Accidental Cults: MLMs & Life Coaches
A culture capable of spreading need not only evolve out of religious, family, or cultural traditions. Cultural evolution can be thought of simply by the truism that a lifestyle which replicates itself and has a low bleed rate has a higher probability of existing in the future than one that does not. This is true even if the iteration of the lifestyle that is spreading no longer serves its original purpose.
In biology, this dynamic can be seen in everything from the communicable dog cancer discussed earlier in the book to prions, which are misfolded, self-replicating brain proteins (that most famously cause Mad Cow Disease). Neither communicable dog cancer nor prions evolved out of something we would typically think of as harmful. Instead, normal parts of an animal’s body just doing their normal function “broke” in a way that caused them to start mindlessly self-replicating. After they began mindlessly self-replicating, various immune systems killed the iterations of these self replicators that couldn’t defend themselves and thus honed the survivors into sneaky and effective killing machines.
Sometimes this process takes place in cultural evolution as well. Occasionally, something that is not a culture but just a job, side hustle, idea, addiction treatment, or even a form of psychotherapy can become self-replicating. Four examples of this we will discuss are “life coaches,” multi-level marketing schemes (MLMs), modern psychology, and Alcoholics Anonymous (AA).
Let’s start by exploring the two more obvious examples of cultures in this category: MLMs and the life coaching industry.
MLMs are different from other prion-like cultivars we will explore in that they are intentionally constructed to be self-replicating. Like AA, life coaches, and modern psychology culture, MLMs are not religious in origin and did not originate from traditional cultures. Instead, they borrow heavily from religious cultures in order to spread themselves and more effectively hook their victims. An MLM is a type of pyramid scheme that has individuals sell products on its behalf while recruiting others to do the same. Members of an MLM make a sliver of the profit generated by their converts. Most people looped into MLMs lose money, though varying sources cite different proportions of net losers, with the AARP claiming around 73% of MLM participants lose money[[34]](#_ftn34) while the FTC argues it’s closer to 99%.[[35]](#_ftn35)
Like a religion, MLMs convince their victims that they can achieve their objectives so long as they convert lots of other people and dedicate themselves to the culture. What is interesting is that MLMs often focus more on culture building and self-narrative improvement than helping members make money. While this may seem strange, keep in mind that people often want money to solve problems that can actually be solved with less effort than getting rich (like feeling sovereign and empowered). So long as the MLM delivers a trickle of victims’ desired emotional state, they will stay mindlessly latched to its teat.
MLMs can draw people into deep financial losses despite their surface promises of profit because people care more about their personal narrative, the story they tell about themselves to themselves, than their actual financial state. To be more specific: MLMs convey messages like: If you submit to our lifestyle, you can think of yourself as a “girl boss” and tell yourself you “own your own business.” Even though neither of those things is remotely true, MLM brands do their best to make them aesthetically true and validate said narratives through peer interactions with other MLM members. It is very common for MLMs to organize big parties—even large conferences—at which everyone constantly tells each other what empowered “girl bosses” they are. They convey that leaving the community would be a sign of profound personal failure by degrading apostate members (individuals who left).
The life coaching industry is slightly more insidious in that almost every individual actor in the industry believes they are trying to do good. The industry itself was started without any mischievous motivations. Just like a cancerous dog cell, cultural evolution can easily corrupt good actors.
The problem in the life coaching industry emerges from the obvious fact that life coaching pedagogies that self-replicate begin to outcompete and crowd out those which do not. To be more specific, a life coaching style that leads to individuals who go through it to become life coaches of that style themselves will outcompete (in terms of number of practitioners) a style that genuinely improves individuals’ lives. We were once told something about coaching and advice in general that rings true here: Don’t expect that anyone else’s advice will get you anywhere other than where they are today. Unless a life coach is spectacularly good, expect their advice to turn you into a life coach.
If a life coach could steer you to becoming something more successful than a life coach, they probably would have done it for themselves. The sad truth for life coaches is that the world is full of successful people who would be thrilled to help other people for free (so long as the other person actually is willing to put in the effort to improve). It is not that life coaches don’t work. Rather, the variety that does was typically wildly successful in some other career before becoming a life coach, hence they often target the ultra-wealthy.
If it doesn’t really “work,” why is life coaching so common? Again: Because the versions of life coaching that spread best are self-replicating. If you need coaching and want to find someone who is an exception to this rule, look for someone who has objectively helped other people become successful—not just someone who has coached people who were already successful.
Accidental Cults: The Mental Health Industry
We suspect most of our readers were aware that MLMs and life coaches had become self-replicating—let’s focus on a slightly more controversial take: That the mental health industry is beginning to evolve in the direction of a cult. A lot of stuff we write in this book is likely to get us flack but none more than this.
I, Malcolm, write this as someone who started my career working in the industry and who believes the destigmatization of mental health services was largely (initially at least) a good thing. The problem came when the effort to destigmatize mental health transformed into a cultural mandate to not criticize anything done in the name of mental health. This enabled extremely toxic practices to begin to evolve.
The first time the extent of this problem was obvious to me was when I was hanging out with a small group of people in which one unironically said, “I would not consider dating someone who was not regularly seeing a psychologist”—and others in the group agreed with them. It was at that point I realized that some psychologists were convincing their patients that no person could be mentally healthy without regularly visiting them. They had so thoroughly incepted a dependency in their patients that they had created a cultural identity around that dependency. As someone who started training in psychotherapy back when it was understood how insanely immoral it was to build or even not actively work to avoid this kind of dependency, I nearly shat myself.
One of the core purposes of a “general psychologist” is to help rewrite your internal narratives—the stories you tell yourself about yourself, your history, and the world around you. This can be an incredibly valuable service but it also puts an individual at risk. When you allow someone else to write your narrative, they can incept that narrative with elements that benefit them.
Some mental health professionals have begun a practice in which they incept an individual’s self-narrative with some form of trauma that can only be addressed through regular sessions with them. In other words, a person with general mental health issues that most people share may go to a psychologist and that psychologist’s model of human behavior is (incorrectly) that “most mental health issues come from trauma.” They work with the patient to find an event in their lives that the patient had not previously contextualized as traumatic only to develop and reinforce a traumatic reinterpretation of it.
This creates an effect similar to the “forgetting before remembering” phenomenon. This is a phenomenon involving an individual telling their friends and family that they just uncovered a repressed memory, like being molested as a child, only to hear from many that they have mentioned that story many times before. An example of this would be someone who previously remembered their uncle “doing something weird that made me feel uncomfortable”. Then, this memory is (accurately) reframed as child molestation (often due to a scene in a movie or a PSA). This reinterpretation is so radically contextually different, this person may forget their original creepy uncle memories entirely and thus assume they’ve just uncovered an utterly repressed memory of child molestation.
The problem here is that trauma is not introduced until the event is interpreted traumatically. Researchers have found that—across cultures—acknowledging trauma correlates with more severe symptoms of trauma (i.e., in countries that contextualize a crime as more traumatic, victims of that crime will experience more trauma).[[36]](#_ftn36) [[37]](#_ftn37)
Our point is not that adverse experiences don’t cause genuine, horrible trauma, but that our interpretation of those experiences—the way we relate them to our personal narratives—influences the severity of effects we associate with trauma. The role of narrative matters in the experience of trauma because it means genuine trauma can be generated out of the blue by almost any trusted authority figure telling you that events in your life were traumatic.
This is a key recruiting technique of Scientology. Get an audit from a Scientologist and we can almost guarantee they will start telling you about stuff in your life that was “traumatic” even though you don’t see it as such. Because you don’t trust the Scientologist performing this assessment, you have some protection in these contexts and can see how the process works. Because you won’t let your guard down during an audit (assuming you don’t see this Scientology process as credible), you can use the experience as an opportunity to study a behavior pattern that you can subsequently recognize in a class of people you do trust: Psychologists. While you expect a Scientologist to try to incept you with trauma to control you, you don’t necessarily expect this from a psychologist.
A good psychologist will take already-traumatic events in your life and work with you to contextualize them as non-traumatic. A bad psychologist will take non-traumatic events in your life and twist your narrative to both make them traumatic and connect them to your current problems. The problem is that good psychologists solve your issues while bad ones create dependency and thus recurring revenue streams.
Psychologists’ unintentional use of a practice that creates dependency is not malicious; it simply evolved as a cultural practice. In a society loath to criticize mental health work, practices that leaned predatory slightly outcompeted those that did not and thus spread more effectively.
We do not live in the first era in which psychologists stumbled down this dark path—and today’s psychologists should know better. Every young psychologist is taught about the horrors of the hypnosis fad, in which hundreds of people had false memories of things like alien abductions implanted into their minds by professional psychologists. Those training for the profession are also briefed on the “lost in the mall” experiment (which shows how easy it is to incept a false memory in someone’s head by having them walk through a hypothetical of that memory).[[38]](#_ftn38) And psychologists are perfectly familiar with the Ramona false memory case, in which a psychologist implanted a young girl with memories of her father raping her, when it appears he very much did not rape her.[[39]](#_ftn39)
Every practicing psychologist should know they run a risk of incepting patients with information that builds dependency on therapy—and yet here we are again, because contemporary cultures harbor subtle taboos against criticizing psychologists’ methods or suggesting to someone they should see a different therapist.
BONUS SECTION: PTSD
We feel compelled to provide a brief explanation of PTSD because, despite increased awareness about its existence, the disorder is poorly understood by the average person. We frequently hear people describe PTSD as though it were the brain’s general response to any form of bad event. PTSD is actually a very specific type of brain damage in that it causes degradation of specific parts of the brain and can be seen on fMRI machines.[[40]](#_ftn40)
Houdini often performed a trick in which he would surreptitiously tense the muscles in his chest and ask individuals to punch him, leaving audiences aghast to see him OK. One day a “fan” sucker-punched him to see what would happen and because he wasn’t prepared, Houdini died.
PTSD is a phenomenon triggered by an emotional sucker punch. Like Houdini, our brain naturally protects itself when it can expect an emotionally charged moment coming. While PTSD cannot be caused by an emotionally charged event you are expecting, it can be caused by even fairly trivial events you don’t expect so long as you are primed to interpret them in a strongly emotional way.
This is why someone who is always abusive is less likely to cause PTSD than someone who is sometimes loving and sometimes abusive at unpredictable intervals. This is also why a fairly coddled middle-class suburbanite whose culture interprets microaggressions as a terrible trauma can get terrible PTSD while someone who has undergone actual daily tragedy can get by without ever experiencing it.
The damage caused by PTSD also does not create a generic “trauma” response. Instead it usually creates a collection of stimuli that prime a person to enter a state in which they are hypervigilant of something traumatic potentially happening—like someone holding a balloon next to your ear with a pin and then asking you to go about your day normally.
Accidental Cults: AA
This chain of evolution is not unique to psychologists. It is all too easy for a secular and well-meaning practice to have so many cultural and religious elements that it begins to evolve in an unintended direction. Alcoholics Anonymous presents an excellent example of this process.
AA started as both a well-meaning and (for the period) effective treatment for alcoholism. Over time, however, more demanding branches of AA that focused on self-replication outcompeted the original strain. These more virulent branches focus on a strict lifestyle that mandates regular interactions with group members in which participants build and reinforce a personal narrative that frames ongoing involvement in AA as an intrinsic part of recovery. This viral iteration of AA has become so effective, it has even infiltrated the U.S. government, making AA meetings (conversion camps) a court-ordered consequence of some types of legal violations.
An effective tool used by this branch of AA is the concept of a “dry drunk” (i.e., someone who cured their alcoholism using a method other than AA). Dry drunks are regarded with the same disgust and disdain with which a hard religious culture would regard an apostate. We have AA’s disdain toward dry drunks to thank for non-alcoholic beer being taxed the same as alcoholic beer in the U.S. AA members have enough say in the U.S. government to limit access to non-alcoholic beer, as it is used in other methodologies of quitting and makes people “dry drunks.”
While there is an iteration of AA that does genuine good in the world, anyone who espouses a belief in the concept of “dry drunk” is clearly just in a cult. The concept of looking down on people who quit drinking through other methods—several of which boast higher success rates than AA—shows that the point of said faction is not about getting people off alcohol but getting them into AA. The derision of dry drunks almost implies that they are worse off than if they were still alcoholics—which, to the viral iteration of AA, they are, because at least an alcoholic is still a potential convert.
You may read all this and think AA was designed from the start to be a self-perpetuating, cult-like meme. It was not. The founders’ thoughts on the subject are well documented. Bill W., Alcoholics Anonymous’ co-founder, is quoted as saying things like:
“Physicians who are familiar with alcoholism agree there is no such thing as making a normal drinker out of an alcoholic. Science may one day accomplish this, but it hasn’t done so yet.”
To him, AA was a stop gap until a pharmacological intervention could be found (he spent his life looking for one in fact).
We now have pharmacological interventions like the Sinclair Method that reliably (in 80% of cases) cure alcoholism. However, they have been to a great extent blocked from use in the USA in large part due to the influence of AA and the belief that people who quit using these methods are dry drunks.
OK … we get it: Who is going to want to join AA once people learn that all they need to do is take a pill an hour before drinking as if they were lactose intolerant or something and after a few months they would no longer have an addiction?
The effectiveness and low cost of the Sinclair Method is an existential threat to the AA virus. Fortunately for that virus, the drug used in the Sinclair Method, Naltrexone, is no longer under patent, so no large pharma company has a financial interest in educating the public about it. This has made it easy for AA to prevent knowledge about it from spreading and keep it illegal in the U.S. (for a documentary on this check out One Little Pill—or you can check out this database of studies on the topic[[41]](#_ftn41)).
In this way, AA has likely led to more deaths than all other cults in all of human history combined (around 0.7M people every ten years)—not because it was created to be evil, but due to simple memetic evolutionary cycles.[[42]](#_ftn42)
Actually, it’s worse than that—it’s worse than just Alcoholics Anonymous leading to the deaths of almost a million people every decade. You know how people say drinking alcohol can cause brain damage? While heavy binge drinking can cause brain damage, most of the brain damage associated with moderate alcohol consumption comes from the withdrawal process upon non-pharmacologically assisted quitting (this causes neurotoxic lesions in the frontal lobe).[[43]](#_ftn43) The mental pain you feel upon quitting alcohol (that you don’t feel when using the Sinclair Method) is your brain trying to tell you it is suffering serious damage. Given the mechanism of action of this damage, it is very unlikely that it would also appear in someone who used the Sinclair Method to quit. We would therefore go so far as to say it should be malpractice to ever recommend AA to an individual until after they were certain they were not one of the 80% of people the Sinclair Method worked on. It is genuinely astounding to us that the damage caused by quitting without pharmacological assistance is not a bigger story. The fact that it isn’t is a testament to the power of the AA cult.
For notes on how a culture might deal with addictions, jump to page 802 of the Appendix.
Religious Psychology
Many cultivars have adopted elements of the practice we now call psychology. The culture that most aggressively uses psychology to convert members is Scientology. The religion heavily leverages a realization that any environment in which an individual may rewrite their personal narrative is a great place to convert them and inspire deeper commitment. Not only is Scientology’s core recruiting practice essentially a psychologist appointment in which subjects hold a galvanic skin response rod, but they also use other, similar practices to recruit through their own alternative to Alcoholics Anonymous.
This is in part why Scientology is so hostile to psychologists—they are competing for the same customer base. Both psychologists and Scientologists will attempt to convert one customer base away from the other using many of the same techniques.
How can a cultivar protect against this type of predation? Almost nothing is more dangerous to a culture, on the individual level, than a member rewriting their personal narrative under the guidance of someone from another culture, be that person a psychologist or a life coach. It is for this reason that many cultures try to take on this narrative rewriting role themselves.
Almost all successful cultivars feature mechanisms for within-culture counseling. The best example is that of Catholic Confessions. When an individual is feeling doubt about their personal narrative—when they are questioning whether they are a good person—they can go to the church and the church acknowledges they did something wrong while giving them a concrete path to redeeming themselves through tedious but easily accomplishable action.
Catholic confession is brilliant for a number of reasons. First, it builds into the individual’s personal narrative that they need the Church in order to be a good person, creating dependency. Second, while confession obligates people to acknowledge their failures and shortcomings, it provides them with an entirely feasible path to redemption. Psychologically speaking, this is much more effective than trying to convince someone they did not screw up or admitting to someone that they did screw up and they need to learn to live with their mistake—not to mention telling someone they must actually rectify that mistake.
Catholic confession also cleverly anonymizes the individual to whom adherents confess, meaning confessors are dependent on the Church itself rather than a specific individual while also making it harder for priests to abuse any relationship they develop with adherents through confessions. As an added bonus, the format of confessions is formulaic enough that even fairly untrained and low-skilled people can execute the process effectively (though obviously skill can make a big difference in quality).
The importance of this last point cannot be overemphasized. We have gone over how easy it is for abusive narrative writing practices to devolve into looser systems or for narrative writing to be performed in a sloppy manner that makes things worse. The confession system is incredibly restrictive and performed with what can essentially be thought of as a fairly simple script, making it scalable with only minimum quality control. (We really cannot overemphasize the elegance and effectiveness of this system.)
These sorts of narrative-building, psychologist-adjacent roles are not unique to the above-mentioned cultures and exist everywhere, from Judaism to Mormonism. While it is easy to look at psychological solutions offered by religious communities and regard them as inferior to those offered by secular communities, there is evidence suggesting these solutions (or at least adherence to “harder” cultures) may ultimately be more effective than modern psychological services. In fact, the study, “Mental Illness and the Left,”[[44]](#_ftn44) shows that left-wing individuals (who see more psychologists on average) suffer from more mental health problems across almost all categories (while we understand some see Kirkegaard as biased, the study itself seems well conducted and its findings align with those from sources like Pew Research Center).[[45]](#_ftn45) In addition, religious individuals suffer from fewer mental health problems on average (this is one of those obscenely well-replicated findings).[[46]](#_ftn46)
One could argue this is correlation and not causation and that it is the suffering certain groups experience that makes them left wing (and thus more likely to adhere to soft cultures). One could also argue that people with mental health problems leave religions at higher rates. Both suppositions strike us as unlikely given that one could just as easily argue that the more a person suffers in life, the more likely they are to be right wing—e.g., that poor and uneducated people lean much further to the right—and those traits are also associated with religiosity (If you find this topic interesting, check the footnote for a few research papers exploring different theories on why conservatives are happier.)[[47]](#_ftn47)
In addition to evidence that hard culture adherents might enjoy some protection from mental health issues, researchers have also found correlations between hard culture membership and happiness. For example, the aforementioned study (“Mental Illness and the Left”) also shows people who lean the farthest to the right (and thus are more likely to be from hard cultures) are also the happiest.[[48]](#_ftn48) In terms of mental health, going to a psychologist is both dramatically more expensive and strictly worse than being from many hard religious cultures.[[49]](#_ftn49) (There are, of course, exceptions—for example, being anxious or uncertain about one’s relationship with the divine is correlated with psychological distress.[[50]](#_ftn50))
As we mention at the beginning of the book, the human brain evolved to work within a strict cultural framework and then co-evolved with those frameworks. Removing that framework from a person and expecting them to be psychologically healthy is like expecting an engine to operate well without oil.
How does one build a new culture or religion that leverages the wisdom of existing cultures’ and religions’ mental health services while protecting members from predatory secular actors—be they MLMs or codependency-fostering psychologists?
In building House Collins’ culture, we face an additional challenge in that our culture is liable to splinter every generation (with many descendants creating new cultivars and Houses), meaning many iterations will be quite small (i.e. just one family). This makes it impossible for us to create our own version of, say, Catholic confession, which requires larger populations with structured, institutional roles. Even small-scale correlates we might design aren’t feasible, as parents simply aren’t reliable or palatable figures in a family to provide these services (and they, too, need mental health support). How, then, can we develop a network of trustworthy, trained, and non-related authority figures who can help members of our cultivar rewrite their personal narratives?
One option is to create a culturally compliant playbook and encourage members to turn to this playbook for counsel without outside intervention from a human. This is hardly a new concept. Throughout history and in the present day, people living in isolation have turned to religious and philosophical texts to help them rewrite their narratives, work through mental struggles, and find solace. Today, thanks to the explosive growth of artificial intelligence, this approach has more potential than ever before, as AI agents can be trained on specific bodies of text and then represent them to humans in an interactive, conversational format.
It comes as no surprise to psychology-familiar readers of our first book, The Pragmatist’s Guide to Life, that we originally wrote it as a playbook for a new model of psychological therapy designed to be a more holistic, less-susceptible-to-abuse alternative to CBT (cognitive behavioral therapy). As we fleshed it out, the Guide to Life transformed into a more narrative format, but the “if-then” structuring of the book still remains in its overall structure and flow. This is true to the extent that we have been contacted by an artificial intelligence company that would like to use the book as the basis for a form of AI-driven coaching or therapy that leverages our model.
We can therefore simply encourage members of our House to turn to The Pragmatist’s Guide to Life and our other general life philosophy texts for counsel—or even to interact with an AI trained on these texts. Other cultures can do the same with their own foundational texts so long as they sufficiently address the major struggles people face.