RollingStone: How People Leave One Cult — and End Up in Another

 https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/what-is-cult-hopping-nxivm-dos-838750/

TEAH BANKS WAS born into an evangelical Christian sect called the Radio Church of God. Founded in the 1930s by an advertising sales representative turned minister, the insular group promoted an ultra-fundamentalist reading of the Old Testament, eschewing divorce, premarital sex and even wearing makeup. “It was a super closed religion,” Banks, now 42, remembers. “We had pictures of the leader in our home. We worshipped him like he was a god.”

Although Banks started having questions about the group, she attended services until her 20s, when she was expelled from the organization. In 2004, she and her then-boyfriend, a filmmaker named Mark Vicente (best known for the documentary What the Bleep Do We Know?), were approached by two women who wanted Vicente to make films for their organization, NXIVM, which taught a curriculum called the Executive Success Program, or ESP. The two women (one of whom was NXIVM co-founder Nancy Salzman) raved about their leader, a mathematician, scientist, judo champion and concert-level pianist who had patented a unique method of hacking the human brain. The man’s name, the women said, was Keith Raniere.

Banks and Vicente’s interest was piqued, and they agreed to join the women for lunch; when Salzman successfully used ESP methods to “cure” Banks of her lifelong lactose intolerance, she was even more intrigued. “I’m just like, wow, this is amazing. This woman is amazing,” she says. “And I said, ‘Nancy, I want to be one of your people.'” 

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"Because cultic studies is a relatively under-researched field (unsurprisingly, cults themselves are resistant to outsiders conducting research on their practices), there isn’t much data attesting to exactly how prevalent “cult-hopping” is. But anecdotally, Eichel says, the practice is common, in part because those who are kicked out of a cult or excommunicated are looking for another organization to fill the void. Most cults, including NXIVM, teach adherents that they are wholly responsible for their own actions, which creates feelings of extreme self-doubt and anguish when they’re cut off from their support system. “That leaves [them] vulnerable to another group to say, ‘Well no, you’re in the wrong group, this is the right group,'” Eichel says.

Those who leave cults on their own – which Eichel says constitutes the “vast majority” of cult members — most often do so because they’ve had a bad experience with the group, perhaps observing something that violates their own ethics, or inconsistencies between the leader’s behavior and his teachings. But contrary to what you might expect, from the perspective of a former cult member, having one bad experience with a cult does not necessarily reflect on cult-like organizations as a whole. Eichel compares it to how most people would feel after they visit a bad dentist: sure, the experience of being poked and prodded by a poorly trained practitioner might make us slightly more wary of dentistry in general, but it certainly won’t stop anyone from hopping on Yelp and trying to find another, better dentist.

Former members may be disillusioned with that specific group, “but open to the next one,” Eichel says. “Because they think, ‘Of course that group didn’t have the truth. This one does.'” (Vicente’s case, Raniere actively referred to his experience with Ramtha when trying to recruit him for NXIVM, saying during his testimony that Raniere said “he needed to deprogram me from my mystical beliefs.”

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"But the main reason why cult-hopping is so prevalent stems from an extremely common (and incorrect) assumption about cult members: that they’re inherently naive or poorly educated or vulnerable to being duped. On the contrary, Eichel says, most people who become involved in cults come from middle-class or upper-middle-class backgrounds and have higher than average IQs. They also tend to have a history of becoming attracted to social justice movements and causes. “We’re talking about people who want to change the world, who want to do something productive,” he says. It isn’t until it’s too late, he says, that they realize the only person whose life they’re improving is their leader."