When we think of harmful conformity groups we often think of religious movements. There have definitely been some infamous and awful examples over the years, such as Jonestown, the Branch Davidians, and Heaven’s Gate. But there are plenty of examples outside the realm of religion. The atheistic philosopher Ayn Rand was the leader of a society in New York City in the 1960s that displayed many of the features of a HCG. The self-help organization NXIVM had little to no religious dimensions and was undeniably an HCG, as was the wellness company OneTaste. We will discuss each of these groups in rough chronological order.
The Collective
Ayn Rand, most famous for her fiction books The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, thought of herself as a philosopher first and a novelist second. The ideas that she formulated with these novels eventually grew into an ideological framework she called Objectivism. In the 1960s, she was living in New York and attracted other like-minded people with her writings and lectures. These folks eventually formed a group that at first was part book club, part philosophical debating society, and part social experiment, with Rand herself as its leader. It was jokingly called The Collective, the intended irony deriving from the fact that Objectivism is deeply individualistic.
The name unfortunately ended up being an apt descriptor, as the group became subservient to Rand. She dictated what they could write and what opinions they could express. She made decisions about their personal lives, compelling one of the couples in the group to open their marriage so she could carry on a sexual relationship with the husband (Rand herself was also married, and brow-beat her husband into accepting the arrangement). Despite constant talk of individualism, Rand vehemently suppressed all ideas that were not her own in their discussion and publications, labeling all such dissent as “dishonest” and “evil.”
The Collective was a tiny group, no more than a dozen or so people. Many of the original members eventually left and became harsh critics of Rand, even if they remained admirers of Objectivism. But these vacancies were filled by new disciples who adopted Rand’s thoughts as their own and continued her condemnation of others. The group was thankfully never involved in any violence, and it disappeared when Rand died in 1982.
Rand’s thoughts, motivations, and even beliefs are somewhat difficult to pin down, so it is hard to know whether Rand set out to create such a group, but it does seem that she was more corrupted by power and the group became a HCG rather than starting out that way. From this description, we can see the ways that Rand drew people in with ideas that she then used to secure their obedience; not through force but through social pressure. We can see the ways she took control of their lives, their behavior, and broke down their inhibitions to bend them to her will. We can see how the group operated under a facade of legitimacy - they could pretend they were just a social group, a meeting of independent individuals. Rand died of natural causes, but she never relaxed her control on these people - they could only escape it when they left.
Jonestown
The People’s Temple was a new religious movement that was active in the 1960s and 1970s, largely in California. It was founded by Jim Jones and at one point had several thousand members. These numbers later declined, after which the group moved to Guyana in South America where they built a new settlement called Jonestown. In 1978, Jones convinced nearly all of the over 900 people living there to drink off-brand Kool-Aid laced with cyanide and other poisons. Several outsiders, including a U.S. Congressman, were shot and killed to prevent interference and to prevent information from leaking out.
The People’s Temple initially attracted followers by preaching ideas of race and social equality paired with spiritual teachings that drew from Christian and Marxist thought. But these teachings shifted frequently and Jones repeatedly revised the organization’s doctrines. Discourse about equality eventually became secondary to the emphasis being placed on Jones’ supremacy. Jones pressured members of the group to abandon or open their marriages so he could take the women as sexual partners.
While Jones displayed plenty of narcissistic tendencies from a young age, it does not appear that Jones set out to dominate others. He was a glory-hound to be sure, but it seems that as he became a more and more popular preacher he was corrupted by power.
The move to Jonestown is a particularly extreme example of isolation. Jonestown was in a remote jungle location without any infrastructure and barely any roads. The government of Guyana either could not or did not exercise much oversight in regards to the group’s activities or the use of the site. For all intents and purposes, Jonestown was its own little universe where Jones controlled everything about his followers’ lives. It maintained a facade of legitimacy for a long time under the auspices of just working to be self-sufficient, and the violence against its own only occurred at the very end.
Heaven’s Gate
Heaven’s Gate also formed in California in the 1970s. It was a very small group, attracting no more than a few hundred followers and eventually reducing down to only a few dozen. It was led by a man named Marshall Applewhite. His teachings were a blend of Christian prophecies of the end of the world mixed with a belief in extraterrestrial life and their spiritual superiority to humans. In 1997, Applewhite convinced all but two of his followers to commit suicide with him, an event that received a lot of media attention.
While the group’s beliefs were highly unusual, their behavior was for a long time fairly unproblematic. It was only in the last few years that things took a dark turn. At first, members simply adopted a communal, monastic lifestyle - a peculiar and arguably ill-advised action, but not necessarily a harmful one. Eventually though, Applewhite started asking for more extreme acts of devotion, such as castration. A cloistered lifestyle devolved into an isolated and paranoid one - Applewhite often told the group the government was probably going to murder them all. Applewhite and his wife had long been revered by the group as more divine than human, but after his wife’s death he drastically escalated the level of reverence demanded.
Applewhite’s narcissism was on display long before Heaven’s Gate was formed: indeed it was his belief that he was a fulfillment of Biblical prophecy that drew people to him in the first place. The demands for conformity and his self-aggrandizement to unreasonable proportions developed later. Heaven’s Gate is thus an example of a group that was initially unproblematic but both leader and members got more and more radical until it devolved into a HCG.
Branch Davidians
The Branch Davidians began in the 1950s as a separation from the Seventh-Day Adventist movement. While their beliefs were intense and unconventional, for the first few decades of their existence there was little to nothing harmful about them. Then in the 1980s, the group was taken over by David Koresh, who pushed them into more extreme beliefs and practices. The group all gathered into a single compound of buildings in Waco, Texas, and they also began illegally stockpiling weapons. In 1993, the federal government attempted to seize these firearms and arrest Koresh and others. When they did so, a gun battle erupted, followed by a nearly two-month hostage negotiation between Koresh and the FBI. Eventually the FBI stormed the compound, which caught fire, killing almost every member of the group.
Koresh displayed domineering tendencies from the start of his adult life - he was always intending to form a group under his control. Unlike Jones, he did not start a new group, but bounced between different groups until he found one that he could take over. His teachings were a dizzying merger of various Biblical interpretations and original prophecies of his own. This made his ideology difficult to pin down - it seemed wise but it might just have been nonsense. Koresh’s draw had much more due to his handsome face and persuasive personality. The vagueness of his theology meant that it was much easier to change it when needed, which he frequently did in order to justify his actions.
Like Jones, Koresh compelled his followers to discard their sexual inhibitions, ‘dissolving’ the marriages of all the group’s members and claiming all the women and girls as his wives. This is just one example of the belief arbitrariness seen in HCGs: Koresh had been the leader of the group for some time before these ideas emerged. The guns being stockpiled were not being used to threaten the members, but to prepare for a battle against the rest of the world, a classic case of extreme vilification of non-members. The group was well-known to the local community and law enforcement, but was able to maintain a facade of legitimacy by keeping their members isolated and their activities largely secret.
NXIVM
NXIVM was founded by Keith Raniere in 1998 as a company selling self-help seminars, books, and other materials. Over the next twenty years, the company attracted several hundred clients and salespeople, or members, who were over time drawn into increasingly controlling situations by Raniere. When former members began alerting authorities to violations being committed by NXIVM, investigations exposed many abuses and criminal charges were brought. By 2019 Raniere and several other leaders were in prison and the company was dissolved in 2021. The case attracted significant media attention because several celebrities and wealthy individuals had been involved with the company.
Like most self-help curricula, Raniere’s teachings were vague to the point of meaninglessness. People were drawn into NXIVM much more because of Raniere’s handsome face and soothing personality. Raniere promised to give people’s lives purpose and meaning, and told them that the way to it was through wholesale dedication to NXIVM, which in practice meant working 80-hour weeks participating in seminars and selling materials.
When this demanding schedule failed to produce any feelings of purpose or meaning, Raniere would blame the individual for not following his teachings closely enough. Because the teachings were so vague, there was almost no way for the individual to confirm or deny this. For most people this had the effect of making them desperate for Raniere to tell them what to do, to explain to them what they were missing. Raniere then exploited this vulnerability to ask for monetary, personal and sexual favors. He would convince people to make deeply personal confessions (some of which were planted ideas and completely untrue) or debase themselves in other ways, seemingly for his own amusement. This went as far as members allowing Raniere to brand them, to literally apply a hot iron to their backsides like they were cattle.
Raniere’s narcissism is clearly seen here, as is the superficiality of the ideas, plus the extreme pressure to conform and the unreasonable level of control exercised over their lives yet without the threat of force. Raniere’s sway over these folks was so complete that they did not have to be compelled to be branded, they volunteered for it. And because NXIVM was able to say they were just a sales organization offering self-help content, they were able to maintain their facade of legitimacy to draw more and more people into these harmful behaviors.
OneTaste
OneTaste bears a lot of similarities to NVIXM. It was founded by Nicole Daedone in the early 2000s as a company also selling self-help material. Their material had a much sharper focus though - it advocated a novel sex practice called ‘orgasmic meditation.’ In theory, it was a technique for more satisfying sex: a perhaps indelicate subject but a legal one and, under the right circumstances, a healthy one. In practice however, OneTaste was putting on live pornographic shows and encouraging people to engage in anonymous and non-consensual sex. Once criminal complaints were made, the company was forced to stop basically all its practices and sales in 2018. A criminal case against Daedone was still pending as of the end of 2024.
Sex sells, so the appeal of Daedone’s group was probably far less about her as a person. But like Raniere, she used psychological manipulation tactics and unrelenting work demands to bend the employees and clients of the company to her will. Some salespeople lived in a dorm the company had set up and clients and employees alike were told to discard their sexual inhibitions and have sex with anyone who asked for it, even if they did not want to. Sexual assault became so normalized in this environment that one employee filmed another employee forcing himself on a client and the assaulting employee did not even react.
Summary
There are more examples that we could cite: the Rajneeshpuram movement, The Family International, Aum Shinrikyo, the Manson family, and others. But these examples should suffice to show how HCGs can come from practically any kind of origin or background, and their leaders can come from anywhere.