Mechanisms of Cults

Observing the workings of a cult is an excellent study in human psychology and sociology.  If you don’t know what to look for, you can miss it as it takes root and grow in your midst.  

Cult leaders rarely start right out with the ‘big lie’.  Even the most gullible of potential members would laugh in their face and move on if they did.  Rather, they lay the groundwork over time; exploiting their followers’ alienation from the modern world – or fear of changes in society.  They begin with smaller, more ambiguous fabrications that gradually draw followers in. 

As leaders strengthen their hold, they isolate followers from outside influence.  This may be overt—prohibiting members from contacting families, reading newspapers, watching television, or listening to the radio—but is more likely subtle.  It is equally effective to consistently ridicule outside sources of information, encouraging members to cut themselves off.  Over time, these sources are less frequently brought into conversation – unless distorted for use as a straw-dog, to reinforce the cult’s orthodoxy.  Outside news sources are ridiculed as the ‘liberal press’, ‘mainstream’ media, ‘drive-by’, or ‘lame-stream’ media.  Peer pressure and embarrassment cause members, over time, to avoid these altogether.  Those who stray from this prohibition are viewed with suspicion by their fellow members. Rather than risk alienation from the group, the transgressor mends his or her ways, and avoids connection with these threatening influences. 

The true test comes when the cult leader tells members something that is clearly, verifiably, false … then asserts it repeatedly.  If the hook is set, followers will come around to believing the leader, rather than their own eyes.  A guru may claim he is flying, thought he is clearly just sitting still in the lotus position – or that he is bench-pressing some ridiculously high weight, when a system of pulleys is clearly visible.  Or a leader might claim to have attracted the largest crowd in history to his inauguration, when photographic evidence clearly shows a sparse crowd.  So, who are you going to believe; your eyes, or the object of your adoration?  

Once this point is reached, credulous True Believers can be led to believe almost anything, and followers become, in essence, an extension of the leader.  Outsiders lose all influence; their silence is perceived as assent; disagreement, if heard at all, is perceived as a threat.  Cognitive dissonance—the fear that if one admits the error of one claim, it could weaken of destroy one’s entire perceptual framework—creates a curtain of denial.  The more ridiculous the lie that comes to light, the more intense is this effect.  Rather than causing followers to question their beliefs or their fealty to the leader, a clear falsehood makes them cling ever more tightly. 

Those who help cultists escape the hold of their leaders have a daunting task under the best of circumstances.  Escaping members they must be shielded from cult influences in order to reenter normal reality – and even so, it takes a long time, and leaves the former member disoriented and unmoored.  When a cult has multiple, easily accessible channels of mass media, and controls all branches of a nation’s government, the prospects for members to escape are dismal.

Problem Analysis - Gun Violence

To seriously analyze a complex problem, one must deconstruct it and look at the pieces: where is it happening, and where is it not?; when is it happening, and when is it not?—then look at the differences.  Keep asking ‘Why’, even after you think you’ve gotten to the answer, because it’s likely that the root cause is much deeper. 

Why does the United States, with only a small percentage of the world’s population, have such a huge percentage of the mass killings – as well as other firearm deaths?  Is it the violence in our movies?  Is it those first-person shooter video games?  Is it young men raised in homes without fathers?  Is it untreated mental illness?  Social isolation?  

All of these factors may play a role in tipping an already unbalanced person toward violence.  And all are worth examining for ways in which we can improve them as a society.  But are they unique to the United States?  

Regardless of where they are produced, Hollywood’s reach is global; our movies are everywhere.  Single-parent households, mental illness, and social isolation are likewise not uniquely American issues – though the fraying of our already thread-bare social safety net means that many human needs, which are addressed elsewhere, are left unmet in our country.  

But the most relevant factor that truly is unique to the United States is also the most obvious.  It is incredibly easy for anybody—including unbalanced, potentially violent people, many of whom may have been affected by the factors mentioned above—to access weaponry that can amplify an angry outburst into a community-wide tragedy.  

To pretend to analyze gun violence in America, while discounting our ongoing wide-open nationwide firearms bazaar, is to ignore an elephant that utterly fills the room.  It’s not real analysis, it’s industry-sponsored verbal gymnastics.   Those who smugly scorn the students who are peacefully protesting gun violence today tacitly condemn those who will be the next victims, and the ones after that, to a cruel fate.  

The Battle of Passchendaele

One hundred years ago today, the Third Battle of Ypres—better known as the Battle of Passchendaele—began in Belgium.  It was an attempt to gain high ground near the northern end of the Western Front, before German reinforcements arrived from the Eastern Front, in the wake of the Russian collapse there.  

The prior three years had been a horrific, bloody stalemate near Ypres, with troops in mud-filled trenches—shouting distance apart—under constant artillery bombardment.  

In a war remembered for wasteful, senseless carnage, Passchendaele is remembered as one of the worst.  A wildly optimistic British plan for quick victory, degraded by weather into a battle of attrition. By the time the fighting slowed (it never actually stopped on the Western Front) in mid-November, over a half million casualties had been suffered by the British, their imperial and commonwealth allies, and Germans.  

Nasty little crossroads in that area.  Twenty-three years later, there would be a massive evacuation of British troops from Dunkirk, about 40 miles northwest of Passchendaele.  And 103 years earlier, Napoleon’s career ended about 90 miles east, near a place called Waterloo.  

http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-wales-40727428
 

Gravity and Society

Gravity is one of the fundamental forces that define our universe.  It is the effect of matter that organizes moons, planets, and stars – keeping them from simply wandering off on their own.  Gravity holds us to the Earth, and holds the elements of the Earth together—even defining our planet’s spherical shape.  It is the physical manifestation of matter’s drive to aggrandize itself across the vastness of space.  

Concentrated in stars, gravity is so strong, it literally warps space-time, creating a well, drawing distant objects nearer.  It crushes hydrogen atoms, fusing nuclei together to form helium, generating and radiating massive energy to heat and light our world – making life possible.  

But where the aggregated mass is too great, space-time is not just warped, it is consumed.  Gravity becomes an end in itself, swallowing up everything nearby, even light – which is why such phenomena are known as black holes.  Within this region, the distortion is so complete that the normal laws of physics no longer apply.  The distortion reaches far beyond its black horizon; nothing within a vast area is unaffected; ultimately everything is drawn in and destroyed.  

In human experience, the desire for material goods and control are likewise fundamental drives.  In normal proportions, these drives encourage us to independently feed and shelter ourselves and our families, provide security, sustain communities, educate ourselves, learn productive trades, seek self-actualization, and build a legacy to assure a better life for our children.   It drives incredible innovation and creativity.  

But when wealth and power become comingled and overly concentrated, they too become ends in themselves; reshaping reality, and isolating those within from the outside.  This concentration distorts everything nearby.  The rules of normal civil society no longer apply.  Information filtering in from the world outside is warped to fit the reality within.  Evidence, established science, and any sense of community, are mangled in transit; replaced by an elite plutocratic alternate reality.  Concerns of the world—if they are perceived at all—are faint and unclear, filtered and distorted through the thick, blurred window of entitlement.  

Advanced societies have institutions to counter this concentration of wealth and power, serving to slow or prevent societal collapse.  Progressive taxation of income and wealth, a fundamental culture of community, self-sufficient educational institutions, and an alert, assertive mass media all serve as bulwarks to sustain balance, maintain awareness, and act as an enduring reference against the alternate reality within.  

But, in their relentless drive for greater wealth and power, those at the center of this concentration seek to draw in, and co-opt these protective institutions; absorbing and distorting them, nullifying their restraining effect, and accelerating the drive toward singularity and socioeconomic annihilation.  Without these moderating influences and references, the population is helpless to resist the trend, or at times, even be aware it is occurring.  Perhaps the most pernicious distortion is the assertion that democratic institutions, and market competition can continue to thrive within the black hole of its influence.    

Narcissistic Personality Disorder

Aeschylus’s axiom that ‘In war, truth is the first casualty’ rings as true today, as it did when he wrote it 2,500 years ago.  Wars begin with the lies, exaggerations, and distortions that make up the carefully-crafted casus belli, which continue throughout the conflict, and are often its most enduring legacy.  

To those with narcissistic personality disorder, their entire existence is a war that pits them against all others.  They see themselves immersed in a world surrounded by others as venal and opportunistic as they.  This world is governed only by the rules of war – including those that apply to truth.  For these people, there are no true friendships, only alliances – shifting alliances, directed at feeding their insatiable hunger for wealth, recognition, and power.  

To them, there is no objective truth – only what is useful.  Because narcissists are accountable only to themselves, even a story they invent extemporaneously—become as real to them as objectively verifiable truths are to the rest of us.  These fabrications are at once a convenience, and a new battleground to defend against a hostile world.  

To the narcissist, a promise—even a written contract—is merely a means to an end; once the end is achieved, the contract is no longer useful, and is ignored.  

They are as likely to violate marriage vows, as they are a written contract; they tend to be unfaithful partners in all realms.  Fine print, Intimidation, and a willingness to ‘out-lawyer’ any who trust them, work in concert to further the narcissist’s goals, and minimize the consequences.  

Psychiatrists say that narcissistic personality disorder is particularly hard to treat; partly because one of the key manifestations is an inability to trust – including the therapist.  Also, because the compulsive drive for gain resembles healthier forms of motivation, these people are often highly successful in business and in politics.  But, rather than seeking success as a means to promote security or the well-being of their family, or society, the success for the narcissist is an end in itself.  

These people are to be pitied; they know no peace, and live without real love or connection to others.  But they are not to be trusted; though they compulsively seek power, no effort should be spared to prevent them from attaining it.  They are incapable of the empathy that moderates the ruthless exercise of power, and are capable of great destruction.  

The West Bank and Sanctions

For decades, the United States and Israel have danced a well-choreographed pas de deux around the subject of the West Bank of the Jordan River.   Whenever a resolution came before the United Nations Security Council sanctioning Israel for planting colonies in these occupied territories, the United States would use its veto to scuttle the resolution.  Then behind the scenes, we would elicit promises to stop, or at least limit, settlement activity.  

The West Bank poses incredibly complex problems for Israel; historical, strategic, philosophical and existential.  They can't annex it without risking their identity as a democratic Jewish state; either Jewish citizens would become a minority of the electorate, or they would have to deny voting privileges based on ethnicity - neither of which is considered compatible with that identity.  There is a consensus among those whose goal is a just peace that there must be some form of a two-state solution, with side-by-side contiguous Israeli and Palestinian nations – divided approximately along the pre-1967 border, but integrating mutually agreed swaps of land.  At the best of times, this has reached a point where the only remaining questions were the details of which tracts go to which state.  This goal is shared not only by the international community, including the United States, but also by significant segments of the Palestinians and Israeli populations, who would be most directly affected.  Neither side’s extremists would get all they want, but in the view of those who seek justice, this is an exchange of ‘land for peace’.  

But there is powerful opposition to this, and always has been.  There are segments of Palestinian society who cannot be reconciled to losing any of their historical homeland – including the internationally-recognized territory of Israel.  And within Israeli society, there are those who dream of a ‘greater Israel’ that incorporates all of the West Bank.  Leaders from this segment of Israeli society have allowed, and in some cases, promoted the planting of colonies throughout the occupied West Bank.  Netanyahu is from this segment of society, and has promoted colonization at an unprecedented rate.  

Each of these colonies (often referred to as settlements) is surrounded by a broad ‘security perimeter’, and they are linked by a network of roads that Palestinians are not allowed to travel, or even cross, except at specified checkpoints.  What the people of this region are left with are isolated islands, with limited movement, within which they are always subject to unexpected, violent intrusion.  The humiliating conditions in these isolated enclaves in the West Bank closely resemble those of apartheid-era South African ‘homelands’.   

There is a virtual news blackout in this country about the conditions of this military occupation – so not surprisingly, there is little sympathy when a Palestinian acts out in defiance.  

Whatever the underlying conflict, it is made more intractable by the continued colonization of the West Bank.  Though Israeli politicians—even those like Netanyahu, who doesn’t mean a word of it—claim to seek a just negotiated settlement, these settlements make that impossible.  Palestinians sometimes use the analogy of two people sitting across a table, deciding how to divide up a pizza, as one of the people keeps grabbing slices and eating them.  It is Netanyahu’s intention to gorge until there is no pizza left to divide

This colonization of the West Bank is also promoted by arms merchants in the US and elsewhere, whose profits would be devastated by an emerging peace in this region.  The symbiotic relationship between them, American right-wing religious leaders, and the expansionist wing of the Israeli body politic forms an implacable barrier to any just settlement of this problem.  As has been evident this week, they respond in outrage even when the United States does not actively stand in the way of international recognition of the obvious problems posed by colonization of these occupied territories.  

Dedication to Cause vs. Tranquility

We live in emotionally and ethically challenging times.  Particularly during political campaigns, it is easy to forget one of the most fundamental realities of human psychology. 

It is impossible to focus on what you hate and what you love at the same time.  Hatred has an addictive effect, which steals one’s attention and focus from those we love. 

We must set aside time to learn, and make informed decisions in order to have a functioning democracy.  But please set aside much of your day … much of your attention to the beauty which surrounds us, those we love, and who love us.