The important thing to understand about cults is that no one ever thinks they’re in one.

From the outside, it can seem so obvious that a random scientologist, or the people who drank the proverbial kool-aid at Jonestown are/were in a cult, and utterly blind to that fact, their beliefs cultivated and perpetually reinforced by the cultist leaders, and fellow followers alike.

From the inside the rationales of any given cult though seem not only reasonable, but in fact superior to the weak-tea rationales of the uninitiated and the lost; better for explaining reality, and better at representing a blueprint for a truly better way to live.

Most cultists therefore quite naturally practice some form of proselytizing or recruiting, consciously or not–they don’t want us to join for some evil purpose, no!–they just want to help us to see the light, and to join in the consensus trance for our own moral and practical good.

Most of what I say and do here is aimed at simple (and maybe obsessive) deprogramming from the biggest and most common Western cult of them all.

You might prefer to think of it as enlightened neo-liberalism, or capitalism, or democracy that must be spread to the darker corners of the globe for the salvation of poor heathens suffering under inferior forms of belief.

Autocracy, communism, benighted somali anarchies, dictatorship, and all the little hitlers out there, don’t you know, in the sunless pockets of the horrible Jungle, in the Heart of Darkness. We come in peace, offering the blessings of the Garden, of freedom, liberty, justice for all, and if we have to offer them on the end of a bayonet or a sanctions regime sometimes, well, that’s just a small necessary evil part of doing the noble missionary work of All Things Bright and Beautiful.

Ninety times, since the nominal end of the last good war, the Empire has practiced coups, overthrows, and regime change in the name of these Things. That just counts the more obvious and overt projects.

It doesn’t include, for example, everything the Good Empire has done to try to get rid of the putin, over there in the old new enemy place. It doesn’t include many things that are just routine and reflexive jerks of muscle memory on the part of the war machine by now. It doesn’t include most of the Benign Presence of the christian soldiers with guns in 800+ military bases all over the human globe. It doesn’t include the aching for war with the Chinese now burning in the breasts of cultists great and small.

The logic of our Cult is inexorable.

You have felt its breath in your ear, whispering silkily, since you were a tiny child in a new school with your hand held over your heart.

Pledging allegiance, once more with feeling …

To the flag; to the Republic for which it stands.

You didn’t think of it at a bestial machine with no conscience, because thinking of it in that quite legitimate way would greatly displease the leaders who run this nearly ubiquitous cult.

You thought of it as the crowning achievement of the progress of Civilization.

Maybe you still do.

To some wavering ever less certain degree, but

There’s a warning sign on the road ahead

Liberal Ideological Extremism Is Driving The Collective West Into Global Suicide

I don’t feel like Satan but I am to them.

I’m only just trying in my own half-seeing way to update this moldy rotting syllabus so it has a chance of reflecting a new reality that the great L. Ron and his henchmen Joe and Donald would prefer you were never exposed to even once.