When something or someone looks too good to be true... they usually are.
Or when people are just too ride or die for something, you smell a problem.
Cults. They're everywhere. We've all probably been in one at one time or another without knowing.
I guess we're all just looking to belong, but at what cost?
That's a literal and figurative question.
RedditorSatoshi_4wanted to warn people about what to look for when following a group.
"What group doesn't look like a cult but is actually a cult?"
Columbia House. That was a Ponzi scheme and a cult. I got swept up a few times.
Mickey Mouse Disney GIFNutrition Lies
"People selling herbal life."
chellie21
"From what I’ve seen people are opening up 'nutrition shops' and selling teas and smoothies with Herbalife in them, but don’t actually advertise that it’s Herbalife so someone who isn’t familiar with it is easily fooled into buying an over priced, syrupy sweet, powder based drink."
SaltBox531
No Chants
"Under Armour's corporate culture creeps me out. Companies should not have an official chant. I would consider them cult-adjacent at the very least."
mehowdi
"I remember when I was 11 or 12, my mom was pretty broke and trying to go back to school for office admin to escape retail. She was a produce manager at a grocery store, and she had part-time co-op office work through the college. She got a third job at Walmart for evenings she wasn't doing co-op. She refused to participate in the weird chant thing and quit lol."
serafel
Juiced Up
"WorldVentures, Plexus, Amway. Those are ones people have tried to recruit me for. I think there was one a long time ago that promoted all sorts of health benefits of Xango juice. I distinctly remember some extended family members getting CASES of that juice for my family and I because they heard some BS about it potentially shrinking/eliminating brain tumors."
"Had to drink that nasty crap juice and all it did was give me heartburn, definitely did not shrink the (benign) brain tumors I have."
Garbage_Solid
NOPE
"We're not a cult. We're an organization that promotes love, and-"
BuffaloStranger97
not today no GIFGiphySave your love babble.
I'm good.
“The Great Way”
"For those who aren’t already aware, Shen-Yun. They advertise this whole 'The Great Way' thing during their shows and some weird stuff about the creation of the universe. Thinly veiled as 'this is a story that is as old as Chinese culture' and it gave me the ick."
SylvrSpydr
shen hua GIFGiphyCamper Crazy
"Summer camp. Not in a bad way, but we have idiosyncrasies to the songs we sing, the stories we tell, the traditions we follow. The small things that are basically rites of initiation, the mysterious doors that only the staff can go into, the separation from the real world."
"You've got the campers who grow up idolizing the counselors, then become those counselors when they grow up and do the same things in the same way, then come back as adults to run programs or drop off their kids or have staff reunions. Everyone has the same shirts and the same closets filled with years upon years of camp shirts."
"And it's really really hard to describe to someone who doesn't go to camp why XYZ is funny or why you always turn the tab on your soda can to the right before you drink it or why you *know someone is telling the truth because no one from camp would ever lie when they swear by a booga booga."
"And you meet someone who went to another camp... and it all sounds familiar, but off. Like they have done things that sound camp-ish, but not quite right. And you can't put your finger on why, but it's just...not. Hey, I loved summer camp. But no one I went there with would disagree that it is a cult."
FidusAchates86
Bad Sport
"Baseball moms."
lemonheadmeg
"Youth sports parents in general are psychos. I played youth sports, and basketball through juco. But I promised myself that I would never push my kids to play sports unless they showed enthusiastic interest. That's how little I want to do with youth sports parents."
urine-monkey
"Corporate training companies. Looking at you agile training. They get one person in a company trained and they take over the whole process and get everything agile and working better (even though no can actually prove it is better). But when it doesn’t work as well as expected due to existing problems more people get training from the same company so they can better."
"Promising if you are more agile it will be better. People spend more time trying to agile than do the actual work. It could be repeated over and with different management philosophies but the result will be the same. There is nothing wrong with agile itself but trying to implement it without fixing other stuff it will always fail."
RobotIcHead
full grown middle aged men...
"Not even Boy Scouts, but those who were in Boy Scouts know the Order of the Arrow is the true cult. Honestly one of the weirder parts about it was that there were scout leaders, like full grown middle aged men, who were also joining it. So you sleep in a field next to some random adult dude and then do a day of a silent service project."
Available_Job1288
Get to the Point
"Salesforce. No, I don't want to build a community, go hiking or join a hundred online classes to learn the basics. Make a couple of well-explained, to-the-point training videos ffs."
fodivaay
Season 4 Michael GIF by The OfficeGiphyI was once almost swept up in that kitchen knife selling craze. Thank God the video "training" was too long and I left.
Careful out there.
Want to "know" more?
Sign up for the Knowable newsletter here.
Never miss another big, odd, funny or heartbreaking moment again.
@kileywrestling/Bluesky
