I’m currently in Oakland, California, wrestling with a breakfast menu to try and order something that’s keto-friendly.
For the last week I’ve been eating mostly meat and sticking to a ketogenic diet. My body feels great, yet it’s been hard because I (like most Americans) am addicted to sugar. Yesterday I went to a potluck with delicious desserts that I had none of. I’ve gone food shopping at inconvenient times because there was nothing I could eat available, and I’ve resisted my urge to eat almost every hour I’ve been awake for the past week. Feeding my addiction to sugar and carbohydrates is easy, but resisting my cravings and changing my diet is hard because it takes more effort.
For the last 7 years I’ve lived at intentional communities, and for my entire life I’ve been immersed in and organizing groups of humans to come together in support of each other — and I’m here to say that organizing community is a difficult, frustrating and often thankless job.
It’s hard to make sure everyone has a voice. It’s hard to keep community financially accessible, while still trying to compensate yourself for the seemingly endless amount of work and planning that is needed. It’s hard to stick your neck out to organize people for their benefit, only to have them project their issues with authority on you.
It’s hard because sometimes organizing community can seem like trying to fill a bottomless pit. In western culture, people are so used to everything being sold to them, that they often don’t understand how to participate in a generous community without a sense of entitlement. There’s not a day that goes by where I don’t feel sad about how much of an uphill battle it is to organize community in a culture that lionizes individualism.
Cult dynamics are what happens when we put less effort into creating and maintaining a healthy community.
Note: When I use the word “cult” I mean to represent a group that is utilizing cult dynamics. The severity and harm of groups like this can vary from relatively benign to catastrophic, so my intention in using that word is to speak about the patterns, not necessarily the outcome.
When I say “cults are easy” I don’t mean to say that cleaning up all the drama and dealing with harm is easy, I mean to say that cult dynamics require less work, much like eating junk food when you get a craving.
As the saying goes, doing the easy thing often leads to life being hard, while doing the hard thing often leads to life being easy. Cults (and groups that have culty dynamics) are essentially communities playing a short game. They are mortgaging their future to make the present easier. Dealing with diabetes isn’t easy, but saying yes to another cookie is. Dealing with drama in a group isn’t easy, but not putting the proper systems in place so everyone has a voice is.
Are these groups that use culty dynamics doing it on purpose? I don’t know. There are definitely rotten eggs among us. But there are also people or groups of people who have severely underestimated the amount of work it takes to organize an ethical, sustainable community. I know I’ve certainly underestimated that in my life.
So what do you do when your project is underway and you haven’t allocated enough time and energy to do it ethically? Or what do you do when you notice there are a lot of disgruntled members, and reports of harm beyond the occasional misstep? You need to double down and recommit more effort, let go of the project all together, or you need to make things easier. That’s where cult dynamics come in — they make things easier, but only in the short term.
It’s much easier to measure the success of your group by tracking the people who benefit the most, but it’s harder to include everyone, because it means staying connected to the ones on the fringes. To really understand the experience of everyone in your community is a herculean task, because it’s not just about checking in with people, it’s about working with the fact that they may not feel comfortable telling you the truth, especially if you are holding power — even if they perceive you hold power.
Group dynamics are so tricky. I believe everyone has trauma around groups. It’s our most ancient wound as a species, and no one is free from the desire to be loved and accepted by a group of peers. Being a community leader means being willing to hold people as they work through those wounds, often at your expense. It would be much easier to take advantage of those wounds instead of heal them, to gaslight people instead of take responsibility for your role as a leader.
It would be much easier to leverage the vulnerability of people needing community as a way to coerce and control them, rather than see those vulnerabilities as an additional responsibility that you must hold.
Capitalism says it’s fine to operate according to the law of supply and demand, and what’s more in demand than community? It would be easy to charge people a lot of money for something they can’t live without. Community is our oldest dependency. In marketing, they say that health, wealth and relationships are the most lucrative industries because they are things people can’t live without, but let’s not forget community. If you can leverage people’s need for community, you can make a lot of money. If you leverage people’s need for community, you can hold a lot of power.
In a culture where the word “community” is used to describe just about anything, it’s easy to call something “community,” but it’s harder to actually walk the walk. No one will blame you for conflating “customers” and “community” because if it’s in service of personal profit, we can find a way to justify it, both personally and on a collective level.
Most people don’t intend to coerce and manipulate others, they are just unable to create a culture that deeply values (and lives out the values of) personal agency. Most people don’t intend to take advantage of people, they are just unable to be with the guilt that inevitably comes with being willing to taking responsibility for the outcome of everyone in a group of people.
To move the needle from cult-ville to community-ville is hard because it requires a lot of effort, and the work never ends. And yet, if we consider the amount of work required in the long run to clean up the mess that culty groups make, to deal with the backlash, the scorned past members, the never ending drama — working toward community is the only thing that makes any sense.
