Amanda Montell

going into this book, i thought i had a pretty solid idea of what her throughline was and i still kind of see where she was going with it but sometimes i just felt sooo confused like why are we talking about this...what does that have to do with this...etc. it didn't feel like one cohesive piece. i actually listened to the first episode of her podcast of the same name and i do think these topics are discussed better in podcast form than an entire book. amanda is clearly tuned in to important modern discourse but i do think this would work more in a format where she's hashing it out with an expert irl. or maybe as individual substack essays, because it feels like she wanted to cram in SO MUCH in a lot of different directions, even within a single chapter. additionally, in the chapter about new age spirituality she claims "educated women are more likely than anyone else to embrace new age concepts" which i don't think is backed up by anything substantial?? it feels very "i'm making statements that i feel are true" but like, are they really? (that being said, i do think the manifestation chapter was the one i enjoyed the most). anyways, all of these psychological concepts are fascinating and i love to get into things like obsessive stan culture, manifestation/astrology, etc but at the end of the day i think this just didn't hit the way i wanted it to.… (plus d'informations)

The title of the book Cultish is offered as a parallel formation to English and Spanish; author Amanda Montell uses it as a name for the language of insular, high-demand socialization. The book would have benefited if she had leaned more heavily on this idea as an organizing principle and treated as her topics the distinctive rhetorical forms of Cultish. As it is, the text has chapters built around a typology of cults: suicide cults, abusive new religions, multilevel marketing outfits, fitness cults, and social media "conspiritualism."

The book is chatty and contains wealth of anecdote, much of it gathered via interviews for the book, some from the author herself and her own family. The social connections repeatedly impressed me with my own decrepit curmugeonliness in noticing how young Montell is. She repeatedly draws on friends from her teen years, which are not so far behind her. She never quite convinced me that she had earned the tone of authority she frequently adopts for declarative statements. In particular, she undermined her case with some casual errors. For example, she calls the Unification Church as a "70s-era religious movement" (85-6), although it started in the 1950s and continues to have significant membership, financial resources, and political influence today.

When Montell writes that she "can think of just one woman" (Teal Swan) popularly identified as the leader of an abusive cult (90), she overlooks Amy Carlson, whose Love Has Won group had a boost in notoriety upon the discovery of her corpse in 2021. Later in the book, Montell herself even mentions another case in J. Z. Knight of Ramtha fame (267, footnote). Where she does her homework and cites sources, she has a tendency to turn to researchers and writers whose work I have appreciated in the past, notably Tanya Lurhmann and Tara Isabella Burton.

The fact that I read Cultish is due in no small measure to how effectively it caught my eye in a book shop. The physical design for the jacket and the interior layout and design are really commendable. They sent me to the biblio page to learn the name Bonni Leon-Berman. At the same time, I wonder if this fact should mitigate the rhetorical reductionism that seems to be the book's thesis--the idea that cult influence is always and only a matter of linguistic effects. At one point, Montell offers a cultural genealogy of the "quotegram" that traces it to Reformation aniconism (278-9), a historical circumstance that attests to the fact that images have their own species of power.

As I was reading this book on June 4, 2024, Congressman Eric Swalwell (D-CA) rebuked the GOP members of an oversight committee for their servility to former President Trump, "My colleagues, none of this today that you are bringing makes sense--your inconsistencies, your hypocrisy, your sycophancy--unless you are in a cult. And guys, I'm starting to think you're in a cult." Montell calls out Trump's cultish pedigree: "prosperity" New Thought via Norman Vincent Peale (176) and Amway via DeVos funding (187). But she strangely failed to close the loop with Trump's overt embrace of Q-Anon tropes and mythemes in her chapter on online conspirituality. Maybe she thought that was too obvious and best left as an exercise for the reader.

Some of Montell's valuable observations regard the cultishness of very secular, commercial activity. She remarks the Cultish she herself encountered in professional cliques (136), and her quick gloss of Jeff Bezos' ideal of "how Amazonians should think" is rather chilling (197-8). In the end, she expresses a healthy ambivalence about Cultish and the wide variety of groups that deploy it.… (plus d'informations)