This Could Be A Cult | S1E4 | "We've Always Been in the Cult"

When was the last time you got genuinely upset on behalf of someone famous? Heart rate elevated. Fingers moving. Ready to post.This episode is for that moment.This Could Be A Cult goes somewhere much less comfortable than it looks from the outside — because celebrity worship isn't just a cultural quirk or a harmless obsession. It's a rehearsal. Every fandom, every parasocial attachment, every act of tribal loyalty performed on behalf of someone who doesn't know your name is a dry run for something with a much more formal structure.The only thing missing is a compound. And sometimes even that shows up.In this episode, April Rain traces the machinery of manufactured devotion from Rudolph Valentino's funeral to the Discord server — and lays out exactly what fan culture is installing in you while you think you're just enjoying something:The first lesson: Tribal identity as a moral position. Your taste is your identity. Your identity requires defense. Defense requires a them.The second lesson: How to override your own critical faculty when the group provides the correct interpretation — and why most fans do it without ever clocking that it happened.The third lesson: Loyalty measured in sacrifice. How much you spend. How far you travel. How many formats you buy. The most efficient retention mechanism in the cult toolkit — and the music industry built it first.The fourth lesson: How the figure at the center becomes the arbiter of your identity. You came in loving the music. You leave having organized yourself around a person who never knew your name.Then April reads two sets of quotes — one from documented cult exit interviews, one from fan psychology research — and asks you to tell which is which.You can't.There's also the personal reckoning April didn't plan to share: the artist she can't quite name, the fandom she disappeared into, the eighteen months she spent reaching for a reframe. And the question she finally had to sit with — what am I actually protecting here?The answer wasn't the celebrity.It was never the celebrity.Loving an artist is not a problem. The machinery around that love is not neutral. It was always training. Every cult leader knows this. The question is whether you do.📬 Have evidence? Send it. Submit your own story — the moment you caught the mechanism running, the group that cost too much to leave, the belief you performed before you believed it — at the link below:This Could Be A Cult: Listener Submission FormThis Could Be A Cult is a podcast about the way pop culture grooms us for cult-like thinking — exploring cult psychology, parasocial relationships, fan culture, celebrity worship, social conditioning, and the mechanisms of influence hiding in plain sight. New main episodes drop Tuesdays.Hosted by April Rain. Part of The Downpour podcast network.