The Cult

Sometimes people call CrossFit a cult. That’s pretty dumb. I want to say, “Do you know what the definition of cult is?” I guess when people join a group and use a certain lingo or jargon, it has the audacity to make other people uncomfortable, and all of a sudden, it’s a cult.

It’s the jargon. People don’t like jargon. If CrossFitters talk about WODs and AMRAPs and metcons—Well, I don’t understand! Gack! It must be a cult!

Eleven years ago, I took this seminar called the Landmark Forum. If you look online, you’ll find their website, which is pretty cheesy—lots of phrases like “extraordinary life” and “design your future”—and other websites full of bloviating and the cyber-equivalent of people getting red-faced and throwing their hands in the air. Negative stuff.

I personally found the Landmark Forum both eye-rollingly self-helpy… and extremely helpy for myself. Swear to god, I use what I learned that weekend pretty much every day of my life.

But, in essence, the structure of the seminar is to call people on their bullshit six ways from Sunday, and people don’t like that. We like to wallow in our bullshit until we can’t smell it anymore, and then just call it ‘reality’. (Don’t get me wrong: I still have bullshit, but I can often spot it and work through it in a shorter amount of time than I used to.)

Anyway, you’ll see it called a cult, which, again, is super dumb because the corporation (yes, it’s a business—they make that pretty goddamn clear) that puts on the Landmark Forum is like: Here’s our course, and here’s how much it costs, and we have other courses you can take if you like that one. And here’s how much they cost.

As with CrossFit, if someone does the Landmark Forum and comes out talking about rackets or enrollment conversations or “empty and meaningless”, well, he must be getting brainwashed.

But every organization uses jargon. Every organization has vocabulary specific to the industry and acronyms that save time.

At my place of business, we talk about AYP, Gifted Service Provision, and Site-based. You non-teachers tell me what any of that means without looking it up. Kids have 504s, IEPs, and PEPs; they’re labeled EC, AIG, AU, ADD, ODD, and OLT (all right, that last one just means Obnoxious Little Turd).

I bet I wouldn’t understand half the vocabulary my friend, a doctor, uses with her colleagues in a given day. Or you with yours because you’re a lawyer and, to me, tort reform is what I’ve had to do to my fruit dessert recipe since going gluten-free.

Or because you’re an IT guy, and even though my brother-in-law has explained it a million times, I just don’t understand how fax machines work. You put a picture in a phone, and it breaks into ones and zeros and gets reconstituted in another phone two thousand miles away?!

No.

Not possible.

Elves.

Even outside the workplace, organizations use their own lingo. I bet your church does, and your family. There are things in the Scott family lexicon that an outsider would never understand. Tell me, what are ‘wooly bears’? What is something that might be ‘wapsed’, and where might it be ‘wapsed’?

And stuff you might understand, but if you didn’t know us, it’s possible you’d think we were mentally impaired. Like, we say we love our chother because when my sister was little, that’s what she said instead of ‘each other’. If two people speak the same words simultaneously, my siblings and I will certainly say, in a deep southern drawl, “Y’all must have ESPN!” because Mrs. Harris, our sophomore high school English teacher, seriously didn’t know the difference between extra-sensory perception and the highest-rated American TV sports network.

One of my groups of friends has a whole language we call The Worst. We say things like “also too”, use a lot of flat vowels, and waggle our fingers at the sky while proclaiming, “Their body temperature is quite low.” Because all that stuff means something to us.

But we have no charismatic leader; nobody’s driving a wedge between us and our families; we’re not forking over our life savings to the organization; and we certainly don’t think our bat-shit way is the only path to salvation.

So, can we cool it on calling groups cults?

Except Scientology. That shit is a cult.

P.S. If you’re curious, wooly bears are fuzzy footie pajamas that zip from ankle to neck, and something that might be wapsed is a wet towel. Where? On your bedroom floor.

And you’ll get in trouble for that.