How We Got Here
The Formation of a Population Built Not to Know
They were not a failure of individual rationality. They were a product.
How We Got Here traces how American formation systems — theological, educational, and institutional — spent roughly fifty years systematically producing a population psychologically primed for high-control group dynamics. The central argument is that this was not a matter of individual susceptibility. It was deliberate institutional architecture.
That architecture is traceable: through theological compliance systems that taught unquestioning deference to authority as a spiritual virtue, through anti-majoritarian political design that concentrated power by fragmenting popular will, through a consent infrastructure that runs from Edward Bernays through Roger Ailes to the algorithmic media environments of the present.
"This was not a matter of individual susceptibility. The population built not to know was built deliberately, by institutions that understood exactly what they were doing."
The book's analytical argument is grounded in the Organizational Coercion Index — a large-scale application of Daniella Mestyanek Young and Amy Reed's framework from The Culting of America (Otterpine, 2026) across hundreds of American organizations. The dataset applies a dual-metric scoring system across ten criteria, producing independent assessments that allow systematic comparison across institutional categories that are rarely examined together.
A megachurch and a media company and a federal agency score on the same instrument. The divergence is informative. So is the overlap.
The result is a body of evidence that allows the book's argument to move from historical claim to measurable pattern. The correlation between authority-axis position and composite cultiness score is 0.561. This is not a coincidence. It is the architecture, documented.
Key Finding
r = 0.561 correlation between authority-axis political position and composite cultiness score across hundreds of American organizations. The formation pipeline is measurable. It has been running for fifty years. The dataset shows what it produced.
The book documents three interlocking formation pipelines — not as conspiracy, but as institutional logic playing out over decades:
The Religious Formation Pipeline
From prosperity theology and biblical inerrancy movements to the contemporary evangelical formation system — a multi-decade project that transformed American Protestantism from a heterodox theological tradition into a compliance architecture.
The Political Formation Pipeline
From the Powell Memo through the think-tank infrastructure and algorithmic media — a consent infrastructure built specifically to produce and maintain a population that could not be reached by counter-evidence.
The Structural Design
The structural design that made all of the above possible: the mechanisms by which minority rule became institutionally sustainable, and the population psychology that made it politically viable.
The dataset applies Young and Reed's ten-criterion framework across organizations spanning religious denominations, political movements, military formations, federal agencies, corporate cultures, media institutions, and educational systems. Two independent instruments produce scores that are never converted between each other — their divergence is itself analytically meaningful.
The first instrument is behavioral: each of Young and Reed's ten criteria — charismatic leadership, sacred assumptions, isolation, exploitation of labor, and so on — is scored on how present and intense it is. The composite cultiness score referenced above comes entirely from this instrument: it multiplies how many of the ten criteria show up at all against how intensely they show up on average, producing a single 0–100 figure.
The second instrument is structural, drawn from psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton's framework for psychological totalism — how completely an organization controls thought, emotion, and identity, independent of which specific coercive behaviors are present. An organization can score high on the behavioral checklist while scoring low on totalism if it still leaves people real exit pathways; another can score low on individual behaviors while scoring high on totalism if what remains of a member's life is totally controlled. Lifton's score is reported alongside the composite score, never merged into it — the gap between the two is itself part of what the dataset shows.
The framework is publicly documented. The dataset is published and freely available in the dataset explorer.
Written by a U.S. Marine Corps veteran whose career in logistics and information systems gave him a direct view of what happens when institutions fail to tell people what they need to hear.
Forthcoming
Publication details to be announced.