CULT WATCH
Posted by anthonynorth on March 19, 2007
INTRODUCTION
Welcome to the world of cults. This is the centre of my Cult Watch domain, and from here you can access everything you ever wanted to know about cults. Just click the links below, and be amazed. Cult Watch is a Second Level sub-domain. See Blogroll. Try, also, Religion Page, above.
Anthony North
Why I Watch Cults - an Introduction
THE DARK ZONE
Click Cults Page One for:
Scientology - Unification Church - David Koresh - The Family - Joshua Creffield - Mark Prophet -Chris Brain - Sabbatai Zevi - Millerites - Third Secret of Fatima - Joanna Southcott - Ann Lee - Margaret Peter - Gnosticism - Knights Templar - Aum Shinrikyo - Charles Manson - People’s Temple - Order of the Solar Temple - Heaven’s Gate
Plus:
They’re Not All Bad - Who Joins a Cult? - The Guru - What Hitler Really Was - The Abnormal Is Normal
THE WHITE ZONE
13 Feb 08 - The Cult Disciple
6 Jan 08 - The Guru
19 Dec 07 - Doomsters
25 Nov 07 - Female Gurus - inc Margaret Peter, Joanna Southcott, Ann Lee, Madame Blavatsky
31 Oct 07 - Cult Suicides - inc Order of the Solar Temple, Heaven’s Gate, Great White Brotherhood, People’s Temple.
3 Oct 07 - Violent Cults - inc Rajneesh Foundation, Aum Shinrikyo, Charles Manson.
12 Sep 07 - Cults and Conspiracy - inc Freemasons, Rosicrucians.
14 May 07 - Persuasion
2 May 07 - Gotcha
19 Apr 07 - Alienate, Assimilate
14 Apr 07 - The Messiah Factor
5 Apr 07 - Hysterically Speaking
29 Mar 07 - Cults and Inferiority
LINKS OF INTEREST
http://www.factnet.org
http://altreligion.about.com
http://www.religionnewsblog.com
THIS IS A SECOND LEVEL SUB-DOMAIN. SEE BLOGROLL
February 29, 2008 at 7:30 pm
I think you should include what I call the “Mock-Liberal Cult”.
It’s the pervasive groupthink of the regime we live under in the UK today.
It’s the sum total of all the attitudes, taboos, and language that describes the organism whose limbs are the BBC and pseudo-left media; and of course the tri-party, the result of Thatcherism and Blair’s IngSoc merging into a management consultancy; as well as the pervasively meaningless Orwellian language of the public services that infects the education system; the local councils; the police and health care sector; and even the forces now… meaningless phrases like “celebrating diversity and challenging prejudice” in themselves enforce a certain species of bigotry; disingenuous terms like “multiculturalism” that conceal the neo-colonialist ethnic cleansing and denial of English and Welsh and Scottish and Cornish ethnicities to serve corporate avarice and the EU project.
“Alienate, Assimilate” - accurately describes the process of Americanisation and immigrationism.
It is a cult; such that people who are subsumed by it and brought up in it are unaware of their bias and bigotry. The very fact it is a cult is manifest in the phenomena of “Political Correctness” - the implicit notion that by saying or complaining about this, you are recognising the taboo status of an idea.
It’s frightening to realise, and not at all paranoic, that we are approaching Orwell’s nightmare.
An study of evolutionary psychology (the lord of the flies effect), history and politics, and an awareness of global warming leads one to see the UK approaching crisis over the next twenty years: a potential of sporadic urban civil war as the fate the of the UK is decided once and for all, as per the prophet Enoch.
Immigration is clearly immoral; and in concert with the sell-off of public housing and commodification of life and anti-deterministic cult of individuality, and the consequences of globalised capitalism for the ecosystem, we face a wonderful diversity of human suffering in the future.
A very pretty site by the way.
February 29, 2008 at 10:15 pm
Hi Rinky,
You maybe have a point, to a point. But might I suggest you take it too far?
Central to my ideas is that of moderation. Fighting an extreme with an extreme is never the answer.
March 2, 2008 at 9:19 am
Dear Anthony,
Well, there is a logical fallacy called “argumentum ad moderatio”, which enables people to assume that the correct response to anything is a function of it’s moderateness.
(It’s also worth mentioning that there is also the “fallacy fallacy”! Rather than tie oneself in knots, the key is to be aware of one’s irrational intolerance for uncertainty, and remain receptive to possibilities beyond one’s paradigm of prejudice.)
In plain English, “never” is as much good as “always”.
I don’t think describing the regime as a cult is at all extreme; I recognise it is a paradigm shift for most people to look upon their institutions as anything other than benign.
If it looks like a duck, and walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, but we have always been taught it is a swan it is hard for us to step back and consider other possibilities, as much as it is for denizens of a 2-D world to accept the existence of a third dimension.
I find myself having similar conversations with my 4-year-old. Even just now, he insisted I fetch down his “drummin fing”; I try to tell him it’s a “Drum Kit”; he insists I’m wrong; and if I continue, he starts becoming upset.
The reason we must name it as a cult is that it is a groupthink mindset that cannot see the bad reasoning and bad decisions it is making. Many people complain about things such as BBC bias or multiculturalism and things like that; what they fail to appreciate is that those whom they detract are completely oblivious to the fact that they are being biased or bigoted in any way.
We see such phenomena arise repeatedly through history in various religio-political forms (because religion and politics are essentially the same thing).
You owe it to yourself and your own credibility to objectively apply your tools of cult analysis to the regime. I don’t just mean the New Labour Party; I mean the whole organism.
Cults, as you must know, are amorphous organisms that indulge in coercive persuasion that suppresses the ability of people to reason, think critically, and make choices in their own best interest.
Studies of religious, political, and other cults have identified a number of key steps in this type of coercive persuasion:
1. People are put in physically or emotionally distressing situations;
2. Their problems are reduced to one simple explanation, repeatedly emphasized;
3. They receive unconditional acceptance, and attention from the leader;
4. They get a new identity based on the group;
5. They are subject to entrapment and access to information is severely controlled
What amongst these things do you recognise in the regime we live under today? All, but number three, I might guess.
Of course, I recognise that it’s difficult to be taken seriously if you don’t moderate your language; some things about the way this country is heading are enough to alarm even the most moderate people:
http://www.britishblogs.co.uk/images/97657.jpg
How far is too far?
The reason I describe immigration as immoral, is because it clearly exploits both the host population and the immigrant, and stimulates human trafficking.
The beneficiaries are the corporations who are able to drive wages down in real terms; and the criminal gangs who are able to round up illiterate peasants with ease and sell them a Dick Whittington dream.
Those who espouse immigration are guilty of two things:
1. Of valuing profit over people: their own people, and their own ethnic identity
2. Of failing to invest in their own people to train them to do the work that is in demand.
We often hear that “immigrants do the jobs we don’t want to”; the omitted end of this sentence is “…for wage that the natives can live on”.
You’ll hear the middle-class urbanite praise the cheapness of their plumber, and in the same breath condemn the northern oik who expresses resentment.
Cut to: Leeds College of Building 2003, Newspapers proclaim the demand for plumbers; Plumbing courses, oversubscribed by hopeful working-class British people rudely interrupted by the sudden deluge of thousands of cheap Polish labourers.
Imagine the sense of betrayal.
Why should the working classes be denied such a cash bonanza, just because the content elite want their work done NOW, and for NOWT?
Cut to: thousands of English work-classes returning to the dole queue.
You, as a Tory, should appreciate the need for every man to work and take pride in it and not be a drain on the state. Immigrants may work very hard, but there presence is destroying the very fabric of our society both economically and culturally. This is not hatred, it’s acceptance; it’s happening all across the world, see Kenya, for instance.
I suppose this is Thatcher’s self-fulfilling prophecy of “there’s no such thing as society”. My views on Thatcher are ambivalent; but as one of “Thatcher’s Children”, I do blame her for the creation of New Labour, and for the fact that even with 10 years of university in quite “hard” subjects, I cannot hope to own land in my own country.
March 2, 2008 at 9:28 am
Hi Rinky,
Can I ask you to keep comments much shorter than this. Some days I get dozens of comments, and simply do not have the time to plough through pieces of this size.
I accept, and actually say often, that many political and social systems are ‘cultish’. But again, it is the degree to which we deal with the problem that is important.
March 2, 2008 at 10:05 am
How about setting a word limit?