PANDEMIC DIARY

Part 3 : “The Promise” : Cultism

September 16, 2020

No quote in recent memory has so concisely described what is occurring in these United States.

Stated slightly differently:

“There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.”
Issac Asimov

What is the attraction of the “cult of personality”? In the previous blog post I provided a list of techniques associated with minutiae and its intentional use to misdirect our collective attention. Lo! and behold, this morning (as I do each morning) I received and read the daily post of Heather Cox Richardson, possibly the most dedicated reporter of pure news working today. Her post started like this: “Lots of people are tired right now. Indeed, the whole point of the constant stream of chaos coming from the administration is to exhaust us to the point we will stop caring what Trump and his supporters do.” WE MUST NOT LET THAT HAPPEN TO US.

In yesterday’s list of “Fallacies of Distraction”, this barrage of information is a technique identified as “the red herring: diverting the attention of the audience from the discussion of the real issues to irrelevancies.” In this case a constant assault of irrelevancies. Today, I wanted to examine the nature of “cults” as it relates to our current political environment and how it is impacting our culture.

“The first thing a cult does is tell you everyone else is lying.”
Anonymous

On July 13, Trump told reporters that “everyone is lying” with regards to the Coronavirus. On other occasions he said that he is not at all responsible for the current death toll, that he acted rapidly and prudently, that it’s the Chinese Virus and ‘they’ started it, that the information was unclear in the beginning, that the experts got it wrong, and as recently as yesterday Trump and his minions began counter-attacking the CDC accusing it of having formed a “cabal”, an inner circle of scientists who are disseminating false information to hurt Trumps campaign. “They want the death toll to go up in order to help their candidate (Biden) win”. He has repeated untold times that “if it wasn’t for me, millions more would have died”.

Insane you say, but “cult leaders utilize the ‘poetry of desperation and salvation’, safety and deliverance, which attracts the seeker both coming and going.” [my quote] So what is it people seek? What is the need that causes individuals to be so susceptible to seduction and cultist certitude? This is how I see it.

1. An alternative to the prevailing value system - Cults pray upon generalized discontent.

2. Failure to succeed within current societal structures - Lack of fit or constant rejection are repeated themes of new members.

3. Reductionist worldview - Cult leaders are reincarnated forms or they speak to God directly. Simplifying the message.

4. Paranoia - Cult members share the notion that those ‘outside the cult’ are enemies and after them.

5. Highly restricted - Once in you cannot get out.

6. End of world - All cult leaders declare in some form the “end of times” and its imminence.

7. Ready answers - like the reductionist worldview, complex issues are answered by easy solutions. Most humans want their lives to be “easy”.

8. Spiritual journeying - Many converts innocently and naively join cults as an alternative attempt to find their place in the universe.

9. Drugs - It should not be lost that a sizeable population of those habituating in communes are or have been addicted to some substance or mind altering chemical.

10. Rejection - After a lifetime of rejection, it is the follower who now rejects all forms of social order finding commonality with those who also reject societal norms. The outcast mentality.

“It’s easier to fool people than to convince them they have been fooled.”
Mark Twain

I don’t think it should surprise anybody that at the end of the day cult leaders institute policies extolling sexual freedom. David Koresh had sex with his multiple wives and with girls as young as 10 years old. David Berg sermonized that “God loves sex because sex is love, and Satan hates sex because sex is beautiful.” Berg was also an advocate of sex with minor-age children in an effort for the children to “embrace sexuality.” To the extreme, he contended that incest was necessary because it enabled children “to learn from their families”.

Furthermore, these rulers have a penchant for and are masters at manipulating empathy. What I mean by that is it takes a unique personality to be able to ‘read’ an others’ psyche and then ‘feed ‘ that psyche messages and values able to fully and totally supplant the original framework. The best description I have read of this process comes from Haruki Murukami, Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche.

“If you lose your ego, you lose the thread of that narrative you call your Self. Humans, however, can't live very long without some sense of a continuing story. Such stories go beyond the limited rational system (or the systematic rationality) with which you surround yourself; they are crucial keys to sharing time-experience with others.

Now a narrative is a story, not a logic, nor ethics, nor philosophy. It is a dream you keep having, whether you realize it or not. Just as surely as you breathe, you go on ceaselessly dreaming your story. And in these stories you wear two faces. You are simultaneously subject and object. You are a whole and you are a part. You are real and you are shadow. "Storyteller" and at the same time "character". It is through such multilayering of roles in our stories that we heal the loneliness of being an isolated individual in the world.

Yet without a proper ego nobody can create a personal narrative, any more than you can drive a car without an engine, or cast a shadow without a real physical object. But once you've consigned your ego to someone else, where on earth do you go from there?

At this point you receive a new narrative from the person to whom you have entrusted your ego. You've handed over the real thing, so what comes back is a shadow. And once your ego has merged with another ego, your narrative will necessarily take on the narrative created by that ego.

Just what kind of narrative?

It needn't be anything particularly fancy, nothing complicated or refined. You don't need to have literary ambitions. In fact, the sketchier and simpler the better. Junk, a leftover rehash will do. Anyway, most people are tired of complex, multilayered scenarios-they are a potential letdown. It's precisely because people can't find any fixed point within their own multilayered schemes that they're tossing aside their own self-identity.”

“There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.”
Issac Asimov

Any of this sound familiar? Suffice it to say, Trump should not be underestimated. His supporters are blind to his faults and manipulations. They reject his crimes and project crimes of the State…The Deep State. Our policy differences have conflated to “with us or against us”. The 40% of the population that supports Trump represent a highly disenfranchised segment of the population. They seem ready to dedicate themselves to Trump at all costs. They have eaten whole every conspiracy theory out there without paying attention to facts, science, evidence or reality. This political/religious fervor has justified Trump’s failure of leadership as God’s Will. All the psychological elements are present for a massive and potentially violent movement. Stay tuned.

“I discover that hardly a week passes that some one does not start a new cult, or revive an old one; if I had a hundred lifetimes I could not know all the creeds and ceremonies, the services and rituals, the litanies and liturgies, the hymns, anthems and offertories of Bootstrap-lifting.”
Upton Sinclair

“Nothing goes away until it has taught us what we need to know.”
Pema Chodron

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Just wanted to add something to the last post on Minutiae. This cartoon I just discovered speaks volumes to the point I hope I made.

PANDEMIC DIARY

Part 1 : “THE PROMISE”

September 7, 2020

I have just completed reading, for the second time, the novel by Chaim Potok, “The Promise”. Originally published in 1969, it is the second of two novels following the lives of friends, Reuven and Danny, religious Jews growing up in an orthodox Brooklyn community. They are both the children of Jewish scholars. Danny, belonging to the more traditional, ultra-religious Hasidic household, chooses to become a psychologist, breaking with the strict fundamentalism of his Hasidic community and its laws. Reuven, a brilliant student of Talmud, chooses to study for the rabbinic, oddly electing a more traditional path given his more liberal, contemporary orthodox upbringing.

From the earliest of school ages, these sects of Jews study Talmud. The Talmud is the comprehensive written version of the Jewish oral law and the subsequent commentaries on it written in two parts ... The Mishnah is the original written version of the oral law and the Gemora is the record of the rabbinic analysis and discussions over the Mishnah, known as the Commentaries. Exegetic in nature, these annotations, historically written on the margins of the page on which the Mishnah or law appears [like a university student might do], attempt to elucidate or provide further dimension to the complexities and sometimes seeming contradictions of the law. Oftentimes, they merely produce further discussion in the form of debates around a single phrase or even a single word’s meaning. These “discussions” can be sufficiently animated as to cause rifts among the various sects.

A Page from Talmud showing the Mishnah [boxed in red], the oldest portion of Gemora below and the Commentaries encircling the center.

There is a beautiful segment in the book in which Reuven’s teacher, Rav Kalman, a great and revered Jewish scholar and Talmud expert, asks Reuven to help him understand a complex series of texts and commentaries on Jewish law. Reuven is asked because the segments of Mishna and their interpretations are from a newly published book written by Reuven’s father, Rabbi Malter. Rav Kalman is exhorting Reuven to explain to him his father’s method of arriving at his understandings of the law and subsequent commentaries.

Reuven obliges having assisted in the editing and proof-reading of his father’ book and himself becoming highly familiar with and proficient at the total body of research. At issue is Rav Kalman’s claim that the Mishnah is the word of God, and therefore cannot be changed. Reuven explains that the Mishnah was written about the 4th century, two centuries following the oral tradition. As well, the Greek philosophers who lived in the 2nd century BC are known to have highly influenced the writers of the original oral tradition. Passages were cited that effectively were literal translations from the Greek sources, including Aristotle and Plato. “The similarities between the Mishnah and these Greek sources are palpable…the Mishnah offers a reasonably accurate reflection of the Platonic or Aristotelian teaching, suggesting some kind of influence. [Greek Philosophy and the Mishnah: On the History of Love that Does Not Depend on a Thing. Gabriel Danzig]

In many instances the Mishnah passages are nearly literal translations from the Greek, originally transcribed in Aramaic then written in Hebrew where the letters are merely transliterated from the Greek. Of course this will cause confusion as to original meaning. But, let’s not distract ourselves with truth. Like many ‘originalists’ today, Rav Kalman would not be swayed. The Aramaic of our people is the true word.

“I will no longer mutilate and destroy myself in order to find a secret behind the ruins.”
Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha

Rather, he instructed Reuven, “Do you know yourself? You must know yourself first.” This is the Conservative Rabbi telling his student that in order to receive his degree and final ordination as a Rabbi, he must demonstrate his adherence to ‘Yiddishkeit’ or the whole of the Jewish way of life. This not so veiled threat is a demand that Reuven, no matter his intelligence, his openness to deeper understanding of original texts, or regard for modernity, fully accept what is written and, worse than ignore, actually reject vociferously his new insights and their implications. He must become a ‘faithful’, an uncompromising disciple of what he knows not to be true.

So, why did I go to this length to relate a segment of this wonderful book? (And, if you are interested in reading this, please read “The Chosen” first.) This is an example, a meager, small-scale example of “cult of personality”. By dint of his credentials, by the impression of his knowledge, by the force of his arguments, and by the staunchness of his commitment, Rav Kalman has divided his community into those who affirm or, at least and cowardly, accede to his positions and are therefore disciples and true to the word of god; or, you are intellectual dilettantes who feels at any time can interpret the writing of ancient books and scribes to your liking and to fit into an altering modernity.

This is not so described in the book as I am now interpreting it, written those many years ago. Nonetheless, from the inception of religious thought, among the obedient of all faiths the world over, it is our differences that are the hallmark of our lives and not our shared experiences and commonalities; not our love of country and commitment to a way of life; not shared human rights and the dignity belonging to us all. Oh yes, Jewish and Christian (and all other) scriptures advance a ‘lip-service’-style unity of humankind message while really envisioning a world in their “fold” — ardent followers who live a committed life of conviction to their truth, their belief…and no other.

Part 2 : “THE PROMISE” - I sincerely hope to get that out for publication tomorrow.