Cult Survivor Daniella Mestyanek Young Explores Why We Are Susceptible to Cults

In The Culting of America: What Makes a Cult and Why We Love Them, Daniella Mestyanek Young, a cult survivor and U.S. Army veteran, explores how cult-like behavior can emerge in many of America’s communities and institutions, from religious groups to corporations to recovery support groups. Co-written with Amy Reed, the book outlines a ten-part framework explaining how organizations adopt these cult-like tactics, often without their members even realizing it. For Young, her understanding of cults comes from personal experience, having grown up in a well-known 1960’s cult, Children of God, which included members such as Joaquin Phoenix, River Phoenix, and Rose McGowan. Following her departure from the group at age 15, Young later joined the U.S. Army, which in some ways felt like she was joining another cult. According to Young, “I didn’t see it as a bad thing at the time, I was just like, ‘ok, this is what I’m doing now,’ …fast forward all the way to 2020 when I went back to school and I got a masters in organizational psychology at Harvard… because all of my experience in group behavior and this executive program was talking about cults or the military or terrorist groups, I started to realize… that people didn’t think of cults as successful organizations, like cults, terrorist groups, anything we call bad we don’t think of it as successful and anything that is successful, financially, we think of as good, and I said, ‘I think it’s much, much more complicated than that.'”

Regarding the purpose of her book, Young aimed to give readers a practical guide to help them determine whether the organization they belong to is using toxic, manipulative tactics. She noted, “I wrote it as a tool and it’s not for you to be like, ‘Everything I am is a cult.’ In my opinion, you’ve got to have all ten of these things to be a cult, and they all hook into each other. However, if you have 3-5 of them and you’re looking to make your group less toxic, start with those, and so I say at the end of the day, I don’t care what we call a group… I just want people to have that information up front because we are all, in all of our groups, are problematic. All of our systems are problematic.”