Life In A Cult

H/T to commenter Cassander. I came across the link to the article I've excerpted below in another link that he provided.

Right now I suspect many of us are feeling a bit groggy--a feeling induced by the bizarre carnival atmosphere of public life in America, in which established liars are suppressing truth in the name of ideological purity. It's as if we were living inside a cult, while resisting full membership in that cult. Already back in 1949 in his The New Science of Politics Eric Voegelin had described this feeling as characteristic of life in the modern West. 

The American republic was established on the basis of a civil theology that reflected a generalized Christian tradition that embodied a philosophically articulate vision of human nature. This generally accepted civil theology is what breathed real life into the institutions established in the paper document we call our Constitution. 

However, as the societal consensus that allowed for a common civil theology broke down, various liberal ideologies began warring to replace Christianity as the new civil theology--Libertarianism on the right and on the left a Progressivism inspired by Hegel's Neo-Gnostic ideology. Both of these ideologies rest upon a radical denial of human nature, and Progressivism has developed into an increasingly explicit gnosticism that espouses a Globalist order to transform humanity--the Transhumanist Global Reset. Their goal is to inform our constitutional institutions with the spirit of that radical denial, as a civic ideology rather than a civic theology (God having been removed from public consciousness).

Ideologies by their nature share characteristics with what we commonly call "cults." Above all, both cults and ideologies engage in a systematic denial of the objective realities embodied in human nature in favor of a desire driven effort to overcome reality and establish a new reality. This manifests itself as a type of libido dominandi in the political sphere, and naturally entails the suppression of WrongThink of every sort--censorship of any expression that contradicts the drive of ideology.

Since the motivation of ideology is to replace reality with a human construct, Truth in an ideological context becomes simply whatever narrative advances the cause. Or, to put it slightly differently, for the Progressive the narrative IS the truth--and can change depending on the needs of the moment. Thus, in our current political crisis, Trump can be fictionally accused of inciting street violence--while the history of Dem calls for violence, and actual practice of violence, are to be not merely ignored but erased from the collective memory of the Left: Media Are Accusing A Republican Lawmaker Of Insurrection For Quoting Nancy Pelosi.

Similarly, in the Covid Hoax we witness the suppression of science ... in the name of science! Tellingly, the motive behind such science suppression is explicitly driven by political ideological concerns of a distinctly totalitarian bent. For a thorough exploration of this theme (h/t commenter Dave) and the totalitarian fantasies that drive it, see this twitter thread: The CCP Global Lockdown Fraud.

In the context of these considerations, I offer below a highly edited version of C. J. Hopkins' The Covidian Cult. Please note that while Hopkins wrote with the Covid Hoax foremost in mind, the principles behind his analysis of our current cultural situation apply equally well to the cultish nature of our public life generally. What we see here is the replacement of our traditional civic theology by ideological cults that seek to impose their total control through a caricature of what we used to understand as true politics. Politics, formerly understood to be the practical effort in history to embody the meaning of human nature in historical institutions, has given way in 21st century America to an almost pure example of the Neo-Gnostic (Hegelian-Globalist) libido dominandi.

One of the hallmarks of totalitarianism is mass conformity to a ... totally delusional official narrative that has little or no connection to reality and that is contradicted by a preponderance of facts.

Nazism and Stalinism are the classic examples, but the phenomenon is better observed in cults and other sub-cultural societal groups. ...

... the delusional nature of these official narratives is glaringly obvious to most rational people. What many people fail to understand is that to those who fall prey to them ... such narratives do not register as psychotic. On the contrary, they feel entirely normal. Everything in their social “reality” reifies and reaffirms the narrative, and anything that challenges or contradicts it is perceived as an existential threat.

These narratives are invariably paranoid, portraying the cult as threatened or persecuted by an evil enemy or antagonistic force which only unquestioning conformity to the cult’s ideology can save its members from. ...

...

“The language of the totalist environment is characterized by the thought-terminating cliché. [E.g., settled science, or diversity, or ...] The most far-reaching and complex of human problems are compressed into brief, highly selective, definitive-sounding phrases, easily memorized and easily expressed. They become the start and finish of any ideological analysis.” — Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism: A Study of “Brainwashing” in China, 1961

If all this sounds familiar, good. Because the same techniques that most cult leaders use to control the minds of the members of their cults are used by totalitarian systems to control the minds of entire societies: Milieu Control, Loaded Language, Sacred Science, Demand for Purity, and other standard mind-control techniques. It can happen to pretty much any society, just as anyone can fall prey to a cult, given the right set of circumstances.

It is happening to most of our societies right now. ...

Most people cannot see that it is happening, for the simple reason that it is happening to them. ...

...

Their initiation into the Covidian Cult began in January, when the medical authorities and corporate media turned on The Fear with projections of hundreds of millions of deaths and fake photos of people dropping dead in the streets. The psychological conditioning has continued for months. The global masses have been subjected to a constant stream of propaganda, manufactured hysteria, wild speculation, conflicting directives, exaggerations, lies, and tawdry theatrical effects. Lockdowns. Emergency field hospitals and morgues. The singing-dancing NHS staff. Death trucks. Overflowing ICUs. Dead Covid babies. Manipulated statistics. Goon squads. Masks. And all the rest of it.

Eight months later, here we are. ...

The “science” argument is officially over. An increasing number of doctors and medical experts are breaking ranks and explaining how the current mass hysteria over “cases” (which now includes perfectly healthy people) is essentially meaningless propaganda, ...

...

I’m not going to go on debunking the narrative. The point is, the facts are all available. ...

Which does not matter in the least, not to the members of the Covidian Cult. Facts do not matter to totalitarians and cult members. What matters is loyalty to the cult or the party.

Which means we have a serious problem, those of us to whom facts still matter, ...

... What we are up against is not a misunderstanding or a rational argument over scientific facts. It is a fanatical ideological movement. A global totalitarian movement … the first of its kind in human history.

... Instead of the cult existing as an island within the dominant culture, the cult has become the dominant culture, and those of us who have not joined the cult have become the isolated islands within it.

I wish I could be more optimistic, and maybe offer some sort of plan of action, but the only historical parallel I can think of is how Christianity “converted” the pagan world … which doesn’t really bode so well for us. While you’re sitting at home during the “second wave” lockdowns, you might want to brush up on that history.