Cult Leader Concept Formation

The Heaven's Gate cult is the subject of lots of scholarly papers and journalistic investigation because it's very well documented and was a shocking public spectacle case. The cult reached its deadly end in the early days of the world wide web and made videos about their beliefs. Investigators conducted interviews in the wake of their mass suicide and the material is out there in various formats.

It exemplifies the "cult leader"/henchman system. Without the henchman, in this case, there's probably no "Heaven's Gate" cult.

The leader was a guy named Marshall Applewhite. His top henchman was a nurse named Bonnie Nettles. They actually met in a mental hospital where she was working as a nurse and he was a patient, although this part of the story seems to be disputed.

In the version where they met in the loony bin, Applewhite suffered a psychological breakdown in the wake of being fired from his music professor job for having an affair with a male student. She was a "seeker" interested in astrology and the occult. For some reason, the two hit it off, and that gave rise to what became Heaven's Gate.

In fact, it looks more like Nettles was the real creator of Heaven's Gate, but she needed a "leader" to glom onto. It's interesting there's not more information about her life out there on the internet and that most people think Applewhite was the brains of the operation and creator of their mythology.

Their beliefs are an interesting mishmash of biblicisms and sci fi, in other words, classic sci fi and modern sci fi. A few of the cults I've read about created a similar blend of ideas where Jesus is an alien, or will return in a space ship, or whatever.

The "UFO"/aliens/area 51 concept seems to be promoted by the government from day one, maybe as a joke, and continues even to this day. The concept there is "the government" has contact with "aliens", but can't reveal it to the public for some bizarre reason. It follows the pattern of priests who are in contact with god, who lives in a cave, or can only be contacted on a mountain top, or whatever. Select "priests" get to talk to the god. Similarly, Trump gets to talk with Aliens, I guess. Lol.

Anyway, I think it's useful to discuss the "concept formation" of people like Applewhite/Nettles from the point-of-view of human consciousness being "alien to 3D reality world". That is, our consciousness exists in an "information dimension" which arises from, but is distinct from the 3D reality world of physics and matter.

The ego/self/mind, whatever you want to label the consciousness in it's information dimension struggles with the limitations, insults, and trauma of the 3D reality world. I think this is the result of a very specific method of raising children.

It's pretty common for parents to shield their children from the brutality and/or skeezy animalistic aspects of the human and natural world. Children often don't differentiate between their fantasy/inner world and the external 3D reality. When a child is shielded from the ugly parts of life, or never has to reconcile their model of reality with real life, they can enter adulthood and adolescence with that cartoonish model intact.

When that model collides with reality, there's a couple of basic paths for dealing with the trauma of life: adjust the inner world model to match the brutal realities of life, or adjust the model to wish that trauma away. In the case of Applewhite, he was a gay dude, but was outed in humiliating circumstances. There's not enough info on the biography of Nettles, who seems pretty "normal" in her early life, but for some reason she formed a quasi-marriage with Applewhite, who eagerly played into her astrology/new age fantasies.

The ego/self/mind of man often can't accept the "you don't matter and you will die" aspect of 3D reality. In the case of Appliewhite/Nettles they created a mythology where, in version one, they'd be physically raptured to a space ship. (The Church of the Subgenius lampoons this belief in their materials: you get raptured to a UFO and have sex with sexy aliens.) There's a version of this story floating around on youtube about space Nazis. Anyway, this idea didn't work out for Nettles, who died of cancer before being beamed up.

In typical cult leader fashion, after Nettle's death, Applewhite had to adjust the mythology rather than accept the grim fact of Nettle's pre-rapture expiration, to more of the traditional view of "the soul" being from another dimension, so Nettles shed her meat chariot but still existed and participated in the cult. In some of the cult videos on YouTube, Applewhite sits in a lawn chair and talks. There's an empty lawn chair next to him, presumably for the ghost of Nettles.

Anyway to summarize the above: the self/mind can't deal with it's temporality and the traumas of life. Rather than adjust the idealized inner world model to reality, the cult leader adjusts the model to flee reality, essentially--this is the seeming basis for at least Christianity and Judaism. The cult leader looks to create various narratives that negate the aspects of life that contradict the idealized version of reality in their mind model of reality.

Cults and religions tend to "go big" in their narratives to elevate the self/ego  to "cosmic import", so the narratives tend toward comprehensive schemes and stories with a beginning, middle, and end of the world where only the cool people survive and are rewarded and everyone else is killed in a flood, meteor storm, alien invasion or whatever. Those narratives tend to gratify the ego of the believer who of course assumes they will get the golden ticket and end up in the land of the blessed.

The millenarian/doomsday cults tend toward biblical/alien themes while ignoring the realm of middle of the road mythology, which I think is actually pretty interesting and telling. By middle of the road mythology, I mean a whole cast of creatures and characters of earthly proportion are omitted from their themes and narratives, AFAIK. For example, I don't think I ever heard of a cult which focused heavily on vampires, dragons, or monsters like Bigfoot. The Norse and Germanic mythology actually includes stories of that type of creature, plus the "gods" of the Germanic mythology are more human-scale entities than the more abstract characters of the bible stories. (Here is an article about a vampire "cult", but it was more like a gang than a cult)

In fact, the people who "believe" in bigfoot or ghosts seem to be more into LARPing and having fun with their mythological subject matter than to be serious. Having fun and playing is antithetical to the cultish mindset.

The Cult Leader/Henchman System

One of the prevailing hopes/dreams of humanity is the world could be good and just if the current day leadership were removed/killed.

The author Robert Sopolsky (sp?) published a paper on a tribe of baboons (I think) in Africa where the alpha male leadership died off after gorging on tainted food from a trashbin or some similar scenario. The alpha males prevented the lower status apes from eating the goodies, so it only affected them.

He described the resulting dead alpha male ape society as a golden age. The survivors had lower stress levels and lived a more equal, mutually beneficial life at least for a while. That seems to support the notion that wiping out the "leadership" of any given corporate entity, like a country, would result in a similar golden age... I think there's some merit to that concept.

The problem with that theory is it seems like "the problem" isn't solely the alpha leadership, especially for humans, it's all the followers that really make the pyramid system function, so even if the top of the pyramid is lopped off, the lower levels will quickly build another one.

Videos of frat hazing cult behavior sometimes are released to the public. Even though hazing has been banned a number of times over the years, and to non-cult members the behavior seems insane, lots of people still "willingly" engage in it. 

Recently there were bodycam videos from police going into a frat house in Iowa where a bunch of shirtless dudes were standing in a dark room in the basement. The dudes in the basement were so brainwashed into an alternate reality of frat membership "omerta" that they could barely respond to questions from the police.

The pyramid structure seems to be something like:

• Cult Leader Figurehead
• Top Psychopath Henchmen
• Second tier henchmen who tell NPCs what to do
• NPCs

In the cases of Aum Shinrikyo and the Bagwan Sri Rajneesh cults the cult leader and the top psychopath henchmen lived in a sort of co-dependent relationship where the attributes the cult leader lacked were made up for by the psychopathic henchmen, and vice versa. The top level henchmen maybe lack the charisma or desire to interact with the public, or lack the confidence or insanity to try to foist their crazy expansive crazy vision on others. Similarly, the cult leader probably lacks the desire to deal with myriad details to carry out their insane schemes.

I think if the leaders and complete top level henchman layer of society were removed entirely, it would take a long time for a pyramid structure to reconstitute. That pyramidal structure, though, and the cult leader/henchman system is duplicated over and over throughout the entirety of a country like the US.

 

Man Made Mud

This time of year, the late winter/early spring in northeast Ohio is the maple syrup season and the mud season.

One of the more interesting, surprising observations of my 50+ year life is mud is mostly man made; there are exceptions, of course, but mud is generally a product of disturbed nature, that is, where the natural courses of drainage and plant growth are destroyed or disturbed.

My property illustrates this very well. In the spring, some areas of our yard, that is the grassy areas of the property where all the trees were chopped down many years ago can turn into a swamp in February/March. Then if people, or animals like deer, walk through the swamp the soil percolates up through the grass and it turns to soupy mud in spots.

In the wooded areas of the property, where the soil is composed of the same glacial till at the same slopes, there's no mud. There are leaves on the ground this time of year from the fall, plus the forest root system seems to form a ubiquitous drainage network. The tree root systems in a long lived forest like that are everywhere, even coming up just under the leaf mat. There are areas which are natural pools formed by long dead trees that fell over and uprooted... even those drain in a day or two after a heavy rain.

People try to dry out the grassy lawn areas with french drains and similar strategies, but the lifetime of shallow drainage systems is pretty short. If they're not buried below the frost line, eventually they'll break up from frost heave, or get clogged up or collapse, or get ripped up by trees or animals. The previous owner of our house went all-in on such drainage systems and they started failing about 10 years ago. They probably lasted 15-20 years, plus they don't really drain the swampy lawn areas, so they're kind of pointless.

I let some of the muddy areas of the lawn grow wild. After a couple of years they turned back into a meadow. Meadows generally do a good job covering up the mud as well. The taller, thicker weeds like goldenrod or berry bushes will collapse under the heavy snows and form a thick mat after a couple of years. Eventually trees will take over there too and in the distant future that will turn to a nicely drained forest area as well.

In perpetually damp areas that were wrecked by annual mowing and rolling, it's difficult for even a meadow to establish itself, and moss takes over, so even in that case, the mud gets covered. So generally a property manager doesn't really have to "do something" to cover up mud, eventually it takes care of itself. However, eventually might be a really long time.

Matter/Pattern

Sometimes the origin of words yields a surprisingly fresh insight into the nature of things. I was curious about the origin of the word "matter" as in "I matter", meaning, "I am important". The more common meaning of "matter", and maybe the "original" meaning is: undifferentiated stuff. Eventually, I guess that concept morphed into various versions of "stuff", for example "the matter at hand", which is maybe how it turned into the concept of "mattering", as in "I matter" as in "I am stuff as well".

The origin of matter is the Latin word mater, which is mother, as in mother earth. I think "mater" and various version of that word go waaaay back into the mysts of time and the theoretical "proto indoeuropean language". 

The origin of "matter" being "mother" leads to the obvious question what's the "pater" derived word that takes on the same role, and that's "pattern".

The concept that the undifferentiated material world is "feminine" and the plan is "masculine" is an old one apparently. One of the symbols of that is the obelisk, like the Washington monument, which is, of course, a dick. One of the associated ancient concepts in agriculture is "the sun" goes into "the earth" and produces the plants in a crop.

Nothing Lasts and "You" Don't Matter

The mind exists in "an information dimension". Other people with a similar model of the mind think there's "one information dimension" and conceptualize it as a place and think the distinction between individual's minds is an illusion. Who knows? Anyway, there's a sort of strange relationship between this dimension and the 3D reality world. They are attached, but distinct. In fact, the concept of a "space" or "dimension" seems entirely off, but there's no other suitable analogy because ironically enough the mind's representations of such a concept revolve around the body's relationship to other objects in 3D reality.

This scenario gives birth to all sorts of human dramas and delusions. The entirety of these delusions is encompassed in the probably apocryphal, too good to be true story of Alexander "the great" meeting the cynic philosopher Diogenes of Sinope, which is in present day Turkey. The two men offer completely different conclusions about how one should live when the temporality of a mind is the most fundamental human fact.

Not only is "I" temporal but the entirety of human endeavor is also. Diogenes decided to live the simplest possible, most "natural" life. Alexander went and killed a bunch of people and "conquered" territory to establish "hellenic civilization", that is to impose the mental model of his bros on as many people as possible to the extent that's ever possible which is "great". The civilization model is basically a shared delusion.

For some odd reason for many people it's a bitter pill to swallow the notion that nothing at all lasts and you don't "matter" even though this is as obvious as the blue sky, stars, or sunrise. In a world of all change, nothing lasts. Even stones eventually turn to dust. Men and women age. Once firm, supple skin turns wrinkly and dry. The entire world of man will be over in the blink of an eye in geological terms. That is all obvious.

The story of Diogenes and Alexander revolves around the "I matter" concept. Ultimately, mattering can be boiled down to "leaving a mark". I think that terminology betrays the origin of the "I matter" concept. The verbal and symbolic reasoning aspect of the mind is an entity of symbol processing and memory. As long as there's "memory" there's an "I". Another aspect of "mattering" is being able to impose one's own internal model of reality on others. A person can insist "I matter the most". This particular idea is expressed by the tombs of pharaohs of Egypt, or those Chinese emperors buried with terracotta armies, or Viking funerals where the bros of the dead dude sacrificed women, pets, horses and the like.

Modern variations on this theme are greatly attenuated and more playful. For example, the grave of Benjamin Orr, a member of the rock band  "The Cars" has a grave site in Thompson, Ohio. Fans put little trinkets to pay homage to his memory. Similarly, Chef Boyardee's grave in All Soul's cemetery in Chardon is honored with cans of spaghetti and meatballs and the like.

 

Another twist on this scenario is people form narratives with a "god" and order of the world related to the god or gods, where the "I" existed before birth, then continues after death but is blessed or punished according to some cosmic rule book and presumably a life score. This is the mind model of probably billions of people. The concept there is one "matters" as part of a gamified, systemic reality. The particular rules of these games are bizarre and utterly arbitrary.

I think the rules various groups invent betrays some genetic underpinning for belief. Like various sects of jews have hyper-legalistic beliefs about their demon lord's systemic game. Other ethnic groups understand the game is not legalistic at all, because of course it's absurd god has a giant set of rulebooks and have more animistic and ironically more comprehensive views of the information dimension/spirit realm.

Japanese Cars and the Tech Industry

I've been working in "tech" for years doing so called embedded software. It's the type of software that runs in an electronic gizmo you might own, like a Roku, or a cable modem, or a stereo, bike computer or whatever. There are countless such items out there in the world, and there's some team of software people making them work.

In the past 10-15 years, I'd say that particular niche of tech, like the rest of tech, "jumped the shark". At some point in the early 2000s, maybe around 2008-10, the task of writing that type of software subtly shifted from creating something new to "integrating" existing components that other people wrote. That same thing happened all through the tech industry.

"Integrating" systems seems much easier than creating things from scratch, but it often doesn't work out like people hope and generally products based on that approach end up being pretty janky and fragile. Tech gizmos "created from scratch" can also be janky, but in my experience, the products built more or less from scratch did not have the "janky" characteristic.

Anyway, I think the "integrated tech junk" problem will get significantly worse over the next few years because of AI generated slop code, which will take the "engineer" job down another notch from being an integrator to being a slopmaster.

I think this is actually a great opportunity in tech similar to the opportunity Japanese car manufacturers had in the 70s and 80s. They focused on reliability and value when the big three in the US were focused on style and marketing. I guess the analogous scenario in tech would be to make software and devices that actually work instead of focusing on AI generated slop, or "natural language" AI interfaces.

NYC Spent $81K Per Homeless Person

Governments are good at wasting money and killing people.

The government of NYC spent $81,000 per homeless person. The obvious reaction to that is, why not just give the homeless people that money so they can live in a home, or smoke it all up as crack, or whatever

There's not really any way to "fix" problems like homelessness because there's no way to fix people. I'm not sure what fraction of the population can actually be helped, but it's pretty small. Dysfunctional people generally can't be "fixed". The people who are otherwise functional, but end up in some acute trouble they can recover from only with help is a very small group indeed.

Those people who are capable of recovering should, obviously, be helped. The people who receive government assistance but can't really recover or ever be productive are actually the basis for an industry that's really lucrative for the people running it.

Anyway, I guess nobody should be shocked at a number like $80K. The really interesting thing to know would be how much do executives and management in the homeless industrial complex make relative to that. I'm sure some of those people are getting into the seven figures in salaries, i.e. a  10x or more multiple of what the average crackhead costs a place like NYC.