7 Essential Steps to Build A Cult.
By: The Party Scientist
Tags: Cult, Community, Community Building, Leadership, Community Engagement

You cannot avoid it. If you build a strong enough community, it will be labelled a cult. This is why I regard the word with positive connotations.

Think about some examples: The CrossFit Cult, the Soulcycle Cult, the Peloton Cult. All these companies have built amazing communities around their brands. Their customers are loyal. Their customers subscribe to their values and show them off.

As community builders, I think we should aspire to be labelled cult leaders.

Sure, there are definitely negative features to cults: the discouragement of dissent, power imbalances, groupthink, authoritarianism, lack of transparency, exploitation of members, and the degradation of members’ self-worth. To name a few. I do not advocate for these. These are manipulation tactics, not community-building tactics.

What I do advocate for is going beyond community-building. Giving members identity and unity. This is what cults succeed at.

So, what are the positive features of cults that community-builders should emulate?

A strong life philosophy. An identity for members to adopt. A strong ritual infrastructure. A ceremonial onboarding procedure. Socially-enforced norms, such as love-bombing. A declarative manifesto. High EQ community leaders.

Ready to dive in?

A strong life philosophy.

I have spent years and years developing the life philosophy for my community. A life philosophy defines the criteria for what a good life is. A good life, according to VYVE, is encapsulated by one sentence:

The authenticity and vibrancy of our personal relationships is the strongest indicator for a good life.

This is based on countless books I have read. Underlying VYVE’s life philosophy is a swath of research articles and historical texts. For some cults, religion is the underlying bedrock for their life philosophy. What I have done instead is based VYVE’s life philosophy on the science of human well-being.

When a philosophy declares what a good life is, it attracts people with shared values. It polarizes people. This explains why there are no hyper-capitalists within VYVE.

Cults have strong belief systems. They declare what a good life looks like, they declare behaviours and goals to live a good life, and they make a statement about how the future should be.

Stories are one way to communicate the life philosophy of a community. In my case, I share stories of spreading belonging and joy in public. The goal is to demonstrate the 5 V’s of VYVE in a visual way: vulnerability, vibrancy, venture, vibe, and vitality.

A strong life philosophy defines what a good life is, the behaviours for living a good life, and how your members should serve humanity in a way that promotes those behaviours. Cults have defined life philosophies.

2. An identity.

I came up with the word Revyver to reinforce my members’ sense of identity. I want them to identity with a movement. A movement about reviving a sense of community in western culture. I want them to regard themselves as making a huge impact in the world.

Cults create an identity around a life philosophy. They have titles for their members. They have secret terminology. They know what it means to be a part of the cult.

I have cultivated an identity for my community members by:

Giving them a name: revyvers

Giving them a shared mission and reminding them all the time.

Publicly reinforcing behaviours that align with the life philosophy.

Designing an opening ceremony with verbal affirmations.

Throughout a community’s documentation, the identity should be reinforced. The shared mission and values must be referenced in the code of conduct, in the onboarding, and in meetings. This is why I always include the mission statement slide at the beginning of my community meetings.

This deserves some emphasis. The WHY of your community is central to the identity. For VYVE, the WHY is to give more humans access to deeper forms of human contact. Humans thrive when they have a purpose. They thrive when they are serving humanity. This is why I have spent a lot of time thinking about the larger picture for VYVE.

The last thing I want is my community being regarded as ‘just a membership business.’ I want to create a movement.

3. Ritual infrastructure.

The power of ritual. It’s rarely applied. I have been to thousands of events. I have participated in hundreds of communities. Very few of them leverage the power of ritual. Cults do.

I regard rituals as pauses in an event where everyone’s attention comes together. Rituals are unifying processes. They often involve group-witnessing and structure. There is a shared intention in rituals. Participants are doing the same thing to achieve the same result.

Rituals reinforce your community’s sense of belonging. They strengthen the life philosophy and identity. They cultivate psychological commitment to your values. They bond your community members.

You can design rituals to open and close events. To welcome newcomers. To recognize contributors. And to celebrate milestones.

My favourite ritual of VYVE is called vyving. My hope is that vyving becomes a normalized practice for all community facilitators. Vyving is defined as spreading joy and belonging to strangers in public. It is a radical act of vulnerability and vibrancy. Often times, it involves music, dancing, and funky outfits. The best moments of my life have been vyving.

Vyving to me represents a temporary dissolution of social distrust and demographic differences. It is the ultimate unification.