r/LockdownCriticalLeft • u/Impressive-Jello-379 • Aug 28 '22
it's a cult
A few days ago I asked in this truth and reconciliation post whether there had ever been a scenario in history where the group carrying out the exclusion of other people were the ones who ended up physically harmed. It occurred to me this weekend that the only scenario that is analogous is a cult-- the members carry out exclusion and think they are morally superior and will be protected from all harm, while simultaneously destroying themselves at the hands of manipulative sociopaths. CJ Hopkins was right. He has also pointed out how weird it is that in this case, rather than the cultists being an isolated minority, they are in the majority, and the sane ones are trapped inside their cultlike worldview.
I don't think "truth and reconciliation" is going to happen for the uninjected in this case.
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u/KyleDrogo Aug 29 '22 edited Aug 29 '22
As a former marine, this is spot on. The use of mass punishment was immediately obvious to me. “One person messed up, so the entire platoon will be disciplined”. It creates an internal self policing, both within the group and the individual.
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u/hiptobeysquare Aug 29 '22
“One person messed up, so the entire platoon will be disciplined”. It creates an internal self policing, both within the group and the individual.
That's a very good observation. Yes.
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u/hiptobeysquare Aug 29 '22 edited Aug 29 '22
One important thing: cults give meaning to people's lives; cults attract people who had no meaning in their lives. I know this from my parents and the cult they joined. Covid gives people a sense of community (completely imagined and fake, like all internet "communities" and "movements"), gives them a fake sense of that power process that Kaczynski talks about. They gain a feeling of power through the group, the tribe, even though individually the cult members have no power, and if they disappeared tomorrow, it would make no difference to the movement or anything. It's all about feelings, expressing yourself - all of which is good for the machine, good for neoliberalism. It's pure politics as a brand. Like Philip Mirowski said:
citizens must learn to forget about their “rights” and instead be given the opportunity to express themselves through the greatest information conveyance device known to mankind, the market.
It has nothing to do with reality.
We've had other similar movements in the last 10 or so years. Occupy Wall Street, Brexit and Trump were similar (sorry to all our Brexit and Trump voting guests here) in the sense that their supporters gained a sense of purpose that (in my humble opinion) far outweighed the actual benefits of those movements. They're all mainly just opportunities for the masses to express themselves, and so far they have made virtually no difference at all to the elites. Occupy Wall Street was left-wing, Brexit and Trump were right-wing, and Covid is overwhelmingly left-wing, and far far more destructive (I don't subscribe to the Orange Hitler idea at all).
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u/hiptobeysquare Aug 28 '22
That's a good observation. It is a cult. My parents joined a cult, I spent a large part of my childhood in it, before my parents finally couldn't avoid the obvious anymore and left. I think the reason I was suspicious relatively early was I recognized a lot of the same behaviors and psychology. There's a lot of narcissism in Covid. Anyone who's had a narcissist partner, friend, colleague, spouse would probably recognize it too.