Trust me?

Do you trust me?

Right?

Everly?

And you astrid to us?

This is the truth, the only truth.

If anybody ever tells you to just trust them, don't welcome to trust me.

The podcast about cults, extreme belief and manipulation from two former cult members who've actually experienced it.

I am Lo Lablanc and I'm Megan Elizabeth.

And today our guest is Jane Borden, author of Cults Like Us Why Doomsday Thinking drives America.

Today, Jame's going to talk to us about why the Puritans were actually a high control group, how the ethos that working was a sign of righteousness informs our current American belief that having a lot of money is a sign of goodness, and how pro natalism and the idea that the correct people should be having more babies is not only incredibly dangerous but also another form of doomsdayism.

We'll talk about the American monometh and why it makes us interested in authoritarian style leadership, How the Book of Revelation is not quite what we think it is, how all this black and white thinking is just a way to make sense of the chaos, and how self help and marketing are their own forms of cultic thinking.

Before we get to our guest, Megan, what is the cultiest thing of the week for you?

My cultiest thing of the week is just learning more about Lauri Bellow.

Do you remember her?

Yes, of the Chad day Bell case.

Yes, exactly.

She's a woman who is accused of murdering her two children with her husband, Chad day Bell, who they're also accused of killing a whole slew of other people.

He wrote like doomsday almost romance novels in my opinion, that she got super obsessed with.

And who knows if he believed it, but I do think she believed that they were coming true, kind of bringing in this new heralding in this kind of revelation into being.

They ended up killing their two children.

They found the bodies anyway, Chad day Bell has been sentenced to the death penalty.

Okay, And I read that Laurie is defending herself and court.

No she's not, Yes, she is.

Wow.

She is very good.

I mean, don't get me wrong, She's going to be found guilty, but she's very good at like flirting.

Are you watching the trial?

No, but I watched the documentary and like she gets pulled over and and she's just like, oh my gosh, my lipstick.

I can't find it.

Oh my god, where is it?

And and like you let her go.

She's very flirtatious and.

She's very out of things.

So uh yeah, that's mine.

What a fascinating person.

Whenever somebody decides to represent themselves in court, I automatically assume that they are mentally very mentally unwell, because why would you do that unless you're like the sickest lawyer of all time, And even then you would know you want a team like she.

And she's not a lawyer, and she's like, I've been reading books.

Good for you, Lorie.

You will end up in jail and you should and you should and you should.

This is the part where we go to your cultiest thing of the week, because we both do one.

What's your cultiest thing of the week.

My cultiest thing of the week is something I actually I'm gonna say I don't think is a cult, but there are there are just like elements of group gatherings that.

That can feel cult eat to be.

Okay, So I started.

Going to alan on And for those of you who don't know what allan on is, because I've learned in the past few weeks that everybody thinks that allan On.

Is just AA which it's not.

AA is for people who are alcoholics or addicts.

Alan On is for people who have been affected by people who are alcoholics or addicts.

So it's you know, your mom's an alcoholic, if your loved one is an addict.

That's the program that you go to.

And it's also a twelve step program.

It's just a slightly different program.

There's a lot of like, you know, people like me who have who are extremely Type A and want to fix everything and make everything better, which is, yeah, are you going.

To alan On because you're host is an alcoholic?

Oh my god, I can't believe it took me this long.

I'm in the program too, guys.

It's fine.

The AA one Yeah, yeah, yeah.

My brother is an addict, and people who you know, have listened to some of our old episodes will know that that's been an ongoing thing.

He did overdose and he has a brain injury now.

But I actually went because of a breakup that happened and just kind of some realizations I'd had about some of my own patterns.

And.

It's my first twelve step program.

I mean I've gone to like a couple to support people, you know, but it's the first one I'm going to for myself, so I'm getting the most like clear window into how it works.

It's really interesting.

Like what I love about it and what I think prevents it from a being a cult is that there's no central leadership.

Responsibilities change hands all the time, so there really isn't room for someone to be like this is the way to do it, or at least there's there are safeguards against that, yep.

But of course some of the other things that will happen in any kind of support group were recurring gathering I think are like the language.

There's like language that everybody uses.

There's like catchphrases and slogans, and I'm like, I don't why are you all saying the same thing?

I don't.

Yeah, I don't know what that means.

You know your secret language, Yeah you have, there is a secret language.

And obviously this is not what everybody does.

But like some people will get up and talk and I'll notice they're applying the alan On principles to everything in their life as opposed to just the things that applies to which also you know, as we know, like when you think one thing is the answer to all things in your life, that can be maybe making it too important totally.

But like it's great.

Yeah, it's great, and I think it's really helpful.

And if anyone actually does have an addict in their life like me, I recommend going, even though I'm so uncomfortable when I'm there because I'm like this, I'd be vulnerable in front of people and not like in the podcast way where I'm like just talk, but like I have to, like, actually, you know, it's different, and if anybody has an addict and their brain like me, go take care of it.

The only thing I don't like is when they refer to it as a family.

Ooh yeah, yeah, I was like, no, we're not.

Yeah.

Sometimes the higher power talk bothers me, but as an atheist, but I have been to meetings where they're very good about not overusing like God language and more just saying higher power.

But yeah, it's what an interesting new thing in my life.

Absolutely shocking.

Honestly, I'm very proud of you, but it can thank you.

Yeah, but sometimes we need that.

I had no idea that the Puritans were one of the most impactful cults in American history, and they just came in hot from the beginning.

And to provide some context for this episode, because we were a little hazy on some of this history, and maybe some of y'all are too, here's just a little little overview to set us up.

Okay.

The Puritans left England because they wanted to create their own, improved, more extreme, purified version of the Church of England, which they thought hadn't gone far enough in its reforms after breaking away from the Catholic Church.

They didn't know that, yeah, same, the Church of England was trying to establish itself as like a mandatory religion, and the Puritans believed that they should be able to do the religion however they wanted without like a leader or a state head or whatever telling them how to do it and running the show.

But they didn't actually want religious pluralism.

They just wanted to create a society where they could do religion their way and make everyone else also do it that way, which is the same thing, ironically.

And then they settled in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in sixteen thirty and within ten years they were the colony's majority group.

So it informed so much of what America became after that.

Yeah, and they didn't even expect to be there for ten years.

They thought the apocalypse was high noon arriving.

Which is what Jane Morden is going to tell us all about.

Let's do it.

Welcome Jane Borden to trust me.

Thank you so much for joining us, Thank you for having me.

I'm excited to be here.

You're here with us today because you wrote a book called Cults Like Us Why Doomsday Thinking Drives America?

Which seems somewhat relevant right now to our culture.

What inspired you to write this book?

First of all to answer those questions?

What's going on?

How did we get here?

Why is this happening?

I had become very preoccupied with the division in the nation after Trump's first election.

How can people who are really mostly the same be so divided or see themselves as so divided?

Where's that coming from?

And so I had all that rolling around in my brain while I was also doing some cult.

Reporting for Vanity Fair.

And I was a religious studies major in college, and I've sort of always been interested in belief, and so in this sort of muck of things rolling around in my brain, it dawned on me one day that the Puritans were kind of a could I mean, if people today look back at them, we would call them a cold.

Can you tell us why that is?

Because I really my knowledge of Puritans is like from some third grade class where what picture book like maybe had a turkey or something like you.

Were like, yeah, tracing your hand, and that's the extent of it.

I was reading this like it was a fairy tale, like had I had no idea any of it was real.

Well, we don't learn those parts because they're a little inconvenient or unflattering at least, Right, But the Puritans, first of all, they were a doomsday group, so they believe the end was very near, and they hoped they were among the chosen.

And they were fleeing England because they thought that armageddon was coming to England.

They thought God was first going to punish England before.

The rest of the world.

Yeah, And they thought England's crime was that it had not purified the Church of England enough, it had not made it distinct enough from the Catholic Church.

Right, I did not realize that they were just more extreme than the Church that they were fleeing.

Like in my head, I was like, Oh, they just wanted to practice religious freedom.

But it sounds like they were like, you guys, aren't letting us be extreme enough and you aren't like going hard enough in your religion.

Yeah, and they were derided.

I mean they were called hot Protestants, which I love ye, and you know they got executed.

They were spit on.

They were not popular, these people, and you can kind of understand why.

I mean, you know, they didn't dance.

There was no you weren't even allowed to like love your kids or your spouse very much, because if you loved anything more than.

God, that was bad.

They were kind of boring to a degree, like if they were at a dinner party, you'd be like leave, right.

Do you must we sit on people for being boring?

Well, I mean, I don't know if this is the quite the right moment for it, but that leads to a big persecution complex, right exactly.

Everyone hates me, everyone hates us.

We're gonna but guess what, God loves us.

Yeah, and you're gonna pay, and you're gonna pay.

Yeah, that's right.

So can you tell us a little bit about how the Puritans were in fact a high control group when they got here and how that kind of evolved.

Yeah, so you know, high control group means belief was controlled, behavior was controlled, information intake controlled.

They did this by pushing conformity.

It was a culture of punishment, so everything you could be punished for.

I mean it was kind of I don't know how they lived their lives in constant fears how they live their lives, which is motivating, you know, to conform.

But for example, swearing was illegal, flirting, gossiping, You couldn't disagree with the minister.

A woman got turned in by her survey because the servant overheard her expressing a disagreement with the minister.

It was illegal to skip church.

The servant people were turned into informants, and so you were walking on eggshells all the time.

They made it very difficult to get into the church.

So there was this thing that you desperately wanted that was always just out of reach.

And so the idea was that no one knows who is or isn't going to be saved on Doomsday because only God knows that and also He's chosen it, you know, before you were born.

But they were still like, we're pretty sure we know, and we're pretty sure we are sure.

And so the way they determined that or proved it was just by looking within, you know, just kind of sit with yourself and look for signs of grace, and if you feel like you find it, then you're probably among the chosen, and therefore you can gain jury into the church.

But the longer the Puritan settlement was around in Boston, the harder they made entry into the church to get This was very much because the magistrates wanted to hold onto power.

They were corrupted by power, and the more people who could get into the church, the less power they had.

And so they started telling people, you know, are you sure, are you sure you found grace?

Maybe you should go look again.

There's probably wickedness in there somewhere.

And so church numbers shrank, and this all led to a variety of crises because they were a theocracy, and how do you govern at any rate?

And so there's all these stories about in the second and third generations about people who get power holding on to it and not letting go.

And sometimes they would change the rules rather than seed power, which is something we always see in high control groups and cults.

So really what we're talking about is power.

Always well What are the origins of this sort of doomsday thinking or has this just always been around like in every religion or is this a uniquely American thing.

I think it's especially American, but it's certainly not unique.

Apocalyptic thinking in general, which just means thinking that the world is going to end, that instead of everything being a circle, it's a line with a destination.

That is a relatively new development.

It pretty much came about with Monotheism, with the development of Monotheism, so it started with the Zoroastrians, and from there it very much influenced Judaism and from there, you know, the Christianity, the Jesus Cult, as some called it, was an apocalyptic group.

Christianity is an apocalyptic religion in many ways, and we've moved away from that modern Christianity has, but it's there at the roots.

And then it flared hugely around following the Reformation, and the Puritans brought it to America.

Can you say a little bit about Roger Williams.

Yeah, so he was a radical among the radicals.

He showed up shortly after the Puritans setup shop in Boston and began criticizing the Church magistrates.

He thought that the Church in Boston had not gone far enough to purify itself of the evils of the Satanic pope.

Right.

He basically thought we should be worshiping the way Jesus and his apostles did.

So no structure, no church.

He would only pray with his wife.

In later years he only prayed alone, and so he wanted He kind of wanted to burn it all down, and the church was not happy about this.

They tried to kick him out.

He caught wind of it, fled south and essentially found at Rhode Island.

And what's fascinating to me about him is that he's become the grandfather of the separation of church and state.

Like the Establishment Clause the First Amendment came from his ideas.

But ultimately he was just trying to bring Jesus back.

He just wanted more church.

He thought, Jesus isn't going to come back unless you get rid of church structure.

And I want Jesus to come back.

Everybody wants the world to end, so everybody wants they want they want to see it, and.

They want to see everybody go to hell more than they even want to go to Heaven.

They want to see their enemies go to hell punished.

That's right, it's freaking weird.

Yeah.

I write about this poem, The Day of Doom, which was is considered America's first bestseller.

It's hugely popular in Puritan New England, and it's the story of doomsday.

It's a long form poem and I think two hundred and twenty some standas are dedicated to people getting it right, like wailing and begging for mercy and being denied and thrown into the lake.

Affair, gnashing of teeth and gnashing of teath duck in my brain.

But before any of that happens, the saints, the elect, the chosen are pulled up to heaven so they can help and watch.

Yeah, that's their first reward.

My goodness, loved ones and they're friends God.

Yeah, anything to feel special.

Yeah.

You wrote about how there are values of like hard work and how this was virtuous to be like kind of constantly working because that meant you were righteous somehow because you weren't distracted.

How did that like stick in American culture and how does it relate to kind of what we see today in evangelical.

Culture why we worship billionaires.

Yeah, this one's interesting because the Puritans were very clear on the boat on the way over, you know, they said, you will give to your neighbor if your neighbor needs it, even if you think you're not going to get that money back.

That's just how we roll.

Get on board or go back to England, you know.

But over time this shifted because of their idea that the way you worshiped God was by having a calling by working.

They thought that God only created us because he wanted to be worshiped, and that the way we did it was by working hard.

So the harder you worked, the more you loved God.

So what that meant is that if you're working really hard, you're going to start accruing wealth.

It's inevitable.

And so is wealth then really bad or is it just a sign of how much you love God and a sign that maybe He loves you in turn if he's rewarding you, right, yes, So then eventually, over time it became okay to acquire money.

Acquisitiveness stopped being this evil sin and started being something good and righteous.

Yeah, because also if you have grace, then you would get wealth.

So it's this kind of circular thinking that begins too.

And therefore, if you have wealth, you must have grace.

Yes, and so John Rockefeller famously said that he got his money from God.

But of course, the people who believe this are generally people who are buying into an unscientific shall we say, reality, because we know that having wealth is what enables you to create more wealth, the bootstraps.

Can you talk a little bit about the bootstraps myth of America?

Yeah, it is a myth.

I believe that people who follow this doctrine that the wealthy are that the number in your bank account represent your moral character, right, because the inverse of the wealthy being among the chosen is that the impoverished are sinners.

Yeah.

Right.

The idea is, if you're poor, well, surely that God wants you to be poor.

You know, God assessed you and decided you weren't worthy, and so why should we help the poor?

Sin should be punished?

Right, And so we see this this bootstrapping ethic preached to the poor, when in fact there are constraints set in place that keep them from ever becoming rich.

Because when you have money, you don't want to give it away, and so this doctrine becomes a very handy justification to not just hold your wealth, but as I argue in the book, actually mine the lower classes of their wealth, because again, if you see them as sinners, you see them as just another part of the natural world, which, according to the Puritan ethos, we're supposed to be mining and extracting from and using for our own benefit.

Oh god, it's baked in there, it's really it.

Really it reminds me of the law of attraction that like, you just aren't thinking, you're not doing it right if you're not attracting enough like wealth and success into your life.

Yeah.

What I took away from this in a bigger way was like luck is so scary for Americans to wrap their head around.

And probably you know, many cultures.

Like randomness, the randomness, the fear of the unknown, so that everything must have a reason and a reward or a punishment.

Yes, the world is just.

It's the just world hypothesis, right, which is that cognitive bias where we are prone to believing that things are the way they are because they're supposed to be that way and because the world is just.

So if somebody is really wealthy, they must be wealthy because they did good things and they are correct and righteous and if they're poor, it must be their fault.

That makes things easier to accept than the chaos.

Yeah, the chaos.

We talk about the chaos a lot.

It is really difficult to accept the chaos.

Yeah, and that's what feels coolt like thinking, right, trying to create order out of chaos.

Yeah.

So I want to hear a bit about the American mono myth.

Where does that come from and.

What is it?

So in the nineteen seventies, a couple of scholars named John Shelton Lawrence and Robert Jewett started chatting about the Vietnam War and how it was possible that Americans could be stomaching so much violence right, And over time and over time they realized they started to see this pattern in pop culture and they eventually named it the American mono myth.

And it's it's a troupe that you see in film and comic books, westerns, and the basic storyline is that there's a small Edenic like community that's under threat and the government and the police force are ill equipped.

They can't stop it.

What's everyone going to do?

Oh?

Wow, here comes this hero, this outsider who literally appears out of nowhere.

Or they're within the community, but they're like a loner in the community, right, and they kill all the bad guys essentially with scalpel precision, and then they disappear from whence they came.

And so the solution is always violence, and like I said, it's precise, so there are never innocent casualties, only the bad guys die.

Therefore it's like a cleansing violence, it's a righteous violence.

And Jewet and Lawrence trace this to something called Indian captivity narratives, which came out of the Puritan era, and these were true life stories written by people who had been captured and then rescued from you know, native communities, and it was always a violent rescue and then the wilderness was cleansed and then became safe again for the white settlers afterward.

Was the idea.

And so this genre really exploded in the twenties and thirties with the development of westerns and superhero comics.

But it's in everything.

I mean, there were three movies out last month that follow this trope, which ones The Accountant.

Okay, haven't I mean, I probably haven't seen any of them, but go on.

What's the one with romy Malik where he goes out on a vigilante killing spray for everyone who killed his wife.

Oh, I don't know, I for guessing.

Yeah, he I'm real behind on movies.

You know, they're vigilanting like Death Wish.

Yeah, is an American model, with Star Wars even Jaws.

I mean, you really start to see it everywhere if you're looking.

But so where I really see the origin of this, You know, if you want to go back farther than the Indian captivity nerves is in the Book of Revelation.

Please tell us about this.

Yes, is so fascinating.

What is the Book of Revelation and how did we get it wrong?

Oh?

My gosh.

So the Book of Revelation was written around ninety CE, and it's a work of anti Roman propaganda.

It was written by one of Jesus, an early follower, this guy John of Patmos is what he's called, and he was a Jew, right, and it was written in response to the Roman occupation.

So I believe it was sixty six Rome just destroyed Jerusalem.

The Jews had tried to fight back and it was horrific, and so their thinking was okay, but Jesus is coming back any day now, he said, he was going to be back in our light in a generation, in our lifetime.

It had been sixty years and he still hadn't come back.

And so basically, this guy John of Patmos delivered the rescue narrative that the community needed.

Interesting and so it's a story of divine retribution and it's very much coded.

Scholars can tell that it's written about Rome.

So the various headed beasts, you know, one heads for each of the Roman emperors.

The six six six is a reference to Nero.

People think that the mark of the beast referenced Roman coins because a lot of Jews at the time didn't want to carry around Roman money because you know their God, Ask God on the money.

Ask God on the money exactly.

So in the Story of Revelation, there is again this outsider who kind of shows up out of nowhere to kick off the retribution, and it's Jesus in this case.

He appears as a slaughtered lamb, as the innocent slaughtered lamb whose hand is sort of pushed, as the one who's chosen to begin opening all these scrolls, which rains terror on the earth.

Incredibly violent, ecstatically violent.

The Book of Revelation at one point an angel collects all of the wicked on the earth.

This is the grapes of wrath.

Reference.

He collects all the grapes of the earth, which is the wicked, and puts them in a giant wine press and smushes them and so much blood comes out that, oh my god, that it creates a river as high as a horse's bridle that flows for two hundred miles.

Okay, it's really creative, though.

You have to hand it too.

And I know, and I just want to state for the record, growing up and the cult that I did, we read this as completely literal.

I would get tucked into my little bed every night and think about revelations and just be like, I'm scared.

And whenever we would leave to go anywhere by two parents would go.

Is that what you want to be wearing when Jesus comes back to the earth.

Is this where you want to be going when Jesus.

Comes back to the earth, Because you are, you'll be squished like you'll.

Like a grape.

I just wanted to go to the mall and I'd be like, God, get zooks or heaven, I.

Don't know, Oh my god, I love get zukes over.

I like forgot about it for the last twenty years.

You mentioned how like this is just like a completely different Jesus from the Old Testament or from the previous Jesus, that.

It's like an actual genus.

Yeah, if you were writing this character in a screenplay, you'd be like, why does he suddenly completely change everything about his motivation and his behavior?

And I would be like, this character doesn't make any sense, please rewrite it.

Yeah, it's like miss understood who wrote this chapter?

Right?

Yeah, So the reason Revelation got canonized is in part because people thought John was like John the Apostle, the guy who wrote the Gospel of John, although that's also up for debate, but that John they thought was that John.

So they thought, well, anything this guy wrote needs to be in the Bible.

But in fact it was written by another John, which was a bit of an oopsie but so wild.

Yeah, and there were you know, there were some people at the time who who saw the distinction and kind of raised their hands, but they didn't they didn't win the day.

And there were also people at the time when I say at the time, I mean when the New Testament was canonized, who were like, this is insane, you know.

Yeah, it's it's it feels a little insane.

It's interesting how much that influenced so much of the rest of history and like you know, used as a justification for so much violence.

This guy was just journaling.

He was just family fantasy, little vision board fantasy.

And now my whole childhood was right.

Yeah, well it's all about a number of other things.

I mean, like the planet was.

It's just like forever fucked because he had a little fantasy.

We had a vision.

He was and he was in the spirit, right, which is what you did back then before you So there were lots of revelations at the time.

His wasn't the only one.

It's just the one that stood the test of time.

But but you would get in the spirit.

So whether that means they were taking mind altering substances or like spinning around in circles until they got dizzy, you know.

Yeah, I'm going to quote you, oh because I wrote a quote about the American monomoth.

Okay, the American monomth undermines our nations founding ideology democracy.

It subconsciously encourages the public to forego the messy, laborious, and painstaking process of cooperation and compromise by instead waiting for a superhero and then granting that figure unlimited and unchecked power.

It's a passive public desiring a totalitarian leader.

This is so interesting to me because I don't feel drawn to these stories.

I don't know if you feel drawn to these stories, but certainly every man I've ever dated has been drawn to these stories.

It feels like such a masculine thing.

Do you.

Find that, like there is more of a craving for that authoritarian style leadership in particular periods, or like right now in particular, like what makes us crave that, or at least what makes men crave that?

Well, indoctrination into it as we all have been in America, and not least because of these narratives showing up in every film, especially today, it feels like but also you know, as you know, cult like thinking increases during times of crisis, So whether that's people joining cults, like the number of the proliferation of cults, or whether that's just increases at the society level in the kind of cult like thinking.

I explore the book, and so.

We're experiencing a time of extreme crisis right now.

Sociologists point specifically to technological revolution.

Social media has completely changed the way we communicate with one another.

The algorithms have changed the way we live AI.

Of course, we don't even know yet how that's going to reshape society.

Global warming doing us no favors.

Global warming being the biggest crisis humanity has yet faced social upheaval, so me too.

The quote unquote woke movement America is going to be minority majority soon.

These are leading people to freak out.

This is leading to a political backlash, which we've seen.

It's also leading to huge increases in quote like thinking.

And the most pressing crisis, in my opinion, facing Americans right now is income inequality.

Majority of Americans are chronically under resourced.

And there's nothing that causes your world to wobble more again that chaos, right, and being unresourced.

And so we're seeing huge increases in cult like thinking right now.

And I think it's swept Donald Trump into the White House.

Yeah, because we want an autocrat.

We are currently flirting with autocracy.

To say the least.

Yes, Yeah, it's like when we are in survival mode, all we want is some hope for relief and for somebody to fix it and make it better.

And when someone comes in with easy answers and black and white thinking and says I will fix it, I will make it better, of course we're going to be drawn to that, and especially in times of great division, where we are being told by media over and over again, the people who disagree with us are bad and evil and wrong and.

We should be against them.

Like, we're just so primed right now for the situation that we're currently in with leadership that is not interested in checks on its power at all, which is how cults operate.

The inability to critique, the ability to question, to dissent in any way like that is authoritarianism, and that is exactly the same as cults.

And we saw that happening with the Puritans after the Antinomian controversy, which was basically just a time when this woman Ann Hutchinson was like, hey, I disagree with you, and they were like shut it down.

And Anna Hutchinson sounded so cool.

She sounds cool, right, yeah, yeah, I mean I don't know.

These people were all a little crazy, right right right.

We like them because we feel like they were fighting the enemy, but we might not want to hang out with them at dinner hard to say, hard to say, yeah, but yeah, So they quashed descent.

They did away with the practice of question and answers after sermons because it was too vexing, which is like what we see happening right now with Trump shutting down universities.

They banished Hutchinson and a bunch of other people who fled to the new colony of Rhode Island where all the radicals went.

That was around the time they founded Harvard.

And there were lots of reasons behind Harvard's founding, but one of them was to indoctrinate youth.

I mean, they really brought down the hammer in response to critique.

Fascinating considering Harvard is the one school that is standing up to Trump right now.

You drew a connection between doomsdaism and this panic right now about declining birth rates, and I just would love to hear more about how some of these ideas are just another form of doomsday thinking.

Yeah.

So, people who ascribe to pronatalists thinking have a variety of beliefs, So I don't want to loop everyone under one umbrella.

But some of the people in that movement believe that if elites in America, specifically stop having kids, that that's going to be the end of civilization.

So inherent in that already is the assumption that America and Western civilization is civilization right right, which is the chosen nation, chosen people thing, which is very puritan.

And very rooted in white supremacy, yep, the myth of the Anglo Saxon and all that.

So the idea behind pronatalism that is shared by the eugenics movement is that only really certain people should be having more kids, right, And so we hear some in the pronatalist movement saying, you know, let's give child tax credits and you know, money for universal pre K and that sort of thing.

But we also hear people like well, for example, Elon Musk was quoted by an anonymous friends as like encouraging all his rich friends to have kids.

So it's it's whose genes do we want right to spread?

Right?

And ultimately I believe this is all just a way for people with power to replicate their own power.

That's what's happening in the eugenics movement, and I think that's what's happening now, and that's what cult leaders do.

I mean, Elon Musk has had thirteen kids, I think at this point that we know of Warren Jeff's had sixty, Malachi Yorck had three hundred.

Jeffrey Epstein had plans to seed the earth by impregnating up to twenty women at a time.

Oh, my god, until I don't know.

And so this is power replicating itself, and this is people behaving like gods, trying to literally reshape society in their own image.

Yeah, I'm saying, we have a lot of money, so we're inherently good.

We're virtuous and virtuous and chosen by God, and so we'll just replicate it.

There was an interesting part of your book about sterilization and how back in the day people would be like, you, guys shouldn't have kids, and we choose who should have more and who shouldn't have any.

There were mass sterilizations, and this was at the beginning of the twentieth century.

Between sixty and seventy thousand Americans were sterilized a lot, most out here in California.

Yeah, and the Supreme Court ruling, the Buck v.

Bell ruling that said it was legal to do that is still in the books.

Well, but so the justification for I get to choose who does and doesn't pro create, and I'm going to base it on you replicating the power of rich white people.

The justification for that is the search for perfectionism, the pursuit of perfectionism, which is a cult like thinking which comes from the Puritans.

So the idea is like, maybe we don't have to wait for God to deliver New Jerusalem as he does at the end of the Book of Revelation.

Maybe we can reach New Jerusalem ourselves.

If we perfect society, if we perfect human civilization, then we will create heaven for ourselves.

And that's what we saw happening before and during the eugenics movement.

Real quick, y'all to give some content for the landscape of pro natalism today and how it relates to eugenics and racism.

At natal con the pro natalist convention in twenty twenty three, a far right businessman presented on the importance of men only spaces and said the Civil Rights Act of nineteen sixty four and its progeny are probably the single most destructive set of laws in American history, and all should be wiped forever from the history of this nation.

You can see why this is a problem.

The organizer of natal Khan has promoted people like discredited race science advocate Charles Murray, who thinks poor women have low IQs because of their inferiority and therefore should not have children, and has described love between men and women as a relationship between superior and inferior.

Obviously, there are a ton of extremely dangerous ideas in this movement.

We will do a full episode on that kind of thinking very soon to dive deeper into some of those beliefs.

It reminds me of the Human Potential movement, which is kind of this very American idea that we all have within us, this almost Jesus like potential to be perfect.

It's been going on for forever.

Think and grow rich.

All of these books are like, you're thinking is the root of the problems, and Heaven is here in your brain.

There's a part of Christ in you that's totally pure, and just fix your brain and you'll get there.

And if you don't get better, then you haven't fixed your brain, right, And so you should keep paying for my course courses.

Yeah, Yeah, I'm really susceptible to self help and.

We all are.

Yeah, And there's nothing wrong with self help.

The problem is that we get exploited by people who are trying to take our money.

Yes, and they do it via our latent indoctrination.

Yeah.

Yeah, and just the never ending pursuit of more and better and heaven and perfect Yeah.

And the study suggests that the more we engage in self reflection, constantly looking inward and trying to improve ourselves, it makes us sick.

It doesn't make us happier, it doesn't make us better.

I was so this was so interesting to me.

You mentioned Rena Raphael's book I love her how she describes the modern spiritual consumer as creating individualized, bespoke practices and belief systems by basically picking and choosing, you know, spirituality.

But then you talked about this twenty eighteen study.

I thought this study was so interesting.

So I'm just going to read an excerpt of your writing from your book for our listeners.

A twenty eighteen study identified among its participants two basic strategies for seeking happiness, one social and one individual.

The study determined that people with the goals of seeing friends and family more, joining a nonprofit, or helping people in need reported increased life satisfaction a year later.

Those who focused on goals such as staying healthy, finding a better job, or quitting smoking reported no increase in life satisfaction.

In fact, the self focused road to happiness was even less effective than having no plans for action at all.

That is so interesting, period, Exactly Why is it just because we're like looping on like almost this obsessive like am I happy yet?

Am I happy yet?

Am I happy yet?

Like?

I think so, yeah, yeah, I mean I think that's part of it.

I think the other part of is that actual sources of happiness come from community, come from mutual aid.

Which is also what cults give people, which is the problem.

You know, that's so tricky.

It's so tricky.

I think it's like it's such a delicate little framework.

Yeah yeah, but community is what ultimately seems to raise people's lived experience.

Yeah, And it just like hammers home for me that the self help which you wrote about, the self help culture is sort of a never ending like it's a bottomless the goal will never really be achieved because it does become this endless cycle of we need to purchase more courses, more books, more seminars, And that's by design, right, Like if the answer was actually achievable.

They would stop making money, it right, it would cease to be a customer.

Yeah, they're just creating more courses for you.

So I went to the Tony Robbins conference where we walked across hot coals chanting like I think it was like.

I believe in me or something.

Anyway, then afterwards you're like, oh my god, yay, I've overcome this huge fear.

And then he's like, and here's a bundle for the next part.

And I remember being really young and being like, well, this is fucking crazy.

A bundle, A bundle like a wellness bundle, like classes and.

More for you to buy, more for you to buy.

You thought you'd reach the dusky.

I thought i'd reach Nirvana.

I was a firewalker, right, and no, there was lots more to do, and it was very sad and I didn't do it, but a lot of people did.

And I can see why.

If I had the money, I probably would have.

But yeah, kind of creating this breaking down is what he did.

Sorry, Tony, if you're listening to this, just these groups kind of break you down in the beginning part and I'm like, you're nothing, and then build you back up and then you're kind of hooked.

And that's what colts do, the exactly down and rebuild you in their own image.

Well, and as you pointed out in the book, that's also what advertising and marketing do.

And can you talk a little about Edward Burne's Yeah, the Father of spin he which is a great book I relied on quite a bit.

He considered himself to have invented more or less public relations.

That's not exactly true, but being a spin master, he wrote his own narrative.

He was the nephew of Sigmund Freud, and so he began his career baby but okay, yeah, a little bit.

He began his career working in you know what would later be known as pr and he went to visit his uncle and came back to New York just full of beans about this idea of what if I take my uncle's ideas about the subconscious and desire and apply it to advertising?

What a perfect storm?

Wow?

Yeah, yeah, and became incredibly successful, revolutionized the industry and changed the way we purchase.

So before then, before Burnese bb basically advertising was needs based, like, hey, we have this product, you might need it.

Do you need it?

It's pretty cool if you do.

And that's oversimplifying things a little bit, but after Burne's it's this advertisement is going to create in you a need that did not previously exist, and we're going to do that by tickling your latent desires and your latent indoctrination, and then you're going to see this as the cure for what ails you.

It's so smart, it's so brilliant, it's so Friday, and he was able to like incorporate symbolism and just cut straight to your unconscious ping.

I mean, it's like a mini little cull if like break creating a need and then filling it Like it's genius if what you want to do is make a lot of money.

Yes, But then didn't political figures in America sort of take notice and become interested.

Yes.

So, at the time, America was overproducing and there was a glut.

There was too much stuff headed into the marketplace, and so the problem was do we scale back these engines of production, which could be bad for the economy, or do we find another way?

And so they heard about what Brenees was doing and were like, hey, can you find a way to convince people to buy all these things that they don't need and sure can, sure can.

And that's really when the American economy became addicted to the consumer marketplace as a driver.

What a lovely thing that happened.

It's been really good for all of us.

Yeah.

Bernez was a fascinating character, and you can tell that he maybe did question a little bit of his motives because he would espouse ideas publicly that we're a little counter to what he believed.

But he certainly didn't have a lot of compunction about doing what he did.

And a reporter during the Nazi regime found a copy of Burne's book in Grobbel's office on his shelves.

Wow.

I mean, it makes sense because you do have to manipulate.

You have to exploit people's inner desires in order to convince them that you of anything, but especially you really need to convince them that an entire group of people is so horrible that they all deserve to die.

I mean, like the different forms that manipulation takes, and how much we are all manipulatable, and how much that is exploited by people in power, It just never ceases to amaze me.

It is also connected.

Yeah, and it's easy to feel super hopeless about all of it.

Yeah.

Yeah, And that was a concern for me when I started researching and writing the book, But I ultimately found a lot of hope because when we see the magic trick, we stopped falling for it.

And I think when we don't recognize that these beliefs are driving us, then we're going to be exploited again and again.

But when we can see, oh, this is not the way life is or the way I think.

This is one driving idea among many, and I can take it or leave it, then we're less likely to be exploited.

And so I think when we can recognize and then acknowledge and articulate the ways Puritan doomsday ideology is still driving America, the less likely we are to fall prey to it.

Can you give us an example of that?

Can you take that from like the unconscious to the conscious so to speak?

And tell I'm curious of what it would look like in myself of like I have a thought and then I undo it?

How correct question?

Yeah?

Well, I think you know, I think you experienced it at the end of that Tony Robbins thing, right, you know, Oh, this is the end I reached Nirvana.

Oh no, wait, you're telling me there's more.

You know, you very easily could have said, oh yeah, no, I'm not there yet, right right, yeah, yeah, yeah.

For me, it's like I think, especially just given social media and we know how quickly oversimplified information spreads because it's just easier to process in our brains.

But like, if we can get better at.

Noticing the underlying narrative, Like, is a group of people being demonized?

Here?

Am I being encouraged to think in black and white?

Here?

Am I being told that there's one group that is the reason for all of my problems?

My like big guest hope with this podcast is to like foster that kind of thinking in people, just literally pausing and being like, what am I being told to believe about others?

Am I being sold an easy solution that maybe is oversimplified, Like you know, Daniel Kahman talks about just like literally pausing to examine our biases instead of just being on autopilot alone can do so much work for us.

Right yeah, yeah, No, I mean it's the pause, it's the pause, but it's hard to pause.

It's hard to pause in such a fast paced world when we're on social media all the time, and we're being told.

You know, and you just want to sometimes you just want to go shopping and it's like kind of bad, you know, and it's like, but that's how I stay.

It's just the whole system is just so Yeah, and it's hard to pause when you're in crisis.

Yes, And people who wish to men pipulate us want to keep us in crisis.

Yes, and that's why because you can't pause.

And that's what thought terminating cliches are, right, they mitigate the pause.

And you know, I talk about the cult watch where it's always striking now o'clock, like the time is now, you have to act now.

Which is we also see an advertising totally.

Michael Flynn had some big post on X Today about you know, the dangers and the evils and we have to fight and we have to fight now and the time is it's almost too late, and you know it's a rallying cry.

Okay.

My one question about that is because like you're absolutely right, Also, there are genuine systemic oppressions that occur that actually do need to be fought.

You know, when people are deprived of doe process, when civilians are harmed who should not be in it when there we're about to actually end from global warming, when warm science is destroyed.

You know, Like, so, how do you do you think that we can differentiate between like panic fear mongering that's meant to demonize people and genuine fighting of injustice.

Well, it's interested that you say due process just going to pull this pause threat a little more.

But that's what due process is is a pause.

Right, You're not going to just execute a person.

They're going to have a trial, et cetera, et cetera.

That's what checks and balances are.

Their pause so you don't actually get to make this decision.

You know, executive branch, we're going to have a say, and it's going to be this process and everything takes forever, and there's a lot of red tape and bureaucracy gets demonized by autocratic factions.

I think because they're trying to mitigate the pause.

I don't know if that answer your question, but what kind of like if we.

Are genuinely interested in truth, then investigation should be encouraged, and it is discouraged when it is a party that is only seeking power.

And I think for folks who are interested in upholding justice and fighting oppression authentically.

Like seeking truth and seeking it from multiple sources and not just one is the goal because truth is how you understand what happened and how to not recreate that.

Does this make any sense?

I'm lost, but I think you're not.

Well.

It just gets so complicated because then that exact advice gets co opted.

I mean, think about QAnon talking about do the research.

Well, sure, but they want you to do the research from their one guy with a blog, which is different from myriad external reliable sources.

But that is a whole other conversation because the meaning of a reliable source has become completely meaningless, right.

But there is such a thing.

And like one of the things we talk about a lot as well is just the importance of having a variety of sources.

And like, even if you have a variety of sources, it's still possible for them to all becoming kind of from the same place and from the same thinking patterns.

So the idea is to diversify not just in your community, but beyond your community.

But it's easier said than done in the algorithms that we are currently locked into.

Algorithms are part of the problem for sure.

Yeah, I describe the algorithms as cult leaders, yes, y yeah, because they the goal is to entrap us, right.

They do that by isolating us from our real life communities, which they achieve by feeding us extreme content because it has higher chances of engagement, and by love bombing us with likes and bells and notifications and things.

They spread disinformation, which literally mitigates our ability to control what we do and don't believe.

And the whole point is to extract money, to make money off of us, right, right, by taking our attention for their advertisers and our data.

Of course, I think they're the most successful cult leaders ever.

Oh my god, that is so true.

Yes, yeah, we've said it a million times, so sorry for repeating ourselves all the time, old listeners.

But like, I think some people have this idea that the information is out there, so of course you can just find it.

But the reality is we are I'm in such a different bubble of social media than some of my friends, Like, we are seeing completely different realities and that is not our faults.

That is the faults of corporations that are trying to extract money from us.

Yeah, control your environments another commonality.

Yeah, Okay, let's le on something hopeful.

Okay, where's the hope?

So, yes, you mentioned there's some hope in this, and we'd love to we'd love to get hooked in it.

Feed it to us, yes, soon, feed that to all of us.

I think the most radical thing we can do in our current environment is to care for one another.

It sounds so cliche and and hackneyed, but community and mutual aid.

I think we have to bridge divides because cult like thinking feeds off of division.

Cults feed off of division, and we are separated now from people who we think are so different from us, and as you said, reading multiple news sources, talking to people who have different ideas, we have to find ways to bridge the divide, and I think that happens a lot via.

Community and mutual aid.

I think we need to bridge the divisions within ourselves, the so called human spirit divide.

As you know, cult leaders profit off of a divide itself.

That's how they conquer you, right, So I think ultimately bridging divides and turning toward one another.

And that's very hard to do on the internet currently.

So this is my new thing is let's get the fuck off line and try to forge community where we live and with people that in the past ten years maybe we wouldn't talk to because we'd be so online.

I feel like learning how to engage with each other in real life is maybe the most important thing we have right now, and you just have to make sure you don't make another cult happen.

Yeah, I have one last question for you, because I genuinely want to know the answer, because I want to do it.

When you say kind of like fix the gap in yourself, what does that look like?

How do I do that?

How do we do that?

A friend of mine once we were at a party and he said he feels like his body is a wheelchair that carries his brain around.

And I think about that all the time because I feel a little bit the same way.

I think I've created a hierarchy within myself of my brain is at the top and my body's at the bottom.

Yeah, And of course that's not true.

And even though I know it's not true, I can't help but feel that way.

And I think the more I find personally that I can bridge that gap when I get into my body, which I do through dancing, swimming, you know, hiking.

Yeah, it sounds like kill a million birds with one stone and go for a walk with your friends.

Yeah, go for a walk with someone ideologically opposed to you.

It's hard.

Yeah, Okay, cool, thank you for complaining that.

I also want to add to this list of hope.

By the way, based on our conversation, is the pause.

Yeah, I love that.

Lean into the pause, Lean into the pause.

And the pause for me, like often I'll have sort of conflicting ideas inside myself, Like even if I'm feeling connected to my body, there might be like a thought that I'm fighting or like that's something that's subconscious that I haven't yet brought to the contra And the pause can help me name and identify what that inner battle is.

And like, once I bring to the surface, it is so much less powerful.

But that's for me.

That's what makes me.

Feel divided is when I have like two you know, cognitive disiness.

Yeah.

Well, this is a fascinating book, and this has been a really great conversation that I've learned a lot from.

Tell us the name of your book again, and where people can find it.

It's called cults like us Why doomsday thinking drives America?

And you can find it.

I think anywhere.

At this point, it's still available everywhere, and I do hope people will be interested in it because I really want to spread awareness, you know, as cult leaders say, I'm trying to make the world a better place.

Amazing, Thank you, thank you so much, Thanks guys.

Okay, that concludes our interview with the amazing Jane Borden.

Yeah, and I think it's worth noting that the last chapter of this book is about love has won a Carlson, and we did do an interview with her daughter, Mattie Stroud, So give that.

One a listen for sure.

And now is the part of the episode where I ask Megan if she would join this cult.

Megan, would you join this cult of the Puritans?

Absolutely not, there is no way.

Number one, I'm not sailing across the ocean.

No.

Number two.

In general, you're just you know, in general.

Now, sure, if it's like a great cruise ship or something, Okay, I mean.

Cruise trips are fun as well, just letting you know I'm not on the Mayflower.

Do you get it?

Like?

No?

Oh, I think I would have been like adventure.

No.

And I don't think I would have left the Catholic Church like they had pageantry.

They had ritual beautiful iconograph.

Yeah, just like weren't there even wigs at some point?

Like I'm not leaving that.

I don't know if that was a Catholic thing ro which is an air thing?

Ok?

Cool?

Sure?

And then you want me to wear like wooden shoes and massive choose its No.

Okay, she's a no on Puritans.

Absolutely not.

Yeah.

I think it's a tough it's a tough one to swallow.

It's a tough one.

I don't think.

I don't think I'm becoming a.

Puritan, no, no, yeah, yeah, but you know it is.

It is really interesting to think about the roots of America and how we became what we are today and how it's evolved.

And there's so many more episodes I want to do on this like kind of stuff.

Even just thinking about manifest destiny, Like do you remember learning about manifest destiny?

Again, these are concepts I haven't thought about since I was a child.

But it's like, you know, the belief.

That like we're chosen and special and we deserve to have this land and those other people are evil, Like.

It's all very culty.

Yeah from the beginning.

Yeah, so I wouldn't join the Puritans.

But there's so many groups that I would join, and we're going to get into a lot of them with our conversations together.

So uh.

On that note, stay tuned, stay two owned, write us five stars, do whatever you want, and remember to follow your gut, watch out for d flats, and never ever trust me.

Bye.

This has been an exactly right production hosted by.

Me Lola Blanc and Me Megan Elizabeth.

Our senior producer is g.

Holly.

This episode was mixed by John Bradley.

Our associate producer is Christina Chamberlain, and our guest booker is Patrick Kottner.

Our theme song was composed by Holly amber Church.

Trust Me as executive produced by Karen Kilgareth Georgia Hardstark and Danielle Kramer.

You can find us on Instagram at trust Me podcast or on TikTok at trust Me coult podcast.

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