Bad People, or Swept-Up People? On Complicity, Regret, and Whether We Owe a Second Chance

Part 5 of a 5-part series on cults, control, and the psychology of getting swept up. (Start with Part 1.)

I'll tell you the thing that started this whole series, the thing I couldn't quite shake.

It's that I keep feeling bad for people I probably shouldn't. I'll read about some guy who was the right hand to a famous fraud — a man who helped hurt a lot of people — and instead of contempt, what comes up is a quiet, stubborn he can't be that bad of a guy. And I've come to understand that reaction not as me being naive, but as me recognizing something. Because if you've read the first four parts, you know the punchline by now: the machinery that runs a cult, a toxic company, a high-control church, a political machine — it doesn't run on monsters. It runs on people. Ordinary, lonely, loyal, frightened, well-meaning people who got the oldest instinct in the human playbook pointed in the wrong direction.

Which leaves us with the question I've been circling for four installments, and it's the hardest one I know: the people who got swept up and did real harm — who recruited, enabled, covered up, hurt others while they were inside — are they bad people? And if they're not, or not simply — do we owe them a second chance?

I don't have a tidy answer. But I've got an honest one.

The series: Part 1 was the machinery; Part 2 the workplace; Part 3 religion; Part 4 politics. This is Part 5 — the reckoning.

The science of how good people do bad things

We have to start here, because everything else depends on it, and because our intuition is so badly wrong about it.

Our intuition says: I would never. I'd never brand another person, never rob a bank for a "revolution," never help cover up an abuser, never scream at a stranger from a moving car. And the research on this is almost insulting in how consistently it says: yes, you probably would, under the right conditions. Stanley Milgram's obedience studies found that 65% of ordinary people would deliver what they believed were dangerous shocks to a stranger, simply because an authority told them to — slipping, Milgram argued, into an "agentic state" where they no longer felt like the author of their own actions. Albert Bandura mapped the mental moves — "moral disengagement" — that let decent people quiet their own conscience: displacing responsibility onto the leader, diffusing it across the group, sanitizing the harm with euphemism, dehumanizing the target.

And sociologist Kathleen Blee, who spent years interviewing people in organized hate groups, found something that upends the whole "they must have been evil to begin with" story: most people don't join because they already hold monstrous beliefs. They "stumble into" these groups through ordinary social ties — a friend, a partner, a sense of belonging — and the extremism, in her words, is often the result of joining, not the cause. The belief hardens after the belonging. Read that twice. It means the person didn't walk in a monster. The group made one, one small compromise at a time — and it could do it to a lot more of us than we'd ever admit.

That's not an excuse. It's a diagnosis. And you can't do anything useful — legally, morally, or in your own heart — with a diagnosis you refuse to look at.

Were they responsible? The honest, uncomfortable middle

Here's where people want me to pick a lane, and I won't, because both lanes are lies.

Lane one: they had no choice — they were brainwashed, it wasn't really them. Lane two: they're grown adults, they chose it, no excuses. The truth lives in the miserable, unsatisfying middle, and the law has actually mapped it for us.

Because you'd think "I was brainwashed" would be a defense — and it turns out it mostly isn't. In United States v. Fishman, a federal court ruled that "coercive persuasion" — the technical version of the brainwashing defense — wasn't scientifically accepted enough to be admissible. The most famous test of it, Patty Hearst — kidnapped by a cult-like group and then filmed taking part in an armed bank robbery — ended in a conviction, despite a defense team arguing coercion with expert testimony. The coercion was real; the jury still held her responsible. (A president later commuted her sentence, and another pardoned her — society, in the end, split the difference.)

You can watch that same split-the-difference happen in real time in the NXIVM case. Sentencing Allison Mack, a first-line "master" in the group's abusive inner circle, the judge said something I think about a lot: "I don't doubt that you were manipulated and also felt captive" — and then sentenced her anyway, because being manipulated made her a victim and an accomplice at the same time. The leader, Keith Raniere, got 120 years and no mitigation. A cooperating member who did real harm but turned and helped bring him down got probation. The system, at its most careful, keeps trying to say the same thing: the coercion is real, and you are still responsible — it changes the sentence, not the verdict.

That's the honest frame for all of it. Reduced agency, not erased agency. Not villains. Not blameless. Both, uncomfortably, at once.

Not everyone in the room is equally guilty

I have to put one hard line down before my own compassion runs away with me, because "they were all swept up" can quietly become a way of excusing the wrong person.

Reduced agency applies to the follower who got caught in the machine. It does not apply equally to the person who built it. The guru who engineered the coercion, the executive who designed the culture of fear, the boss who deliberately isolated and frightened people so they'd comply — that person is a different moral animal than the twenty-two-year-old they love-bombed into a script. That's exactly why, in the NXIVM case, Keith Raniere got 120 years and no mitigation while manipulated members who turned got probation. It looks lopsided. It's actually the system getting something right: culpability runs on a gradient.

Picture it as concentric rings. At the center, the architect — the one who created the trap on purpose. Then the enforcers who ran it knowingly. Then the mid-level people who both suffered it and inflicted it on others. Then, at the outer edge, the rank-and-file who mostly just believed and belonged. Compassion for the outer rings is right and necessary. But it should not leak inward and soften how we see the center. The clearest moral line in this whole series was never "cult member versus normal person." It's the person who built the trap versus the people who fell into it — and keeping those two separate is how you stay compassionate without becoming a mark.

Real people, carrying real weight

Let me make that concrete, because it's easy to keep it abstract, and the abstraction is where we lose the humanity.

Leslie Van Houten was nineteen when she took part in the Manson Family murders. She spent more than five decades in prison and was paroled in 2023 — and somewhere in those decades she stopped defending it and started carrying it. "I feel absolutely horrible about it," she said, "and I have spent most of my life trying to find ways to live with it." That sentence is not the sentence of a monster. It's the sentence of a person who did a monstrous thing at nineteen, inside a machine built to make her, and then spent fifty years reckoning with the fact that she let it.

The NXIVM women say versions of the same thing. Lauren Salzman, testifying through tears about confining a young woman for nearly two years, called it "the worst thing I did." Allison Mack, in her sentencing letter, called following Raniere "the biggest mistake and greatest regret of my life." The survivors of Jonestown — the ones who got out, or were away that day — carry a guilt most of us can't imagine, not for what they did but for what their community did and what they couldn't stop. Even Mike Rinder, who ran Scientology's feared enforcement arm for decades before he left and spent his last years helping others get out, said his greatest regrets were the family-splitting policy he'd enforced on other people.

None of that undoes the harm. Van Houten's remorse does not give the LaBiancas back their parents. But it tells you something true and important: the capacity to do terrible things inside a group, and the capacity to become a person who can't live with having done them, exist in the same human being. That's not a paradox. That's just what people are.

What actually breaks the spell

So how does anyone come back from that? Not the way you'd think.

The research is clear that leaving is gradual, not a lightning bolt — the sociologist Helen Ebaugh mapped the universal stages of "becoming an ex" — and that walking out the door is not the same as changing your mind. John Horgan, who studies how people leave extremist groups, draws the line sharply: disengagement is a behavioral change; deradicalization is a cognitive one. You can leave the building and still believe every word. Getting the belief to loosen is the harder, slower work.

And here's the finding that undoes most people's assumptions about how you'd fix a "bad person": across story after story, what actually breaks the spell isn't being defeated in an argument. It's being shown unexpected kindness by the very people you were taught to hate. Megan Phelps-Roper left the Westboro Baptist Church — she'd picketed soldiers' funerals — because strangers on Twitter were patient and human with her until she couldn't hold the caricature anymore. Christian Picciolini walked away from the neo-Nazi movement he'd helped lead after the people he'd been taught to despise showed him compassion he felt he didn't deserve. Derek Black, raised to inherit the white-nationalist movement, changed his mind because a Jewish classmate kept inviting him to Shabbat dinner instead of writing him off. It's the very thing decades of research on the contact hypothesis predicts: it's very hard to keep hating a category of people while an actual person in that category is being kind to you.

Sit with what that means. The thing that pulls people out of the worst versions of the machinery is the opposite of what our instincts scream at us to do. Our instinct is to shun, cancel, write off. The evidence says the door out is held open by someone who refused to.

Two ends of the same broken spectrum

Here's the frame I keep coming back to, the one that ties this whole series together. Almost everyone who gets caught in one of these is somewhere on a single spectrum — and it's all the same wound, abandonment and rejection, just worn two different ways.

On one end are the people-pleasers: the ones who will bend all the way over to keep from being cast out, who comply and accommodate and stay far too long, because being abandoned feels like dying. On the other end are the antagonistic ones, who handle that identical terror by making absolutely sure that they're the one who gets to reject and abandon first — who grab control precisely so they can never be the one who's controlled. Different armor. Same fear underneath. And cults, high-control groups, and abusive people are devastatingly effective because they can pull in both ends at once: the pleaser who'll do anything to belong, and the would-be-somebody who'll do anything to be adored.

But watch what happens next, because it's the most hopeful and the most heartbreaking thing I know about all of this. Once the people-pleasers finally see the machinery, they tend to get free — the very sensitivity that made them easy to catch is what lets them feel that something's wrong and walk. The other end rarely does. Because getting free requires being able to say I was wrong — and the entire antagonistic strategy is built around never, ever being the one who's wrong.

So the people you root for hardest — the ones who were losers just like you, who lost something and went looking for it in the wrong place — a lot of them find the door. And the ones who got comfortable in their insecurities, who turned their wound into a weapon, mostly don't. That asymmetry is sad, and it's real, and I'd rather you understand it now than spend years of your life waiting by a door for someone who has no intention of walking through it.

Cult guilt: if the swept-up person was you

I need to slow down here, because this is the part that isn't abstract for a lot of the people reading it. Maybe you didn't lead anything. But you recruited a friend into the thing. You stayed quiet while someone got hurt. You said the cruel thing, cut off the family member, defended the indefensible, went along. And now you're out, and you have to live in the same head as the person who did that.

That specific pain has a name. Clinicians call it moral injury — the lasting wound of having done, or failed to stop, something that violated your own deepest values. It's different from ordinary trauma: it runs on guilt and shame rather than fear, and it's one of the most under-recognized things I see people quietly drowning in. And there's a crucial distinction inside it, one that psychologist June Tangney's research draws cleanly: the difference between guilt — "I did a bad thing" — and shame — "I am a bad thing." Guilt points toward repair: amends, accountability, change. Shame just points at the exits — hiding, numbing, despair. Almost all the healing work is helping a person move from the second sentence to the first.

Because here's what I most want you to take from five parts of this: you have to be able to hold both truths at once — "I did real harm" and "I was really manipulated" — without collapsing into either one. Collapse into "it wasn't my fault" and you never grow. Collapse into "I'm a monster" and you're too crushed to make anything right. The whole task is standing in the middle, where it's true that you were swept up and true that it was your hands, and building something honest from there. That is hard, specific, doable work — and the research says people don't just survive it, they can grow through it. It's also very hard to do alone, which is the entire reason people like me have jobs. Practically, the work tends to look like this: making genuine amends where amends are possible, and accepting — grief and all — the harm you cannot undo. It means treating yourself with what researchers call self-compassion — not to let yourself off the hook, but because the crushing shame that says "I'm irredeemable" is exactly what keeps a person stuck and unable to do any repair at all. Penance-forever helps no one, least of all the people you hurt. Honest accountability that you can actually live inside of does.

So — do we owe them a second chance?

Here's my actual answer, after all of it.

A second chance is not automatic, and it's not never. It's earned, and the thing that earns it is the one thing this whole series has been about: reckoning. There's a world of difference between the person who owns it — who can say plainly "I did that, it was wrong, here's what I've done since" — and the person who just rebrands: the apology that's really an attack, the "I was a victim too" deployed to dodge accountability instead of to explain it. You learned that move back in Part 1; it's DARVO in a redemption costume. The tell isn't whether someone was manipulated. Almost everyone was. The tell is what they do with that fact — use it to understand their harm, or use it to excuse it.

So: grace for the person doing the work. Boundaries for the one who isn't. You can believe, fully, that someone was swept up and not responsible in the way the leader was — and decide you're not the one who has to let them back into your life. Compassion and consequences are not opposites. Understanding why someone hurt people is not the same as owing them your trust.

And the hardest part, the part I sit with myself: some of them are never going to take the chance. The people-pleasers, once they see the machinery, tend to get free — that's most of you reading this. But the ones on the other end of that spectrum, the ones who got comfortable in their insecurities, often never do the reckoning at all. You can hope for them. You can leave the door open, the way somebody once left it open for Megan Phelps-Roper. But you cannot walk through it for them. In the end, the only person who can decide to change is the one who was swept up — and some, sadly, the ones you rooted for hardest, just won't.

That's not a failure of your compassion. It's the limit of it. And knowing that limit — being able to grieve for someone and still keep your own two feet on solid ground — might be the most important thing in this entire series.

Where this leaves us

Five parts, one point: this machinery is not "them." It's us. It runs on the best things about being human — our need to belong, to believe, to be part of something — and it can catch almost anyone who's lonely or frightened or hungry for meaning at the wrong moment. Understanding it isn't about learning to sneer at the people who got caught. It's about three things: recognizing the machinery when it comes for you, forgiving yourself precisely and honestly if it already did, and extending grace to others wisely — open-hearted, but not a sucker.

We started with a quote about a bunch of losers who'd all lost something. That's still where I'd end it. The people in these stories — the followers, the enablers, the ones who woke up and the ones who never will — most of them were just that. People who lost something, and went looking for it in the wrong place, and got used for the looking. That deserves clear eyes. It also deserves, I think, a little bit of mercy. Both at once. Same as everything else.