The holiday shopping season begins. My online adventures led me to the magnetic window cleaner, a clever device that allows you to clean your outer window from inside, looks good. Despite the stellar reviews on the manufacture’s site, something felt off. I checked Amazon. There it was, only 3.7 out of 5 stars with an alert, “this is a frequently returned item.” A quick search on do magnetic window cleaners work confirmed the idea is good in theory, in reality, not so much. This would not be a good purchase and I can forget my desire to control clean windows outside the twice yearly schedule for now. I had to chuckle; of course the official product site is not going to say this product is meh, results are mediocre at best. Marketing promises better, something others can’t do. In that sense, it’s kind of like a cult.
Cults have a a promise of better. Just like the magnetic window cleaner. I’ve been on the fringe of cults a couple of times, a history I was reminded of over my long weekend as I watched several documentaries, Breath of Fire, Dancing for the Devil: The 7M TikTok Cult and Escaping Twin Flames. No one starts out with I am going to join a cult, be led by a charismatic leader to believe and do things I won’t recognize as myself a couple of years from now. Much like no one starts out to buy a trash product. Really, would you join a group you knew to be a cult?
What’s your definition of a cult? The official definition of cult is a system of religious veneration and devotion directed toward a particular figure or object. Are cults a good thing or a bad thing? There isn’t much dispute that Jim Jones with his People’s Temple in Jonestown was a cult and that was not a good thing. Over 900 people died in mass suicide in 1978. Jim Jones had fled from California with his followers and set up in Guyana. Of the dead, more than 150 were children in California’s foster care system who should not have been out of the state. In 1993, fifteen years later, there was David Koresh with the Branch Davidian and the Waco Texas Tragedy. This left 76 dead including 28 children. The US has a history of cults and estimates are, at any point in time there are anywhere between 2,000 to 10,000 cults. Are cult members doing harm to anyone other than themselves? Is this freewill and choice?
Radicalization is defined as he process by which a person or group develops extreme political, social, or religious beliefs, and may come to support or be involved in extremist ideologies.. Is there much of a difference between a cult and radicalization? Is radicalization a cult with racism? Timothy McVie was an onlooker at the siege of Waco. He sold “…pro-gun, anti-government bumper stickers slogans off the hood of his car that said “Fear the government that fears your guns,” “When guns are outlawed, I will become an outlaw,” and “A man with a gun is a citizen. A man without a gun is a subject.” McVie, along with Terry Nichols bombed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma on the second anniversary of the Waco siege as an act of retaliation against the US government. This resulted in the deaths of 168 people including 19 children. Mr McVie was a white supremacist, a member of the Klu Klux Klan, and strongly opposed immigration. He was influenced by the Turner Diaries1 and even carried pages of the book with him. In the novel, white supremacist use a truck bomb to blow up the FBI headquarters.
It is estimated that between 10 to 20 million Americans are in cults. No one knowingly joins a cult. There are exit counselors and deprogrammers who help cult members get out. There are a plethora of books and studies on cults. Yet, how often do we discuss cults, the abuse and the dangers other than the buzz for about a week after a new documentary airs? The stories of parents trying to get their children out our gut wrenching and so is the reverse, children of parents in a cult who want to leave. A quick online search will lead to characteristics of a cult and three of the common things are authoritarian, isolation and extreme belief. Teenagers and young adults want to flex their independence, which feeds into the isolation from family and friends of a cult. “They will try to pull you out, they don’t understand you and of course that promise of better. Hence the strange loop of parents and friends trying to pull someone out actually validates the messages the cult member is hearing.
As a society, it is true we tend to drift into a cult of personality. We do have “leaders”, be they politicians, musicians or celebrities that are idealized and seen as heroic figures. While not a a cult per se, we have created a cult of personality in which a leader is glorified. (Musical Interlude Living Color, the Cult of Personality.) Is this topic uncomfortable because under certain lenses and scope you might be considered to be in a cult or cult adjacent?
Through time, the nature of spam has changed. It used to be those annoying flyers in the mail. The mobile phone provided some relief from the telemarketing calls until the practice went cellular. Then came the email spams and finally, what appeared to be the final frontier, we get spam text now. The point here, how a cult looks like now may not look the same as in the past, but the underpinnings are the same. The three documentaries were on cults were to find love, to deepen yoga and dancers monetized on TikTok. The saying goes, changing the font, does not change the message. This week, consider cults and your relationship to them.https://youtu.be/7xxgRUyzgs0?si=FhWH5EFoUfMZKM92
Balancing on Unstable Surfaces 