My favorite nonfiction books about cults, scams, and schemes
bookdna.com156 points by bwb 7 hours ago
156 points by bwb 7 hours ago
No literature list on MLM scams can be complete without Bridget Read's meticulously researched 2025 book "Little Bosses Everywhere".
sound like you lead a cult called "MERLBE" make everyone read little bosses everywhere.
Highly recommend: Life 102 - What to do when your guru sues you
For a British view, I like "Spying In Guru Land" https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2487851.Spying_in_Guru_L...
The author alluded to it, but I really think the BITE model of authoritarian control[0] is something everyone should know about. BITE stands for Behavioral, Information, Thought, and Emotional, which describes the 4 categories of controlling behaviors used by authoritarian groups (from religious cults, to the Maoist movement in post-war China, to multilevel marketing schemes). They really are surprisingly consistent, from controlling what members wear or how they cut their hair and encouraging sleep deprivation on the Behavioral side, to discouraging access to external sources of information, punishing people for asking questions or engaging in struggle sessions to get people to confess to false beliefs, and isolating people from the other people in their life that may love and care for them.
Not everyone or every group that exhibits some of these behaviors is going to be a cult. But the warning signs are something everyone should be aware of.
[0] https://freedomofmind.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/The-BIT...
I always thought the below was much simpler:
1. love bombing
- make you feel welcome/loved/accepted
- lots of attention etc
2. isolation
- "you weren't appreciated before so why hang out with those people"
- "your family didn't understand you, but we do so stay with us"
3. control
- "we have your best interests at heart so you should do X"
- etc
> Not everyone or every group that exhibits some of these behaviors is going to be a cult. But the warning signs are something everyone should be aware of.
I agree, but I'd say a lot of the BITE attributes can be damaging regardless of whether or not the group rises to the level of cult. If your group is doing stuff in BITE you really should be questioning "why" and thinking about whether or not the group policing is actually good for you.
Steven Hassan, who developed the BITE model, is really missing on that list. You're absolutely correct, not everything that checks the boxes of the model necessarily is a cult, but more often than not it's only a small step to transform into one.
Hassan’s own account of being recruited into the Moonies while he was in college really highlights an important point too, almost anybody can fall into a cult. They prey on nearly universal human traits. I wish we had an effort to equip everyone with this knowledge in the same way we teach kids to stop, drop, and roll if they ever catch fire. Especially in our hyper-connected age where anyone with an internet connection might be exposed to a cult.
I have no sympathy for group bullying, hazing, or manipulation, but the concept of a cult seems to only be possible post-enlightenment. We say there is a secular society outside that we always need to preserve and that sets limits on the level of fanaticism of our private group memberships.
But the unanswered philosophical problem is if you actually believe in those things doesn’t some level of fanaticism make sense?
In 2026 so we are so divorced from organizations and non-secular sources of information that I don’t think we can even talk about the subject. A 1950s neighborhood bowling club looks like a jihadist training camp from our completely detached ways of living.
Underground, by Murakami, was one of the better books I've read. It mostly covers victims, but the later chapters are interviews with various members of the Aum cult. It does a pretty decent job of presenting the psyche of the type of person who joins, stays, and some that leave. Although mostly relevant for what he calls the "Japanese psyche" I still found it very insightful.
Cultish (by Amanda Montell) is great. It also defines really well how Claude speaks currently---avant la lettre, of course. Language is a big part of the book: one example is how Scientologists can recognize each other in the wild from the language they have unknowingly adopted even for everyday conversations.
I’m native French speaker and do not understand what you mean with “avant la lettre”. That translates to “before the letter”, what do you mean?
> I’m native French speaker and do not understand what you mean with “avant la lettre”. That translates to “before the letter”, what do you mean?
Metaphorical language, of which French is a rich source, often prevents native speakers from understanding. Literal translations are of no avail.
> avant la lettre : before the letter : before the (specified) word or concept existed [0]
[0] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/avant%20la%20lett...
TIL, I should have just googled it, I assumed it was a bad auto complete
Thanks!
Thank you, I was beginning to think, that a few scraps of Latin I am familiar with aren't considered to be enough for reading comments on the internet...
No One Would Listen by Harry Markopolos about how he knew Bernie Madoff was a ponzi scheme is a great book in this genre. Markopolos went to the SEC with proof, multiple times, and each time the SEC blew him off.
My favorite read about cults is this short interview with Richard DeMille about Ron Hubbard: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/Library/Shelf/miller/interviews/... The interviewee comes across as extremely level-headed, maybe as a reaction to having been in a cult and escaped.
One definition of a cult I've liked is "A cult is a group you can't leave with your dignity intact". You can really get a good understanding if something is a cult by the way they talk about their ex members. A healthy organization will pretty much just say "Sad to see you go, come back anytime". Unhealthy organizations spend a fair amount of time warning members about how how dangerous/bad/sinful/sad/miserable their ex members are.
And yes, I'd call several mainstream religions cults because of this. I'd not argue that something isn't a cult if they don't fit this definition, but a very large number of the most damaging cults do have this behavior.
> And yes, I'd call several mainstream religions cults because of this
Which ones ? Not something I have seen myself
I do like your definition. Its a pretty clear and meaningful distinction and linked to other cult behaviours such as encouraging members to cease contact with ex-members.
People I know personally were strongly ostracized after leaving Jehovah's Witnesses (in the US) and the Catholic church (in Latin America). Cut out of their existing social circles, immediate family members refusing to attend their wedding over it, etc.
JW was the first one I thought of by that definition.
I was raised Southern Baptist. When I stopped going, the church contacted me a couple of times to say they missed us and asked if everything was OK, and to say they'd love to have us back if we wanted to come back sometime. My parents weren't thrilled but that's less religion, more family dynamics: it was much the same when they found out I didn't support their preferred political party anymore. That was about it, though. The church didn't lean on us in any way, or tell people to stop talking to us, or use any other means to cajole or punish us.
My thinking on cults is very similar to all this, plus another distinguisher. A cult typically requires you to join before you get all the information about what you're signing up for. I've never been a Muslim, but know that if you walk into a mosque, someone will cheerfully greet you and load you up with a Koran and all kinds of other reading material. Same with any mainstream Protestant church, or the Catholic church, or Hindu, or Buddhist, etc. In fact, many/most churches won't let you join until you've shown that you understand that church's beliefs. Compare and contrast with, say, Scientology, which is notoriously different.
If that’s the definition both political parties are included.
Not really. Both mainstream political parties don't like each other, but by and large they don't attack someone for leaving the party (from what I've seen).
Perhaps if you are saying attacks of politicians switching parties, which I could see. But I don't think I've ever heard of republicans talking about exrepublicans or democrats talking about exdemocrats. I personally have switched from voting republican to voting democrat. It's not something my family really cares about and I still have good relations with them even though a number of them are pretty MAGA.
Cults will actually have lessons and classes about the evils of ex members. Someone brought up JWs and that's a pretty good example of what I'm thinking of.
I think you’re correct that mainstream leaders of the parties try not to talk about each other in that way and mostly succeed. But I absolutely do know family members and friends treat it with that level of zeal.
Apostasy is treated very severely by many (most?) religions. The cults have just borrowed that concept.
I'd disagree. Most religions don't love apostasy but they also don't actively tell their members to go out of their way to punish or avoid non-believers.
The reason cults severely punish ex members is to protect the flock. They don't want their members to learn from ex members real criticisms of the cult.
It's precisely so when books like mentioned in this thread come up, the cult can say "oh, that's just a bad ex member who's lying".
The idea of "forbidden knowledge" is pretty unique to cults. You won't find, for example, a Methodist church that tells you not to read exmethodist books (do they even exist?). Heck, they probably wouldn't even get upset if you read something like "The god delusion".
Yttt
Hello
Interesting list! I really enjoyed "The Square and the Tower" by Niall Ferguson. Not exactly in the same realm as these, but pretty close and definitely eye-opening
Not exactly a cult, but... "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test" by Tom Wolfe. Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters. It sounds like fun, until it doesn't so much. Soundtrack by The Grateful Dead.
If you haven't read it already, Fads and Fallacies by Martin Gardner is a great book. A bit more focused on pseudoscience than on cults but Scientology comes up for instance.
Never read Michael Lewis's book about SBF. It's so bad it permanently ruined him as an author in my mind, I doubt the verity of any of the other books he wrote as a result of it.
Why? I really enjoyed the book, over-colorized, probably written to be made into a movie. He never portrayed SBF in a good or bad light, but he showed the mess SBF and his companions made.
It really revealed how much he relied on the gift of hindsight when writing his earlier books. Nothing wrong with that per se, but it's something he should have been aware of when doing a book on an ongoing event.
Stripping the Gurus by Geoffrey Falk is an interesting survey in this vein, albeit covering a previous generation of problematic cults. Gurus like Chogyam Trungpa, Adi Da (or whatever name Franklin Jones was going by at the time), even reaching back to Paramahansa Yogananda and Ramakrishna. His take is perhaps a little juvenile at times, but I think the book is an interesting survey.
Ok, now I want the fiction books about cults, scams and schemes.
"Illuminatus!" I read this while suffering from the worst attack of flu (fever, hallucinations, the works) I have ever had, Edinburgh circa 1975. I thought I was going mad. Never dared to read it again.
"Seductive Poison" is a good one. It's a story about the "Koolaid suicide" cult. It's one lady's story about how she got indoctrinated, abused, and ultimately escaped from Jonestown. It's told from her perspective, and really does a good job of showing how a seemingly reasonable person can get wrapped up in that.
+1 to Cultish.
Another great one: The Confidence Game by Maria Konnikova.
If we are talking about scams an obvious one is Bad Blood, about the Theranos scam.
The game "Cult of the Lamb" is a great way to learn about cults :)
Look, fun quick game that I'd not knock anyone for playing.
But it's not informative about cults in the slightest. It's just a caricature of what "satanic panic" [1] people thought a cult was.
Real cults are much more normal, which is why they are so easy to accidentally fall into. The worst cults have pretty mainstream acceptance. Often, they are simply break-offs of already well accepted religions.
Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds is a rollicking fun read
Just know that it isn’t considered a reliable historical record, a good amount of the book is exaggerated and some of the sources were newspaper parodies interpreted as facts. Still a good read though
Seconded. It's almost encyclopedic in scope. I'm almost embarrassed to admit that the hilarious chapter on English slang of the time was my favorite.
I can also recommend the book Mindfuckers - a source book on the rise of acid fascism in America. Each chapter is about a different cult from the 60s and 70s including one on the Manson's. Super interesting read.
I hope to release a book on how this all has evolved.
One side is the technology of artful misleading, which is usually much stupider than it sounds.
And another side is a forbidden taboo to speak of. An occult secret that lives like a cancer within us.
Through a sustained art of Power human minds may entangle and manipulate each other at any distance. Counter intuitively, this “esp” is merely consciousness entangled. And some have great skill and others delusional cargo cult “gifts.” Those “gifted” rather than rigorously formed are played in games by their handlers who they themselves cannot perceive perched in their own minds (big spacious brains and all.)
This is how the CIA Stargate programs and those since have largely worked. Overt participants are gamed by handlers who can see in everyone’s minds. It is for those who can “mind trip” to a degree, that functional awareness gradually forms. The basic neurological feedback of being messed with by such “Power” is what causes its development.
It is not that some are “psychic”, it is that all minds may be entangled and some have decades of development “screwing around” in the backs of minds. Their own and others.
The modern occult mindfuck is that consciousness has been hacked.
This list is incomplete without Eric Hoffer's True Believer, which is probably a reference/source for all of these other books. It's basically how to build a fanatic, a cult and a mass movement. It's also required reading for Terrorism studies classes, and CIA personnel, the latter, using it to conduct regime change in banarepublics and oil bearing nations.
Of course now it's used on everyone who uses smartphones and social media.
It's a Brave New World, and you're carrying the main tool to mind control you in your pocket. Bonus, you probably pay for it too!
I quite like The Cult of Trump due to the relevance to current events.
Reading these books shines a light on how the current events have come to pass.
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Looks like she is still trying to make money. So the cult didn't work out. I left a cult. If she wants to use the word for sympathy, talk about the really bad ones. Start with Nebraska and work back from there. Sympathy farmer.
I'm sure these are all entertaining and engaging and reveal some exciting insider details, but it's worth keeping in mind that memoirs like these are closer to fiction than most things we think of as "nonfiction".
They're individual testimonies, often nearly impossible to verify, and written in an era where "autofiction" and "creative non-fiction" are mature commercial genres with their own tropes, standards, forms, and conceits.
If you're intellectually curious about "cults, scams, and schemes", there's a whole other -- drier but more earnest -- world of nonfiction to be found in places like JSTOR or the catalogs of academic presses.
As an academic, I wouldn't like to state papers are any different in regards to reliability of sources. They will just be testimonies and author viewpoint.
Well, there's certainly no objectivity in academic sociology or history, but there's a culture of trying to build narratives and justify viewpoints through richer collections of evidence: multiple testimonies, contemporaneous records and primary ephemera, prior publications, etc
In contrast, memoir is often simply held to the standard of "is there strong and ready evidence against this claim, or can it at least hold up as the author's subjective interpretation of some event" because it's purpose and history as a genre is entirely different. Its audiences aren't academic peers hungry for material against which they can safely anchor their own work, but tens of thousands of airplane readers who are hungry for titillation or personal relatability.