Cults running wild

Originally posted on: https://invertedwheel.wordpress.com/2019/06/30/cults-running-wild/

The atomisation* of today’s individual combined with the success of the western world, which has removed all strife from modern societal living is creating an ever growing mass of people stuck in an infantile state of arrested development. This phenomenon is exacerbated by resent technological and political developments, as well as the emergence of bulldozer parents determined to level any and all obstacles from little Jay and Jane’s way, making their lives even more lacking in any actual challenge. Then there are the corporations and governments, both of which are benefiting from this development, since weak, scared and incapable people are in constant need of assistance in order to cope with even the most mundane of tasks. The corporations provide the services and products without of which these addled individuals couldn’t get a microwave meal ready and into their systems, and the ever expanding nanny state is required to shield them from the ever gnawing feeling of inadequacy at the core of them.

All of this plays its part in creating a society that slowly increases in mental and emotional issues. Large proportion of these psychological problems stem from the mostly unconscious understanding that modern people in such a deferred state are extremely vulnerable to situational change, while at the same time the situation itself is veritably unstable and unsustainable, particularly in the long run. This sometimes conscious but mostly unconscious realisation fills the individual in the modern world with anxiety, dissatisfaction and heightened insecurity about the future, causing in turn hyper sensitivity to perceived dangers, real or imagined, that can easily be exploited by actors capable of profiting from the situation. It also causes the said individual to be on a constant lookout for safe havens in which to crawl in order to garner some solace and peace of mind.

This dynamic again works to create the perfect consumer. Increasingly psychologically tied to the corporations and their products, unless by some miracle the individual is able to free themselves from this circumstance and create some autonomy. This of course need not ever happen. Man is an incomplete being, only developing, let alone completing, himself through arduous self-examination and effort. As many religious and spiritual orders throughout the ages have stated, most people are not willing or able, especially without guidance, to go through such an endeavour and work to attain this nebulous goal. From this follows that the corporations and other organisations benefiting from the situation, are in no hurry to change their strategy away from instigating addiction after addiction and dependency upon dependency on the populace in order to make money and acquire power.

Psychological safe havens and cults

Examples of psychological safe havens people use to escape their inner feelings and weaknesses abound. Some clear ones are alcohol, drugs, social media, pornography, games and other forms of entertainment, food (overeating) and currently gaining steam, technology. Technology is fast revealing itself to be the greatest deceiver of all, facilitating other self-deceptions by telling humans the oldest of lies, that men can become gods by their own hand. But exactly the opposite seems to be true, especially in spiritual terms. Human beings are becoming weaker and weaker in themselves and ever more infantile and dependent on systems and mechanisms designed to sustain them. And all of this is great for the corporations developing the systems as well as for a cohort of other organisations gaming those systems.

As stated before, one way in which human dependency presents itself is in the endless search for psychological safe havens. Safe havens are a form of escapism, protecting the individual from unpleasant realisations concerning himself and his society. Many of the earlier mentioned safe havens are already somewhat suspected by people to be at least spiritually suspicious, but there is still one big one that is seldom, if ever, questioned by most or analysed in any profound way. This safe haven happens to be experiencing a meteoric rise in number and severity. The safe haven in question is cultism and cult-like action.

People don’t readily recognize cults or cult activities because of the cartoonish image of them created by fantasy writers and Hollywood. Cults are also usually thought to represent themselves only in religious context. While cults and religiosity definitely often overlap, religious cults are not the only form cults can take. In fact, it may not even be the most common form of them. Also, not all religious activity is of course cultism. So what is a cult? It might be a good idea to start by pointing out a couple of things that cults definitely are not. Cults are never individualistic or encourage independent thought. Instead they are collectivist and dogmatic. It is of course somewhat obvious that cults would not encourage individual thought by not being individualistic to begin with, but this is an important thing to notice separately, since cults tend to be particularly dogmatic and limiting in allowed thought. Even to the point of hounding out anyone with a separate point of view.

Why are cults prone to hounding people who think differently? This connects to the basic reason why cults are attractive at all. Their attractiveness is tied strongly to the deep emotional and mental issues arising from human vulnerability. Because of this cults can sink their tendrils all the way into the individual identity itself. Cults provide a psychological outlet for peoples insecurities concerning isolation, loneliness, feelings of weakness, separateness, mortality and so fort. The collectivist nature of cults, and institutions in general, allows the individual to connect to a larger whole and experience safety, strength and power vicariously trough them. This lessens the psychological insecurities and fears the individual has, and so provides an escape from them. It also provides a way to execute aspirations and delusions of grandeur, which otherwise would be barred from the individual. The fulfillment of these psychological needs further binds the person to the institution, be it a cult, corporation, political party or an ideology. This dependency also makes the individual strongly inclined to protect the institution, sometimes at any cost, and to persecute those appearing to threaten it. The less the individual has going on in their life outside the institutional or organisational structure of the cult, the stronger the potential for this mechanism. This is also why atomised societies are such fruitful ground for the proliferation of cults.

But cults don’t leave the undermining of individuation to this above described rather superficial level. They go deeper. For example, cults not only strive to cultivate the ego in a way mentioned above, they actually try to destroy it. At first glance this might seem counterproductive, but in reality it is diabolically ingenious. This is because if the cult succeeds in eliminating the individual ego, it has the person completely. This stems from the fact that if the individual manages to shed their ego in the service of the cult, the sole driver left to guide their actions is the cult and its doctrines. This is precisely why so many cult organisations place such an import on suppressing and subduing the ego.

Modern cultism

Currently our culture is inundated with cults and operators whose methods mirror them. This can clearly be seen in the culture war as well as in the ideological battle being waged in mainstream media and social media. It is also clearly detectable in certain ideologies such as third wave feminism and transgenderism, as well as in the alternative left and alternative right movements more generally. In my opinion however, the left flank of the political divide is currently more cultish than the right. Why do I say this? Why do I think the (so called) left is presently more cult like than the right? Because unlike the right, the left holds serious institutional power across the board, participates in limiting thought and freedom of expression through the institutions it controls, and uses peer pressure to force its line of thinking on others. It is also extremely hostile to any ideology or way of thinking that does not align with its own, and uses exaggerated and denigrating depictions of those who, even slightly, deviate from its required positions.

Yet again, this is not something that the strongest of our society, corporations, would object to. The modern left is globalist and directs its ire almost exclusively against individuals, people who express politically incorrect opinions in social media, politics or common parlance. Their criticism is seldom directed at corporations or other institutions and if it is, it is completely devoid of any economic class distinction. With this I mean the classical leftist distinction between workforce and financial capital. Instead, all their time is spent on identity politics, intersectionality and parsing up society into groups that can be provoked against each other. All the while the operators with any real power, influence or wealth are sitting pretty, almost entirely untouched or even noticed by them. Anyone consistently criticising large corporations and/or organisations, especially global ones, is soon declared to be from the right.

The power imbalance in the actors being criticised in the current culture war is striking. Some YouTuber or national level politician is the greatest danger to our democracy, while CIA, DoD, Google, Apple, Facebook, Twitter, PayPal, World Bank, IMF et cetera are barely even mentioned. And all of these great power players display entirely the same values, pretty much without exception. They are completely monolithic, and in all their power they are not alone. Increasing number of other western institutions are starting to display the exact same homogeneous ways of thinking. There is barely any leeway anymore in relation to institutional doctrines of values. Things like intersectional feminism, transgenderism, identity politics based social justice, and eventually perhaps even such issues as veganism, are becoming unquestionable. There are still differences of opinion among individuals, thank God, but governments, media firms, mainline political parties, celebrities and even significant religious orders are all starting to become uniform, espousing the same mind-numbingly simple talking points of political correctness. The amount of cognitive dissonance this level of ideological and worldview solidarity must require is stupefying, and people criticising it are denounced as far-right. They are no such thing. They are just people with a different point of view. They are common people who typically consider feminism annoying and fake, transgenderism unconvincing and identity politics insane. And they are the majority. The left doesn’t seem to be aware of this, which is exactly why the right is currently ascending politically, as well as in social media, where ordinary people drive the discussion. This is also the impetus for the loudening calls for censorship online by many of those aligned with the left.

One place where this new cultism is fairly prominently displayed is in the novel hipster music festivals, which have hatched in recent years, as well as, to some extent, in the ever multiplying draft beer festivals popping up everywhere. In these events the marriage between corporatism and a markedly New-Agey spiritualism is easily observable. It has its own logos and symbols, rhetorics and ways of speech, accepted ethics, relics and even hymns created by popular music icons who serve as a kind of priesthood for the movement. There is also a very tangible infantility to it all. A kind of Teletubbie-like hedonistic triviality and an unwillingness to engage in a grown up discussion about difficult topics that cause emotional discomfort. All this is doubly worrying because the people in throes of this paradigm, not only believe their opinions and ideas to be quite universal and unquestionable, but also that they themselves are the counterculture. They obviously are not counterculture! They seem more like unwitting stooges of social engineering and corporate manipulation. Look at all the corporatism and corporate advertising in the events. There is nothing counterculture about it! You could not be more mainstream if you tried! Take a look at the sponsors. Large corporations are the ones preparing it all for you. The counterculture has been assimilated into the corporate structure ages ago. The vegetarian food restaurants, comfortable beer lounges, internationally acknowledged rock bands, illustrious artists, miscellaneous t-shirt stands and ”rebellious” tattoo parlors are just merchandise. There is nothing wild, rebellious, individualistic or riskey about it.

Global New Age cult?

Anyone paying attention can see that a sort of corporate New Age spirituality is currently being pushed strongly all over the world. This is particularly evident in Hollywood. Every year a new monied New Age guru pops up from the corporate world or from the movie or music industry. Personalities such as Eckhart Tolle, Oprah Winfrey, Deepak Chopra, Jim Carrey, Arianna Huffington, Marianne Williamson, Marina Abramović, and now even Mike Tyson, are all advocating for the same kind of spiritualised, ego melting, positive psychology gobbledygook. The ego destruction is of course present, as expected, but another conspicuous element of this ideology is its unwillingness to look at negative or dark issues, be them psychological, institutional or social. Here it shares a lot with the establishments disdain for the so called conspiracy theories. Anything concerning, alarming or suspicious, not part of the established narrative or readily discernible, is not to be reflected upon. ”Don’t be negative” goes the mantra. ”It will lower your vibrations” whatever that means. As if enlightenment would come by brainwashing yourself into happiness, no matter the circumstances.

Is there a deeper reason for pushing this pseudo spiritual nonsense? I think there is. And I think that all the subjects written here are connected to it. They are part of a planned global corporate culture meant to spread everywhere and overtake the old traditions. For this purpose all must become palatalised*: nations, sexes, sexualities, ethnicities, religions, political and economic structures, worldviews, and so on. For this process to succeed, you need a spiritual doctrine for the deeper needs of man. But the spiritual doctrine must be such that it does not intervene with the palatalisation, and therefore it has to be completely relativistic. This is what the occultist, New Age, feel good religion is about. It takes no hard position on anything, and therefore it has no real substance. It is, by its very nature, meaningless.

In the long run, opposition to this corporate new world can’t be tolerated. But because it is essentially about overturning everything, opposition is sure to arise. The doctrine of ego death and propagating distrust for the ego is there for that reason. This is quite clever because then you can eventually disparage all those criticising, questioning or resisting the new order as working from the ego, which has already at that point been declared as something dangerous, uncivilised, backwards and unenlightened. This is therefore a tenet of yet another dogma, contrived as a mechanism to ostracise and marginalise dissenters.

We’ll see if all this comes to pass. I hope not, but the writing is on the wall. This seems to be the world the most powerful among us are working to materialise. Positive psychology has penetrated the entire corporate world and is making inroads into peoples personal lives, intersectionality and political correctness are strife in the cultural and political spheres, New Age is taking over the religious practices of young people, and if you pay close attention to Hollywood, academia, specific NGOs, the New Age movement, and corporations such as Amazon, Google, Apple and Facebook, you can see that all these seemingly disparate things have a connection. They are part of a growing and solidifying cultural movement with global aspirations and ramifications. These aspirations can be clearly seen in the actions taken by big tech against rivaling ideologies, as well as in their organisational culture milieu.

The big tech and corporate media are increasingly censoring and misrepresenting worldviews that are incompatible or ill suited with their own. More and more prominent figures in the alternative media and traditionalist camps are driven out of the big mainline platforms and into obscurity or alternative, smaller service providers. Some well known names that have already been allocated to this fate are Alex Jones, James O’Keefe III, Sargon of Akkad a.k.a. Carl Benjamin, Dennis Prager, Milo Yiannopoulos, Tommy Robinson a.k.a. Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, Jay Dyer, and of course as the most drastic example, Julian Assange to name a few. And this is only the overt stuff. Then there is the subtler political scheming, good examples of which were the torpedoing of the presidential campaigns of Bernie Sanders and Ron Paul, one a classical left-winger and the other a true libertarian, as well as the growing institutional bias towards very specific values and ways of thinking.

This trend is not letting up. In fact, it’s getting worse, and will not be limited to any one group like conservatives, because that’s not what it’s about. It’s about control and managing the narrative while transforming the world into a global corporate monolith with all other value systems dismantled. Everyone not submitting to this is going to be subject to the same treatment. If you don’t believe me, just wait and see how the situation develops. The pursued end goal is so radical that all psychologically wholesome and thinking individuals will eventually reach their ”What the hell?” moment, when they have to admit to themselves that something is not right. I just hope that the number of people waking up to this gets sufficiently large before it’s too late.

*atomised: separated from the whole, like an atom, without community

*become palatalised: merge with something, become similar, blend into a new entity