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Why Smart People Still Bend to the Group
Amanda Montell dismantles the myth of brainwashing, calling it a pseudoscientific idea most psychologists reject. Instead, she points to a 1950s experiment by Solomon Asch, where students picked an obviously wrong answer just because everyone around them did. Her own father experienced this pull firsthand inside Synanon, a commune where insider phrases like being 'in the Game' turned ordinary words into passwords—and turned belonging into control long before anyone noticed.
The Small Phrases That End Big Arguments
Psychiatrist Robert Lifton named the thought-terminating cliché: a short phrase that sounds wise but ends thinking instead of starting it. Montell traces these lines from high-control groups all the way to dinner-table phrases like 'everything happens for a reason.' She pairs this with the sunk cost fallacy—once someone has given a group their savings, their marriage, or their twenties, walking away feels like admitting those years meant nothing, so they stay instead of leaving.
Selling Hope, One Empowerment Slogan at a Time
Multilevel marketing companies borrow directly from the prosperity gospel, treating wealth as proof of virtue and poverty as proof of bad attitude. Recruits are warned against 'stinkin' thinkin'' whenever they voice doubt, while empowerment slogans like #bossbabe promise dignity to women squeezed out of steady jobs. Montell notes the brutal math behind the vocabulary: roughly 99 percent of recruits never make a dime, because what's actually being purchased is hope, not income.