INTERVIEW — Aug 8, 21:37
Interviewee: 35 years old, male, main language Spanish, speaking in English, lives in Germany, Mexican nationality.
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Interviewer: Perfect, all right. So, the main question is: when you hear the word cult, what comes to your mind?
Interviewee: My first thing that comes is probably the Ku Klux Klan, because — yeah, stereotypes, that way.
Interviewer: Interesting — that's what, you know, because of the movies, I'd say?
Interviewee: Yeah, yeah, but yeah — nothing more than that.
Interviewer: So the Ku Klux Klan — for you, what aspects do you think make it a cult?
Interviewee: Because it's, like, from the stereotype — particularly against, you know, a certain topic, and it's like — kind of a privilege to be in it. They sell it that way, okay. And, top — like, not everybody can be there, and, like, kind of a higher status. Yes, if you want to call it that way. And, yeah — say, like, cults — they're just like a really, really niche, small group that's against a topic. And I always think, from a bad perspective, that they are getting something that they shouldn't — being against something, that way.
Interviewer: So, if I understand well, the main feature for you is this — opposing something?
Interviewee: The way I've been shown it, like a stereotype — it's because it's like a privileged, small group of people — like, how do you call this — the one where there's only one dollar bill, you know, like this Illuminati thing, you know. It's not that it's a cult, but when I hear "cult," it's like something small, not good — I always think a cult is not the best group to belong to. No, no, okay — that's my personal opinion.
Interviewer: Yeah, yeah, of course.
Interviewee: And, and — also religious — the religious part, we probably didn't touch on that one, but a cult can also be extremely religious, in a way that it's a cult if it's a religious brand. It can also be called a cult if it's extremely into a certain religious topic, right? You know, like, these people have — I don't know — thousands of children, because it's [encouraged] by nature. And —
Interviewer: Yeah, yeah, do you have an example in mind?
Interviewee: Not that it's necessarily a cult, but — I don't mean a particular religion, but, you know, like these that are things of the church, whatever you call it, temple, whatever religion — but the cult, when they are so extreme on that religion — you know, I can also belong to that religion, but that's like a thousand kilometers apart from — exactly, that's the difference — I believe in it, and they're more extreme, in the sense of practice and ideology and all of that. I would say, okay, they also practice the ideology so strictly that they kind of raise their people to not know anything else than that, and they're also not open to the world. You know, an example — it's not a cult, a bit far from the topic, but — in Mexico there was this "La Luz del Mundo" religion, up in Guadalajara.
Interviewer: What's it called? "Luz del Mundo"? "Los del Mundo"?
Interviewee: Yeah, it's a religion that was created in Guadalajara, Mexico, and they have a church, like, I don't know, an impressive building, a lot of money there, and the people, the community — not a cult, because "community" versus "cult" — you know, like a bunch of people, and this was, of course, a broader topic. But there was an extreme part of the religion where the people who grew up there — like, if your parents were there, you grew up there, and you don't know anything else than that, so anything outside of that is wrong. And it's a bit of — okay, an extreme part of any kind of religion, whatever you believe in, you know.
Interviewer: So, then, if you were to compare this church with the Ku Klux Klan — how are they different, or how are they similar, also, because of the extreme way of practicing their beliefs?
Interviewee: Okay, no — that can be — this goes more into the religious and against a particular topic, but in a super extreme way. Yeah, no — talking about back in the day, again — this Ku Klux Klan thing is really more like a movie stereotype of what a cult means, because probably this is how I learned what the word means, you know — that can be the first thing that came to my mind when you say the word.