Podcast Recommendation: The Cult Vault Episode - "Get Away, Amway!"

In my most recent post I wrote the following: "... I thought about the most famous, wealthy, and immaculately coiffed citizens of the First World (particularly the U.S.) and the psychological impact these people have on many of the rest of us.  For in looking at these people it's easy to get swept up in their propaganda, believing that these people are rich because they possess rare and unique accomplishments of stellar value.  These people prop up the systems of inequity that exist in the world by telling us that if we only imitated them, we could be like them.  This, for instance, is the foundation of the thriving sale of many worthless "business advice" or "life coaching" books, conferences, podcasts, and the like."  

This week I stumbled across a particularly destructive example of aspirational propaganda as I listened to an episode of a podcast which deals with the cult phenomenon in the U.S. and in Britain in the 21st Century.  The name of the podcast is the Cult Vault, and the name of the particular episode is "Get Away, Amway!"  (Amway is a particular example of what is known as a "business cult.") Feel free to check out the episode; it's quite instructive.

The Fallacy of Aspirational Propaganda

I was recently talking with a friend who lives in eastern China.  I am helping her with English vocabulary and grammar.  她也帮我练习中文的生词，语法，和发音。During the course of our conversation she mentioned to me that Elon Musk is now the world's first trillionaire, as a result of the most recent valuation of Musk's company SpaceX.  I had not known this, as I don't usually pay attention to Musk.  I find Musk to be rather emetic.  

My friend told me that many people in China are quite impressed by Musk because of his achievements.  I told her that it seems to me that many people throughout the rest of the world ought to view the richest and most famous people in the U.S. as a collection of crazy folks.  But afterward I thought about the most famous, wealthy, and immaculately coiffed citizens of the First World (particularly the U.S.) and the psychological impact these people have on many of the rest of us.  For in looking at these people it's easy to get swept up in their propaganda, believing that these people are rich because they possess rare and unique accomplishments of stellar value.  These people prop up the systems of inequity that exist in the world by telling us that if we only imitated them, we could be like them.  This, for instance, is the foundation of the thriving sale of many worthless "business advice" or "life coaching" books, conferences, podcasts, and the like.

But I'd like to say that these rich people are on their way to hell, because the foundation of their wealth is evil, since they have made themselves great by exploiting their fellow human beings.  And what they promise through their aspirational propaganda is impossible.  There is no way we can all be rich - especially not obscenely rich.  Why?  Because the earth is a finite planet.  And no matter how much Elon Musk boasts of how he's going to open up outer space as a "final frontier", at present neither he nor anyone else is even close to colonizing Mars, let alone anywhere else.  So why the aspirational propaganda?  It serves merely as a means of normalizing and legitimizing the really horrible behavior of the world's richest and most powerful people.

What is the implication that the earth is a finite planet?  Simply this: that anyone who wants to get really, really, really rich can lay claim to only a finite amount of stuff as long as they are limited to living on earth.  Once such a person actually lays claim to those resources, there are far fewer unclaimed resources available to the rest of us - even for those of us who wish to imitate the first person who successfully made himself really, really, really rich.  Once a second person succeeds in obtaining wealth similar to the first guy, the remaining unclaimed wealth shared by all the rest of us shrinks drastically yet again.  It doesn't take a rocket scientist to see that once a certain mass of rich people comes into existence, all the rest of the world must subsist on mere crumbs.

To put it another way, imagine a group of ten neighborhood kids who are trying to split a pound cake between them.  The biggest, greediest, and most aggressive kid bites off a 7 ounce piece of the cake.  Then the second most greedy kid manages to bite off another 6 ounce piece.  A fight breaks out between the remaining kids for the remaining part of the cake, and in the process the rest of the cake gets torn to crumbs.  However, one other kid manages to snag a 2 ounce piece.  What will the remaining seven kids eat?

At The Crossroads

For the king of Babylon stands at the mother of the way,

at the head of the two ways, to use divination; 

he shakes the arrows, he consults the teraphim, 

he looks at the liver.

- Ezekiel 21:21

"'We do all agree that Tianming's final words are very important.'... He then went on awkwardly. 'Then let's pick a spot to meet - somewhere other than the Earth.' ... Yun Tianming had very little faith that the Earth would survive."

- Death's End, Liu Cixin

I must report a rather sad fact.  The two cats who first came to live in my present home have died.  I believe one of them (Vashka) succumbed to feline leukemia virus (FELV) and the other (Koshka) began to suffer from severe edema and possible organ damage.  Both of them passed in 2024.  I now have two new cats.  The name of one of them is Paka and the name of the other is Neko.  However, from time to time I do think of Koshka and Vashka as I remember what cool cats they were.

The passing of Koshka was especially significant, as I was intimately involved in the process.  When I returned home from a trip out of state to visit family, I discovered that Koshka had not been eating, and that he was unsteady on his feet.  I put him into a cat carrier and took him to two vets on a Saturday evening during a snow/ice storm.  Those visits forced me to make some difficult decisions, although I was not without a bit of wry irritation during the first visit.  I did not realize it, but that first visit was to a vet from what I would call a "boutique" clinic, who started off by calling me a "pet parent."  He suggested a number of very expensive tests, but I did not have "pet insurance" and was unable to afford his suggested regimen.  What I felt I was getting was someone who wanted to use emotional manipulation to bleed me dry.  What I needed was someone who would do the necessary work to give me a basic diagnosis along with a reasonable prognosis given my limited ability to pay for my cat's treatment.  

The second clinic I visited specialized in emergency veterinary care, and when I brought my cat to them, they told me straight up that he was basically on his last legs, and that even drastic interventions would probably not lengthen his life more that several months.  Thus I made the decision to have him put to sleep.  That decision felt weird - both at the time I made the decision, and on and off for a long time afterward.  Here after all was a cat who had entered a trusting relationship with me, and yet now I was deciding to do this to him.  I seem to remember trying to second-guess my decision on more than one occasion afterward.  Yet objectively, my decision had to be constrained by such facts as my cat's condition, his prognosis, and my ability (or lack thereof) to pay for a heroic intervention.

I think many people can relate to the experience of being in a potentially emotionally charged situation, yet being forced to think objectively in order to make a rational choice.  So we come to the consideration of the United States in these present days, and the consideration of how we who are in the U.S. should choose to live in these days.  And to be a person of conscience in these days will inevitably lead to psychic distress as we see how the rich and powerful are preying on those who are weak.  For instance, the entire foreign policy of the second Trump administration has been and continues to be one long, violent, murderous tantrum against those who are not rich, not white, and not Western.  And Trump even sought to extend that tantrum to Canada, Europe and Greenland.  Trump's domestic policy is similarly poisonous.  And Trump is but the most prominent symptom of a greater American psychic disease, a disease shared by a majority of America's richest and most powerful citizens.  (Note that when I use the word "psychic", it means "pertaining to the soul."  I am not talking about supernatural or preternatural powers.)

Faced with this late-stage American pathology, many people of conscience are grieved.  This is especially true of those who have embraced the narrative that the United States once stood for a great and lofty ideal, and that Trumpism is merely an unfortunate aberration in its departure from that ideal.  Therefore for these people, "resistance" or "civil resistance" or "strategic nonviolent resistance" consists of trying to re-unite Americans around that higher ideal in the hope that those who are promoting the departure from the ideal might reform on their own initiative.  Such people place great hope in "advocacy" and mobilizing (as defined by the late Jane McAlevey).  But I think most objective observers would say by now that mobilizing and "advocacy" have not thus far been able to secure lasting beneficial change in the U.S.

Maybe the best thing then is to ask what is the current condition of the U.S., and whether it is even possible anymore to change that condition for the better.  I believe our condition has the following characteristics:

• Most of the flow of commerce and economic power is concentrated in a very small number of hands.
• Most of us who are not among the privileged live lives of great precarity and inequity.
• To be perfectly blunt, a majority of the members of the dominant culture are radically devoted to the promotion, maintenance, and re-expansion of white privilege.
• This has distorted our view of human rights and of basic morality to such an extent that a large number of Americans no longer wish to treat other people the same way they themselves want to be treated, but seek to do the exact opposite to their fellow human beings.
• The vast majority of mainstream American media outlets (yes, including the New York Times and the Washington Post) have shifted and are continuing to shift ever farther to the right.
• The rich and powerful have shifted the political process to such an extent that it will be very hard for ordinary people who are not rich and powerful to use ordinary channels to shift the process back to a more equitable foundation.  Those who seek to restore a right balance will increasingly have to work outside of established systems to do so.
• The moral distortions of the most powerful members of our society are leading to the kinds of distortions of thinking and reasoning that may well destroy the nation.

Can this condition be remedied?  That depends on whether or not there are sufficient numbers of people of conscience in our neighborhoods, towns, cities, and states.  How many people are there in your locality who possess a working moral compass?  The essence and starting point of a properly working moral compass is this: "Therefore, however you want people to treat you, you too do so for them, for this is the Law and the Prophets." - Matthew 7:12.

It also depends on whether it is possible to eliminate the continuation of sources of toxicity in our culture.  I am thinking especially of the overwhelming promotion of right-wing, selfish, libertarian, supremacist propaganda through American mainstream media, and the rabid anti-tax rhetoric that is destroying all the publicly-funded instruments of the public good in this country.  Trying to repair the damage done to our partially-destroyed society while the organs of right-wing media continue to pump out their message is like trying to clean up a basement that has been flooded by a sewage spill even while the broken sewer force main that initially caused the flooding continues to pump sewage.

Faced with the challenge of trying to repair our partially destroyed society, some have concluded that repair and healing are impossible.  These people hold out very little hope for the long-term survival of the United States.  Thus many people are choosing to try to emigrate.  It will be interesting to see how many of them succeed, and what they will find in their new homelands.  Emigration is an extreme example of the withdrawal of economic and political cooperation which I have been promoting in my remarks on strategic nonviolent resistance.  However, I can still see other ways of achieving nearly the same level of withdrawal.  What a person chooses will depend on the diagnosis, and hence the prognosis of the American condition which he or she is able to construct.  Here's a hint to my prognosis: I think that there are still many steps of withdrawal that can be taken by people of conscience who must still live in the United States.  But we'll have to be willing for some hard work.

Blog Post Recommendation from "Diary of An Autodidact"

I haven't had much time over the last few weeks to write a new blog post, but I do want to recommend a post from another blogger.  The name of the blog is Diary of an Autodidact, and the post is titled "Underground by Haruki Murakami".  Like me, the author of this blog is a survivor of an American white supremacist fundamentalist/Evangelical cult, and he has noted several similarities between present-day white evangelicalism and the Aum Shinrikyo doomsday cult which perpetrated a massive terrorist attack on Japanese subway commuters in March 1995.  I have myself commented on the lessons which I learned from reading (or in my case, listening to the audiobook version of) Haruki Murakami's book Underground, with its detailed description of the process by which many Aum participants lost their souls to the delusions of the evil man named Shoko Asahara.  It is interesting to see how others are drawing the same lessons in order to understand the present partly destroyed state of much of mainstream American culture.  To quote from the author of Diary of an Autodidact, "In the end, this is the legacy [of cults of narcissism] - dozens of deaths, thousands of injured, and little else to show for it. Thus is the end of every doomsday cult eventually. And, for that matter, of every Fascist movement. Death, destruction, and ultimately oblivion."  These sentences give us some idea of the final outcome of Trumpism.

And as for white evangelicalism/Protestantism (particularly the American flavor) - which has been the enabler of slavery, attempted genocide, and wars of conquest for centuries - I too am struck - as the author of Diary of an Autodidact was struck - by this quote from Underground:

“People the world over turn to religion for salvation. But when religion hurts and maims, 

where are they to go for salvation?”