Cult-O-Rama

I wrote about the topic I'm writing about again today about a year and a half ago. "Cults are the Norm" to expand on an idea that's in the last sentence or two of that post. I'm writing about this now after realizing how many gardening YouTube channels are really cult-like. (Interestingly enough "cultus" is the root of the word cultivate.) The concepts of the gardening cults are promoted with religious zeal and are cast as panacea, and cure alls with no possible downsides.

Is it safe? It's safe as long as we all think it is.

Humans, like a lot of other animals, seem to have multiple completely distinct forms of evaluating what they experience. "Social intelligence" is a common way people evaluate things. Our ducks do the very same thing. In fact, after living with ducks for a few months, I've started to think human beings more closely resemble flock and herd animals than we resemble predatory social species like wolves or lions. I'm not even sure you could have civilization like ours without social intelligence being the basis for most judgments people make.

The widespread prevalence of cult-like organizations and pop-culture, or more media driven cult behavior (sports fandom is one example) seems to be founded on the primacy of the social intelligence mode of evaluating information. This is really the basis of the moral panic phenomenon or the bizarro puritanism of the shitlibs we see today.

In the pre-christian world, cults were much more overt and front and center. Where today you might be a part of a club, like a cycling club, in the classical world you would be in a cycling cult. It's really pretty mind boggling that the monotheist cults of the middle east totally monopolized people's cult memberships for  ~1000 years, which gave overt cults a tinge of evil--to this day, people are still suspicious of competing religious cults like Scientology or Mormonism.