Why Smart People Stay in Cults

Opening

This is completely unacceptable.

I am angry.

I am clear.

I am done.

It was 2022. Three years before I left.

Someone who had harmed people was being let back in.

And then—within days—someone swooped in and said, “I believe you. I’m going to fix this.”

And just like that… I wasn’t done anymore.

Suddenly it felt like there was hope.

“Maybe the system works after all.”

And I stayed.

That’s the part people don’t understand.

You don’t stay because you don’t see the problem. You stay because something keeps interrupting your ability to act on it.

And it’s not random.

It follows a pattern.

A pattern that works especially well on smart, thoughtful people.

And if you don’t understand that pattern…

you will misdiagnose what’s happening—both in other people…and in yourself.

Break the Default Model

When we hear about people trapped in bad systems —cults, toxic workplaces, cult-like political movements, abusive relationships — we tend to reach for the same explanations.

“These people are dumb.” “They’ve been brainwashed.” “They’re weak.”

And look — I’m not going to pretend that never happens. There are dumb, credulous people inside nearly all of these systems.

But that’s not the most common failure mode.

Most of the people I knew inside my group were intelligent. They were reflective. Thoughtful. Morally serious. Many of them were more conscientious than the average person I’d met outside.

I respected them. I was friends with them. I wanted to spend time with them.

I was one of them.

So if it’s not stupidity, and it’s not malice — what is it?

Why Smart People Are Actually More Vulnerable

Here’s the thing that may surprise you:

Intelligence doesn’t protect you from this.

In some ways, it makes you more vulnerable.

Political scientist Dan Kahan has studied this extensively. He calls it identity-protective cognition. What he found is that the smarter you are, the better you are at generating reasons why the thing that threatens your identity is actually wrong.

The smarter you are, the more tools you have to protect what you don’t want to lose.

You don’t just believe things.

You build arguments. You reframe situations. You reinterpret evidence.

You can make almost anything make sense—as long as it protects what matters to you.

Two equally intelligent people can look at the same situation and frame it completely differently.

One person sees someone defending themselves against an aggressor.

The other sees interpersonal drama.

If it’s a real boundary violation, the intelligent response is to support the person being attacked — maybe remove the aggressor.

But if it’s just petty squabbling, the intelligent response is to remind everyone how small grievances get in the way of the group’s larger mission.

Both responses are intelligent.

But they depend entirely on what you’ve already decided is most important about the situation.

And that’s where these systems get you.

The Real Problem

The problem isn’t what people believe.

It’s what feels important to them in the moment.

And that’s not random.

These systems systematically train what you notice—and what you ignore.

People in these groups know the principles.

They know you should think critically. They know you shouldn’t blindly defer to authority. Many of them have watched the same cult documentaries you have.

I even knew one guy inside whose speciality as an academic researcher was cognitive biases.

But in real, lived situations — when something is actually happening in front of them — something else takes priority.

Someone raises a valid concern about leadership overreach into people’s private lives. The response is deflection and invalidation.

Someone points out how a well-connected predator keeps getting protected. Someone comes back with a platitude: “You are the organization. We need good people like you.”

A former member tells their story. People attack their character rather than engage with what they’re saying.

These people are not forgetting what’s right. It’s just not what feels relevant to them right now.

The Cognitive Mechanism

Here’s what’s actually happening underneath all of that.

There is a massive gap — for all of us — between what we can articulate and justify on the one hand, and what we actually do on the other.

When we see this in other people, we call them hypocrites. And sometimes that’s right.

But there’s something else going on that you and I are just as susceptible to.

Right now, in this moment, your brain is drowning in information.

Sounds. Memories. Interpretations. Emotions.

You can’t process all of it.

So your mind makes a brutal cut:

What matters… and what doesn’t.

That includes most of what you “know”—your values, your principles, your beliefs—

It doesn’t even get considered.

This process is called relevance realization, and it has enormous consequences, because it determines how you categorize an experience — and with that, what beliefs and skills get applied.

Which means: if you can shift what someone feels is important, you don’t need to change what they believe.

You just change what they think their beliefs are relevant to.

And you can do that without them ever noticing.

How These Systems Exploit It

Every high-control group has some idiosyncratic belief system.

But what makes these systems effective isn’t what they tell people to believe.

It’s what they train people to notice.

In one group, members are trained to constantly identify limiting beliefs. Every setback is a limiting belief. Every criticism is a limiting belief. Conveniently, the organization has coaches who can help you work through them.

In the group I was in, dysfunction was reframed as an opportunity for personal growth.

So when someone threatened violence against another member, the response wasn’t to remove a dangerous person for everyone’s safety.

It was to convene a mediation. Because this was a growth opportunity.

Meanwhile, when someone from outside criticized the group, that was recategorized differently. Not as a growth opportunity. As a threat. And personal attack became the natural response.

Same person. Same stated values. Completely different behavior — because the situation had been categorized differently before any conscious reasoning even began.

This isn’t just cults. You see the same thing in toxic workplaces, where raising a legitimate concern about safety or ethics gets reframed as “not being a team player.” Or in political movements where questioning leadership gets reframed as “giving ammunition to the enemy.”

The machinery is the same. The categories just have different names.

What It Feels Like From the Inside

From inside one of these experiences, you don’t feel like you’re ignoring reality.

You feel like you have a mature, nuanced take on a complex situation.

You feel like someone wise enough to see both sides.

You feel like the adult in the room.

You have all the subjective experiences of insight, growth, and even transcendence.

And meanwhile, your actual ability to act keeps shrinking.

I know exactly what this feels like.

I was an intellectual and moral leader in my group. I took my capacity for reasoning, my powers of communication, and my ability to stay calm under pressure — and I put all of it in the service of legitimizing a corrupt and harmful system.

My self-awareness didn’t protect me.

My moral compass didn’t protect me.

I could see the problems clearly. I named them. I argued for reform. I defended people who’d been hurt.

And in doing that, I helped the system continue.

I didn’t just stay.

I made the system work.

I took my intelligence, my moral seriousness, my ability to stay calm under pressure—

and I used all of it to make a corrupt system look reasonable.

That cost me years.

It cost the people I cared about more than that.

Closing

So when you see someone defending something that makes no sense to you…

Don’t just ask what they believe.

Ask: What has become more important than the truth for them?

And how did that happen?

Because the real influence isn’t what people believe.

It’s attention.

It’s salience.

It’s what you’re even able to see.

And if you think you’re immune to that—

that’s exactly when it’s already happening.