Word Gems: Cultism

“The nature of psychological compulsion is such that those who act under constraint remain under the impression that they are acting on their own initiative. The victim of mind-manipulation does not know that he is a victim. To him the walls of his prison are invisible, and he believes himself to be free. That he is not free is apparent only to other people. His servitude is strictly objective.” Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited

I recently spoke on the phone with my old college friend, Adrian. We were discussing the threat of a new economic downturn. Adrian begins to laugh:

"You and I don't have anything to worry about. We'll never have to stand on a street corner banging a tin cup for loose change. We can always start our own cult religion, we were taught by the best."

And now we're both laughing at this; unfortunately, we do understand cults very well - we learned the hard way.

Maybe you were you thinking of cultism in terms of crackpot minority religion. It's more than that.

Definitions of cultism easily devolve to bigotry; meaning, it's always the other guy's religion. Tom Wolfe well understood that consensus, majority opinion will sanctify and smile upon certain "kook" religious ideas while condemning less-popular minority views - as if reality were fashioned by voting. This kind of venal subjectivity, however, is just another example of egoic "me versus them."

But there is a larger picture to consider. Some years ago I came to realize that the spirit of cultism extends beyond religion to be found in every facet of society. There are hard-core versions, to be sure, but cultism's essence is a much bigger problem than "one true doctrines" with which we disagree, or even the isolated and dramatic Jim-Jones kind.

Hoffman is exactly right. Anything can take the form of a cult because people attempt to quiet the inner neediness, the sense of "I am not enough," by identifying with almost any power symbol. We'll talk about this.

The word cult derives from a family of Latin words with the basic sense of "cut."

This core concept of "cut" leads us to images of refinement and fashioning; by extension, also to development, control, pattern, order, and system.

We see the root-word cult in cultivate, which, when applied to plants, offers the prospect of increased plant development and greater control over the growth process.

A cultured person is refined and developed, with social imperfections pruned and cut away, now conforming to well-accepted elite-group mores and codes of conduct.

A particular ethnic culture is one in which elements of life are ordered, chosen, and sanctified in a certain way; modes of living are systematized, given blessing or spurned, executed according to a particular pattern.

(1970) See my old 4020 John Deere on which I spent thousands of hours during my teens. My brother here is changing a plow's coulters or culters, the cutting edges, the knife-blades which cut and turn over the soil. Today, farmers don't plow anymore, having moved on to "no-till" seeding.

The very word agriculture, most significantly, contains this root-idea of "cutting," that is, a refinement and fashioning, an injection of order and system relating to the food supply. As Will Durant reminds us in his monumental Story of Civilization:

"Three meals a day are a highly advanced institution. Savages gorge themselves or fast [with the soporific thought,] 'I do not have to think. I have plenty of meat'… In the last analysis, civilization is based upon the food supply."

But my favorite insight from Durant regarding agriculture and civilization is this:

"Civilization is social order promoting cultural creation... It begins where chaos and insecurity end. For when fear is overcome, curiosity and constructiveness are free, and man passes by natural impulse towards the understanding and embellishment of life... A people may possess ordered institutions, a lofty moral code, and even a flair for the minor forms of art, like the American Indians; and yet if it remains in the hunting stage, if it depends for its existence upon the precarious fortunes of the chase, it will never quite pass from barbarism to civilization... The first form of culture is agriculture. It is when man settles down to till the soil and lay up provisions for the uncertain future that he finds time and reason to be civilized. Within that little circle of security - a reliable supply of water and food - he builds huts, his temples and his schools; he invents productive tools, and domesticates the dog... at last himself. He learns to work with regularity and order, maintains a longer tenure of life, and transmits more completely than before the mental and moral heritage of his race. Culture suggests agriculture, but civilization suggests the city ... civility [literally points to] the refinement which townsmen ... thought possible only in the civitas or city."

The first form of culture was agriculture, which allowed for stability of life, an ordering and systemization, as the food supply became more predictable; all of which allowed for a refinement and control regarding daily living.

but what does the term cult signify in reference to religion and philosophies of living

Given the above discussion of cultism as systemization, we begin to see that a definition within the arena of religion and philosophy will relate to a patterning and ordering of ideas.

And now we must ask the question, "Is there anything wrong with bringing order and pattern to our religious views and philosophies of living?"

ordering and patterning of data has been one of the great achievements of civilization

Aristotle was one of the fathers of classifying information about the world. He organized living creatures in terms of mobility and apparent mental capacity. This was a great advancement for humankind.

In our day, Mortimer Adler undertook the massive project of cataloging and ranking what he called "the great ideas" of the last 2500 years. These 102 most important topics derive from the writings of history's greatest thinkers.

bringing order and pattern to data is one thing - but when attempts at system and control are aimed at the minds of human beings, now we've stepped over the line into dark cultism

Many of my writings deal with this cultish assault upon the dignity of the human essence; as such, I will not attempt to reproduce those discussions here, but will refer you to my core articles:

how do you bring system and order to an entity whose capacity, like an inner cosmos, as Father Benson eloquently stated, has "no discoverable upper limit"

How do you build a fence around the infinite, the illimitable? How do you contain, bring pattern and formula, to creatures who are like the prairie with its magical panorama of endless horizon - unbounded, untrammeled, unfettered; an inexhaustible human aptitude - vast, wide open, without discernible demarcation; the wondrous sacred destiny of those "made in the image."

One must have observed that throughout the world man, the human being, has always been searching for something much more than the transient. He has always been, probably from time immemorial, asking himself if there is something really sacred, something that is not worldly, that is not put together by thought, by the intellect...

And organised religions seem to have supplied the answer. They say there is - there is a reality, there is God, there is something which the mind cannot possibly measure. And they begin to organise what they consider to be the real. And man is led astray by organised religions.

a humorous illustration

You may remember that story of the devil and a friend of his were walking down the street and they saw a man ahead stoop down and pick up something from the road. And as he picked it up and looked at it he was very startled, there was a great delight in his face.

And the friend of the devil asked, what was it that he picked up.

And the devil said,

'It's truth'.

And the friend said,

'Isn't that a very bad business for you then?'

The devil said,

'Not at all, I am going to help him to organise it'.

organizing reality is the essence of cultism

Krishnamurti's little joke has it exactly right.

We’ve discussed that the etymological root of “cultism” is “to cut”; that is, to pare and prune, to refine and order, to systematize and regulate. The history of science might be viewed as a long chronicle of humankind attempting to control and bring order to the material universe. This is “cultism” in its finest sense. But it all goes wrong when a self-denominated elite, purportedly God’s excusive agents, pose as gurus and infallible teachers. When this happens they will attempt to systematize and regulate, organize and craft, truth and spiritual reality. This is when the shooting starts.

Krishnamurti well understands the pernicious role of religion in history. The ego loves to identify with the apparent solidity of Religion’s infallible doctrines. What better way to secure for oneself a sense of safety and security in a hostile world?

For this reason, religious people, more than other dysfunctional ones, have felt justified, have more readily killed and tortured, in the name of God.

here's the most important point I would have you know about the essence of dark cultism

The history of science and philosophy is a chronicle of humanity's quest to control and manage the forces of nature. In early times, primitive man saw himself as helpless pawn of the gods; but with the hard-won discoveries of science and philosophy, humanity began to cast off fear-based concepts of superstition and fate, taking to itself a sense of mastery over the world. It's been a long, slow climb out of the pit of ignorance into the sunny open air of rational enlightened thought.

All this is well and good, and we need more of it. It could be said that here we find the good version of cultism which seeks to fashion and shape, pare and refine, manage and control, the wild and untoward elements arrayed against us in nature.

At this point in the process, however, some veer off into dysfunction. While the clear-thinking scientist and philosopher will season their views with generous sprinklings of humility, dark-spirited cult leaders reject such equanimity; the former readily admit to partial knowledge and incomplete understanding of the universe...

... but the latter, the dark-spirited cult leaders, with bloated vanity, speak pompously of:

Adrian and I ask ourselves, why did we put up with that nonsense for so long?

The arrogant decrees of Religion represent a throw-back to totalitarian views of the Middle Ages; to borrow a phrase of Nobel Laureate F.A. Hayek, it's all "counter-Renaissance," anti-humanistic, and unscientific.

Here's where the "cutting" of their brand of dark cultism comes into play: Dear Leaders attempt to mold and fashion, pare and refine, a hostile world with promises to make it all safe and secure. Dark cultism offers to create certainty in an uncertain world; predictability and absolutism amidst endless vicissitude.

We speak of charismatic leaders who draw to themselves an intoxicated "cult following." I think we can now see what this means. The party-faithful, in a psychology of the "inner child seeking for a strong father-figure"...

be it in a religious, political, corporate, pop-celebrity, or other context, delude themselves into believing that their Dear-Leader Hero will be able to fashion and shape, pare and prune, systematize and order, reality itself into a form less terrifying and more certain. For thousands of years, cult-followers have been seeking "saviors" to rescue them; but as Eric Hoffer masterfully points out, it is an ill-conceived attempted rescue, primarily from their own sense of "I am not enough," the "spoiled self."

I need not ask others why such illusion is applauded. I need only bring to mind my own days in cult-religion with its "one, true this" and "infallible that."

Why did we put up with the nonsense? Why didn't we just walk away? Why did we stay for so many years?

We allowed ourselves to be psychologically bullied because of then-present states of mind - our diminished levels of awareness and consciousness at the time. We had not yet sufficiently grown out of fear-based mentality and into self-respect and self-love; as such, it seemed reasonable to seek for some form of impressive external authority who promised to save us from our own "spoiled selves." As Aldous Huxley stated, in the masthead quote at the top of this page, those dominated by cult-religion do not realize that they are not free. In those days, I certainly did not.

the spirit of dark cultism, with its promise to reshape and redistill reality, making it safe and certain for you, is found in every aspect of society, not just religion

It is very important to understand that the spirit of dark cultism is to be found in all aspects of society. We find it in politics, the corporate world, the arena of music and the arts with its celebrities, in materialistic science, in academia...

Dark cultism will be found wherever human dignity is up for sale due to lack of self-knowledge; where people willingly merchandize themselves to power symbols, to Dear Leaders in various guises, in exchange for empty promises of hope and change, security and safety.

Take back your life, declare your independence today, from this slavery, this mind-control -- all forms of cultism.

Editor's note: Consider, in the following passage, what Krishnamurti said about "organizing truth" - which is the essence of cultism:

Jiddu Krishnamurti, the famous "dissolution speech," August 3, 1929: "Truth, being limitless, unconditioned, unapproachable by any path whatsoever, cannot be organized; nor should any organization be formed to lead or to coerce people along any particular path… Truth cannot be brought down, rather the individual must make the effort to ascend to it... You are accustomed to authority, or to the atmosphere of authority, which you think will lead you to spirituality. You think and hope that another can, by his extraordinary powers -- a miracle -- transport you to this realm of eternal freedom which is Happiness. Your whole outlook on life is based on that authority... You are all depending for your spirituality on someone else, for your happiness on someone else, for your enlightenment on someone else… Organizations cannot make you free. No man from outside can make you free; nor can organized worship, nor the immolation of yourselves for a cause, make you free; nor can forming yourselves into an organization, nor throwing yourselves into works, make you free… Again, you have the idea that only certain people hold the key to the Kingdom of Happiness. No one holds it. No one has the authority to hold that key. That key is your own self, and in the development and the purification and in the incorruptibility of that self alone is the Kingdom of Eternity. So you will see how absurd is the whole structure that you have built, looking for external help, depending on others for your comfort, for your happiness, for your strength. These can only be found within yourselves. You are accustomed to being told how far you have advanced, what is your spiritual status. How childish! Who but yourself can tell you if you are beautiful or ugly within? Who but yourself can tell you if you are incorruptible?"