By framersqool:
Yesterday I finished a three-part series on the Mother God crew out of Crestone, Colorado. This was one of the many shocking (shock-value?) news stories I'd missed during my lengthy general abstention from monitoring news events, which began sometime around while the trending hoax about confused clocks ushering in the apocalypse was all the rage back in '99 (and the less-than-credulous bumper stickers in New Mexico about it saying 'Y2, Que?' Still wish I'd bought me one of those.)
I had tried to emerge from that fog of divorce-fueled self-absorption during the 2016 election year, only to find two more quite silly but quite dangerous cults seeking to out-insult each other into the White House, whereupon the Talking Heads' 80s-vintage assertion of 'same as it ever was' began to make a tad more sense to me.
Apparently the short-run documentary series about cults has become something of a genre-template of late. I've now seen several, covering the Manson outfit, Jonestown, Bhagwan Shree-whatever, Synanon, FLDS & the Order, even one about a bunch of unfathomably naive college kids at Sarah Lawrence who ended up bunking rough in a filthy urban apartment being told what to do by some corporate-dropout asshole twice their age with cameras running the whole time....
They're all interesting in one way or another, as infotainment fixes go, but also a tad frustrating for me: their common subliminal shock-value hypnotic suggestion is, 'look what happens when people fall for this nonsense.' Frustrating, because that's exactly what I've been wondering ever since it first dawned on me that advertising wasn't really meant to inform me about anything, but rather to stoke my pre-installed impulse-cravings by assuring me I'd be more with-it if I fall for their bullshit....
It's the too-common theme of folks, any folks, being led around by the... neurotransmitters (?), that I find so interesting, and yet so disappointing in human conduct generally. But the also-inescapable constant of all these cult-exposes is... somebody always ends up with all their money (!)
So while watching the appalling pageantry of that 2016 cult-parade, my old Southern Baptist indoctrination well-installed about anything not Southern Baptist probably being a cult, it dawned on me that there really wasn't (isn't) much difference between a cult led by a brazenly conspicuous grifter caught joking about how many women with fake tits he'd fucked, and one led by some old brazenly drunken harridan claiming we'd be Stronger Together because... otherwise we'll be dismissed as deplorable. They both just wanted to be the ones who end up with all the money, more or less.
The more scrutinous approach to cult behavior might be to apply the question of whether or not anyone is allowed to leave them once joining up, or having been born into them, as has been the case with outfits like Synanon or Warren Jeffs' sad tribe of deep-rural polygamists.
In this sense I can probably rule the Deadhead cult as one of the less harmful ones, ultimately. It was more of a drop-in ongoing party than any dropout-can't-go-back movement, as legions of now-comfortable suburbanites bouncing their grandbabies on their knees while reminiscing about Oakland '83 (or whatever) can attest. Nobody had made them join up, or forced them to stay once they had, and if they'd parted company with some of those Gold-Card funds so generously provided by Mom & Dad during the festivities, it had all been in good fun, even if there had still been a whole bunch of way better bands to serenade their Deep-Sixties revisionist-nostalgia events.
Similarly, I confess to being somewhat shocked by the updated smart-phone-era behavior of the Mother God cult, and certainly by how absolutely unhinged their everyday world view was, and apparently still is among the survivors still joyously keeping that particular faith.
But ultimately it was about two not-very-compatible and quite banal objectives: one was a nice lady from the suburbs who'd abandoned her children for mysterious reasons to go off to Colorado and start a cult to help her commit a prolonged suicide-by-colloidal-silver while being surrounded by people who loved her and hung on her every vodka-soaked word; while the other more predictable target was all their money (of course), which their erstwhile CFO who'd played along enough to end up with access to all the bank accounts tidily absconded with over three hundred grand of, while they were bringing Amy Carlson's ten-days-dead corpse back from Oregon disguised as a sleeping pasenger in the back seat while crossing five State lines undetected. It was their own finance guru, after he'd quite legally withdrawn all the money, who had provided local law enforcement with the tip about the dead lady in the bedroom....
But after it was over I got to wondering who exactly had been harmed there.
Amy's kids seemed to have got over the living loss of their mom, and gone on to achieve great things more or less. I didn't see any mention of children being abused by or babies born into a handful of recovering childhood-abuse victims' little encampment while they made up their more-ridiculous-than-usual New Age religion as they went along, in order to sell New Age miracle cures online, and none of them seemed to be the kind of cultists who were ever too scared to leave.
I got the impression these nice damaged younguns really believed in what they were doing, and that the most harm they'd managed to do was to the wounded sensibilities of a few superstitious Hawaiians, who'd become offended when Amy had added their goddess-of-choice to the growing list of messianic figures she claimed to be (which also included White Buffalo Calf Woman, leaving me to wonder how the folks at Pine Ridge and whatnot may have felt about that, but this didn't make it into the script of the docko I watched.)
The larger and more personal revelation for me about cults and cult behavior is, with my damaged brain and my terminal uncertainty about what place in the world might belong especially to me, all my travels as a totally vulnerable hitchhiker Looking For America years ago ought to have, one would think, led me either to joining a cult or... starting one of my own.
I certainly have shown the charisma and the leadership instincts, to at least make a half-dozen young men at a time believe that building McMansions really was an important mission and not one to be taken flippantly, and I guess I could have invested those into gathering a band of fellow-refugees around me to hang on my every word by adding in some tormented Tibetan-Buddhist ravings or whatever...
Thing is, I don't think I ever found the company of other humans appealing enough in itself, to let my life turn into one of a bunch of people who'd already been harmed enough, hanging on my every word. I am neither that interesting a person, nor all that interested in having anyone believe I am.
I find I'm way more interested in folks finding their own lives, as they are, interesting, and try to do no more than set the example by telling a few of my own stories.
The not-at-all-hypnotic cue being, 'now let's hear about you.'
Whereupon they generally change the subject....
The cult constant defining the human experience itself is my most interesting discovery. But one doesn't start a cult these days by telling people they need to stop believing all the post-hypnotic suggestions which make up the whole of the modern sensory environment, and start (at long last) bloody well thinking for themselves.
If I'm being honest, I'm not sure I really want them to. They might put less valuable treasure in the trash for me to pluck out and play Farmtown Hippie with, and then where would I be?
READ MORE BY FRAMERSQOOL
Thoughts from an aging bachelor of no particular consequence who is in command of more opinions than facts (but occasionally the facts, or the lack thereof) and can make a thing seem worth writing about.
I think that Mother God mockumentary was a fiction created by HBO (a front of the US Intelligence apparatus) to discredit and ridicule those who might question the aspects of the mononarrative created by the oligarchical forces. It was over-acted, contrived, and full of signs of fakery and deception.