Cult Capitalism

Abstract

Cult Capitalism Lyra Walsh Fuchs (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Ex-NXIVM member Sarah Edmondson holds one of the colored sashes that she earned while ascending the ranks of the cult. (Warner Media/courtesy of HBO) [End Page 6] In October 2017, the New York Times broke the news that NXIVM, an Albany-based company that peddled self-help and professional success courses, contained a secret women’s group that branded its members in a painful ceremony. “For hours muffled screams and the smell of burning tissue filled the room,” the Times reported, as a leader’s initials were carved into the women’s skin. The branding, it turns out, was the tip of the iceberg. Several of NXIVM’s inner circle now face prosecution for an array of garish crimes. As the court cases unfold, interest in the company and its downfall has proliferated, resulting in several front-page investigations, two documentary television shows, a hit pod-cast series, multiple made-for-TV movies, and several tell-all memoirs. The Vow, an HBO series that first aired last summer, garnered the most attention; it attempted to relate what it was about the group that appealed to so many. Seduced, which broadcast a few months later, focused on one young survivor’s story and provided revelations about abuses that were glaringly absent from The Vow. Commentators seeking to understand how things got so bad inside NXIVM often gesture toward QAnon and our larger conspiratorial moment. “As dangerous conspiracy theories rise to shocking prominence in American life,” a review in the Times reads, “‘The Vow’ examines why people are so primed to fall for the kind of tempting but perilous psychological traps that skilled manipulators use to lure and catch their idealistic prey.” But there’s less to this parallel than first appears. QAnon projects a shadowy otherworld upon the one we live in, translating decades of moral panic into anti-government rabidity and hoping for an apocalyptic rupture. NXIVM, with its focus on networking and professional success, promised to help its adherents better themselves—and thus the world. Its perilous psychological traps, in other words, are not outliers but, rather, all around us. In a video advertising NXIVM that appears in The Vow, actor and higher-up Allison Mack waxes rapturous on the revolutionary potential of empathy: “If we actually understood compassion the world would be a much better place. Not even the world. Like .003 percent of the world, if they could just have a little dose of love, everything would change. Everything.” Former NXVIM propaganda master Mark Vicente doubles down on this philosophy later in the series. “The only sustainable way to change a society,” he says, “is if the wealthiest, most powerful people meet with this education and this will trickle down to everything else.” It’s a theory of change similar to what Tressie McMillan Cottom calls “trickle-down feminism,” in which wealthy women, correctly diagnosing that the world is full of injustice, posit that their own success and happiness will benefit all others that are oppressed. They can “make the world a better place”—a phrase that litters NXIVM [End Page 7] media—while furthering, rather than threatening, their status. Mack and Vicente’s theories about empathy would not sound out of place coming from the CEO of any wellness start-up or Silicon Valley consultancy. In that familiarity lies the secret to understanding NXIVM: how its members slipped from the apparently innocent pursuit of professional success to facilitating and enduring horrific wrongs, and how its leader Keith Raniere was, for a time, able to shape a persona of innovative brilliance. ________ NXIVM was founded in 1998, when Raniere, fresh out of things to do after an earlier pyramid scheme was shut down by the State of New York, met Nancy Salzman, a nurse and self-professed hypnotist. Together they created a self-improvement course called Executive Success Programs (ESP). ESP combined cognitive-behavioral therapy with group therapy and a sprinkling of Steiner seminars, Ayn Rand, pop psychoanalysis, and Scientololgy. Hardly anything in NXIVM was original, but the course was styled as the expression of Raniere’s unique genius. Committed adherents progressed...