Hi, everyone. And welcome back to Geek time. 欢迎回到Geek时间。Welcome back to the studio, Brad.

Thank you.

Today we are going to talk about something equally niche. We’re gonna talk about cult.

Indeed.

就是邪教了。You know cult I guess in any culture in any country is kind of a taboo topic, isn't it?

It can be. Especially like if you know someone who was part of cult because that's when you see someone going through the process of getting into a cult, it kind of like can destroy a whole family.

It's something very serious and it can potentially be very, very dark. First of all, let's talk about the definition of cult. What is a cult?

Usually a cult is a group of people that follow a leader or some sort of ideology. It might be some sort of idol as in like a thing.

一个领袖或者一种理念。And they are usually just families joining, or individuals join...

Sometimes it's families, but often time it's like a group of people will follow an enigmatic person.

I think cults based on my very limited understanding of cults, the reason why there are cults is because they hurt people. They are destructive.

Oftentimes they are, and it's something you see after the cult becomes much much bigger, you don't see it in the early stages because if you were to do something like that, people are obviously going to quit. But once you have a cult established and you have these followers, then in order to keep people from going somewhere else, you might hurt them in order to get them to not leave.

So a lot of it is to attract them first, and then once they build up some sort of loyalty or fear to the leader and then it's destructive.

Right. It's some sort of dependence on them oftentimes like a cult will get someone to sell off all their possessions or like hand over the money, or if you have a house, you sign over your house to the cult leader, so then you have nowhere to go, you have that home and you can live there so long as the cult allows it.

It seems like a lot of the cults across the globe seem to believe that the world is going to end and then just believing in that cult is the only way to save yourself.

Right. It's either the cult is you're going to save yourself by being in this cult or that they as a cult are going to be the thing that saves the world.

这种所谓的末日邪教doomsday cults. But we talked about secret societies before. What are the differences? It sounds somewhat similar - it’s secretive with a small group of people.

Well, like a secret society can be kind of a subset of cult in some ways they have the, usually it’s an ideology rather than like an individual person. Like in a secret society, you may not know who the cult leader is. It may change from area to area and it might be like a group of cults over a large area.

So they don't worship any particular leaders. Secret societies are more connected by an idea.

Yeah, an idea or some sort of idol. And in most cases, there can be like secret societies that are akin to a cult in the fact that they have a leader who's controlling everything, but secret societies tend not to have such a limited nature.

I mean when you're back in the states, like growing up, did you have any run ins or have ever heard about cults in like your social circle?

In fact, I did. I've known several people who have been in different types of cults, it's actually when I was just after high school, one of my friends who I worked with actually, he got fired, he lost his job, his wife divorced him. And then he kind of joined this cult, inside of the cult the leader said that he could read other peoples’ previous life so it was like this reincarnation cult.

这种重生转世。And why would people believe him?

Well, when people are kind of going through a tough time, you pray on the week and then you get them to kind of follow you and once you have a follower, you can get some sort of benefit from that. And some people some cult leaders may not have that kind of idea, some do some actually believe what they preach, you know, so it's kind of like this whole it depends on the situation. But...

It's almost sort of like a mass hysteria就是集体癔症的这种感觉。I mean when you're talking about people around you actually being involved in cults honestly that kind of shocked me a little bit because my idea of cults they are very very like vicious for lack of a better word. They will destroy families; they will kill people. Because I'm quite interested in all these weird subjects, I remember reading somewhere there are some major cults like tragedies, massacres, one of them in United States, Jonestown?

Oh Jonestown yeah. So there was a leader and his name was Jim Jones. He created this commune and his whole idea was that in order to create a life for the world he wanted to kind of have people living in communes and which isn't like a bad thing necessarily. But the way he went about it was very bad, like he kind of put himself forward as not necessarily a god but ...

Almost like a god.

Almost, like his word was final. It got to the point where he was starting to get into a lot of trouble with the government for tax evasion. And so because it wasn't like an actual commune like it normally would be, he was actually somehow benefiting from this monetarily. And so like when the tax authority started coming after him, he moved all of his group to Guyana.

So basically it sounds like a lot of the cult leaders, they don't really believe in the things they preach. Ultimately they are still after money.

I was saying a lot of cases that is true, in some cases, I would say that they actually do have, maybe some sort of maybe mental disorder that actually makes them believe what they’re saying.

Believe themselves to be god. Um. Sorry, I interrupted you and then continue with that story that I knew that because that lead to the death of a lot of people.

Yeah. So he moved his cult down to Guyana and while he was there, like people were under armed guard, like there were some people who wanted to leave, but if they tried to leave, they weren't able to. Somehow word had gotten out to local authorities and someone from the American embassy went to go see what was going on. They brought a news crew with them and while they were there, they were passed a note by someone within the cult saying they wanted to leave and they needed help. And so when they tried to leave with that government official, there was an official and he had reporters with him, but when they tried to leave, Jim Jones actually shot all of them and killed all of them. And then he went back to the cult and basically everyone committed suicide. Some people were forced to commit suicide or forced, you know they were killed, but then even he shot himself, but some people say it might have actually been his nurse that shot him and then shot herself.

So essentially everyone in that cult, committed suicide or died.

There was like maybe 10 or 20 people who survived out of like the thousand that were down there.

Over 900 people died.

Like nine hundred and nine, I think was the final count.

Wow, that is. I mean if you look into world history, it's not difficult to fine some of the really tragic cases of cult massacres, of these mass suicides. But that's reality. Let's dial back a little bit to talk about cults in movies that you can see because this is one of the things that I found. Even though they are such a sinister existence, they sometimes can be really vicious, because of the sinister nature of it, the secrecy, it makes very good movie material, for example, top of my head, The Wicker Man.

Yeah. So like that cult is actually, it’s somewhat based on reality. I haven't really been able to find out like what parts are true, what parts are not. I know that like the burning of The Wicker Man dates back to some sort of like farming type of... based on something people did to have a good harvest. But in the movie, they actually burned a man alive, at the end of the movie and that way they could kind of have a like a pagan type of ritual sacrifice etc.

很多电影里面都会有这种邪教或者这种神秘感的邪教性质的组织存在。What else, what other movies can you think of？

One of the probably the most famous examples is Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.

So that’s kind of like it’s almost a semi religion type of a cult and the cult in the movie is actually based of a real cult, but they use some sort of like voodoo type magic, kind of like what we talked about before, where they kind of put people into like catatonic states almost, where they’re very easily susceptible to suggestion using different types of drugs.

Yeah, it is a dark hole if you dig into the topic of cult. To finish the basic episode about cult off, I just want to ask you one thing because we know cult means邪教but a lot of the times in arts in the realm of arts, when you talk about movies or other types of artworks, sometimes you do hear the word: “a cult classic” 中文我们叫邪典比如邪典电影。That doesn't mean cult as in sinister religion.

Yeah. Oftentimes when you get a movie that has a cult classic, it's something that wasn't necessarily popular when it was released, but something that kind of gained a foothold once it was out and a lot of people had seen it and they have like this, certain groups of people who really like fall in with that movie and really like that movie. And so you get that with, whether it's a movie or particular type of product, anything within society, it has like a cult following - can be a restaurant.

So it's not for the mass market. It's not the general public that like it. It's more a small group of people, but they are fanatic about it. 邪典就是比较小众的这种经典吧。That's a little bit about cult. In the advanced episode we are going to get into this topic and talk about something that might not look like cult on the surface, but it has a cultish idea or logic behind it. On that note, thank you very much for coming to the studio, Brad, we’ll see you next time.

Thank you, everyone. See you again.