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I would be a terrible cult member. After all, I overanalyse everything and take nothing at face value. I'd be the one undermining the whole enterprise with my niggling doubts and fears. The cult leader would despair of me.
He (it's always a HE) would eye me warily while I kept asking questions.
"Sorry! I've got a question about your British Royal Family theory. When you say they are 'reptiles from another planet', do you mean like Barney the Dinosaur or the Woman who ate the Hamster in that sci-fi series V?' "
Or: "Sorry, yes I KNOW, me again. It's just, if the Rothschilds really do rule the world, why did the Goldsmith who's actually married to a Rothschild, lose the London Mayoral Election'?
Or: "One last question. Why is it OK for you to sleep with all the female members of the sect while we only get to have sex with you, Oh Great One?"
We’re too ballsy, individual, opinionated and probing
I don't think cults are for Jewish women. We are too ballsy, individual, opinionated and probing. We aren't able to do anything without a 20-minute debate. Does this make us difficult? Nah. I take comfort in the words of Rabbi Jonathan Sacks: "In Judaism, to be without question is not a sign of faith but a lack of depth".
Cults are playing on my mind at the moment. I'm reading Wunderkind Emma Cline's first novel The Girls and it's got under my skin. It's a fiction loosely based on the terrible events involving egomaniac Charles Manson and his young female acolytes. Manson's dangerous charisma saw damaged, young, middle-class women flocking to hand over everything to him and join his quasi-commune The Family. Their minds, bodies and souls were up for grabs.
Cline's book is set in 1969 California and focuses on a similar version of events, following teenager Evie, who becomes entranced with the ethereal hippie girls living on a run-down ranch presided over by a flawed drifter, would-be pop star and delusional Christ figure.
Like Manson's own "girls", they go on to commit terrible murders on his behalf. They are his personal Furies unleashed on to an unsuspecting world. A world, he persuades them, that's run by a shadowy "Elite", whose aim is to suppress the honest truth-speakers from fulfilling ambitions.
With Cline's book as a backdrop, I've been watching the political leadership battles play out and am unable to believe in any one of the players. It's all becoming increasingly frenzied: the rhetoric, the conspiracies, the paranoia, the tone of "you're either with us or against us". Friends of mine have been forced to flee all social media because of the bullying.
It must be very comforting to have no doubts, to be swept up in oratory with absolute certainty in someone and their ideals. Instead, I'm scared by those I sometimes cross paths with. They're the ones who hurl abuse if you point out things that seem bothersome.
For example, if Jeremy Corbyn can criticise Cameron's "mockery of an honours list", he must surely be open to the same treatment, with questions over the dubious timing of his own offering of a peerage to Shami Chakrabarti.
I'd also like to know why Baroness Royall wasn't even allowed to publish her report on antisemitism within the party, and ask Donald Trump and his baying mob why he's pandering to such a vile right wing.
I'm frightened by the mad cries of a "Blairite Zio Tory Trotsky Conspiracy" every time someone asks a difficult or penetrating question … of anyone (see Owen Jones).
Don't conspiracy theories belong in cults, not modern thinking political parties? Hurling abuse and threatening violence in the name of a leader in the belief you are supporting him or her is cult-ish behaviour. Let's take a leaf out of Rabbi Sacks's book and go for depth. Ask the difficult questions. Always.