Einstein’s Cults

by Akim Reinhardt

Are you savvy?

I like to think I’m savvy. I’m 57, I’ve seen a lot. Not, I joined the Foreign Legion and traveled the world, seen a lot. More like, I’ve lived a while, and have tried to keep my eyes open along the way.

I can’t predict the future any better than anyone else, which is to say, not at all. I’m not out to get one over on anybody. And I may or may not be wise, which is probably savvy-adjacent, but also definitely different. So when I say I think I’m savvy, mostly I mean that I’m not a chump. I rarely get taken anymore, and on the odd occasions when I do, I usually know it’s happening, but just sigh and go along with it, passively if not actively.

I’m also savvy enough to know that I might actually be quite the chump without realizing it. After all, big chumps don’t know they’re chumps. And even if I’m not much of a chump now, I can look back and see that I was much chumpier when I was younger, embarrassingly so in some cases. I can also look forward and know that as people enter their senior years, their critical faculties decline, at least to some degree, exposing them to all kinds of nonsense. There’s a reason scammers target the elderly, and I’m not that far off from being in their sites.

But for now, I think I mostly have my shit together. You wanna fuck with me? Fuck you.

Here’s an example in the form of a recently posed question: “Ever go to Trader Joe’s on a Saturday morning?”

No. Absolutely not. Never. I generally avoid Trader Joe’s and haven’t been inside one in about a decade. They’re invariably located out in the ‘burbs and their parking lots are notoriously under capacity. I’m a city boy; I just walk to my neighborhood markets. Plus, here in my corner of Maryland, supermarkets are not allowed to sell alcohol. Remove cheap wine from the TJ equation, and the place is about as special as a white t-shirt. Drive out to a faceless suburb on a weekend morning so I can fight for parking and stand-in-line with a basket of mediocre groceries sporting supposedly clever titles? You’ve gotta be kidding.

And just like that, I felt like my answer to the question, which opens Mara Einstein’s new book, marked me as savvy.

But as I made my way through Hoodwinked: How Marketers Use the Same Tactics as Cults, my unease began to deepen.

It’s not that I slowly realized, despite my cynicism, I actually am like one of the black, silhouetted sheep on the book’s front cover. I’m really not. My misanthropy, stubbornness, and asceticism pretty much inoculate me from such bovid behavior. FFS, I still have a flip phone.

No, it was something else.

Einstein argues that during the early 21st century, as consumers got savvier about dodging traditional advertising, advertisers increasingly relied on more deceptive forms of advertising, such as: ads masquerading as fake new articles; sponsored posts in your social media feed that look like “real” posts; and of course the ever-growing army of paid hawksters called “influencers.” And that corporations’ quest for deceptive advertising was substantially aided by social media, which, Einstein tells us, doesn’t actually operate an attention economy; it pushes an anxiety economy.

According to Einstein, this all adds up to marketers employing the same tactics as cults for the purpose of engendering brand loyalty. And this in turn has softened up the public, making them more susceptible to all kinds of nonsense.

Sigh . . . just look around you these days, and you can see what she’s talking about.

Yet, ultimately I did not buy into a lot of the arguments presented in Hoodwinked, at least to the degree that Einstein advances them.

Part of the problem is that Einstein fails to define cult with enough depth and detail to establish strong parallels to marketing. Admittedly, cult is notoriously difficult to define, and Einstein didn’t go into this blind. She is well aware of the problems with using cult as a framework. She’s also careful to define what she means by “cult tactics” before arguing her case about marketers employing them, and she does add to our understanding. For example, Einstein tells us that cults don’t have total control over their followers, just undue influence. But she does not do as good a job at defining cults themselves. This creates the wiggle room she needs to expand our understanding of what can be a cult, and who and what can employ cult tactics; things that you may not have realized are cultish, can be rather cultish. But it also leads to some flabbiness.

For example, Einstein’s willing to consider (not assert, but consider) American culture’s ideas about human bodies as the “cult of thinness” (p. 11). She notes that according to one study, 75% of American women “reported disordered eating behaviors or symptoms consistent with eating disorders.” (p. 18). But can abstract forces really be a cult? It might be a nitpicking question in other contexts, but not regarding a book about cult techniques in modern society.

Hoodwinked is well organized, and Eienstein certainly has her targets. But as a reader, every time I put down the book, I was left feeling like most anything could be analyzed for its cult techniques. And if most anything can be a cult, is nothing a cult? After all, there are so many individuals, organizations, and even abstract systems, that manipulate people’s insecurities, break people down a bit, and turn them into uber loyal followers, for the purpose of getting what they want out of them, and sometimes to their detriment. You have to ask, then: What isn’t cultish?

Professional militaries since least since Napoleon? What about nearly all religions ever? Nation states rallying people through jingoistic patriotism? Even over-the-top sports fans? The word fan is originally short for fanatic, and many fans believe and behave like cult followers even though sports organizations are rather hands off with their fans. Aren’t all of these then also cults on some level?

Einstein would say, Yes, these institutions also act like cults (she actually says this directly in some cases), or they at least use some of the same tactics as cults. But this begs not only a firmer definition, but also a deeper discussion. For example, when cult tactics are employed, what is the nature of voluteerism and agency versus manipulation? How much extraction must such tactics be aiming for before they become cultish? How much damage must they be willing to inflict? And how must we widen our understanding? For example, what we could learn from adding in research on addiction and addictive personalities?

Absent this type of analysis, I was left wondering: Even if, to some degree, marketers are using some of the same tactics as cults, then what are we really learning from this revelation? Perhaps not enough.

I also came away from Hoodwinked thinking that corporations are actually way more sophisticated in their marketing than cults are. At the same time, the goals that corporations are truly angling for (sell you some shit) aren’t nearly as thorough as the goals of actual cults (co-opt your life in a way that far exceeds anything corporations strive for). The truth of it is, paying too much for a Peloton bike, feeling loyal to the Peloton brand, and biking in your basement everyday with other Pelotoners (Pelotonians? Pelotonites? Pelor Peddlers?) just doesn’t compare to selling everything, including your home, giving all the money to Your Leader, and cutting off ties with your family and friends. And when the degree of difference in goals and outcomes is so vast, similarities in methods can tell us only so much.

For example, Einstein has a chapter on colleges. Great. As a university professor for nearly a quarter-century now, I’ll be the first to tell you there’s a ton of bullshit in the collegiate system, and that colleges do in fact take advantage of a middle class American hysteria that, at its extreme, starts to sound a bit like If my child doesn’t get into an Ivy League college, they’re going to end up homeless and addicted to drugs!

But that’s not because colleges are engaging in the same tactics as cults, even if we can identify some superficial similarities, as Einstein does. It’s because of very complex economic, social, and cultural processes and factors that have played out in the United States over the last sixty years (at least). And it’s not incidental that while some colleges cost too much (and some do not), they provide their followers outcomes with of tremendous potential value and importance: an advanced education, job skills, and credentials. Does that matter? If not, why not?

To be fair, college isn’t the thrust of Hoodwinked; Einstein focuses mostly on Multi-Level Marketers and Influencers, and she certainly adds to our understanding on those topics. But the issues I’ve cited stand.

Yet I still think Hoodwinked an important book. Einstein achieves some of her stated goals. She also achieves some that she perhaps did not mean to. Her blurring of cults and culture is at once a weakness of the book, but also a strength.

Culture might be even more difficult to define with any real precision than cult is. Just ask an anthropologist. Their discipline is the study of human culture, but they didn’t invent the word, they co-opted it from, er, culture (sorry for the tautology), and then significantly complicated it. Culture is a system. It’s about knowledge and beliefs. It’s about physical stuff. It’s about patterns of behavior. It’s dynamic and contested. It belongs to, and is practiced by, people in a group that is also dynamic, because people are constantly changing their minds, coming and going, and being born and dying.

At that point, culture starts to have some of the same definitional problem as cult. What isn’t culture? Perhaps their common etymology can shed some light.

Both words stem from the ancient Latin coelere, meaning to tend, or to cultivate. It also means to worship. But it’s people, not plants, that are being tended to, that are being worshiped, that are being domesticated and cultivated for a desired outcome.

How does a culture cultivate its members? In Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), Sigmund Freud argued that societies create rules to keep people from doing what they want, because if people did what they want, society would be dysfunctional. People can have a knee jerk response to that (think libertarian dreamscape), but most adults recognize, as Freud did, that we’re not cut out for living without a society of humans. We’re socials animals; even hardcore introverts need at least the passive cooperation of other people to survive. Thus, Freud concludes, since we all must live in societies, we are all doomed to be unhappy and riddled with anxiety.

That’s a dumbed down version of Freud’s argument, but it will suffice. And it dovetails nicely with a small error Einstein makes very early in her book. She claims that advertising has used the field of psychology to manipulate the public since the 1950s (p xviii). Actually, that unholy marriage is actually much older; Walter Dill Scott published The Psychology of Advertising in 1913 (and wrote it a decade earlier). But either way, it gets to the core of what Einstein’s writing about, and it is, I believe, at once both much bigger and less precise that she portrays it.

Here in the 21st century, the culture of anxiety is certainly amplified by social media, which employs all sorts of old (cult) and new (advanced computer algorithms) techniques. However, American cultures of anxiety are much, much older in origin. Indeed, for all of U.S. history, the American population has suffered various waves of anxiety. Some, such as anxiety about immigration, sadly seem to be timeless. Others, such as panics over Masons, seem quaint or even perplexing to us today. Early 19th century anxieties about changing economies and gender roles helped birth today’s dominant forms of American Protestantism. And anxieties we’ve largely overcome, such as hysteria about Catholics, inspire hope that we can move forward as a society.

There are lots of reasons why Americans have been given to various anxieties since the nation’s inception. The social upheavals of urbanization and suburbanization; the tumult of the developed world’s least regulated, least socially netted economy; and a brand of American Christianity built on anxiety about eternal damnation: these are just a few of the large, overarching historical forces that have driven Americans to fret.

Furthermore, mass anxiety was already ramping up again in America before social media burst on the scene about fifteen years ago. Since the turn of the 21st century, American anxieties have been driven by (among other things): the end of the Cold War, which pulled a rug out from underneath the American sense of purpose and identity; the economy’s ongoing de-industrialization and near-obliteration of good playing, un- and semi-skilled blue collar jobs; and the largest volume of immigration in American history, producing a demographic impact not seen since the immigration waves of 1880–1920.

It would be ahistorial to identify our current anxious culture as especial. It has its own features to be sure; every period of heightened anxiety does. But in a general sense, it is just another such period. Whether born of inherent stresses, as Freud proposed, or tied more specifically to periodic social, cultural, economic, and political disruptions, as historians understand it, such episodes of heightened anxiety are recurring.

And If societies create anxiety within people by demanding conformity in the face of change and tumult, then perhaps cults are just high intensity cultures: groups that do cultish things (manipulate people) to an extreme degree instead of to an acceptable degree. Of course, lots of individuals, groups, and institutions do this, so perhaps the ones we call “cults” are the ones that employ dogma most of society rejects, or the ones that most of us just don’t like.

And when large social and/or economic anxieties emerge, sweeping up many in the hysteria, perhaps it’s no wonder people become susceptible to the manipulative cult tactics Einstein effectively describes.

This speaks to where Einstein is at her strongest: showing us the banality of anxiety in modern society, and how pervasive the institutional exploitation of anxiety really is. In this day and age, few things are more worthy of recognition and consideration. Thus, even though Einstein failed to convince me of her main arguments, in making them she helped me think in productive ways. Something about putting the cult in culture.

At the end of the day, perhaps I’m just too much of a skeptic to fall for cults, brand loyalties, or silver bullet explanations for complex phenomena. But whatever the reason I did not fully buy-in, and despite any shortcomings it may have, Hoodwinked did make me think deeply. And if there’s one thing that neither cults nor corporations want you to do . . .

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You can join Akim Reinhardt’s cult at ThePublicProfessor.com