Quit the Cult

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Kishkumen
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Quit the Cult

Post by Kishkumen »

There are plenty of people out there who can turn just about any organization into their cult and use their cult to make fellow members and outsiders absolutely miserable. These are the people who work a salaried 40hour/week job without overtime who nevertheless work 70 hours a week and police when their colleagues arrive at and depart from work. These are the people who pray about which can of beans to buy at the grocery store. These are the tribalists who only see tit-for-tat and cast a blind eye to sensible principles.

Facts do not matter to them. Laws do not matter to them. Only the object of their cultish obsession matters, which provides them the sledgehammer they will take to everyone who gets in their way. Devotion to the cult and the power trip are, I think, one and the same. Uncomplicated, obsessive devotion is the power cult members wield against others. People respond to loyalty and devotion, and they have a hard time questioning it. We should be on our guard against zealots, but too often their excessive zeal is treated as a virtue.

In the LDS Church the cult member is all about being unreasoningly devoted to the prophet and the literal truth of all LDS claims. It is about defending the LDS position against all evidence and arguments to the contrary. It is about calling out those whose minds and character prevent them from competing in zeal with the truly devoted cult members.

In the GOP right now it is all about Trump. If anyone does anything that looks like it is aimed at Trump, no matter how justified, how legal, how much in the interests of the country, that person is the enemy of Trump and by extension an enemy of the cult members. These enemies of Trump must, in the view of cult members, be taken down. The cult members have the rest of America living in fear, and that is exactly what they wanted. Not only do they need Trump, they also use Trump. The line between the two is hard to distinguish, if it indeed can be.

Maybe that is the attraction. As long as they stick with Trump as a group, they can feel satisfied that the rest of the country is worried about what they might do next. That lever keeps the GOP in Trump's pocket. And from there the rest of the country is hit with Trump's nonsense. Without the GOP, Trump would have nothing. But because he holds enough cult members in the GOP, he owns the GOP, and thus the entire country continues to be anxious about the loss of democracy.

And this is, in my view, the result of the cult phenomenon. Devotion to Trump is a weapon. He was chosen as everything decent, rational people would hate and fear, and loyalty to him has thus become a kind of superpower against decency and reason. Decency and reason had become so soiled by cowardice and greed that they were abandoned by those who were least served by the system. Now decency and reason have been abandoned for vulgarity and corruption, which are held as being good for at least being empty of hypocrisy and certainly for being effective in driving others to distraction.

I hate to make a dark prediction, but I fear that only the shock of atrocity will sate the cult members and allow equilibrium to be reestablished. I don't say this because it is Trump we are talking about. I say this because we are talking about a cult. And, at the end of the day, this might be what a cult truly is. A cult is not a place where people are victimized by an abusive leader. A cult is a place where a personality is used by the group to commit atrocities. Once the atrocities are committed, they can claim they were brainwashed by the dear leader.

And all they need is a dear leader. Any dear leader. No matter how buffoonish or dignified, no matter how gorgeous or ugly, no matter how pure or corrupt, no matter how genius or stupid. The dear leader is the vessel through which the cult members wield power over each other and others. The leader is the handle of the weapon. The blade of the weapon is the power of the group and the fear others have of the group and its leader.

It is when the blade tastes enough blood to make the group sick on its own gorey banquet that they will wake up, be unable to face what they did, and pretend like it was all just a nightmare that they woke up from.

What is also worrisome is that the enemies of the cult are drawn into cultlike behavior on account of their fear of the cult. Remember: the cult is not one organization. The cult is a condition that people participate in, that drives their state of mind and actions. We can't just say the cult is the GOP without recognizing the cultism on America's Left. It is also there, and also frightening. The zealots are locked in battle with the zealots, dragging the rest of us along, until inevitably the zealots get what they really thirsted for: blood. Whose blood does not matter.

People must quit the cult to prevent disaster. My prediction is that they will not quit but will justify themselves all the way to the feast of blood.
“If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about the answers.”~Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow
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Manetho
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Re: Quit the Cult

Post by Manetho »

Kishkumen wrote:
Sat Aug 13, 2022 4:54 pm
I hate to make a dark prediction, but I fear that only the shock of atrocity will sate the cult members and allow equilibrium to be reestablished. I don't say this because it is Trump we are talking about. I say this because we are talking about a cult. And, at the end of the day, this might be what a cult truly is. A cult is not a place where people are victimized by an abusive leader. A cult is a place where a personality is used by the group to commit atrocities. Once the atrocities are committed, they can claim they were brainwashed by the dear leader.

And all they need is a dear leader. Any dear leader. No matter how buffoonish or dignified, no matter how gorgeous or ugly, no matter how pure or corrupt, no matter how genius or stupid. The dear leader is the vessel through which the cult members wield power over each other and others. The leader is the handle of the weapon. The blade of the weapon is the power of the group and the fear others have of the group and its leader.
This echoes an analysis of the alt-right that I saw a few years back, which argues that the internet has enabled the alt-right to create the same psychological effects as a cult, but without the formal structure of a cult, thus allowing them to radicalize people while most participants in the process maintain plausible deniability. The whole video is worth watching, but I've linked specifically to the last few, most salient minutes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e-MP_yOHiV0&t=1924s
Ian Danskin wrote:So if you can encourage a degree of authoritarian sentiment in people, get them wanting nothing more than to be ensconced in a totalist system that will take their agency away from them, putting them in the orbit of an authoritarian leader, but no leader presents themself, can you just kind of… appoint one? Like, if you don't have a leader, can you just find an authoritarian and treat him like one? And if he doesn't give you enough directives, can you just make some up? And if you don't have enough recruiters, can you just find a conservative who speaks in thought-terminating clichés mainly just because he thinks they win arguments, or find a conservative who speaks in meaningless diatribes because he genuinely thinks he's making sense, and then maneuver those speeches and videos in front of the people you want to recruit?
I think it also fits with my own characterization of the right wing in general as a feedback loop. Conservative media outlets — whether they're Fox News, OANN, Alex Jones, or the various online platforms that Danskin focuses on — become more and more radical to keep their audiences happy, while those audiences become more and more radicalized by the propaganda they surround themselves with. At this point, the politicians are largely just along for the ride. Trump himself is a special case. He is, at bottom, a narcissist, incapable of caring about anyone except himself and obsessed with boosting his own ego, but bullying people is one of his favorite ways of doing that. His genuine, instinctive love of bullying connected with the authoritarian tendencies of the conservative base in a way that cynical panderers like Ted Cruz could never match, and that was enough to allow him to fill the "leader" position. But he is too self-absorbed and too much of a short-term thinker to truly be in charge.

I agree with you that I don't see this fever breaking. Even if Trump were to die of natural causes, someone else would slide into the "leader" slot. Shutting down the propaganda outlets could disrupt the feedback loop, but with the United States' vigorous free-speech protections, that would be very difficult to do. I fully expect there to be greater violence than we've already seen, and the thing about violent conflicts is that they're highly unpredictable.
Last edited by Manetho on Tue Nov 01, 2022 2:11 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Some Schmo
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Re: Quit the Cult

Post by Some Schmo »

Manetho wrote:
Sun Aug 14, 2022 3:46 pm
This echoes an analysis of the alt-right that I saw a few years back, which argues that the internet has allowed the alt-right to create the same psychological effects as a cult, but without the formal structure of a cult, thus allowing them to radicalize people while allowing most participants in the process to maintain plausible deniability. The whole video is worth watching, but I've linked specifically to the last few, most salient minutes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e-MP_yOHiV0&t=1924s
I started watching that where you'd marked it and ended up going to the beginning and watching it all. Man, that was interesting, and it helped explain a lot of the behavior we see here from certain posters.

Thanks for linking it.
Religion is for people whose existential fear is greater than their common sense.

The god idea is popular with desperate people.
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