Wealth & Money Quote by Keith Henson

Henson’s line lands like a scalpel: it treats “small cults” not as exotic spiritual curiosities but as measurable economic drag. The intent is corrective. People tend to imagine fringe groups as too marginal to matter, a niche problem for a few “gullible” individuals. Henson flips that framing by counting the spillover. Victims don’t just lose money; they lose time, job performance, relationships, and often the ability to make independent decisions. That damage propagates outward in invoices and missed shifts, in parents paying for “seminars,” in friends pulled into unpaid labor, in employers absorbing burnout and sudden disappearances.

The subtext is a scientist’s impatience with cultural storytelling. “Cult” is usually discussed in moral language (evil leaders, naïve followers) or lurid spectacle. Henson recasts it as a system that externalizes costs onto everyone nearby. The phrase “world economy” is deliberately overwide, a provocation meant to force the reader to stop treating coercive groups as private lifestyle choices. It’s also a quiet warning: when harms are distributed, no single person has enough incentive to fight back, so the ecosystem persists.

Then comes the punchline: “credit-card companies.” It’s wry, almost cynical. By putting corporate creditors on the same list as families, he signals how cults monetize devotion through modern financial plumbing. Belief isn’t just manipulated; it’s financed. The line’s power is its refusal to romanticize: exploitation doesn’t need massive numbers to be “serious” if the mechanism reliably converts human vulnerability into predictable, billable losses.