The Prophet Who Failed
harpers.org
harpers.org
The posters also, incongruously, had this androgynous-looking image prominently displayed:
https://store.summitlighthouse.org/images/thumbs/0000144_pos...
I thought up until very recently that this was supposed to be an image of Elizabeth Clare Prophet (whose name I thought also was surely made-up), and always wondered why this woman had a mustache :)
A fun fact too: General Nathan Flynn recited a very strange prayer at one of his gatherings. Turns out it’s a prayer from the Church Universal and Triumphant, this woman’s fascist cult. So there may be surviving ideological links today, or Flynn may be in a cult himself, or maybe whoever wrote it for him is.
https://x.com/PiperK/status/1445663165186904065
A lot of this stuff goes even further back to William Dudley Pelley and the Silver Shirts, an American fascist movement. Pelley and Edna Ballard, one of the founders of I AM, were associated.
Wouldn’t be the first time cults tried to use rich or powerful followers to gain money or power for themselves. Look into Scientology.
This is in the article.
As an aside, your repeated use of the word "cult" and the word "fascist" detracts from your comment. Both words have been diluted past all meaning, and using them together so frequently in just a few paragraphs induces a lot of cringing from anyone who is moderately familiar with either religious studies or political science. They're essentially just expletives at this point and don't add much meaning beyond intense disapproval.
The Silver Shirts were straight-up fascists. The other movements you refer to were right-wing nationalist movements but I see no evidence of most of the characteristics of fascism except that you try to paint them with the same brush by referring to a vague association between founders.
Another interpretation is that Cult has been somewhat disarmed from it's modern, weaponized usage.
Historically, Cult was as a neutralish term.
In discussing religious groups, Cult helped clarify that the group in focus was a subset of a larger group. It was also used as a catchall reference to small religions.
In the latter 20th century, Evangelical authors/lecturers (eg:Walter Martin) strongly associated Cult with evil and used it to help introduce+nurture animosity toward smaller, unliked Christian faiths.
If Cult hadn't been so loaded with sinister vibes, it might not have become the term we use to reference cloistering, manipulative groups.
I don't disagree with your assessment here.
I am okay, however, with Cult becoming defanged.
Cult's negative connotations sprung from the worst of intentions - to divide Christians by demonizing other, smaller Christian faiths. Turning a vulnerable group into an (punishable) enemy is a classic fascist tactic.
I argue that the negative associations with 'Cult' were originally a product of fascist methods.
The further we are from all of that, the better I'll feel.
Sort of adjacent to your point. I think the label 'Fascist' best serves us when we apply it to fascist behaviors.
I'm not saying Fascist isn't a reasonable label for people who embrace fascist behaviors. It is.
But 1) understanding and identifying fascist behaviors - this is how we know when to apply the label and
2) the behaviors are the mechanism for harm; they deserve our greater focus and
3) People are multiple things and things change. Behavior is what it is.
> a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy, subordination of individual interests for the perceived good of the nation and/or race, and strong regimentation of society and the economy.
Our vocabulary in the US around politics (left and right) gives the false impression that politics is a 2D spectrum. It's not, and very few right-wing groups today have many shared beliefs with fascists at all. This includes the nutjobs who think they're Nazi sympathizers.
According to Orwell the word was already a mostly meaningless insult by 1944 [1], and it's still a mostly meaningless insult:
> Except for the relatively small number of Fascist sympathizers, almost any English person would accept ‘bully’ as a synonym for ‘Fascist’. That is about as near to a definition as this much-abused word has come.
> ... All one can do for the moment is to use the word with a certain amount of circumspection and not, as is usually done, degrade it to the level of a swearword.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fascism
[1] https://www.telelib.com/authors/O/OrwellGeorge/essay/tribune...
I don't think you've tried to determine their politics at all, you just want to say that the dominant ideology of the US is not allowed to be named.
I’m surprised people are low key defending these groups, even people on the right. This isn’t conservatism. It’s totalitarianism backed by new age woo.
I guess I shouldn’t be that surprised. Totalitarianism is back in fashion lately. Feels like we want to LARP the early 20th century.
Since I'm assuming that I'm one target of this as the only person to contradict you in this subthread, I just want to be clear: I'm not on the right. As far as the conservatives in my (very red) state are concerned I'm a flaming liberal.
As for how I'd describe myself, I'm basically in the "we desperately need to reverse the trend of everyone assuming that anyone who disagrees with them is evil" camp, which is why I strongly object to casual comparisons to fascism. Using that word or the word "cult" to label someone immediately frees you from any obligation to engage with them as a person, and I'm not okay with that tendency from either wing of modern politics.
We need to stop handling psychotic totalitarian lunacy the same way we handle people we don’t agree with about the use of pronouns or tax policy.
Some are contrarians with the opposite polarity, such as Arianna Huffington. Kudos, maybe.
I met an ex-JW the other day who has become convinced that he is an extra-terrestrial volunteer, sent to earth in order to help stabilize human society, and that he's able to remotely converse with anybody through the aid of his physical paraphenalia. He was interesting to talk with; 100% convinced that his belief system was real; IANAP, but I wouldn't immediately lump him into any major DSM-5 category. I guess certain minds seek non-mainstream belief systems as a way of distinguishing themselves from the norm, or accounting for a deep feeling of being different, or not fitting in. Perhaps this too is somewhat endemic in the startup crowd; why work for a big firm when you have special capabilities, and can blaze your own trail?
Ouch. So on-point.
There's wrong, and then there's so-wrong-it-should-be-a-musical!
- they are not at all who the faiths they were raised by said they should be - they know there's not actually anything wrong with themselves (or others like them), despite what their faith taught them
Squaring these two deeply personal realizations is challenging. People take many paths. Your interaction is an outlier, but by no means the most extreme I've encountered.
As long has there been human writing, people have been saying the end is nigh. Nobody has ever been right!
You aren't wrong. I've been a Christian of some stripe, my whole life. Even general Armageddon predictions (soon!) are really dumb and I wish we would stop them.
Besides being wrong, they're either a pointless distraction or they're counterproductive. Counterproductive because fear sucks as a long term motivator.
Faiths have examples and our job as adherents is to strive to embody the example. That's it.
The rest of the guff might be supportive if applied correctly. Mostly, we don't do that.
Like, if you created a dataset with the notable features of various doomsday cults and then compared them with the notable features of Rationalism, then used that dataset to inform your priors in an attempt to answer the question, “Are my concerns about impending doom reasonable or have I succumbed to a doomsday cult?” surely the only reasonable answer is, “I have succumbed to a doomsday cult.”
And yet here we are.
You can also hear the Church Universal and Triumphant on Negativland's Escape From Noise as "Michael Jackson," giving a lecture about the evils of pop music (also on Sounds of American Doomsday Cults.)
Show's archives here: https://www.wfmu.org/playlists/MW
All of us are facing a personal apocalypse. We all build an entire universe in our minds based on what our senses take in and that world is going to evaporate when you die, and the rest of the world will continue on just fine without us. For a lot of people, it feels better, for some reason, to think that we are so important that the rest of the universe will also cease to exist when we die.
Aside from dreams of the world ending, another way to sort of assuage that dread that we all carry around with the knowledge of our own mortality is to lean into the intuitive belief that we are somehow non-physical entities that are merely contained in these physical bodies temporarily, and that some day we'll be released and go back into our true form. These two ideas often go together, but don't always. The neo-platonists, for example, believed in eternal non-physical bodies ascending to some kind of divinity after death, but didn't really have an 'end-of-the-world' prophecy.
A lot of people reading an essay about this will think about this as an object lesson in gullibility and people failing to use reason, but there are a lot of so-called "rationalists" on this very website who themselves believe in a version of this -- that the world is soon going to face a technological apocalypse of some kind -- maybe it's a super-powerful AI escaping, or climate doom, or nuclear war, or whatever, and at the same time believing that they themselves will find a way to escape death, from mind-uploading, or life extension or something similar. Transumanism, extropianism, "effective altruism", a lot of those modern techno-utopian philosophies are just millenarian doomsday cults with a "scientific" technological gloss.
I don't think there's anything especially "wrong" about the religion this essay is about. It's no crazier than Christianity was, which was also a religion built around a prophet whose apocalypse didn't arrive and who died unexpectedly. They had to build an (at times beautiful, at times ridiculous) tower of philosophical abstractions to retroactively make any of it make sense to them.
On a completely unrelated tangent: If you read https://www.reddit.com/r/Superstonk/ the subreddit for die hard Gamestop "investors", there's a lot of similarity between the way they talk about the "mother of all short squeezes" and the way the doomsday cults talk about the end of the world. There's a religious fervor to it that's sort of based around the idea that the modern economy is a house of cards and will completely collapse because of people shorting a retail video game store.
No point trying to see more to it, maybe that could be one goal for folks desperately looking for this.
Disagree - I'd say we are special in that we have enough self-awareness to develop technology to destroy the ecosystem our existence depends on, but not enough to stop ourselves from doing it.
We may still be mentally on a level of bacteria compared to maximum intelligence obtainable in this universe, so self-awareness may not be such a huge milestone some here think it is. A bit of humility about ourselves would serve us well.
Agreed, hence I made no such claim. But a lack of it may render one unable to wonder what is true, and that may play some role in whether we can do anything about climate change. Like, I don't expect too much of it from the stereotypical Trump supporter, but I now no longer expect it of anyone.
> ...when all out ancestors and other even quite smart beings don't / didn't for whatever illogical reasons.
It would seem the power of science is required to destroy the Earth's ecosystem (religion is only adequate to kill people within the ecosystem, and then only sometimes), and as it turns out it took a while for it to overcome religion. But boy once it did, it didn't take long to fuck things up...with zero responsibility to boot (credit where credit is due: good artists copy, great artists steal).
> We just desperately wish for it to be so, because the concept of permanent death is fucking terrifying, for everybody.
If wishes were horses, beggars would ride! And wishing (story telling, etc) seems to be our main skill when it comes to certain topics.
> We may still be mentally on a level of bacteria compared to maximum intelligence obtainable in this universe, so self-awareness may not be such a huge milestone some here think it is. A bit of humility about ourselves would serve us well.
100% agree with the second sentence, but do the two sentences not directly contradict each other?? I think we must have our wires crossed somehow.
Are people who believe that technology can save their life considered lunatics? Because it can already do so now, to a point, but it's not hard to believe that even old age could potentially be cured in the future, although perhaps not our generation. As far as I know there is no law of physics that would prevent us from being immortals (except perhaps the heat death of the universe or something).
Believing in medicine and its incredibly fast paced progress is believing in something irrational with a "scientific" technological gloss?
If it is driven by an assumption that tech will always save us because it always has in the past.
I would draw the line at things like global climate change though.
Building your life around _near-term_ apocalyptic scenarios doesn't seem super healthy to me, but it is vastly different from being part of a cult or believing in Santa Claus, as there is indeed some science behind it, although people living that way may imagine those catastrophic events more probable or severe than they really would be.
> ...there are a lot of so-called "rationalists" on this very website who themselves believe in a version of this -- that the world is soon going to face a technological apocalypse of some kind ... believing that they themselves will find a way to escape death....
Neither of these points resonate with me. I think the people you describe are a tiny fraction of people — I'm not sure I know anyone like that in any event.
I think the current trajectory of our civilization is unsustainable for a number of reasons and we will no doubt see some bad outcomes. I have absolutlely no expectation of being able to dodge the consequences though.
Maybe it's people like Peter Thiel though that you have in mind.
She's definitely right about that one ^. A very slow decay, most visibly seen by its gradual fall of GDP and world influence. This is also paralleled by increasing social welfare over the years, which the church also rejected:
"Elizabeth preached against socialism in all forms, seeing it as part of the global elite conspiracy's plot to control all facets of society. She instead emphasised a philosophy of individualism. Palmer and Abravanel characterised the Church's viewpoint as a 'conservative Republican stance'."
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_Universal_and_Triumphan...
Blame the Republican party for preferring to embrace and try to weaponize their lunatic fringe, and blame the other side rather than clean their own house.
This the British talk this way in the 18th century ?
“But why Rome, of all ancient empires? Why so Eurocentric?”
Well, the short answer is the Industrial Revolution started in Great Britain.
If you mean why right-leaning groups are interested in it: I’d guess it’s the narrative of barbarians threatening from beyond the borders, the cautionary tale of how that and internal corruption brought them down (“well that’s a bit reductive…”—look, I know that), the honor-culture stuff (real or imagined), et c. The more intellectual side of the right in the US (though I think they’ve been rather left behind at this point) may be interested because of connections to the founders, like Washington’s Cincinnatus-like rejection of power after two presidential terms (we named a fairly major city after the dude, even)
Interesingly, avoiding chocolate when pregnant is really good advice given, as has been posted here numerous times iinm, most commercially profuced chocolate contains lead and cadmium at toxic levels. Sometimes false prophets hit upon truth.
Anyway, I suppose all of this is very reassuring to catholics. Not sure the author could see the bigger picture though. Seemed a bit petty and small minded with scattered humble brags like growing out of her little kierkegaard phase. Lol