Spend enough time inside a strong-culture company and someone eventually makes the joke: It’s basically a cult. New hires might float it nervously or veterans deliver it deadpan. Either way, the line lands.
The vocabulary expands—cult-like devotion, cult of personality, the cult around the founder—and you can find it stuck to all the usual suspects: Tech founders posting like prophets. Big companies whose CEOs call employees “family” the week before layoffs. Mission-driven startups where doubting the founder reads as heresy. Fitness brands where physical sacrifice is worn like a badge of honor.
The joke is a release valve that lets people name something without having to deal with it. So let’s deal with it now.
What’s a cult?
Cults aren’t a separate category from organizational culture. They’re the extreme end of the same continuum every organization sits on, and the mechanics that produced Jonestown also produce ordinary, unhealthy workplaces, just at different doses.
The way to spot a cult is by its mechanics, not by its outcomes. By the time the outcome is visible, it’s already too late.
Scholars of cults give us three questions that work to score any culture:
- What happens when someone disagrees? In a cult, dissent gets punished. (Called “doctrine over person” in the scholarship.)
- Could you explain your work to an outsider without insider language? In a cult, no, because the language is built to obscure. (“Loaded language.”)
- If you left tomorrow, what would you lose? In a cult, everything: identity, friends, worldview, future. (“Bounded choice.”)
If your culture scores high on all three, you’re at the extreme. If it scores low, you’re at the healthy end. So where does your workplace sit?
From culture to cult
Culture. Healthy cultures don’t happen by accident. They are built deliberately, by what leaders choose to celebrate and what they refuse to tolerate. The behaviors celebrated in a healthy culture include pushing back when something seems off, asking questions when something is unclear, helping others succeed, and staying healthy. The behaviors not tolerated are the subtle, passive-aggressive ones: distancing dissenters, marking people down for speaking up, treating the founder as above question, and dressing surveillance up as accountability. People are trusted to do their work, given the autonomy to do it well, and given a real sense of why it matters. They could leave anytime, but they stay by choice.
Cult-ish. Strong-culture companies and intense startups can end up here, where the cult mechanics are subtle and often passive-aggressive. Disagreement isn’t punished outright; it gets quietly distanced. You notice it in the silent eyebrow when you push back, in the meetings you stop getting invited to, and in the lower performance rating that arrives after you spoke up. Insider language seeps into your dinner conversations. The founder or CEO is admired and sometimes loved in a way that makes critique feel disloyal. People who leave become “not the right fit.” This is where Culture starts to bleed toward Cult.
Corporate Cult. You don’t need a religion to run cult mechanics. Enron, Theranos, and FTX ran them aggressively, inside the broader economy rather than off the grid, and in each case the insider language obscured more than it revealed. At Enron, accounting techniques let the company book future profits as present revenue, and the executive who flagged the fraud was sidelined. At Theranos, futuristic product names implied a working machine that didn’t actually work, and the employee who raised concerns was hounded by company lawyers. At FTX, the vocabulary of crypto innovation disguised what was effectively the misappropriation of customer deposits. When each collapsed, employees lost their jobs, their savings, and their worldview at once.
Cult. At the extreme end of the continuum, the three mechanics run at full strength. In Jonestown, Heaven’s Gate, NXIVM, and the Manson Family, dissent got punished and sometimes destroyed. The language inside was built to override reality rather than describe it. Leaving cost everything, often including life itself.
Beware: current conditions favor cult formation
These questions matter especially right now. Cults have always surged in moments of upheaval. In the 1970s, Watergate had broken trust in government, Vietnam had broken trust in the military, stagflation and the oil crisis had broken trust in the economy, and the postwar consensus that had organized American life was coming apart. Out of that came Jonestown, Rajneesh, and the Moonies. We’re living through another moment like that one, with AI, political realignment, post-COVID work rupture, and a collapse of institutional trust all happening at once. When the future feels unknowable, a leader who claims to know it can become magnetic.
The goal isn’t a culture that nobody jokes about being a cult. It’s a culture where you could answer the three diagnostic questions out loud, without code.
So check yours. If the answers are healthy, you’re probably somewhere good. If they aren’t, push to change what you can. And if you can’t change it for the better, get out now: the longer you stay in a culture drifting toward cult, the more leaving will cost you.