How does something like this happen?
About The Author
BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
20 Comments
Recent Posts
- Day 14: Louisiana Senator Approvingly Compares Trump to Stalin
- Day 13: Elon Musk Flexes His Muscles
- Day 12: While Elon Musk Takes Over, We Podcast With Driftglass and Blue Gal
- Day 11: Harm of Fascist Regime’s Foreign Aid Freeze Comes Into View
- Day 10: The Fascist Regime Blames a Plane Crash on Nonwhite People
How does it happen?
Well, ya see…it happens like this:
Someone much like Trump but without his original bankroll or connections wants to control and humiliate people…part of the gig for people like that…it’s genetic…and some people much like Trump supporters (only probably a little more middle class/”educated” class and thus a little more New Age, if you get my drift) want an ultimate leader and then there y’are.
And they like it.
Cult 101.
That’s how.
Trump has raised this approach to new heights.
Remember Jim Jones, and don’t drink the Kool-Aid.
From any containers.
Later…
AG
And this dude?
Up and down the scale of talent…or lack thereof.
Gotta give the devil his due…as the great (and famously non-blaming) jazz cornetist Bobby Hackett once observed during a barroom conversation where he was challenged by someone that he wouldn’t even have a bad word to say about Hitler:
Ditto Trump.
Like I said…
Up and down the scale of talent…or lack thereof.
AG
I recently was reminded of the incredibly saga of Andy Blake, who began a Lord of the Rings cult from 2002-2008 when his last follower broke free. That woman has blogged extensively about her experiences and recovery. For example, Andy’s cult was directed at fandom because people who are active in that way (writing fanfiction, conventions, etc.) are people who are already predisposed to get more into something that the average person so once they get hooked on the cult they can get really hooked.
Oh, don’t read Aja Romano’s 2015 article about this person. For whatever reason she treated him incredibly lightly and several former cult members who she interviewed expressed that they were hurt and insulted by her article.
LOL, Aja Romano. I used to participate in the fandom communities on JournalFen when the original site was still active. Aja was known there and not well liked, in part for the very reasons you mentioned. It’s a shame that one of the best journalists on fandom happens to be her. Fandom could better, except better journalists aren’t covering this aspect of pop culture.
P.S. For a critical examination of Andrew Blake and Aja Romano’s softball interview of him, I recommend The strange lives of Andrew Blake on Fanlore.
I’m reminded of the cults of the 70s and 80s. There were a lotta weird ones back then, eh? And they often involved young women in thrall to older men. Though there were young men, too. The M.O. seems pretty run-of-the-mill — you use blackmail to keep ’em around, and sleep-deprivation and other psychological conditioning techniques to get ’em to obey and eventually buy-into the program.
The part that was most stunning was that the woman (Mack) was last week running after Papa Horndog (Rainiere) as he’s getting arrested. Sheeite, that’s gotta take some serious conditioning.
Reminds me a little (I was too young to have a serious opinion at the time) of the Patty Hearst story.
In the 1980’s when my children were teenagers, our church had a speaker to explain how cults were accessing teenagers and college students.
First, they are ultra friendly to the kid, “we’re just one big family”, they offer food and company, then slowly wean the kid from his/her family “they don’t understand, do they?”. Once they have them hooked, they limit their contacts, their diet (which can literally change the brain’s functioning), and secrete them in private areas. It takes someone who knows how to do an intervention and detox to get them back.
At least that’s the way it worked then. Ask ISIS for the latest method.
This is the MO of a lot of churches.
Qualify “a lot”.
Serious question, but the wrong question. The answer — to the question that should have been asked — is simply this:
The world is full of crazy people, and there’s a few more.
If that answer seems empty or off the mark, well, so does the epistemology of quantum mechanics; but nevertheless, in each case, that’s all there is.
I feel like it’s relevant to remember that whatever Trump is, he’s not like this guy Rainiere. Yes, in a way what Trump is doing is much worse. But Rainiere is (allegedly) the head of a cult that uses psychological conditioning to groom young women for sex, and to cause them to them groom other young women for sex with him also. Sure sure, Trumpists exhibit cult-like qualities sometimes. But I doubt there’s any sleep-deprivation going on (grin). Instead, it’s much simpler. As Davis X. Machina put it: “he hates the same people I hate — gimme the damn ballot”.
Nobody brainwashed these Trumpists to hate black/brown/Asian/gay people (or at least, if anybody did, it was their parents when they were small).
I -do- agree with Heart of the Rockies, that this sort of conditioning shows up in religions more than we’d like. But even there, you don’t see the use of such -blatant- (we might call it) brainwashing techniques. Instead, religions usually just start with small children at an age where they’re easily impressionable. What did Loyola say? “Give me the child for the first seven years and I will give you the man”. These cults achieve their results on educated (ostensibly compos mentis) adults.
No fuckin’ idea.
Everyone can be vulnerable and some people are very good at striking the vulnerable person in that moment.
Cult leaders (and other forms of abusers) deliberately target the vulnerable — they’re such easy marks, make prime recruitment candidates.
Both the question and the responses so far miss much of the point. There is a large and thriving BDSM subculture in this and every other country. Most of these relationships take pains to ensure that the bottoms (sub, “slave ” or whatever else they call it) enter into the relationship consensually and have the option to opt out.
There’s also a history in
this country, especially if someone gets out and decides it wasn’t consensual after all, of prosecutors misunderstanding and sensationalizing the situation. It’s impossible to tell from these details whether this was sensationalized or genuinely abusive. And it underscores the huge gray areas that still remain in our legal system around the concept of consent, especially for scenes where things like “consensual non-consent” are part of the dynamic.
How Does Submissive Sex Work in the Age of #MeToo? — NY Times
Go figure ;-] I may find experts who say that absence of domination games is a massive reason of failed marriages.
How Japan dominates discount dominatrix market — Asia Times
Perhaps many BDSM & pee sessions is the reason why Trump is so immune to scandals and “trash talk”.
As with many of these sorts of things, at some point the sheer -number- of victims argues against some sort of exonerating story like “BDSM gone wrong — no harm, no foul, eh?” In this case, from the Rolling stone story Mack alone recruited 25, and I haven’t been able to read about others. One of the victims alleges she was a teen at the time (and whatever you may believe about BDSM, that’s a crime).
Again: At some point, the sheer number of victims speaks against some story spun by the perp.
Life doesn’t come with an instruction manual and people have a deep need for love and meaning, which certain others prey upon. Not everyone’s susceptible. Those who more fully buy into the norms of mainstream culture make do with life as it is. Others want more and seek it out. When something seems great on the outside, one has to be discerning and that’s not always easy.
I watched the recent Netflix documentary on the Oregon cult around the guy who called himself the Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh. There were many seemingly obvious signs that the guy was not honest. The fact that he had a string of Rolls Royces for instance. Or the willingness to run over the interests of those outside the community, or the huge stash of weapons. But he was able to give people a sense of happiness that’s uncommon in this world so they thought he carried something, and in a sense he did.
There are spiritual techniques that work, that give one a sense of deep connection. They’ve evolved over centuries and there are those who know how to evoke them. But just because someone can teach those techniques doesn’t mean they’re honest or trustworthy.
I’ve noticed that much new age spirituality, which is what it seems to me the Rajneeshies were peddling, is not truly spiritual. It uses spiritual techniques to amplify and expand ego, which can feel really heady and wonderful. But it doesn’t really produce much of lasting value. The practitioners in that community had a lot of orgasmic sex but they didn’t obtain anything that could be loosely understood as enlightenment.
I personally believe that religion and spiritual practice can be profound. But one must either be extremely lucky or extremely discerning because a lot of garbage is peddled, both in and out of the mainstream of contemporary culture.
The proportion of our exploding population that does exactly that has us far down the road to self-annihilation by ecological collapse, with pedal to the metal.
Folks who recognize this and are looking for an alternative may well be vulnerable to cultist appeals, but that’s not because the problem they recognize is not real; and likely, sooner or later, fatal.
Inherently meaningful, worthwhile lives — including inherently meaningful, worthwhile work — are a basic human need that our dominant culture does not provide a way to meet for many, many people (I’d estimate a large majority of us; Thoreau agreed: “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation”).
And yes, writing in this vein, I’m obligated to acknowledge — again! — the profound influence on my thinking of Daniel Quinn’s three Ishmael novels. They remain the most compelling attempt to grapple with the critical question of “how things came to be this way” that I know of. Several related past comments are linked below, in no particular order except that the one your comment got me thinking of is first, containing this:
Adding that that now looks too narrow to me: this universal understanding of “Let me tell you how to be saved” includes not only perceived need for “salvation” from personal “sin(s)”, but also from the dominant culture that’s not working to provide meaningful, worthwhile lives/work for many; and “salvation” to a culture that would do so. The thoughts in the second link below also seem most relevant here as sort of the other side of the coin completing the part summarized above.
link
link
link
link
link