"Excuse me, do you have a moment to spare?"
That's generally how it starts. You walk up to someone who appears troubled, lay on the charm, make a connection, tell them what they want to hear, become their best friend, and then about a year down the line they'll be in full-blown worship of Gyarn the Goat Redeemer.
What, you haven't heard of Gyarn? The savior of mankind? The hallowed horned mammal? The great guardian goat God of the generation, harbinger of the apocalypse, and holder of the 17 keys to heaven?
Well, that's probably for the best. I mean, objectively speaking all of this sounds ridiculous, and a person who buys into any kind of strange goat deity would have to be a special brand of idiot or in need of some sort of mental help, right?
Wrong.
People who think they're too smart or self-aware to be recruited into a cult are exactly the type of people that are easiest to recruit.
Oh yeah, I guess I didn't mention that. My name is Sain Spriggs, I'm 18, and I'm a cult recruiter. Well, a part-time cult recruiter. One of the best. I don't say that to brag or anything, it's just a fact. My success rate is 100 percent; every time I approach someone with the intent to recruit them into my cult they become a follower.
I guess that makes me seem like a bad person. From an outside point of view I'm approaching people, altering their beliefs, and even taking their money (as the cult does in fact have a membership fee after the initial 30 day free trial). Other people would see this as worsening the lives of those around them.
But let me put things under a different light. Suppose you're an insurance salesman with a product that you know is worse than your competitors'. Surely you've still got to make money to feed your family (for the sake of the analogy you have a lovely wife named Karen and 2 darling daughters named Farnese and Fernese. You guys also sucked at naming kids.) Anyway you'd still try to sell your crappy product because you benefit from it, despite someone else being worse off, and you'd do this by making these potential customers believe that they were getting the better product. And from constantly telling people that they're better off with your product maybe even you would start to believe that your product is better. Or maybe you quit your crappy salesman job and started working as the head of a crappy pharmaceutical company. Then you might be more willing to increase drug prices in order to increase the salaries of your employees, despite the consumers having to pay more for the drugs that give them life.
In this way my job as a cult recruiter isn't really that much morally worse than many other jobs that society generally accepts.
Besides, being in a cult really isn't all that bad. What's so bad about a bunch of like-minded individuals getting together to have a good time expressing their beliefs? As long as they're not hurting anyone else, even if they do have weird practices or unconventional beliefs should these people really be shunned from the rest of society?
Looking at it from my perspective are you now starting to realize that what I do isn't really so bad?
Well, you shouldn't be.
If at any point in hearing me out you've lessened your initial disdain for the word "cult" then you're the easiest brand of sucker there is. To put it into the perspective of how much of a mindless sap you are, if we had met in person in 5 minutes I would have convinced you to attend a seminar on the many lives of Gyarn and you'd be singing hallelujah for the sake of your new savior.
Ok, maybe I'm exaggerating a bit, but here's my point; peoples beliefs aren't as set in stone as they think they are, and I'm particularly good at manipulating them.
But let me make one thing absolutely clear. Just because I work for a cult doesn't mean I believe in all that crap. I fully realize that my cult's philosophies are some of the dumbest things that have ever been created by humans. And the one at the center of it all is my dad.
Harold Spriggs, my father and founder of The Church of Capricious Redemption. He's... interesting.
It all started 22 years ago when my dad had a dream. In this dream God spoke to him, telling him the true history of the world. God then told my father to quit his job as CEO of the company he'd built, move to the city, and preach to the depraved masses his 667 Codes, an excruciating long list of religious laws and practices that the true believers abide by. These codes range in insanity from #32 "Thou shall not kill unless God deems it necessary," which in my opinion would be much less unsettling without the last part, and #568 "Thou shall not consume dairy on a Wednesday," which seems a bit too unnecessarily specific. And he obeyed. With these codes in mind my father worked tirelessly to amass a following in the name of his lord and savior. In his first 2 years he had about 30 people join his church, one of such people being my mom, and by the time I was 15 there were around 500.
This is where I come in. During the summer of my 15th year of existence I needed a job, so me and my dad struck up a deal where I'd get paid based on the number of people I recruited to the ever so valiant cause.
I'm just in it for the cash.
I mean think about it, it isn't unreasonable for a person to give around 1000 dollars of their wealth to their church over the course of a year. For that they get to take part in the fun church activities, and they even get to visit the big guy in the sky himself when they die. All for the low price of 83 dollars a month! Sounds like a pretty good deal to me. Therefore if I'm able to recruit 100 people, and lets say that my commission is about half of what they pay to the church, that's at least 50,000 dollars a year directly to me. And that's only 100 people. Plus a handful of these people might invite more people into our little club, which in turn invites more cash into my wallet.
Anyway now I'm 18, and since then the Church has gone from 500 to 8000 followers, almost exclusively due to my involvement.
I mentioned before that I was good at this, and that's mainly because of two things. First I am easily able to read people. Expressions, movements, posture, speech patterns. All of these things convey the desires, emotional state, sense of self worth, and fears of those that I attempt to recruit. With this knowledge it is just a matter of telling people what they want to hear, and they'll happily join the cult.
Although I would never tell someone that I'm talking to them on the behalf of a cult. Nobody wants to join a cult. I mean you'd have to be really messed up to one day just wake up and think, "Hey, I want to worship something fun and new, just for the hell of it".
People that join cults are always unaware of the fact that what they joined was indeed a cult.
The key is to make people think that they're joining a hot new club where it's easy to meet new people. They need to think it's a totally normal thing to do like watching grown men tackling each other for a ball in their spare time or dressing your 6 year old daughter up like a supermodel and campaigning across the country through various beauty pageants for toddlers. Yeah, normal.
The second reason why I'm good at what I do is that I'm very attractive.
Like really attractive. Relatively tall without being too tall, medium length wavy blonde hair, blue-green eyes (two of them to be exact), thin yet muscular, and always dressed to impress.
I'm the kind of attractive that would make your grandmother say, "ohh if only I were 70 years younger" or the kind that would make the star of a football team say, "I'm not gay, but..." You get the point, I look good.
This is important for a cult recruiter that's going to be approaching strangers in the middle of the day on the street. Think about it, would you rather be approached by sweaty Greg or hunky exotic athlete Eduardo? Well jokes on you because Greg is only sweaty because he went on a 10K run and Eduardo is a 7 foot tall sumo wrestler with a neck tattoo.
But you know what I mean; attractive people have it much easier in general. Life is so easy if you're good-looking, and if you don't think that's true then you're clearly not good-looking enough to reap the benefits.
This attribute of mine, when applied to my noble profession, causes people to open up to me more easily, and be more willing to join in on something that I am a part of. It makes people feel special to have someone so beautiful take interest in them.
I suppose I've talked up myself enough, but now you know why I have a 100 percent success rate. I mean imagine if the person of your dreams came up to you out of nowhere on the street and started asking you about your interests, which he or she also shares. Now imagine that this person gives you their number and asks you to hang out with them.
You might just be willing to go.
