Cult-Sure: Further Thoughts about Society and The Individual, Inspired by the FoF

I recently received a new batch of thoughtful comments to an old personal essay I wrote about my own brief encounter with the Fellowship of Friends, a pseudo-Gurdjieffian cult which has spawned a very extensive on-going discussion over at Animam Recro. Among those thoughtful responses was one by a reader who goes by the handle artn.

I’ve excerpted the portion that has inspired some thoughts I have regarding cults and our Cult-Sure:

The Fellowship of Friends has its own lingo, which unfortunately is part of the group-think. Ph[r]ases such as “how I met the school” are fairly common in the Fellowship, and the phrases sometimes imply certain unspoken meanings. For example, “how I met the school” (and this is why TmR places the term in quotation marks) seems to imply that “meeting the school” is an extremely important moment in one’s life — which, by the way, is being “directed by Higher Forces.”

“One is given an opportunity” at that moment to “begin work on oneself.” As one “joins the school” and develops “valuation for the work”, “one learns to “accept one’s role” in “building an ark” and “creating a new civilization” following “the fall of California” in 1998, and nuclear war in 2006.

As members of the Fellowship of Friends, “we are not better than life, we are just luckier.” The term “life,” by the way, is referring to the entire population of the Earth other than “members of the school.” People in life are sometimes called “life people.”

Anyway, you get the point. There’s a certain acceptable method of speaking in the Fellowship of Friends, and if you use the lingo — which is usually referred to as the “work language” — you are probably a “good student.” Those who ask questions such as, “Why does Robert Burton travel around the world with an entourage of 9 or 10 young men?” are usually criticized and “photographed” for “lacking valuation.” If they continue asking those questions, they will most likely be “expelled from the school.” Another term for this is “being released from the school by Influence C.”

It goes on and on.

The Cult-Sure and Its Miniatures

In my experiences, cults often have their very special jargon, not unlike the “corporate world” or many other groups. My feeling is that, in NLP terms (a.k.a. NLP jargon!), this specialized terminology is about “reframing” someone’s reality through language so as to trick or finesse social cohesion and unity. In other words, to create group identity through group think. That could be good and that could be bad. Words are quite literally magick (that’s why we spell them) and so specialized jargon is often required in order to conjure a “group reality” into existence. Of course said “group reality” is not really any more “really real“than a zillion other group realities, although each partakes of that “really real” reality to some extent simply by existing.

These “group realities” exist via consensus, a consensus often based upon overt or covert coercion: implied or actual psychological and/or physical violence. The most basic type of this coercion can be demonstrated by the ancient practice of banishment. “Either you stay within our group reality, accepting all its obligations and performing all the actions that entails, or we will kick you out and you will starve.” A variation on the theme is: “…or we will kill you outright/ ruin your standing within the group/ severely limit your ability to attain food/sex/ shelter. ” One can argue, as certain old, dead philosophers have, that this is exactly how society at large works: like a cult. Yet the larger society refuses to acknowledge the Cult in the Mirror, pretending to somehow be above such an identity. That’s why I call it Cult-Sure.

The major difference between our Cult-Sure and all its sub-cults, the groups we faithful Cult-Sure members more easily call cults (e.g. FoF, the Reilians, the Moonies, etc.), is that the latter have more limited access to a magickal-energetic food supply. Having cut themselves off from the greater mass of individuals as magickal food-source, the “cults” tend to demonstrate the negative aspects of group cohesion in a much more concentrated and extreme way. The sub-cults are much smaller with a considerably more meager energy base upon which to feed. Thus, retaining the cult’s food source, the individual member/magickal-energetic livestock, becomes increasingly important. It becomes a far more immediate, and desperate, need. It’s no surprise, then, that each individual is more important to the sub-cult than they ever were in the Cult-Sure at large.

Every sub-cult, even the wealthiest, stands ever on the verge of disintegration, of potential famine for the feeders/leaders at the top of the cultic pyramid. Thus, the feeders must ensure that their food source does not get away. Simultaneously, they must scramble with increased desperation to acquire more food. In the long-term, it’s in the interest of a sub-cult’s leaders/feeders to domesticate their magickal-energetic livestock, keep it controlled and drugged— literally, hypnotically or both. In this way, when the livestock breeds, the leaders will have ensured the future of their food supply via the offspring of their cattle. And if the feeders’ efforts are pursued assiduously enough and the sub-cult grows, it may one day hope to become the majority Cult-Sure, with the feeders’ descendants enthroned at the top of the food chain. (In case you didn’t noticed: the “cult” has the character of the feudal/plantation model of society.) The probability for this kind of success is quite limited, but may be increased somewhat to the extent that the feeders/leaders of the sub-cult (your Robert Burtons, et.al.) perfect their ability to cast jargon spells, while innovating other, subtler forms of coercion and compliance.

In contrast to most “cult leaders”, the Bushes, the Astors, DuPonts, Rockefellers and yes, that dual sub-cult and global Cult-Sure High Priest Sun Myung Moon, can totally afford to have thousands of their magickal-energetic livestock walk away, turn off and drop out. After all, the feeders at the top of the Cult-Sure (and the Archons of Power that, in turn, feed upon them) always have plenty more magickal food where the drop-out came from; so why unnecessarily turn on the overt violence? It becomes less necessary, unless the individual is particularly influential and likely to ruin their great pyramid scheme or if, in resorting to violence, the Cult-Sure leaders (and their Archons) can ensure a greater feast of energetic food. In this case, the increase in “food” is attained via the energy released by massive bloodshed. The bloodshed, in turn, leads to further energetic food via the increased birthrates among their surviving livestock, whose reproductive-survival drives are kicked into high gear by the increased psychic anxiety caused by all the in-your-face death, real and/or threatened, that surrounds them.

Often, those who drop out or escape the Cult-Sure, still carry its code within their hearts. They know nothing else than to recreate its structure in miniature— in the form of a “cult.” Individual founders of this new sub-cult either take on the role of leaders/feeders or maintain their conditioned status as the fed-upon. This doesn’t always happen, though. Sometimes those who escape the Cult-Sure retain or regain enough of their natural, spiritual essence to create true conscious communities: living, vital and love-based. The Cult-Sure is likely to ignore any new sub-cults and conscious communities because they represents little competition to its resources and survival. Furthermore, they are usually little known within the Cult-Sure itself or ,if known, are usually feared for their real or imagined excesses. However, when the rate of escape or de-domestication of the livestock reaches a tipping point within the Cult-Sure wherein the entire pyramid threatens to collapse, this often results in overt violence, instigated on a mechanical level by the feeders/leaders who are, in the end, the most dependent members of the Cult-Sure.

I’ll offer one final note about the Cult-Sure and all its sub-cults. As implied above, by their very nature, every Cult-Sure and sub-cult ensures that some individuals will wake up, destroy the totalitarian programming within themselves, and truly get free to create living communities with true individuals. It’s a small possibility, but nevertheless exists. If that possibility did not exist, the feeders/leaders and the Archons of the sub-cults and the greater Spectacular Cult-Sure, would have no market for their snake-oil.

Sometimes a blow to the head doesn’t knock you out; it wakes you up…

Discuss.