stananderson4524 It's because they know their cult is a joke and have to protect it. The wealth is how they harass, not why they harass.
Scientology is forbidden in Germany.
@@Peter_Scheen Germany learned from its mistakes, and is smart on this one!
I have a masters in leadership and was fascinated to learn about how cult leaders use language and symbolism in their approach. When not used for nefarious purposes they have some interesting tools all leaders can use. However, there is absolutely a line you shouldn't cross.
Is the babble hypothesis why every time a politician or CEO or whatever goes on a "listening tour" it almost always utterly fails?
When I was in college, a female friend of mine told me she was approached by this group calling themselves the "Nuwabians". She showed me their bible written by the leader of their group and I remember telling her this group sounded like a cult just from reading the text. The Nuwabians were an African-American cult who had a compound outside of Atlanta. Their cult leader is currently serving a 135 years in a maximum security prison for child molestation and racketeering. I always wondered if my friend ever joined them. She stopped talking to me after I told her she was dealing with a cult.
She joined
Here's a Wikipedia article about them (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuwaubian_Nation#Beliefs) and here's the Wikipedia article about its founder Dwight York (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dwight_York).
I met a girl I was in that cult on a bus once. They adhere to the belief that African-Americans descend from ancient Egyptians. Similar to the ones who think that African-Americans are the true Israelites.
If someone tells you that you are special, they are almost surely lying, and they definitely want to massage your ego.
"Thought terminating terminology" +1 👌
This is giving me flashbacks to a cult I was in when my mom dragged me into it when I was 15. They used the verb “to evolve” or the word “evolution” to refer to being a better person or changing for the greater good. It makes my skin crawl to remember that.
The greater good is on par with that 😊
@@thefirm4606 no it’s not. Not when an organization that tries to brainwash taints the word and uses it to harm other people. I bet you didn’t catch the part where I said it makes my skin crawl because it is wrong and it’s traumatic. So don’t tell me you think it’s for the greater good because it’s not and it just proofs you are as brainless as a cult member.
Literally stole their vocab from Pokemon.
Hmm. Maybe we were in the same cult.
OH MY GOD!!!! She said Flavor-Aid. She got it right.
It's a professional outfit, with a staff that prepares the content. More reliable than, say, UA-camrs who work alone.
Yea, but she said those in Jonestown voluntarily took the cyanide. Though some did, many were forced at gunpoint and the children certainly were unable to consent.
^She never implied some didn’t. She only said that he made people drink it, which is true.
Will you people ever cease nitpicking literally every single detail about your favorite pet serial killers? lolll
My co-worker and I were just talking the other day about how it must suck for Kool-Aid's marketing/PR team how "Don't drink the Kool-Aid" is still a common saying to this day and it wasn't even Kool-Aid lol
@@samaraisntthey’re literally arguing he FORCED many of them-that isn’t defending him it’s making a careful distinction that he WAS a killer.
This video has given me all the critical information to start my own cult ! Thanks.
Can I get in on the ground floor?
In Islamic fundamentalism, I was always taught "الله علم" ("God knows"). This cliché would always be used when I found a contradiction that the imam couldn't answer.
If God knows, does that mean you do not need to know? Thanks for your comment. I am always interested in learning about the beliefs of non Christians.
That's called a "thought terminating cliché." Almost every ideology has them and even personally we use them. When something unpleasant happens, we say, "It is what it is," or "C'est la vie."
It isn't inherently bad. We can't analyze and dissect everything in our lives. We'd be paralyzed. But people or institutions with bad intensions or desire for control absolutely use these for nefarious purposes. Just knowing that it is a tactic used goes a long way to inoculating a person against them.
"God may know, but sucks at communication"
@@usainengland read your bible. Christianity is just as bad and has just as much of a distaste for thinking
Growing up Catholic, I got, "It's a Mystery." With the capital M.
What you said about jargon is actually a fact I teach my students early on. If you want to use jargon and complicated sentences, than you're basically giving away that you don't know what you're talking about. Or feel insecure. I also deconstruct their answers that way. I hope this teaches them to do the same - and don't automatically trust unnecessary wordy people. Like me 😂
Jargon is a shorthand that is entirely reasonable for specialists to use when talking between each other about their specialism, but it's counterproductive to use when explaining something to a non-specialist. I learned this the hard way decades ago when people would ask me about what I was doing to fix their computer problem. I realised that while some really were curious about how the things worked, most were just looking to chat rather than to stand around in silence. I might have preferred to concentrate on the job at hand, but asking them about, say, a a family photo on their desk was just as good a way to get them to think well of me as was fixing their computer quickly -- and it saved me the hassle of giving a running commentary on my job progress.
@@RichWoods23 That's definitely true. But even then it can slowly creep into your everyday speech, making you incomprehensible to people outside your profession, creating some kind of bubble. In Germany government officials and doctors are best known for this. They are so used to talk to each other within their job that it can become difficult for them to hold a conversation with outsiders. Mostly because they never learned how to scale down their speech. I had a lecturer in university who taught us to keep jargon to a minimum and am also the first one in the family to study, so I had to constantly explain what my words meant. I think this brought me to a good balance between jargon and everyday speech. But as a teacher I see an increasing trend in children being taught jargon for no reason other than them learning fancy words they don't quite understand. Science and especially business should not be about learning vocab alone. Especially if nobody really teaches them the concepts that go along with it. Or worse, teach the concepts out of context, so the students heard the words, think they understand them but are still in lack of knowledge about them.
@@RocketJo86 I'll happily agree that business suffers terribly from that. I was around for the rise of management-speak in the 1990s and I was left with the distinct impression that there was a certain type of manager who was using and inventing jargon entirely due to a jealousy of the technical professions. They wanted people to hold the management profession in the same regard as medicine, law and computer science, much in the same vein as the economists who created a Nobel-sort-of Prize for themselves.
One PA I worked with back then would constantly apologise when she sent me documents from her boss for publication. She always spoke impeccable English, with a cut-glass Oxford accent, and was visibly embarrassed at the atrocious abuses of language that she had to type up for him and wasn't allowed to correct.
Knowledgeable people speak swiftly,succinctly and surely.
Matter of fact tone and the listener (s) realize, yes that is true ,like my sister in the garden, she knows and reminds me.
You have to remember… each other.
Don’t forget to remember, children!
Grana Rose
Yes! I took an advanced hydrology class in school and the book was written in plain English and we all talked to be understood. Then I took organization theory course and the book was all ten syllable words and compound sentences. Basically, the organization theory people clearly felt insecure if the academic bonafide of their profession and were compensating with garbage jargan.
This reminds of the book 1984 by george orwell, towards the end of the book he talks about how the big brother regime tries to limit the scope of language by dumbing down words, so that people would soon lose the ability to convey more complex political ideas and riot. Both intriguing but terrifiying at the same time
This is how you build a cult with language
1. Speak a lot to assert leadership 2:00
2. Use loaded language to push feelings 3:15
3. Use thought ending cliches to suppress critical thinking 4:00
4. Encourage Us vs Them mentality 5:00
5. Creat a lot of jargons to promote the sense of privilege for "secret knowledge" and again Us vs Them mentality 6:35
6. Alter the target's world view incrementally
Am I missing anything?
7. Buy a newspaper, like the Moonies did
8. Get contracts to develop social policies on family with the G.W. Bush administration, like the Moonies did
5. "Jargon"
This is a great summary, thank you!
How to create a cult in a nutshell!
that's for the language part, but charisma is mostly non-verbal I think
Don't get any ideas!
English male boarding schools have used the terminology of exclusivity for hundreds of years, having a ‘special’ vocabulary for ordinary words that only those who attend/have attended know, thus enhancing their sense of privilege.
That's really more of a sociolect, which serves the function you describe but it develops based on social class and has the express purpose of delineating class and subculture. Most people are actually skilled in multiple sociolects and will switch between them fluently depending on the situation.
Yep. Also other exclusive schools or cliques.
Bird-spotting groups have their own jargon, as do molecular geneticists, and prisoners in the Russian penal system have an argot.
Your axe, having been ground, is now waving impotently in the air with nary a windmill to be seen.
I'm a Spiritualist and I see many of these things among spiritual preachers. I don't fall easily for them, because I question everything and that's how I started my journey and got rid of institutionalized religion in the first place. But many people are still used to accepting rather than investigating, believing rather than knowing, and that's how the problem starts. Major religions (specially western religions) use these same strategies, with the difference that they're not always inflicting harm or exploiting their followers (although it happens also). When words go beyond functionality and start getting embellished, too pompous and prolix, I automatically feel there's something suspicious. Thankfully today we have informations like the ones in this video to make ourselves conscious of such "subtle" dangers.
Mainly cult leaders attempt to inspire fight or flight in their followers to coerce them by threat of some fear, which is elaborated on by use of the language of conflict, which is used to pass judgement and vilify some thing to allow for easier manipulation.
I saw this first hand when my community helped a group of twenty mothers asking for help. We rescued well over 30 women and children, never vaccinated, never showered, did not understand how the native English language worked or how to form full sentences like the men within the cult. My heart was crying, I was crying.
They are doing much better today. And there's a mention of this in the TV show Numb3rs. Everytime it airs on CBS I can't watch it. All those people refusing medical treatment or any form of aid. It makes me angry and sad.
Edit: After all this time, you can still see fear in the mother's eyes. They hope that their daughters and few sons are able to live in a freer, more caring world. Something they didn't have growing up.
Thanks for correctly identifying Jim Jones' drink of choice as "Flavor Aid"! Details matter!
Kool-Aid is better known, which is why people use it.
@@julietfischer5056i think they mix up jonestown and heavens gate, heavens gate did use actual koolaid
@@nope19568- I think 'Kool-Aid was used in the phrase before then. A couple of decades separate the two tragedies.
I have been that weirdo at parties, correcting everyone about the flavoraid. I also notice her correct usage. Liguistic phds, unite!
@@nope19568 heaven's gate used pudding or applesauce
It’s borderline not even fair when someone not only is aware of these tricks, but knows how to implement them. Not a single one of us is immune to all of it. Even groups fully aware of this will end up using tricks like this internally within their group.
Worked at a used bookstore and a lady brought in $1100 worth of Scientology books. They fit into a small milk crate. Unfortunately we couldn't pay her anything for them.
Sounds like, on the plus side maybe she was “cleaning house” as it were. Good for her! I’ll bet those books cost her a bundle, monetarily and psychologically.
Good you didn't pay her. Those books were worthless 😆
Just when I thought my opinion of Scientology couldn't get any lower, I learn they use a term that is deemed very very racist here in the UK to label outsiders.
Just reading your comment when she got to that bit of the video; I nearly choked on my tea. I was completely not prepared to hear that word said out loud so casually! I assume it doesn't mean the same thing in other countries.
Thank you for sharing this! I've been absorbing content critical of Scientology for years, and I'd somehow never known that that term had a meaning outside of their usage. It's fascinatingly on-brand for Hubbard.
@@mortalLP Given that Hubbard served in the Navy during WWII, I don't think it's an accident that they use this word for outsiders in Scientology.
@@davidmylchreest3306 exactly! I never considered it a puzzle piece of any kind, but *with* this info, I feel like the unsettling "vibe" of Scientology (setting aside it's many concerning practices & perspectives) makes much more sense/seems more cohesively unsettling
@@tamaraclare2059 sorry, but what was the word? or at least a timestamp, of where it was typed or said, i don't want to say a slur on accident and i hadn't caught any that i know of.
That last part about listening to more views on reality, if you look at the first 4 commandments of the 10. It basically amounts to a metaphor of “DONT LOOK OUT THE WINDOW AND DONT THINK ABOUT QUESTIONING WHAT YOU SEE OUT THERE”
it's taken me a lifetime to understand these behaviors I grew up in cults and both my mom and her mom were manipulative matriarchs. there are still members of my family, including older members, who are dazzled and fully convinced by this ruse. I think they feel invested and fear being proven wrong or something
Narcissists....
part of my interest in linguistics came from growing up in a high control religion. thank you for bringing awareness to this!
"Thought terminating cliches" is a good example of scrutiny suppression.
Is it me, or is this deeply saddening?
Way to go humanity. You’re doing f’n great.
Humanity is interesting, on the one hand we always seem to be developing some great stuff, meanwhile we're also always in some kind of crisis
The crisis is most always caused by exploitation in some form or another. Progress, but at what cost... and for whom's benefit? It does leave one wondering doesn't it X'D
@@isabelrodriguezsjolund9701 same as it ever was. Since Prometheus first brought the fire of the gods down from Mount Olympus, Man has used that spark to cook food and smelt metals, as well as to raze enemy villages and burn outsiders and heretics like witches and Giordano Bruno. Language is the most prolific and invisible technology in humanity's toolkit; it will be our exultation and our downfall
There's one way out. A little things known as "memes". The DNA of the soul. By spreading awareness of these tactics through culture, we can vaccinate society against cults.
Hey we got this far. I guess that's something.
I will say, studying the warning signs and tools of cults helped me to get free of fundamentalist, Evangelical Christianity. I would absolutely not let organized religion off the hook in their language, as I have experienced no greater "us vs them" mentality than in religion.
Oh, yeah, some organized religions can definitely lean into some cultish tactics. I'm an ex-Catholic, and right now the Holy See is creating an "Us & Them" type of narrative. Now I wonder if they've always done this.
Organized religions are cults...
As someone who was never in a religion, I can see that from a mile away.
This is especially true if the religion requires you to "convert non-believers". There are religions that don't act predatory and tend to have a more complete view of what it is to be human. I'm not about to subscribe to any of them, but they shouldn't all be painted with the same broad brush.
Yeah, 99% of religions give the rest a bad name.
When you point out the stupidity in religion, the believer tells you, you need the Holy Spirit to understand.
Mhm.
And the few times I can be sure that ol' HS *_has_* talked to me, it's been in preparation to get me to speak Truth to Power to these silly guys.
This is such an important warning to all of us... specially because it also applies for relationships persuasion.
This is genuinely fascinating, and genuinely scary.
The channel Innuendo Studios did a whole series diving into the stuff she talked about here. Go check it out! The more you know, the better you can fight back.
LOVE that you used the correct drink they used flavoraid instead of what most ppl think it was thanks to the infamous "drinking the kool aid" line idk why but the fact it's flavor aid instead of kool aid is my roman empire
I don't want to read too much into this, but I feel like I know what person might have inspired this episode. Well done, Doctor.
"RIP Noam Chomsky, you wrote books about questioning the media and 1 unsourced tweet says you are dead X"
@@gastonmarian7261 Wikipedia says he is still alive, but he is 95 years old...
Time to start a cult for Dr. Brozovsky of Otherwords
Will there be snacks?
I'm in. Do I gotta sign something?
The rule of the cult should be that anyone who offends the ghost of Noah Webster by inserting a letter "u" in the words color, harbor, flavor, favor, honor, and neighbor will suffer death by listening to Weird Al's Word Crimes musical parody continuously until death. 🤪
Limeys, Aussies, Kiwis, and Canucks beware. 🤪
-Dave the Bloody Yank
The rule of the cult should be that anyone who offends the ghost of Noah Webster by inserting a letter "u" in the words color, harbor, flavor, favor, honor, and neighbor will suffer death by listening to Weird Al's Word Crimes musical parody continuously until death. 🤪
Limeys, Aussies, Kiwis, and Canucks beware. 🤪
-Dave the Yank
Will there be Kool-Aid?
This was fascinating! I love your show so much!
Using a lot of jargon to seem smarter is very common. You see it when people talk to police or justice.
You get sentences like 'I witnessed the individual perform the action' instead of 'I saw them do it.'
I laugh every time I witness this action. ;)
Are you quoting a witness's words or a police officer's words?
@@rosiefay7283 Haha, I've seen both of those do it. And their obvious pretending is funny every time.
Police speak also makes heavy use of passive voice to deflect responsibility. You get odd sentences such as 'the suspect was injured in an officer involved shooting' instead of 'officers shot and injured the suspect'
They watch cop shows and hear the things said by law enforcement personnel and lawyers, and think that's how they should say things.
@@JoeJaJoeJoe- Probably a legal thing, also. Hedging bets until the investigators reach their conclusions. Wording can skew verdicts to the wrong way.
It’s sad that a lot of people get deceived because they want to be a part of a group that makes them feel superior to others. arrogance is their own undoing
I was invited by someone to go to a meeting once that turned out to be Amway. I’m glad that I went because it was very interesting to see first hand how a cult mentality works. I allowed three of them to visit me in my home to try to get me to join up. When I told them that I didn’t want to treat my family and friends like a resource to be exploited they suggested that I needed new friends….them.
the background art of this episode is amazing
Oh, you know about Teal Swan? I was, for a few months, in with the cult who helped her get her start: Spirit Science. This was more than ten years ago, my dad had cancer, I thought he was going to die, and I was looking for easier, comforting answers. I don't remember exactly HOW I found Spirit Science, but I have to hand it to that kid: he's a spectacular animator. It's one of those New Age "give me your money" cults. He was also really, REALLY good in his hay-day at, ahem, "marketing," shall we say. He's super charismatic, but he's not the handsomest guy on the block, so he went down to Australia and made friends with a sex god who supported him financially--I think--for a while. Guy had an oceanside property, so I'm ASSUMING he had money. Thing was, the Aussie was smart enough to work his way out, and he more or less dropped off the face of the Internet. Smart move. I do hope he's happy: he was actually very nice to me. And there were others besides Teal and Tyler as well, but, uh, sexual assault allegations don't go wonderfully well with maintaining a cult, Jordan. Jordan: he's the guy who runs Spirit Science. Not to mention a real-life astrophysicist named Marty getting his intellectual teeth into the guy and ripping his arguments to bits. Marty was the reason why I finally woke up and went, "Oh, wait, this is BS." Thankfully, I never gave Jordan a CENT of my money.
This the guy with the blue character? Sir Sic takes jabs at him, also.
I didn't realize TS was cult related. I saw one of her shorts and she makes the hair on my neck stand up.
@@julietfischer5056 , yep. Jordan Duchnycz. He lost his entire original team over being an ass, not to mention...I don't want to SAY "a sexual opportunist," because he could honest-to-Gods be bisexual, but he slept with a girl after she said no, which IS sexual opportunism, and he slept with a guy--not the Aussie hottie, another one--so he could get his hands in his wallet. The guy told me about it personally. And I'm just like, "Damn, dude, you're brave. I'm happy he didn't run you for every penny." The real shame of it is, HOLY CRAP can Jordan animate. He could make a pretty penny, and do so honestly, if he just used his creativity for good things, and not to be a scam artist.
Cults (and culty religions) are experts at finding people who are vulnerable and pulling them in. Some of them go as far as to haunt obituaries and funerals for potential converts. Finding them when you were in that kind of mental space wasn't a coincidence.
@@Cardboardruna I tried to watch the documentary about her "The Deep End" or something like that and about five minutes in I was like, "Naw,!"
“Witch hunt, perfect call, woke, radical left, nasty woman..” are additional examples
"A woman is anyone who identifies as a woman" "Would you rather have a dead son or a trans daughter?" "No uterus, no choice." It goes both ways, you blind dork wads
So is fascist,misogynist,and racist in the 21st century. Those words have been used to unjustly demonize anyone who disagrees with certain sociopolitical groups and ideologies which have become probably the world's largest cult ever at this point.
I have been thinking about the shift in vocabulary US Military veterans use to describe their service. Many WW2 veterans when recounting their war time experience often call the axis powers by their names i.e. the Japanese and Nazi's. While more recent veterans tend to talk about their combat experience in terms of a vague "bad guy" while always talking about their side as "good guys."
Yep...glad I'm not the only one who's noticed this.
It's really sad but it shows how the US sticks its fingers in conflict. We didn't and shouldn't have draft in Vietnam, and I feel like we never should have been in the Middle East
That's probably because our most recent conflicts have been against guerilla forces where it's hard to tell the "good guys" from the "bad guys" as opposed to World War II where all the "bad guys" wore uniforms and operated as an army.
I didn't realize I signed up for getting some Monstrum in my Other Words today! 😱
Wow, there is so much to learn from this amazing channel
All hail The Supreme Language Doctor Brozovsky of the Otherwords Organization!
As an autistic who thinks in pictures instead of languge, my perception of reality depends entirely on the physical things I see, which is probably why I hated being made to use a copyrighted corporate jargon at one job.
Yeah! I am also autistic, and find these sorts of "empty words" to be grating, or even telling of hidden intentions. I wonder if there has been research into autistic vs. non-autistic people in how easily they can be influenced into a cult, or if different cult strategies harm either group differently. It is interesting to think about.
Did you forcibly imagine your UA-cam comment into reality?
@@Moho_braccatus_ autistic people, in general, can be significantly more susceptible to cults and other similar organizations than the rest of the population.
Interesting. What do you make of some of the major world events right now?
@@Moho_braccatus_That would be such an interesting study because I’m ND (diagnosed with ADD, need to get retested) and I’m hyperaware of predatory corporate jargon and attempts at indoctrination. I wonder if it bleeds into religious beliefs at all too?
To the Babble Hypothesis: do people choose leaders because they talk a lot, or do they *allow* people to talk a lot because they seem competent and charismatic and therefore worth following?
I also have to wonder about that. I'm assuming the recent study likely addresses that, and I'll be hunting it up.
But also, anecdotally, I find that people who talk a lot do so because the rest of the party allows or even encourages it, but the people who talk MOST frequently manage that by interrupting and talking over others. At the same time, those usually aren't people I would CHOOSE for leadership. Also wonder how that question was phrased. I'd give very different answers to "Who do you think would make the best leader for this group?" and "Who do you think WAS the leader of this group?" If the latter, then yeah, I might describe the loudmouth as the leader, albeit self-appointed.
That twenty-second summary raised more questions than it answered for me. XD
I was thinking a similar thing. Like if you don't have time to talk, well people can't tell how great a leader you are by your ideas. So like maybe the person who talks the most, their ideas on average aren't that good, but they are putting them out there as opposed to other people so probably more likely to be seen as a leader.
It's hard to know the exact reason why they chose length of talking as the deciding factor, but that's what makes science fun.
@@quiestinliteris You make a lot of good points here!
I would have to say the later. When I was younger and in school, I was almost always interrupted. Even when I knew the answer or had a good strategy, I was ran over by some other dude. TBF, I'm one person and shorter than average, but intelligence and calm rarely does well in a team exercise.
I used to own an electronics repair shop. When someone would come in, I would just give them and estimated time of completion. But my tech always had to come out and start talking electronics terms and tech babble to impress the customer how smart he was. He would hijack my conversation with the customer and stand there mouthing off every electronics term he could think of, probably a bit of elitism was involved.
This video was so interesting to watch and I like how you explained cult language in a way that anyone could understand while still explaining what we need to know about them. I’ll have to keep this in mind when I listen to leaders from now on!
The formula to becoming a cult leader is to be brutally honest about the small and inconsequential, while being evasive about nature of a central mission. The trivial is perfectly in focus against the backdrop of an end goal which must always remain blurry.
They love to create "mistery" and it's just manipulation by omission.
DJT
sounds like you’re speaking from experience 😂
@@coolchameleon21 Sounds like you want to give me your bank account number while cutting all ties to your immediate family.🤫
Very well put, the Original Post.
And now we know the signs, and what to look out for.
You'll never need to look far.
It is what it is isn’t thought terminating. It’s acceptance. Don’t come for my fav phrase. 😂
^same.
I *_deprogram_* myself on the regular with that. It's the doomerist creed.
Tomato Tomato 😜
@@E4439Qv5 Acceptance isn’t inherently pessimistic. I came to it largely through Buddhist teachings and nature-centered thinking.
It depends on the context. “It is what it is” can be thought terminating or acceptance
@@ligondesenuts769 yes, if I say it to myself and I mean it to be acceptance. Vs if someone who needs empathy to shut them up. I got so good at acceptance I stopped listening to what I really want out of life. The dark side of Buddhism. 😂
What a timely and scary post.
This misses one of the most important primers: You tear the person down and rebuild them in a way that makes them more amiable to linguistic manipulation.
As much as I dislike the police, I don’t think most of them are aware of what they’re doing. This brings us to another thing that was left out: the way memory works. Every time a memory is recalled, it is subject to manipulation. If a police officer keeps interjecting while a person is recalling, those interjections can become a part of the memory during reconsolidation. It can lead to a false confession. To the police officer, it will seem like a breakthrough achieved through hard and diligent work. However, the memory has been manipulated; most interviewers are unlikely to know this.
I wonder if you are following The Behavioural Arts or Martin Decoder. One of them breaks down how memory can be manipulated and harmed by the person interrogating. If not, I definitely recommend them.
I've seen other groups use both language and drugs to numb the mind. And insert false information in order to prove that sadly humans can be hacked just like computers. I covered my eyes through the whole process. It gets too much. Their memories were returned to its original temple afterwards.
This is important to know especially with how people have been experimenting with strong hallucinogens for decades. And still do and in some cases are left for hours to consume it, and are overdosed. It is not a tin foil type of thinking anymore. It's a fact.
This was very thought-provoking! I appreciate your sharing with us!
Scientology:
At best, it's a business and at worst, it's a cult.
It’s so much worse than people realize-there’s horrific systemic child abuse because they don’t believe in children, they’ve forced sea org members to abort wanted pregnancies, and Shelly Miscavige is STILL missing.
Google "Gold Base"
It's both!
It's a MLM. (And a cult...but they literally only started calling themselves a religion to get the tax exemption.)
MLMs and cults in general tend to function similarly anyway, but Scientology is the clearest example of a large group that's actually in both categories.
This is on par with why some people get caught up in the rambling word salads of J. Peterson, the annoyingly fast-paced gish-galloping nonsense spewing of B. Shapiro (his initials are very on point), the incessant shouting and delirious foaming at the mouth of Alex Jones and so many others.
Jorps and B-Shaps. Still on the hunt for the clitoris.
Ben "my wife doesn't get wet" Shapiro
Also on par with radical liberal ideological media like Vaish and Minority Report. It’s all a waste of time for depressed people.
@@mckernan603 I agree with what you say about Vaush but not that he's radical since he's still very much an imperialist hiding behind faux progressivism. A liberal, basically, sure. Can't stand him and his sophistry. The Majority Report could be better, sure, but at least is made by people who actually know what they're talking about, and not really comparable to this.
@mckernan603 they're radical? Really?
everything you described is observed in modern day far right rhetoric online, its so accurate its scary.
Only two genders
Otherwords got a lot creepier than Monstrum
maybe we were the monster all along
@@oldcowbb(* insert dramatic prairie dog gif*)
Probably
The damage man voluntarily does to its random fellow man freaks me out.
Videos like this make me want to hug a vampire. At least I know why I'm a target to him or her.
@@oldcowbbmaybe the real monster was the fiends we made along the way
3:05 "Fake news," "rigged," "believe me," "strongly," "no one's ever X before," all the dumb nicknames for people, etc. 🤔 These all serve to short-circuit critical thinking.
"Not one person has the power to shape your reality...". Except for you, but you're in for a long and bumpy ride, so kudos to anyone who decides to climb that wagon.
3:41 This crystallized how & why right wing figures use dog whistles and why they talk EXACTLY how they talk. The way he can just bring up words like “Witch hunt” to make people feel immediately passionate/angry is so well explained here!
This should be taught early in school.
It already is.
No one would pay attention anyway
Certain subsets of the parental wing would be very invested in their kid NOT learning to question authority figures or doctrines
It is. I learned it in 8th grade English class and it was touched on in social studies in 7th grade. This is in Las vegas, which has been the worst school district for 35+ years. If it was taught here it's taught everywhere.
Americans are not fans of being smart, but fans of appearing smart cuz they watch a particular cult leader.
8:02 There is so much to be said about speaking simply. Speak simply.
Dr B's earring game is _always_ on point!!
Yeah those are cool!