I am uncomfortably under the spell of Hulu's new drama, The Path. I promise no spoilers in this essay, so don't worry as we start by going over the premise of the show.
The Path features a group of people who are part of a smallish "movement" (read: "cult", I guess) who do lots of good things and some pretty awful things. The main character, Eddie (Aaron Paul of Breaking Bad fame), plays a family man who is a member of this movement but is starting to question the validity, maybe even the morality, of the group itself. He's struggling mightily because it turns out that this group kind of saved his life. He joined up way before the show begins, and the...um...movement, gets him off the street and creates stability and order in place of what had been a chaotic and pretty agonizing life. Now he's got a great family, a nice home in the suburbs, a loving wife, and wonderful children. In other words, even if the group to which he has pledged his belief is a little bit full of crap, is it enough crap that he ought to abandon it? After all, it has at least on the surface brought him a pretty nice life.
And that of course is the rub of The Path. Why we do choose to believe in anything? Among many reasons, it strikes me that we believe in things in order to relieve our suffering. That doesn't mean that what we believe isn't true. It just means that believing what we believe can sometimes also make us feel better. Life can be miserable, and we have a natural, some would argue even a neurobiological tendency to want to belong. That means that we will instinctively circle our wagons. The price of our distinction as social creatures is our need to categorize those with whom we can comfortably socialize. Society becomes a series of Venn diagrams, and we overlap inevitably most often with those who happen to share our convictions. We will always think of some people as "in" and some people as "out." Being excluded is existentially excruciating - we'll do almost anything to be on "the in".
For these reasons, I find The Path barely tolerably magnetic and creepily disquieting. It plays me, like a fish on a line, like I'm a captured thing that won't quite allow itself to be reeled in. There is, I would argue, an even slightly sadistic tone to the show - a tone that, by definition, puts me in the position of being the masochistic participant. The show hurts. All of this hand wringing inevitably leads me to question what I believe, or how I happen to believe what I believe, and perhaps most important, why I choose to believe anything at all.
Like a lot of people, I find cults absolutely fascinating. I even find the word "cult" fascinating.
If occult means "hidden from view" - and that is indeed the definition - than cult must mean the opposite, right? It must mean "not hidden," or "out in the open."
But still, when we say "cult", we're usually using the word as a noun and not an adjective, and we're virtually always talking about something with secrets. A "cult" is a thing, and if we follow the dialectic we've created, a cult must be a secretive thing that is paradoxically hiding in plain sight.
Cults, in other words, could be anywhere. Cults can be secretive and welcoming, ubiquitous and hard to find. Cults, by this reasoning, traffic in paradox.
This is of course a lot of wordplay. Cults are not everywhere, at least according to common knowledge. There's data I could point out to confirm this, but that's not really the point of this piece. The point of this piece is to make readers a little uncomfortable with the definitions themselves.
Please don't misunderstand. It isn't that I think cults are good, or that we are wandering towards an epidemic of cults. Cults are pretty uniformly awful. They rob their members of free will, or free speech, or even of thoughts and feelings themselves.
It's just that I can't quite define what a cult is. It seems like something that is inarguably bad ought to also be easily defined. But cults can be powerfully nuanced.
If a cult is a small group of people who follow a charismatic leader at their own social and emotional expense, then do we say something stops being a cult when it's numbers grow? What if the leader ceases to be charismatic? Then are the people who follow him or her no longer members of a cult?
Does a cult have to ask for money? Or time? Or your soul? If these are how we define cults, then we need to do thread some uncomfortable needles to separate cults from religion. Most religions ask for your time, or your money, and at least some responsibility for your soul. (Let's leave the definition of "soul" out of this for now.)
And, unlike my sentiments for cults, I am not bothered by religion.
The strength of The Path is that it does not for the most part present the extremes. Jonestown, for example, was bad. Period. No one would argue that what happened at Jonestown was anything but horrific. The same is painfully true with regard to the mass suicide among followers of the Heaven's Gate group in 1997. These extremes are easy to recognize and well worth our hardy condemnations.
But in Eddie's case, the transgressions of the Meyerists - the group to which he belongs on The Path - are present but not at all on the scale of mass suicides. There is brutality, sure, but then there is brutality in mainstream society as well. That doesn't make either of these brutalities in any way OK, but like Edddie, I get bogged down in what I choose to call cultish brutality and what feels more like, I don't know...expected brutality?
Wow. Did I really just write that? Expected brutality? Could it be that our social conventions enforce overly simplistic binary standards through force? That's not meant to be a rhetorical question. In fact, the lack of obviousness to this line of reasoning is what I find so unsettling.
But here's what I find most troubling: The techniques of a cult - the ways that a cult convinces members to join - are extremely familiar and recognizable. We use these techniques all the time. We use these techniques to convince our children to make good choices. We use these techniques when we caucus for our favored political candidates.
Heck, I use these techniques when I practice medicine, and these techniques have been used on me when I have accepted medical care.
"In my clinical opinion," is what I am taught to say, and that's what I've been told by my doctors as well. I smile or have been smiled at. I have been trained to think of illness as separate from the self, as something on the inside that we'd like to have on the outside. It is the same whether we're talking about taking medications for high cholesterol or engaging in psychotherapy. We want to belong, to rid ourselves of the intruder, because belonging relieves our suffering. I think these are perfectly legitimate definitions of illness and health, but stories like The Path remind me that things are substantially more complicated.
This is why I think The Path is such an important show. Virtually everyone in society has at different times a position of power and a position of subordination. These distinctions help us to transact with each other. We rely on these distinctions for everything from buying a television to choosing a faith. We struggle not to do any of this blindly, despite the inextricable fact that the river of social conventions selects for acceptance at the cost of skepticism.
Skepticism hurts. Acceptance feels good. And I'd argue that both skepticism and acceptance are important in a thoughtful society. But blind acceptance? Blind skepticism? That's tyranny. That is the central paradox of social convention. It is also the power of The Path.
Steve Schlozman, MD is assistant professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and Associate Director of the Clay Center for Young Healthy Minds at Massachusetts General Hospital. He is the author of two novels: The Zombie Autopsies and Smoke Above Treeline.