A linguistic concept called the theory of performativity says that language does not simply describe or reflect who we are, it creates who we are.

The fitness industry’s maximalist ethos that throwing yourself wholeheartedly into a program—that working harder and faster, never quitting, and intensely believing in yourself—will give you flat abs and inner peace is uncannily reminiscent of the prosperity gospel.

No “cult leader” takes advantage of our psychological drives quite like The Algorithm, which thrives on sending us down rabbit holes, so we never even come across rhetoric we don’t agree with unless we actively search for it.

“So a Protestant valuing of the Bible made it a much more text-based religion.” Ever since, our culture has looked to snack-size proverbs for guidance and gospel, convinced that when it comes to written quotes, what you read is what you get. On the internet, however, a mysterious epigram with no clear source can serve as an on-ramp leading seekers

Like most destructive “cults,” they’re in the business of selling the transcendent promise of something that doesn’t actually exist. And their commodity isn’t merchandise, it’s rhetoric.

One type of leader uses language (perhaps even unwittingly) to support frameworks that already exist; the other uses language, always deliberately, not to uphold the current order of things but instead to swoop in and create something tyrannically new.

In every corner of life, it’s true that the way we interpret someone’s speech corresponds precisely to the amount of power we think they ought to have.

In his book Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism, Lifton writes that with these stock sayings, “the most far-reaching and complex of human problems are compressed into brief, highly selective, definitive-sounding phrases, easily memorized and easily expressed. They become the start and finish of any ideological analysis.”

There’s a companion tool to loaded language that can be found in every cultish leader’s repertoire: It’s called the thought-terminating cliché. Coined in 1961 by the psychiatrist Robert J. Lifton, this term refers to catchphrases aimed at halting an argument from moving forward by discouraging critical thought. Ever since I learned of the concept,