This is the 9th essay in our pro-democracy series. Yes, it’s been a long while since the 8th episode, as we’ve come to find it much easier with how our life is currently structured to output shorter insight episodes in the meantime, as it really takes us 2/3 days to write and record a full 5 to 10 (or more) page essay and we all know how few of us with jobs, family, etc get that much free time to ourselves in modernity. And for this 9th of at least 25 essays on the subject, as perhaps we can think of this as a slow written book where each one is essentially a chapter, we’re heading over to not only talking about cults but nested cults. Otherwise known as, cults within cults, or one cult that predicates another cult.
The word cult itself through history has had a neutral connotation. Historically, it has more or less meant “a community of worship and/or ritual” regardless of what civilization or system that may have been within. Most early cults were likely neutral that any member could leave at any time. But over time the definition has primarily adjusted into a pejorative of being “a group which one joins that puts undue influence upon them and is something they can't leave without pain.” Since cults have existed on a continuum from healthy ethical influence to unhealthy non ethical influence, in modernity there are both non-destructive cults but also far too many destructive ones.
We've mentioned before that one of the biggest traps that people sink down into when on the spiritual path (and if you don’t like the word spiritual, simply switch it out for growth path, or improvement path, or development path), is getting into a cult. But what is often the case is that someone is born into a cult, which then has a knock on effect driving them getting into a secondary cult, followed by a tertiary cult etc.... and like Matryoshka dolls, otherwise known as Russian dolls, we will be focusing on three specific cults nested within one another in this essay.
People get brought into a cult thinking they are doing the right thing. For at initial glance, cults can seem to offer a sense of identity, discipline, knowledge, community, or opportunity. Yet, once being brought in, destructive cults use something called the BITE model, which stands for “Behavior, Information, Thoughts, Emotions” to manipulate one’s mind, heart, and will through thought reform. Creating a group with us vs them thinking, where members come to believe that anyone in the group is good and anyone outside the group is bad.
There are levels to cult indoctrination and programming and the longer one has been in a cult, sadly the deeper they have sunk. When people are deep in a single damaging cult or nested damaging cults, they don’t want the truth. They want to live in the illusion and lies of Plato’s cave. Because in order to be true they must transition through the looking glass of realizing that the foundations their supposed truths were built on are actually based in half truths at best our stacked lies at worst. It’s way easier to double down, or triple down, or quadruple down on their previously inaccurate cult programming. Because looking at the foundation of illusions and lies is too painful. Better to continue to live in echo chambers of more lies. For when one is in a mind control cult they are not allowed to think independently or critically, they must parrot the cults programming. They must replace their pre-cult impressionable self with a cult identity.
One of the most difficult things in the world will wise, meaning what one decides to do, is for those who have sunk down into groups that discourage individual thoughts, and encourage group think and use such indoctrination, to instead spiritually grow through the steps of admitting that what they’ve started in is incorrect, negative, wrong, or damaging. They don’t want to acknowledge that they’ve been lied to, manipulated, and exploited. They don’t want to be told that they are in a destructive cult, or multiple damaging cults which predicate one another, and they don’t want to admit that course correction is needed, they certainly would never want to read or listen to this essay, and they will at time fight to the death to prevent themselves from being unplugged from their false reality. Sadly a lot of people in a single cult, let alone multiple nested cults, will never be free of them. Leaving is the last thing they ever want to do and they will ultimately continue their de-evolution. But for those who have the will and development to acknowledge that they have been the fool card from tarot, those people always need to be talked to with compassion and care, even those who have replaced their old self with a new cult self or never knew who their real non-cult self was in the first place. This is the path of life growth, which is hard. As we often say, the human mind is a very complex thing and one can only work on their own mind for themselves through their heart and will. Hopefully with the help of compassion and caring via friends or family, but, just like kicking heroin, doing so or removing oneself from a cult can ultimately only primarily be done through the individual's own will.
Cult Layer 1 - The Religious Cult
One definition of cult is “usually a small group of people characterized by heavy devotion.” This can exist across all extremes of a political spectrum. As extreme ideologies can certainly be either extreme left or extreme right. The “Symbionese Liberation Army'', who kidnapped and indoctrinated Patty Hearst in the 1970’s would be an example of a far left cult. We know someone who got very devoted at first to living for a time at Gilliland's ESCETI Ranch. It is/was a hippy style community in rural Washington state that is/was probably so left wing its right wing that claims/claimed to be a hot bed for paranormal activity and supposed frequent UFO sighting. After realizing it was a UFO cult, and a not very large one at that, they and their partner went through severe mental damage and PTSD trying to leave and decouple themselves from the years they spent there. It was very difficult and painful for them.
But if you think cults are just small woo like organizations think again, because no one has done cults for such extended periods of time and at such large scales as dogmatic, organized, big religion - which is extreme male patriarchal hierarchy on steroids. Primarily in the East in the form of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islam, and in the West via primarily Judaism, Catholicism, and Christianity. Can folks be litely in these systems in a non-destructive non-pejorative sense of the word, of course. Is everyone in these systems in a cult in the negative pejorative sense of the word. Of course not. Especially if they keep it primarily personal. We personally are not screaming to the hills with our study or praxis in our two main spiritual systems which we find vastly superior to these other systems because their based in nature and not male authority hierarchy and instead focus on direct experience over just faith and the improvement of the individual instead of conforming to group ideologies - which are entheogenic shamanism and Hermetic alchemy. Short of sharing insights regarding in our films or writings, we keep both primarily personal and lite.
Many quote un quote “religious people” in the world who have the volume turned down into the personal for their faith, solely using it for their own development, or as community building at a Sunday gathering, or for a lite moral framework are the type of folks who don’t get caught in the binary trap of my religion good, other religions bad. But instead want equal opportunity for both women and men, agree with science, agree with evolution, can be sympathetic to all the world’s spiritual practices (some of which many are within structured faiths), and others are not and as a result have much less dogma. There are plenty of humane modest churches that allow their members to have the ability to think critically. Even though still patriarchal and incorrectly thinking God is only 1/2 of the two sexes, these are still superior, more embracing to women and more accepting of gay people churches and are not destructive and their members are allowed to come or go. But it’s important for very smart secular people to realize that a large percentage of the world, and this is definitely true for the United States, are religious in a heavy way. From birth!
Since the numerous uno problem in the world is shit parenting, far too many parents indoctrinate their children into heavy fanatic religious dogma from birth. With an underlying foundation in a destructive religious cult. This indoctrination into heavy big religion is so strong that someone will spend their whole life not questioning the operating system that has come pre-installed on their mental hard drive. And especially in more rural America, much of red America grows up their entire adolescence and into adult life with their social lives being based only around their church environment. So if the church is love and lite then fine - all good. But if it’s a hate church filled with guilt and shame, then it’s a destructive cult that is incredibly painful to try and leave. So to leave the church would require leaving many or not all of your friends and family who are also in the cult. In much of rural USA, your church is your whole social scene and is thus the control point of one's social environment. So if one leaves the church, they must leave all of it. Easier to just give up your free will. This is often why well educated, well studied in history folks are often secular, because while dogma can also exist in science, they have matured to focusing on the fact that morality and being a good person comes primarily from open minded good parenting that allows children to arrive at what they want on their own time rather then pre-installing a heavy membership in a religion. Which likely comes with so much extra potential baggage.
In the book "Critical Thinking: An Introduction to Reasoning Well" by Jamie Carlin Watson and Robert Arp, it discusses the concept of social conditioning and its impact on people's beliefs and thinking processes. Stating: “The overwhelming preponderance of people have not freely decided what to believe, but, rather, have been socially conditioned (indoctrinated) into their beliefs. They are unreflective thinkers. Their minds are products of social and personal forces they neither understand, control, nor concern themselves with. Their personal beliefs are often based in prejudices. Their thinking consists largely of stereotypes, caricatures, oversimplifications, sweeping generalizations, illusions, delusions, rationalizations, false dilemmas, and begged questions. Their motivations are often traceable to irrational fears and attachments, personal vanity and envy, intellectual arrogance and simple-mindedness. These constructs have become a part of their identity.” And this is nowhere more true than within heavy religious indoctrination.
This is most heavily seen in the United States within the extreme religious loudness of the Christian Right. Which should be called the christian wrong because they don’t like or respect other faiths, hate thy gay neighbor instead of love thy gay neighbor, and anyone who isn't a WASP, and protect the top of the socio-economic hierarchy instead of the bottom. So basically they pretend to honor the love based Christos teachings but do generally the opposite. While promoting Christian nationalism which is really just christian supremacy. John Pavlovitz, writer, former non hate pastor, & activist says “I Would rather be excluded for the people I include, than included for the people I excluded.
The Christian wrong is a minority percentage of the population. And although church attendance has been steadily dropping over the decades within the US, dark imperial hate churches still make up a sizable percentage, at least 25% in a very religious country slanted and want absolute power with actually less religious freedom. So even though 75% or more of the population are a pro-democracy coalition, regardless of their secular or more moderate to litely religious stance, this dark minority sector wants an oppressive Hainmaide’s Tail fascist theocracy, and the way they promote that is through right wing policies which protect the top of the socio economic hierarchy and lead us into the second cult.
Layer 2 - The Political Red Cult
We would never in a thousand years put shamanic and hermetic on the info section of our social media profile. Cause we don’t claim to be a shaman or an alchemist while also keeping it lite and for the most part, outside of what we share in our creative outputs, personal. But when someone puts Christian, Conservative, right front and center in their social media profile, you can tell they are very heavy with it because it’s their whole identity. And what they are doing is signaling to other cult members that they are in their same multiple cults.
Alchemy is a very evolutionary based science which teaches us that most if not all things in binary reality, meaning the physical world, have on the lower end, dysfunction at best or corruption at worse - both physically and mentally. And the purpose of alchemy is to, through a rotary evolutionary process, remove dysfunction. You wouldn’t be here as a developing soul if you didn’t have problems to work through, with things to improve upon and one day, shall we say - perfect. And a lazy statement would be to say, “politics is corrupt” or “all politicians are corrupt.” Politics is, in a democracy, messy yes, and still dysfunctional yes, but if working on behalf of the middle class, can progress a society through compounding good decisions that work to improve the lives of the proletariat - meaning the working people. So democracy, in that regard, has value, should result in the progressing and evolving of a civilization, and should always be worked on improving. But evolution can be painfully slow and in a country with only two real political parties which have a chance of getting into office, there during our lifetime has not been a symmetrical level or corruption between the two parties in the United States but instead one's heavy corruption influencing the others lesser corruption. While the left in the US certainly has some corruption, it pales in comparison to the corruption of the right. It is a very asymmetrical comparison. While the problem with blue America, and especially the democrats, which we are not a member of but acknowledge they are less corrupt and dysfunctional than Republicans, is at times some of them can be too much like virtually all Republicans. Which primarily protects oligarchic wealth and power. Since the American left wing is superior to the American right wing, which is inferior, we're going to focus on two right wing cults.
Even after the January 6th domestic terrorist attack (and terrorism is using violence for political influence or gain) on the US capital after the beautiful, beautiful, beautiful 2020 United States presidential election, some more moderate, members of the Republican Party (even though moderates within the party are an endangered species because of our soon to be discussed third cult) who realized it was wrong and a heavy threat to democracy for trying to stage an insurrection, said they would never vote for the opposition party. And instead had to come up with fairy tales of a “fed-surrection” and said they would still vote for the same people who were responsible for said attack. Why? Because they are in a political cult. Which would be too painful to mature into leaving because then they have to admit it has been wrong the whole time.
Cults work from the top down. Usually but not always around one leader. The problem with the red part of America, which is lead by the GOP otherwise called the Republicans, is that they are a top of the hierarchy cult, historically being subservient to robber barons and corporate greed, which is primarily learned through a hierarchy of men cult - being their very staunch religious stances. Not all right wing people are heavily religious, but the more right wing someone is, the more likely they are to also be pushing their religion on others. So as said in previous essays in this series, when you are said to be born into sin, and spend your whole childhood being taught to be subservient to sky daddy, and sky daddy’s son, and being taught to be scared of the red firey man underground, that hierarchy of men programming, combine with getting power dad downloads from a macho cowboy father figure, makes one much more susceptible to only caring about those at the top of the hierarchy. Which are the morbidly rich. So when your policies over the decades have primarily only represented the top 1% of income earners, as red America’s has, and screw everyone else, you have to fib about your intentions. You have to spend decades building a propaganda media machine that spews 24/7 lies with statements like “coastal liberal elites'' (even though over 50% of the US population live within 50 miles of a coastline), and inflate bullshit cultural wars to get the masses fighting against each other while your robber baron friends rob the people’s coffers. And because of top down cult dogma, being so sure you’re right about your stance the higher up the hierarchy, the better, the lower the worse, in a democratically limited constitutional republic with a constitution which is suppose to represent “We The People” meaning all the people, which also include the people in the middle of the hierarchy and the not just white but also black and brown poor people in the bottom of the hierarchy, you have to turn into ultra tribal professional liars. See our insights series regarding the L-Curve of income distribution on the subject. And regarding the leading edge of lies, this leads us into the third cult.
Layer 3 - The Conspiracy Cult
Now when someone puts on their social media profile, Christian, Conservative, then #WWG1WGA with multiple American flags then they are announcing that they are not only in one cult, or two cults, but thrice cults. It’s turtles of cults all the way down.
When we were 12 or 13 years old, we saw Donal Trump in the crap movie Home Alone 2. We would later see him in our late 20’s at the US open in New York City in the early 2000’s. All we knew about him when we were a teenager is he was a slimy schlockmeister business man who had gotti gold everything in his NYC penthouse, showed up to classless World Wrestling Federation and plastic miss USA pageant events, and was the textbook example of everything wrong with Corporate American financial greed. He was also obviously a crap un-loyal cheating husband who had been married numerous times (divorce could be said to be very un-Christian btw) and as we got into our early 20’s it was obvious he was a clear conman and ignoramus. In our 30’s it became more obvious he was just an outright fraud and criminal who runs everything he’s ever been a part of into the ground, being a chaos agent and destroyer. Then into our 40’s we’ve come to realize that he’s a sociopathic, narcissistic, grifting, dog whistling, gaslighting, bottomless human. Not to mention at the time of this writing, an adjudicated rapist. And let’s not bullshit, Neo Natzi’s have been delighted to vote for him so that tells one everything they need to know about his messaging on civil rights.
Yet into the present time of this writing and speaking two primary traits about him have become more and more clear to us. The first is that if there’s one trait that defines Trump more than any other, it is that he is a liar. It’s been fact checked that he told more than 30,573 misleading or factually inaccurate statements over his term and those continue every day for the short remainder of his life. He’s always been a con man, and with his daddy money has only been able to fail upward through endless lies. So lying is all he knows how to do. So the party of professional liars now has a lie with almost every breath slob as their Emperor. While the other trait that defines him is that he is a talented cult leader spreading a dangerous mental illness to his weak willed supporters. Knowing what buttons to push and what lies to tell to turn on the ears of those with authoritarian leanings. Trump is the reigning world champion of something in debate called the “Gish Gallop.” Which is a method of outmaneuvering rhetorical opponents with an overwhelming onslaught of dubious arguments. Essentially just talking over someone with a fire hose of lies, which is challenging to respond to because in classical debate you’re supposed to respond to each of your opponents specific arguments with counter arguments. Even Mark Burnett and other people primarily responsible for creating the garbage reality TV show, “The Apprentice”, which revitalized Trump in the early 2000’s, knew he was a fraud back then, but also a talented blabbing gish galloper and thus mental exploiter. Thus perfect for trash television.
This is probably true in all countries throughout the world, but the worst part of America is we’ve always had an asshole problem. The least nice, most mean people - who are the liars, extractors, and authoritarians, otherwise known as the assholes, are always trying to gain power. If we look back at history, the confederate South, who then didn’t want to transition out of chattel slavery for Africans, would be an example. The GOP, because of their 40+ years of Reaganomic golden shower economics that hollow out the middle class, have created an environment where someone like Trump can come into their top down group not as a cause but as a symptom of America’s middle class financial struggles. Then their members look to all the wrong places for terrible solutions. Rather than focusing on reducing the gap between abject poverty and the tiny sliver of aristocratic morbid wealth, from the middle out, the authoritarian cult members solutions are to look upwards toward the top of the economic hierarchy to a corrupt robber baron, (who literally named his son Barron after the robber barons) and who doesn’t give two shits about those below him. So the problem that the Republicans now have is there is an authoritarian anti democratic loyalty cult of hardcore assholes which has taken over their party, and is purging anyone who’s got some remaining shred of decency left from the remainder of the party. Named the MAGA cult, which stands secondarily for “Make Attorney’s Get Attorneys'', which we’ll get into the importance of the natural guardrails of democracy, the courts later in this series, but primarily stands for “Manipulating America’s Gullible Assholes.” It’s a non-original stale fart rehash of Ronald Wilson Regan’s (6 letters 6 letters 6 letters) campaign slogan, and make no mistake is a fascist cancer now embedded into the party.
So when you’re not in a wrong wing authoritarian cult, let alone multiple wrong wing nested authoritarian cults, all of these accurate traits about Trump we stated earlier, and could already see when we were still a kid, are obvious. But when one is in these cults, they think 180 degrees the opposite. They think he’s hand picked by fictional white Republican Jesus for the highest office in the land. They think the worst person for the job is the best, and the best person for the job is the worst. Everything is mirror back to front. Because fascism, through all of history, has only been able to exist within an endless soup of lies stacked upon lies, from cults within cults.
Fredrick Clarkson writes in his book “Eternal Hostility - The Struggle Between Theocracy and Democracy” that it would only be a matter of time where such a top down party would allow such a type of person to infect it. The GOP, has now transmuted from heavy corruption to near full corruption - becoming the GQP. With theocracy, nested in regressive backwards politics, nested in shadow conspiracy, resulting in a 5 alarm clown show dumpster fire that can’t tell the truth, let alone legislate on behalf of “We The People” because it's infested with MAGA and QAnon. A far-right conspiracy theory that alleges a secret plot against Donald Trump by a "deep state" of government officials, celebrities, and other prominent figures. The theory is based on cryptic messages posted online by an anonymous user or group of users known as "Q." These messages, which started appearing on forums in the toilet sewers of the internet, 4chan and 8chan in 2017, and had been consistently incorrect in their forecasting, often predicted future events or claim to have insider knowledge of government operations. QAnon followers believe, and remember believe has LIE in the middle of the word, that Trump was waging a secret war against this supposed deep state, which they beLIEved is involved in various nefarious activities, including child trafficking, Satan worship, and attempts to undermine their orange hutt emperor. It’s also a loyalty cult to Trump, Putin, and other wanna be dictators, with no room for questions or criticism of the malignant narcissist cult leaders who are said to never do any wrong.
We are very 50/50 on conspiracy. Having been a guest on what is likely one of the world’s top conspiracy podcasts called “The Higherside Chats” related to a past project, we will absolutely acknowledge that the world is not how you initially were taught it to be. And thus some conspiracies are accurate, such as countries doing what’s called false flags as pretexts for war. But the 10,000 foot is that a conspiracy is accurate if it’s on behalf of the oligarchs, and not accurate if it’s not helping the oligarchs. The thing about conspiracy that boggles the mind, is the accurate identification of problems, that yes there are secret things going on behind the scenes, followed immediately by bat shit crazy solutions being proposed to such problems. A conspiracy theory claiming such a bottomless human being who became a TV show con man is the savior of the republic is so dumb it’s mind boggling.
Yet the deeper one goes into it, the darker it gets. Being a closed authoritarian loop where truth doesn’t matter. Only a dark imperial theocracy with deep capacity to hate. With anything from not their MAGA ideology being said to be deep state fake news which is textbook cult programming. Being a hall of mirrors of misinformation and rocket fuel for inciting violence. Thrice cultists Q’s have literally called for executions of their opponents which literally sound like they’re from out of the first crusade from nearly 1000 years ago. In 2020, the FBI identified QAnon as a domestic stochastic terrorism threat, citing the theory's role in inspiring violent incidents and its ability to radicalize individuals.
Watching people we’ve known from the alternate media sphere or even some past acquaintances, friends, and colleagues get sucked down into the QAnon joker spiral has been deeply disappointing to us. We have a friend, a woman, who was literally engaged to a guy who then wisely broke off the marriage cause she came to find out he was a QAnon lunatic. We have another friend, a man, who hasn’t spoken to his kooky sister in over 5 years cause she’s so deep in the cult. And we suspect you have a similar story… The Reddit thread “Q-Anon Casualties” contains story, after story, after story, of families separated or destroyed because of souls lost to QAnon, in which people share their pain and suffering caused by friends and family who have had their pre cult selves replaced with cult selves to the cancer’s cultist mutation. Some of which will leave the cult, but many of which sadly will never return. We understandably do not waste time on someone deep in thrice cults that we know have been hollowed, so we can instead focus on those on the vile or returning from the event horizon of the black hole of cults and away from toxicity to come back up into the realm of critical thinking. We’ve also called it a death cult, because like Milton William Cooper, a UFOlogist and conspiracist who wrote the book “Behold a Pale Horse” which we have read and became one of the conspiracy bibles, chose to clock out via a harrowing shootout with the sheriff's department rather than just pay his federal taxes, some members of the cult will continue to go to jail for QAnon lies or even win the Ashley Babbitt award and die on behalf of QAnon. Jim Jones cult clock out style.
While QAnon and MAGA both deserve zero respect, to give some credit to more moderate conservatives, which do deserve respect, many of which have switched to become independents, there have been members of the Republican Party who are in only cult #1 and cult #2 but not in cult #3 and have spoken out against cult #3. While many of them are too cowardly to speak out against cult #3, it must be understood the pro-democracy movement is not as much a liberal vs conservative issue but more a pro-democracy vs authoritarianism issue, and those on the front lines, which are those within red America whose party is the primary threat to democracy, must continue to leave. Just like the "Chrisitans in Name Only" that hide within Christianity, many authoritarian who hate democracy hide within conservatism, but that certainly doesn't mean all conservatives are not pro-democracy. Because MAGA could be said to not even be conservative. Instead it’s mainly just fascism mixed with idiocracy, who don’t like members not in their cult voting.
