Cultish

There’s a religious power in quotegrams that far predates social media. Our love of a pithy adage in square form is connected to the needlepointed psalms on display in reli
gious aunts’ powder rooms. But it even goes back further than that, to—can you guess the era?—the Protestant Reformation, when there was a big shift in focus away from religious imagery (stained glass, Last Supper frescoes) and onto text. “There was an increasing discomfort with the ambiguity you get from images,” commented Dr. Marika Rose, a Durham University research fellow in digital theology, in Grazia magazine. “So a Protestant valuing of the Bible made it a much more text-based religion.” Ever since, our culture has looked to snack-size proverbs for guidance and gospel, convinced that when it comes to written quotes, what you read is what you get. On the internet, however, a mysterious epigram with no clear source can serve as an on-ramp leading seekers to something much more sinister.

“Being in a top management position, if you’re not careful, you go into an echo chamber,” Kets de Vries explained. “People are going to tell you what you want to hear, so you start to get away with your madness. And that madness becomes institutionalized very quickly.”

According to ex-Amazonians, maxims often repeated around the office include: “When you hit the wall, climb the wall” and “Work comes first, life comes second, and trying to find the balance comes last.” As Bezos himself wrote in a 1999 shareholder letter, “I constantly remind our employees to be afraid, to wake up every morning terrified.”