I’m in the process of becoming a published author, and hopefully a well-known speaker and cultural critic. At least, that’s the hope. So I know that I should get used to attacks, especially of the online variety. Knowing and accepting are very different things, especially since the things that I share, in my book and my stories, is intensely personal. I’ve decided to share personal things because I think they are intensely relevant to the current cultural conversations, culture wars really, that are going on in our nation. My stories include growing up in a religious cult, suffering all kinds of abuse and deprivations, before escaping and moving to America. In the next part of my life, I served in the US Army as an intelligence officer, studying religious extremism, terrorism, and bad actors trying to kill American Soldiers. I was also one of those American Soldiers, operating as one of the first women on the ground in deliberate ground combat, part of the military’s initial experiment in embedding women with male-only, specialized combat arms teams. I’ve experienced group-think, cult-mentality and how socialization can have extreme effects on large groups of people my whole life. And I’m seeing it today in America—we all are. On both sides.

Last week’s attack was interesting and personal, because it came from other cult survivors. I was accused of several things—talking about open-mindedness but wanting everyone to think just like me. Of sensationalizing my experiences. And most importantly, that I should feel creeped out by the very words ‘brand-building’ or ‘thought leadership’, two things that I’m very focused on doing intentionally with my own business. The comments came out in a public forum, within a private group, and other cult-raised people vehemently agreed with her, going as far as to call any kind of culture or leadership consulting ‘grift’, and calling me personally evil. Of course, it was hard to take, and while I try to not spend all of my time wrapped around negative online comments, I also want to make sure I’m thinking enough about other sides of any issues that I may not be considering.

I posted on LinkedIN, and the ensuing discussion was quite engaging. I wanted to know, what do people think about these terms? Is it true that tools like brand-building, thought leadership are mostly negative things used by people to manipulate others? Is attempting to gain a deeper understanding of qualities of dynamic leaders and organizations with strong cultures something that should be ‘cringey’? Because cult leaders use these tools to ultimately harm others, does that make the tools themselves evil? By that token, because the US Army attempts to use some of these tools to ‘help’ other developing nations, does that make them inherently good? Could it maybe be, as I suspect, that our human tendency to put ‘good’ and ‘bad’ labels on everything makes it harder for us to analyze events and experiences in a deliberate way. Can’t we learn as much from Hitler as we can from Churchill, figuring out what tools worked for mankind, and what didn’t?

I know that, in my life, it wasn’t until I stopped looking at ‘cult’ as evil, and ‘army’ as good, that I started being able to really see and appreciate the similarities, differences, and important nuances that were wrapped up in many of my experiences—uncovering deeper insights. In order to answer the question, “Why to people join, or stay in, cults” you have to be willing to consider the idea that cults are not all bad—they really do meet some of the driving needs of human beings, things like community, connection and sense of purpose. If you want to understand why many Soldiers are so capable of incredible feats of heroism and self-sacrifice, you have to be willing to accept that the training that we go through is an incredibly high level of mental programming—not too different from what we would call ‘brainwashing’ in different circumstances.

In his book Good to Great, Jim Collins states that we must “face the brutal facts” and in examining them I have always found the solutions, because you can’t solve nothing, you have to understand the problem to find the right solution. And it’s so easy to misunderstand the problem when you are trying to put a label on it. I’ve spent my life trying to explain, not justify, the mindset of people who join cults (like the people who raised me), to people who think they are super opposite. I’ve learned, and this is supported by research, that there is no ‘type’ of people that cults. There are just the type of people that join groups—which includes every human being on the planet. It wasn’t until I was willing to stop seeing cult people as ‘evil’ that I was able to really understand how cults are just groups where everything is taken a bit too far to the extreme.

In addition, understanding why and how people join cults has shed a lot of light on other things. Why and how people join the military and then justify their actions in war. Why and how people join certain political parties and refuse to consider anything else. The same patterns can be seen in almost every group—and that’s because groups are built by humans, and humans are all subject to patterns in human behavior. As one friend put it, “The tool itself isn’t good or bad – it’s ow the tool is utilized. A hammer can be used to bash someone’s head in, or it can be used to build a lifetime of shelter. A tool is merely a reflection of the intentions and skill of those wielding it”.

So now I’m building a brand around CULTure—in the larger sense of the word. We need to study culture without labels if we ever hope to be able to answer the important questions. Questions like how does culture happen? How does it manifest? How does it control and socialize us? And most importantly, how do we intentionally change it when we notice it getting off-track. And while I understand that studying a cult from the 60s to learn about tips for a business in the 21^st century might seem ridiculous or creepy, if you are able to put aside the good and bad titles and dig into how things work and what makes human beings tick, that’s when you start to see it for what it is.

              This post won’t have a list of steps to take, or things to think about, like I usually do. Just one challenge. In what ways have you been socialized? How have you been brainwashed in your life? What circumstances or events do you think of as only good or bad, positive or negative, black or white? Here’s a hint, if you really, truly believe that it’s never happened to you, that your thinking has never been influenced by what’s around you every day, or that nothing good could ever come out of ‘situation x’ in your life, then you might be a little more brainwashed than you think.

DANIELLA YOUNG IS A TEDX SPEAKER, AN AUTHOR, COMBAT VETERAN, BOARD MEMBER OF OPERATION CODE, & THE CO-FOUNDER OF CAVNESSHR—AN HR-TECH COMPANY WHO’S MISSION IS TO MAKE BIG-BUSINESS HR AVAILABLE TO SMALL BUSINESSES, THROUGH INNOVATIVE SAAS AND VIRTUAL CONSULTING. DANIELLA SPECIALIZES IN HELPING BUSINESSES CREATE CULTURE ROADMAPS, LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT PLANS & EFFECT TEAM TRANSFORMATION. WANT TO LEARN MORE? VISIT OUR WEBSITE AT cavnesshr.com.

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