Friday, May 20, 2022

Cults as the Norm

 I think I did a post on this topic a couple of years ago, but it comes up repeatedly, especially the past couple of years with covid so it's possible to add more detail.

Day-to-day life choices are pretty muddled. It's not possible to really know where the chain of small choices we make all the time will lead: health and happiness and wealth, or financial ruin, diabetes, or heart disease for example.

There are big pre-fab sets of ideas that purport to clarify this muddled mess. Religions, for example, help guide a person in their life choices, but omit really important information. Most religions are extremely out-dated and their general themes won't help a person make choices about technology or medical procedures--like should a woman get fake tits? Should man go into debt to buy a sports car? The lessons of religion provide really broad concepts, but they're so broad as to be unhelpful, and a person could probably find a priest or minister that will counsel them to take the materialistic course if they so desire and even site chapter and verse passages of the bible to back their claims.

There are much more specific cults today that purport to clarify the muddled mess with absolute precision, and I'm not talking about Scientology or some other quasi-religion, I'm talking about cults like the vegan cult or the keto cult or the electric car cult. These cults have "science" on their side in many cases, at least some specific versions of science.

In fact, cults are everywhere these days. It seems to be one of the favorite vehicles of advertising and propaganda. It's not such a surprise that's the case--cults eliminate choice, they're ultimately authoritarian and are all about mind control. The common people probably like that about cults too--it absolves them from responsibility; they can go on auto-pilot and follow the mob off the cliff.

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