I have been following Cosmic Connies' blog Whirled Musings for a while, and I really appreciated her latest post. The first part of that post deals with Ginni Thomas, the crazy-mixed-up wife of crazy-mixed-up U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence (Uncle Tom) Thomas. It appears that she got involved in a cult during her young adulthood, then saw the light and got out of the cult. After leaving the cult, she did some very good personal work which helped to build an exit path for others who had been sucked into cults. But much later, she fell into the present day cult of white supremacy and the conspiracies that have been manufactured to express the existential fears of white supremacists whose supremacy is now fading away.
A few observations. First, I think that the cults which hapless rubes fall into tend to reveal a lot about the motivations and values of those rubes. I am thinking of those who fall into money cults, for instance. That Ginni Thomas could fall into the cult of Trump and the associated cults such as QAnon does not speak well about her inner motives and values. But let's consider the issue of cults from a larger perspective. It seems to me (having myself fallen into a cult once and gotten out of it after many years) that people who fall into cults are looking for a certainty in life that simply cannot be guaranteed. Therefore they look for gurus who will show them the minutest details of a supposed "One True Way" so that they can regiment every aspect of their lives to fit this supposed "Way" without having to do any thinking of their own. Gurus tend to be people who lay out every detail of all the steps which the lives of their followers should take, including what to eat, what to wear, whom to marry, and where to work. The guru's false promise is that if you follow all the steps which he (or sometimes she) lays out, you will never make any mistakes. Cults provide both leaders and followers with an illusion of control.
But life can't be controlled the way the cults promise, simply because although we can know the past and experience the present, we cannot know much about the future except in its broadest brush strokes. In many cases, all we can do for the near and intermediate future is estimate possibilities and probabilities. There are general principles (especially moral principles) that we can and should apply in navigating those possibilities and probabilities. And we can be confident that sooner or later, the moral principles will always work themselves out. But we can't always know in advance the precise details by which this working out takes place. People probably shouldn't expect a voice telling them to buy a certain lunch from a certain restaurant on a certain day. You'll have to figure that out on your own.
So in my own post-cult life, I have had three main priorities. The first is to un-learn the malignant ways which I learned in while in the cult. The second is to figure out for myself the general moral principles which I should follow. Let me explain this one a bit. I am a Bible-believing Christian and I intend to stay that way. But I have had to realize that most of what I was taught by mainstream American evangelicalism is completely false. (How could it be otherwise, when so many white evangelicals refuse to obey the Sermon On The Mount, when they are armed to the teeth, when they vote for slimy politicians like Trump?) So I need to construct my own theology. It is a work in progress. The goals of that theology are that I myself may become a decent person, and that I may not get fooled again. The third priority is to recover some of what was stolen from me. To borrow a bit from Shawn Colvin,
I have lost too much sleep
and I'm gonna find it.
And as for the one in five Americans who still believe in QAnon or the Americans who still belong to the cult of Trump, I can only say that by their own evil they have made themselves the willing victims of "a politician who has fallen into populism and begun to make impossible promises...Naturally, his lies will come to light before long." (The Courage To Be Disliked, Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga) Some of the lies which have come to light have come from the anti-vaxxer and COVID denialist members of that group, many of whom are now pushing up daisies because they became victims of COVID. Based on my reading of trends, I think that life is about to serve up a number of other painful contradictions of the things which these people believe.
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