#idk my parents never framed anything as being explicitly anti-cult?

[brehaaorgana]

I sometimes wonder if other common traits that make people vulnerable to cults are:

a desire to please others/make them happy

a willingness to try new things, and to potentially compromise your usual comfort zone in the pursuit of trying something new

I've never felt I was too smart or savvy to be drawn into a cult. I *have* often felt I was too argumentative/questioning and perhaps stubborn to join a cult, though. Like I am otherwise a GREAT TARGET for cults — I am lonely, would like community, am passionate, & sometimes feel aimless. I should be the perfect target.

Neither of those things are necessarily bad character qualities to have! They can, in fact, be very positive. But indoctrination into a cult usually involves some kind of peer pressure and/or desensitization to certain experiences over time. And that's probably more effective with people who are eager to people please or gain more positive feedback from peers even if they're uncomfortable in the meantime?

Idk I've only ever had really obvious cult recruitment tactics happen to me and those ppl usually fall very flat within a minute or less. A lot of the opening salvo the VERY obvious recruiters use is just them relying on forcing someone to feel like they must be nice in order to be polite. Basically you get trapped into a conversation because you don't want to seem rude, so you let them keep talking. Or you engage because they're so friendly and nice! and if you cut them off/say something, it makes you look like the rude person. So they prey on that freeze moment where you're going along with it so you don't seem rude. The leverage is your desire to please others/seem polite.

But the trick is, if you aren't afraid of seeming a little bit rude or making things a little bit awkward— you can get them to stop talking very quickly by just directly shutting the conversation down. So I've never had anyone get past that point because I will just be socially awkward/perhaps appear rude (but not nasty!) in order to end the conversation.

Similar but not necessarily a cult— I've done this shut down thing with annoying xtian missionaries both for my own friends/myself before but also for complete stranger retail employees being harassed by other customers trying to evangelize. Like I saw someone trying to recruit a Trader Joe's employee or whatever and because I don't care about pleasing people and didn't mind seeming "rude" so I just barged in, started talking over them, and asked the trader Joe's employee if they had any rutabagas, and if so, where could I find them? Just blithely ignored the missionary and acted like I was a self-absorbed karen. Made me look really rude, but their whole evangelizing thing relied on the social rules of "appearing polite." The employee couldn't be rude to a customer so I stepped in to be rude and then it collapsed because the expectation that everyone would politely abide by social norms fell apart. The employee took my out, told me they'd look it up in the system, and so I immediately followed them away from the missionary and then whispered "I don't actually care about rutabagas, I just figured you needed a way to get out of that."

Anyways I say that mostly to be like...being unwilling to be "forced into discomfort so you don't appear rude, even though they're the ones being rude" is basically the only way I can see how I have avoided being recruited into...like, anything.

My hypothesis is that in like 10 years gen z is gonna have a big cult boom the way the boomers did in the 70s