Stop Calling Everything a Cult
I've been noticing something troubling in the alternative health world.
People are calling everything a cult.
One branch of mineral balancing labels another branch as cultish. Someone explores German New Medicine and gets told they're in a cult or being manipulated. A practitioner questions the dominant narrative of copper toxicity? They've been brainwashed.
This pattern appears to be spreading.
Here's what's happening. We've become hyper-aware of cult dynamics through podcasts, documentaries, and books that have introduced this vocabulary widely, but often superficially. When you expand the definition of "cult" enough, basically any group with unconventional ideas becomes suspect, any paradigm becomes brainwashing.
So "cult" has become a convenient weapon for dismissing ideas we find uncomfortable.
Don't agree with someone's interpretation of objective scientific evidence? They're in a cult.
That protocol didn't work for you? It was a cult.
Someone questions your deeply held beliefs? Cult behavior.
Problem solved. No need to engage with ideas, examine evidence, or do the intellectual work of actually evaluating claims.
But here's what I think is really happening underneath this pattern. When our fundamental beliefs are challenged, something protective kicks in. It's not rational, it's emotional and psychological. Rather than do the uncomfortable work of examining evidence that challenges our worldview, we reach for the nuclear option: "cult."
This word carries such weight, such finality, that it ends all inquiry. It transforms any disagreement into a moral issue. You're not just wrong, you're dangerous. Brainwashed. A victim or a predator.
Once that label lands, there's no coming back from it. No need to examine evidence, consider alternative explanations, or engage with the actual substance of what's being discussed.
This is what psychologist Robert Jay Lifton called a "thought-terminating cliché," a phrase designed to end thinking rather than encourage it.¹ When we use "cult" to dismiss groups or ideas, we're employing a logical fallacy known as "poisoning the well," attacking the source rather than addressing the argument itself.²
The irony is striking. In trying to warn people about cult tactics, some people end up using cult tactics themselves: shutting down inquiry through dismissive labeling.
Most groups being labeled "culty" aren't cults at all. They're paradigms, frameworks for understanding how something works.
Germ theory is a paradigm. So is terrain theory. Traditional Chinese Medicine is a paradigm. So is German New Medicine. You can explore these frameworks, compare them, even combine insights from multiple approaches.
The key difference? Paradigms are intellectual frameworks you can adopt or abandon freely. You can put them on like glasses, see how they work, take them off if they don't fit.
But when someone calls a paradigm "culty," they're not engaging with its ideas. They're using character assassination, attacking the people involved rather than examining the framework itself. This is a classic ad hominem fallacy.³
This is particularly troubling when it comes from people who should know better. Practitioners, influencers, people with platforms who are themselves selling ideas and working with individuals have a responsibility for intellectual honesty. It's one thing to disagree with a paradigm, but if you're going to tear something down as a cult, you should fully understand it first.
Sometimes what happens is a classic straw man fallacy. A person with influence, who may believe they understand a paradigm, will mischaracterize key aspects, misstate key reasoning, and then attack this distorted version. They then justify their cult label based upon a false premise they themselves created.
This misuse of "cult" language creates three serious problems.
First, it makes us terrible at identifying actual dangerous groups. When everything unconventional is labeled culty, we lose the ability to identify what's actually concerning. We become unable to tell real danger from intellectual disagreement.
Second, it shuts down the very inquiry that drives progress. History's biggest breakthroughs came from people willing to question dominant paradigms. When we reflexively label paradigm exploration as cult behavior, we kill curiosity.
Third, it's profoundly unfair to actual cult survivors. Their experiences of genuine abuse deserve serious attention. Every time we casually throw around "cult" to describe groups with different beliefs, we cheapen what real survivors have endured.
I've written before about a troubling pattern where people systematically destroy those who tried to help them. They idealize certain paradigms or even teachers, then turn against them when reality doesn't match their fantasy.
The weapon of choice? Accusations of coercive control.
Can't handle that your teacher maintained boundaries? Coercive control.
Didn't get the results you expected? Manipulation.
This weaponization exploits our rightful protection of genuine victims while avoiding any actual engagement with ideas or responsibility for one's own experience.
Instead of reflexively labeling things culty, we can ask substantive questions about the ideas themselves:
Does this framework help explain phenomena better than alternatives?
What evidence supports or contradicts this approach?
How does this paradigm handle conflicting data?
What are the practical outcomes when people apply these ideas?
These questions focus on substance rather than character assassination.
The practitioner exploring terrain theory isn't in a cult, they're working from a different paradigm. Their ideas might be wrong, right, or partially useful. But we'll never know if we dismiss them with lazy labels instead of examining their merit.
I've seen this pattern directed at me personally. Years of researching copper led me to question the toxicity narrative, not because I'm brainwashed, but because I haven't found convincing evidence. When I've read respected doctors questioning whether the heart functions solely as a pump, I'm not joining a cardiac conspiracy. I'm simply following where the evidence leads, remaining open to changing my mind.
Yet this type of inquiry gets labeled as cult behavior. The accusation reveals more about the accuser's discomfort with uncertainty than it does about genuine intellectual exploration.
True intellectual exploration means examining ideas without adopting them wholesale. You can study something thoroughly and still hold your conclusions lightly.
This is what genuine paradigm exploration looks like.
I've contributed to this problem. In previous writing, I jokingly said "everyone is in a cult," meaning we all swim in cultural paradigms like fish in water.
But that muddied the waters. It didn't help people understand that there's a crucial difference between exploring paradigms and being subjected to coercive control.
I should have been more precise then. I'm trying to be now.
We're living through a moment when people are questioning many established paradigms. This questioning is healthy and necessary, what I've called epistemic humility in prior writing.
The challenge isn't stopping people from questioning. It's maintaining our ability to think clearly about what we're seeing.
When we can't distinguish between paradigm exploration and actual coercive dynamics, we become useless at protecting anyone from anything.
When everything is "a little bit culty," we lose our ability to recognize genuine danger.
That's not protection. That's intellectual paralysis disguised as wisdom.
We can do better. We can engage with ideas on their merits rather than dismissing them with thought-terminating clichés. We can distinguish between frameworks for understanding reality and systems designed to control people.
The stakes are higher than semantics. Clear thinking requires precise language. And right now, we're failing at both.
References:
¹ Lifton, R. J. (1961). Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism: A Study of "Brainwashing" in China. University of North Carolina Press.
² Walton, D. (1998). Ad Hominem Arguments. University of Alabama Press.
³ Hamblin, C. L. (1970). Fallacies. Methuen Publishing.
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