Why People get into QAnon & the So-Called "Conspiracy Cults"

Thanks to a Redditor on r/cults for triggering me with an excellent, previous post to dig into and pull this together for this and other uses.

There are indeed a LOT of people in modern day America who were repeatedly neglected, ignored, abandoned, discounted, disclaimed, and rejected, as well as invalidated, confused, betrayed, insulted, criticized, judged, blamed, shamed, ridiculed, embarrassed, humiliated, denigrated, derogated, set up to screw up, victimized, demonized, persecuted, picked on, vilified, dumped on, bullied, gaslighted, scapegoated, emotionally blackmailed and/or otherwise abused by others upon whom they depended for survival in the first few years of life. As well as sexually abused as children and/or KNOW and strongly I-dentify with someone who was.

These people almost always present the symptoms of Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder including being stuck in...

a) reactive rage,

b) compensatory narcissism,

c) repetition compulsion (in not-moses's reply to the OP on this thread),

d) reciprocal reactivity with others with whom they disagree or feel victimized by, and

e) righteous victimhood on interpersonal and societal...

f) Karpman Drama Triangles.

Read Eric Hoffer's mid-20th century classic The True Believer, and it becomes self-evident that this is the typical personality of those who jump on board the fast-moving freight trains of such conspiracy-obsessed and plain delusional mass movements as German National Socialism in the 1920s and '30s.

Adolph Hitler was himself the victim of horrid abuse by his awful father, Alois, btw. And Germany at that time was as full of people who'd become accustomed to being the elite of Europe as America full of people who've become accustomed to being the elites of the entire planet.

But is QAnon really a cult?

Couldn't answer that for sure without looking into the organizational hierarchy of any particular "brand" to see if it operates like this in a manner that meets most of the requirements set forth by the experts who put together the various lists of characteristics in this article.

The control imperatives of the leaders on the upper two or three levels of each group's organizational pyramid vary considerably. Some "hurt people hurt other people" because, on the persecutors' Drama Triangles, victimizing others is imperative so that they do not have to experience themselves as victims. The intended upshot of the victimizing is to bind the members all the way to the ninth level into Learned Helplessness & the Victim Identity even when it may not look like that from the outside or from the lower levels.

You can go look at all the various cult models in this article, of course. (And that will be instructive.) But at the bottom of it all, widespread evidence of Religious or Cultic Trauma Syndrome, the right-side-up pyramid and the upside-down triangle are the essential criteria.

In my experience, however, these involvements are "cause addictions." See Cult Membership as an Addiction Process... and a Process Addiction.

Added 01-15-2021:

I've read Eric Hoffer's The True Believer three times, along with a lot of other stuff. But Hoffer's book is enough by itself to explain the QAnon phenomenon as a transitional mechanism, a propaganda device utilized by radicals to radical-ize the minds of the frustrated and angry but unsuspecting and "clay-headed" in a way that moves them up what cognitive theorists called "ladders of abstraction."

That occurs in precisely the same manner as is seen in The Typical Path of Cult Involvement but -- as is addressed in that Facebook post -- outside the formal structure of a cult per se. The result, however, is pretty much the same, and is as described by Alexandra Stein in Terror, Love & Brainwashing: the QAnon "true believer" becomes the willing -- if unconscious -- tool of his manipulators.

It's all "divide & conquer.

Cult members tend to see pretty much everything as all good or all bad, all right or all wrong, all good or all evil, us vs. them, etc. QAnon finesses that first definition of cognitive “splitting” (in not-moses’s reply to the OP on that Reddit thread)...

...by effectively "delivering" the TBs to their "handlers" at the sixth, seventh or even eighth level on The Cultic Pyramid... at least long enough to manifest some of their handlers' anarchistic hopes and dreams.

And if one thinks that what I just wrote above is similar -- or identical -- to what takes place at the opposite end of the polarized political spectrum, they'd be exactly right.

(See also: Toch's Social Psychology of Social Movements on Cults & Political Parties.) 

Resources: Abgrall, Atack, Cushman, Delarue, Hoffer, Kramer & Alstad, Lifton (1981), Meerloo, Milgram, Ofshe & Singer, Riezler, Singer et al (1986), Stein, and Toch in A Basic Cult Library.