Why People Join Cults
 Let us begin with a brief survey of just why people join cults. Millions of Americans are eager to slough off their familial and social obligations, abandon their homes, and forsake long-beloved truths to dance on street corners, castrate themselves, follow diets that would kill a billygoat, and take up weapons in pensive anticipation of the end times. 
Is it because an insurrectionary Jew executed millennia ago will return to save us? Because ancient mystics have foreseen the world’s end? That our planet faces cataclysmic change and unprecedented natural disasters? Because a witch’s brew of yoga, chanting, and enlightenment will prepare you for the next evolutionary level? No, sorry, human motives are hardly so sublime. People join doomsday cults because they are weak, gullible, hungry mendicants who desperately yearn for a sense of purpose, authority, discipline, purity, community, power, wisdom, revenge, and salvation. Understanding this is key to beginning a successful cult. You must offer immediate material incentives to interested members, or your religion will fail.The actual doctrine that you decide to preach is wholly irrelevant. The religious teachings and fine points are merely aesthetic embellishments. All that matters is the group’s structural framework and your skill at exploiting human weakness. For example, it is immaterial whether you are promoting Doomsday via a foreign missile strike, computer malfunction, Jewish conspiracy, demons rising from Hell’s pits, environmental disaster, Fenrir bursting his fetters, interstellar war, or Christ’s triumphant return upon a white steed. The issue is that by joining your group, one will avoid the hideous fate awaiting 99% of humanity and will be instrumental in building a post-apocalyptic Utopian society. Let us now explore the key elements inherent in any cult by examining the functions they serve.The doomsday cult (as an extreme pole of religion in general) supplies 
instant easy answers to all those nagging questions stealing your sleep. Furthermore, the cultist’s life takes on eschatological significance: he is no longer Joe Salaryman; he is now Lord Avatar, Vicar of Christ, Herald of the Thousand Years of Joy, and an instrument in God’s Holy War. Everyone who has ever mocked him will have their comeuppance in the form of fire, perdition, and the Worm that Gnaweth. These prizes, coupled with a new sense of community and belonging will insure a long line of wild-eyed applicants at the gates of your compound.
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