 For as long as I can remember, there are two subjects that have always piqued my interest, serial killers and cults. I'm not alone in these interests either. And recently, I found a possible explanation for why people like myself and many others are interested in these subjects. In his book, How Pleasure Works, the New Science of Why We Like What We Like, Yale professor Paul Bloom explains that this may be because it helps us run through mental scenarios so we can be prepared if these types of situations happen. And I don't know about you, but avoiding serial killers and not being indoctrinated into a cult are pretty high on my priority list. Recently, my girlfriend and I watched a four-part docu-series about Heaven's Gate on HBO Max, and it was really interesting. And I recommend it if you want to learn more about this group who committed mass suicide in the 1990s. In this series, they feature Stephen Hassan throughout the episodes to provide some insight as a cult expert. As a former cult member of the Moons, Hassan has spent the last four decades helping people leave cults and deprogramming. I've heard of Hassan before, but I've been reluctant to check out his work. As we'll discuss, many people throw around the word cult far too often. But when watching the docu-series, I could see that Stephen Hassan seems to know what he's talking about. Not only that, but I respect the fact that he doesn't try to belittle cult members and tries to educate people why it happens in the first place. With eight years sober and experience working at a rehab, I know how many people look at drug addicts without trying to understand why they started down that road in the first place. After watching the Heaven's Gate docu-series, I finally decided to pick up a book from Stephen Hassan that I've seen many times and refused to get. The Cult of Trump, a leading cult expert, explains how the president uses mind control. At first, I didn't purchase it because it seemed like a cash grab playing on my fellow liberals confirmation bias. By the end of 2020, during election season, I became interested in it again. But after Trump locked, I made a decision to do a Trump detox and try to forget that the man ever ran our country. But after watching the docu-series and getting to know Hassan a little bit better, I decided to give this book a try. This morning, I've spent the last three hours reading The Cult of Trump. And while I believe that Hassan is an intelligent, well-meaning individual, the book is little with flaws that any scientific or critical thinker would take issue with. An issue that I've recognized for years is that people label just about anything a cult that involves a group of people that they disagree with. In his book, Hassan explains that there's a cult continuum where you have people who are followers of people like Jim Jones or those who were at Waco on the extreme end of the spectrum, and then you have fans of people like Bruce Springsteen on the other. This is the first red flag when it comes to trying to define a cult, because now anything from fans of a sports team or people who attend Comic Con are on the cult continuum. Hassan explains that one of the aspects of a cult is that members often can't leave without being shunned, threatened or chastised. Going back to his Springsteen example, he says that these followers are fine because they can come and go as they please. Personally, I think that's a key characteristic as well. For those who are familiar with Nexium, X members were threatened and tied up in legal battles, and it's difficult for members of Scientology and other groups to leave as well. Something that's all too common is how people label random groups as cults, even though they don't meet the basic characteristics. 12-step programs are often called a cult, but as someone who has attended meetings and knows many others who have, I can tell you that not many people care if we come or go. Due to the pandemic and simply not needing meetings as much as I used to with 8 years sober, I haven't been to a meeting in months. Nobody was trying to hunt me down, and if I showed back up at a meeting, nobody would notice nor care. So, when I picked up Hassan's book, I thought he was going to make stronger ties to Trump supporters and cults, but that's not the case. Something I've learned is that when you make something a core aspect of your life, you start seeing everything through that lens. In the case of Hassan and many others, I believe that may be the issue. Hassan's life revolves around helping people get out of cults and studying cults. So, when he sees something with a following, he thinks, cult. The book is riddled with pseudoscience and poor arguments, but I think one of the biggest issues is how easy it is to play into the confirmation bias of your audience, and that's where I want to start with my critique of his book. But, before we get started, if you're new to the Rewired Soul, make sure you subscribe and ring that notification bell. Here, we practice critical thinking and skepticism to better understand the world and improve our overall well-being. And, if you're interested in any of the books that I referenced, my affiliate links for each book are listed down in the description below. You don't need to be a master salesperson to know that one of the best ways to manipulate someone is to tell them what they want to hear. You can also make people believe explanations that have no scientific rigor by telling them what plays into their current beliefs. At the time of writing this, it's been over a month since Trump lost the 2020 election, and he is still claiming that there was election fraud. On top of that, he has news outlets, members of the GOP, and his base living in an alternate reality by backing his false claims. To those of us who consider ourselves rational human beings, this makes absolutely no sense. Not only is there no valid evidence of fraud, but people are experiencing massive amounts of cognitive dissonance. Rather than trying to understand what's going on, we save cognitive effort by looking to simplistic explanations. One of those explanations is to say, they are a cult, and they've clearly been brainwashed. Most people don't want to have a nuanced analytical conversation, so we slap a label on people and move on with our lives, and this is a major issue. I've noticed the same thing happen with the word narcissist, and there are many people capitalizing on our lack of nuance by using this label. Your partner broke up with you? Narcissist. Your boss is bossy? Narcissist. You argue with your parents? They're probably narcissists. Disagree with someone online? Obvious narcissist. Narcissistic personality disorder is a real thing, and I've never claimed that it wasn't. But it's been used as a catch-all to play into confirmation bias and to explain away anyone people don't like. A prime example of this is the YouTuber Angie Atkinson. She's managed to build an entire career around helping victims of narcissists. I don't know Angie and will give her the benefit of the doubt that she's not trying to take advantage of people, but knowingly or not, she's profiting from confirmation bias and lack of analytical thinking. To date, she has 140,000 subscribers on her YouTube channel with almost 1,000 videos about narcissists. From your Narcissist ex to your Narcissist parents, friends, and bosses, you can find it on her channel. Not only that, but she offers one-on-one coaching at $150 for a 45-minute session, and she has an assortment of self-published books for sale on Amazon. I appreciated how Hassan started the book and explained how we saw similarities between Trump and the leader of the Moons, but I feel this book merely got sales because it says what people want to hear. In his book, Hassan refers to his famed Byte model to argue that Trump is leading a cult. The Byte model explains cults as having behavior control, information control, thought control, and emotional control. The issue is that this model is often abused by just about anyone who wants to label a group as a cult, and it plays into confirmation bias as well as the sharpshooter fallacy. What's the sharpshooter fallacy? Imagine a cowboy who tells you he's the best shot in the west and proves it to you by shooting the broad side of a barn. Then he walks up and draws targets around his bullet holes and tells you that's where he was aiming. The sharpshooter fallacy pulls data and information where the person wants it to go. The Byte model is pseudoscience at best, and you can test this easily by seeing how broad the definitions are. Under behavior control, Hassan lists items such as controlled types of clothing and hairstyles and discourages individualism. As someone who grew up during the emo era, are we going to say that emo kids were a cult looking a certain way and liking certain bands? If you really wanted to, you can rationalize just about any group or organization to meeting some of the criteria of the Byte model, but one of the biggest sins that Hassan commits in his book is confusing the reader with information. Have you ever talked to a conspiracy theorist? They can connect the dots in ridiculous ways. One second, you're talking about a TV show, and the next thing you know is that the shoes a character is wearing is a sign they're being controlled by a secret government entity hell bent on world domination, and that's why soda cans are made out of aluminum. Yes, I know my example was extreme for even the most passionate conspiracy theorists, but if you want a better example, just seek out a QAnon conspiracy. When it comes to Hassan's book, his issue isn't so much reaching to connect dots, but it's the lack of doing so that's disturbing. Don't get me wrong, Hassan does a marvelous job showing similarities between Trump and certain cult leaders, or how the actions of his followers are similar to the actions of cult members. But more than trying to connect the dots, he throws random information about cults at the reader, which is irresponsible in my opinion. For example, he regularly discusses the thought-stopping techniques he was taught in the Moonies, but he never ties that into Trump and his supporters. Hassan will also randomly start discussing aspects of cults like regulating members' diets and cutting members off from their families. When he does this, he either uses a very weak tie to Trump or doesn't try to tie it in together at all. I call this irresponsible because he's using a lot of irrelevant information to strengthen his argument. Imagine if I was talking to you about how much I disliked somebody, and then I just started giving you definitions of racism. If you're not paying attention, you'd think that I'm calling the person a racist even though I didn't give you any examples of their racism. Personally, I don't mind the additional information because I like learning about cults as a whole, but for the unsuspecting reader, you'd think that Trump's following meets all the criteria of a cult even though the author doesn't make those connections. Maybe Hassan merely included these types of tidbits of information to prove his expertise on the subject, but an editor worth their salt should have removed this prior to publication. So, is there a cult of Trump? I don't think so, and I don't think Hassan made nearly a strong enough argument to say that there is either. As discussed, we humans love categorizing and labeling. To lessen our cognitive load, we slap labels on people, and this is a big issue. No matter which side of the political spectrum you're on, I guarantee you dislike stereotypes about whatever side you're affiliated with. It's easy to label liberals as stuck up and thinking they're better than everyone while thinking that conservatives are just dumb. The reality is that the world isn't that black and white. By reading books like The Righteous Mind, Moral Tribes, and Strangers in Their Own Land, I've done my best to learn the complexities about what people value on a moral level. Through books like Conformity, Situations Matter, and Hive Mind, I've learned how groupthink can happen and why we're sometimes irrational due to our group identity. I'll end by telling you what I really enjoy about Stephen Hassan, and it's that he believes that educating yourself is the best way to avoid falling into bad situations. In his context, he thinks we should learn about calls so we don't unknowingly become a member. But for me, I love to learn about all things so I can be a better critical thinker and try to make better decisions on a regular basis, and I hope you do the same. Alright everybody, thank you for checking out this video essay. And yeah, the reason I make a video like this is because all of us, every single person, we fall for confirmation bias, right? Like this is how the mainstream media plays into our emotions because they tell us stuff that we want to believe. They tell us stuff that's easy to believe. They tell us stuff and give us these really simplistic explanations. And meanwhile, they're all littered with pseudoscience. You know what I mean? There are a bajillion explanations for why things are going. The way they're going and why they have been, you know, even though Trump lost like it's insane that 70 million people still voted for him, right? And my question back in 2016 is still to this day is why, right? And we want to believe like, oh, well, you know, Trump is clearly using mind control. But the reality is, is that this system is not working for just about anybody, right? Unless you're at the very, very top. So there's a lot of other nuanced reasons. And we can't just say, oh, well, he says the same thing over and over. So that's mind control. You know what I mean? But anyways, what's really helped me is just everything I look at, everything I look at, even when it agrees with what I'm thinking, I try to think critically about it. And I try to pick it apart. I'm like, is this based on real science? Is this based on pseudoscience, you know, and things like that. And, and yeah. So anyways, if you want to, you can check out Steven Thesson's book, like who am I? I'm not your dad. Go read it if you want to. And I love if some of you were checking out some of these books. Like I said, they're always down in the description. And we can have conversations, you know, about the books, debates, if you will. I enjoy, you know, reading and learning about this stuff and all that. But anyways, I've had you here long enough. That's all I got for this video. If you liked this video, please give it a thumbs up. If you're new, make sure you subscribe and ring that notification bell. And a huge, huge thank you to everybody supporting the channel over on Patreon, as well as everybody who supports my channel by getting the books that I recommend. Those are affiliate links. So a little bit comes back to support the channel and everybody who supports the channel by getting the books that I've written. Those are pretty cool too. All right. Thanks again for watching. I'll see you next time.