argumate:

crazy that there are still legit cults doing the time honoured cult tactics and they still work just as well as they ever did, like someone shows up at a compound and sees everyone wearing robes and chanting and they’re like shit mate this looks like a cult! but then they settle in and they’re like oh nah it’s just a place where the leader tells everyone what to do and psychologically manipulates them into handing over their cash and sucking his dick, nothing weird about that, and then five years later they’re like wait, this is a fucking cult!!

One of the roommates I stayed with in Portland before I got the house, in no small part for locally acclimating myself, was a guy who’d grown up in a local small town in a church where they were all a little off from the common world, wearing formal clothes and that, but all so happy cause they knew they were all going to heaven, and then around the early 90s his parents and some others were like “wait is this a cult? It’s starting to seem like a cult” and they got together and confronted the founder and he did enough to wave them off but within the week had taken the church’s money and expatriated to the Caribbean, and then that roommate’s world was torn asunder and he suddenly had to go to public school still dressing like that