One characteristic of cults is how they get defined and define themselves. They define themselves in conjunction with everyone "outside" but it goes further as

One characteristic of cults is how they get defined and define themselves. They define themselves in conjunction with everyone "outside" but it goes further as "outside" itself gets defined partly by them and partly by others. For example, if a bunch of newspapers says "X organisation is a cult" then it provokes a kind of self-reinforcing reaction in the organisation to separate themselves more from those not in the group. The group becomes more strong by defining itself in comparison to those outside the group. A member of a group finds their membership and sense of belonging stronger when people outside the group separate them. Polarisation isolates the poles but it also strengthens them. It's therefore kind of one sided to say that a cult isolates a member from the outside world, although they do actually do that. It also gives a potential path away from dangerous cults to be formed - it's about allowing groups to exist within ones life and allowing people to move around - a kind of tolerance for the other or the margins. Outside of cults, 2 examples: A good example of the group solidification mechanism is in the parallel with US politics where people in either sides think it's the other side that polarises politics. "I'm not an extremist you are". There's also an example of Reddit about subreddits and communities. Reddit organisation labelled subreddits "communities" where before the labelling the people who visited subreddits didn't think of themselves as a community. "communities" were created to isolate certain problematic subreddits who indeed had a unique group identity. Quarantine was introduced at the same time to perform the isolation. Subreddits turned into communities by becoming identified as such from within and outside but also the communities own self-culture, moderation rules became stronger because they were labelled as such. I can recommend Spying in Guru Land for a book about cults. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2487851.Spying_in_Guru_Land https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2487851.Spying_in_Guru_L...