cults and cultures

[Jonathan Barlow Gee]

 

My fingerprints are all over my copy of Mein Kampf. I've been reading it in the shitter. If anyone thinks I am evil for this, please speak up and say so, I would welcome any debate. There is a warning in some publications about ha QBLH that a friend pointed out to me. On the first page, prior to everything else, it said the following on a copy of the Tikunei Zohar: "This is a holy book. Please take this into regard in how you treat the experience of reading it. Do not mix the sacred with the profane. Please do not take this book into the bathroom." No joke; it seriously said that, in so many words of course, not verbatim.

 

In Mein Kampf, Hitler discusses at nauseating length his views on building up a political party. In his case the party he built was the NASDAP, later called the NAZIs, and took power in Germany during the Third Reich. They led a successful campaign at the time by preying on the poor economic conditions to justify their belief in a need for stronger leadership. The party Hitler built was authoritarian, top-down, and a typical ponzi-structure applied to the chain of command. In Hitler's version of a "political party," one man alone dictated what the entire NAZI party was to do, think, feel and believe.

 

This is, of course, only one form of group-think, and applied to only Hitler's German NAZIs. As the Zohar implies, however, there are other groups with other forms of thought, and although all of them consider their unique collections of writing to be sacred within their group, no two groups have the same basic core literature, nor their basic core literature the same core philosophical principles.

 

Thus, in discussing a "cult," we must first look at what defines a "cult." A cult presupposes the existence of a culture. What, then, is a "culture"? In this case, it is meant as a group of people who share the same basic core literature as one another in the group, and who hold the same core philosophical principles as are expressed in their group literature.

 

So, what, then, is a "cult"? It is a small sum of people practising secret group rituals. But, insofar as these people share time together outside these rituals and correspond with one another directly, they will each still have their own point of view in their debates, but their goal will be to reach consensus amongst themselves. A "cult" then cannot escape politics seeking to bridge any party-line divisions.

 

So, when we say, a "cult" is a small group of ritualists, and that a "culture" is a broader group of people with the same philosophical beliefs, but we say, also, that any "cult" will depend on its own niche in "culture" we mean that a cult will either need to find and adopt an existing culture, create one on its own through propaganda, which is more difficult, or infiltrate and subvert an existing culture, which is nearly impossible.

 

Most "cults" feed into pre-existing fashionable trends. For example, the "cult" of Britney Spears' fans, or the followers of the show "Buffy the Vampire Slayer." These trends, albeit a mystery to those outside, are the subject of fanatical worship by their, legitimately so-called, "cult" of fans. However, these trends and fashions shift and change form with the times, such that the carved statuette of a Goddess has been replaced with a Barbie Doll. The concept is the same, but the outer garments - the exterior appearance - changes. The concept is the cultural "niche," and the trends of fashion in its appearances form "cults" over time.

 

Cultures are comprised of individuals, and individuals may belong to multiple differing cultures, but the cultures as groups of people are measured by all who belong to each, without counting overlaps. These numbers of cultures, these sums of their adherants, form ratios that may be further studied. However, for now, suffice it to say that any one culture is measured without overlap of any others.

 

Because cultures are summed up by their total numbers of adherants, and these include cross-over individuals in all the groups to which they want to belong, therefore "cults" form as sub-cultural "niche"s. Cults occur when the cross-over individuals between cultures form smaller, sub-groups, which gradually complexify. Cults develop due to the spontaneous evolution of hierarchically structured small sub-groups. It was these small sub-groups, structured in the various different forms of political schema, that Hitler called "parties," but I prefer the further distinction for them of calling them "cults" to imply their "hierarchical structures" result from obsessive-compulsive disorders of themselves as individuals, and will never provide anything but grist and fodder for the mill-stones of the larger cultural collective, as they are incapable of imagining a new cultural niche for themselves to base their own cult around.

 

The second form of cult-creators are those who seek to create a cult for themselves that is either based on an existing culture they wish to infiltrate, as I shall discuss next, or if they wish to sway the cultural "main-stream" more in the direction of one cultural philosophy or another. If they wish to infiltrate an existing culture, it may be to strengthen or weaken its core values, and this effects that culture relative to the others surrounding it. Thus, if one culture is weakened, it creates a vacuum that eventually lowers the average level for all the rest. It is in the good of all cultures to prosper through unity. However, cultures are defined by individuals' differences. I will return to this in a moment.

 

When an individual or a small group wishes to influence the mainstream current of all cultures, their average, they create a small political-body, or "cult." When this cult is unique from any others before it or contemporary to it, it is the product of an individual's or a small group's mind(s) alone. When the politics and philosophy of the cult is not unique and is, rather, exactly identical to the "status quo" - or the mediation of the main-stream into a mass unified collective hive-mind - then it is the result of no individual's or group's orignal creative influence, but is simply "reptition of error(s)."

 

Thus, the second form of cult-creators are neither attempting to infiltrate nor immitate any existing culture. They are creating a cult only as an expedient to changing the main-stream of all cultures combined and averaged. They can, as Hitler suggested, seek to unify all the existing cultures under a single autocrat, whose choice alone determines the fate of those outside the new mainstream. However, this method was, obviously, already tried and failed. A more successful method, in terms of lasting longer and making the greatest number of people as wealthy as possible, would be to approach the core-political structure of the group by basing its group hierarchy on number sums of individuals who belong to that niche, as divided into groups of basic, principle number sums.

 

When a cult wishes to infiltrate an already existing cultural movement, it is either because it wishes, like the cult-creator who forms an entirely new political hierarchy, to influence the mainstream, or because it wishes to strengthen or weaken the host culture from within. If it wishes to weaken it, this cult will be an enemy to all cultures in whole. If it wishes to strengthen the individual culture it infiltrates, it can still have various results, which we will come to in a moment. However, either way, if the cult seeks to weaken or strengthen the pre-existing culture, if its tactic is infiltration to change the mainstream, then it will have ot keep its own rules and beliefs a secret while adopting, in show and as a public face, the rules and beliefs of a pre-existing culture.

 

If a cult is thus both a uniue contribution towards changeing the course of mainstream culture, and an infiltrator into the affairs of a larger pre-existent culture, they are considered "clandestine" towards that larger, older, host culture. If the cult is not an original design, but a copy-cat, and seeks to infiltrate an opposing pre-existant culture, then it is considered a "spy" within the opposing culture.

 

If a cult is successful in all three of these ways (those being - 1. to be from within an existing larger culture; 2. to be independent and have the will to devote sufficient free time to forwarding a new political philosophy; and 3. to exist within a culture that is opposed to that which you are from, and to thus propose to both a compromise between them on your own system) it becomes a religion. If it fails in any of them, it cannot become a religion.

 

Whether a cult can become a religion or not is determined by a great number of factors. However, if it does not meet these three criteria, it can never succeed to be considered as a possible religion. If a cult has not proven itself capable of being cross-cultural, it cannot next be considered omni-cultural. However, to be "omni-cultural," that is, to be able to dictate the mainstream or to influence it by a small group, is more than being only "cross-cultural" alone; it is that and many other things more. But, it is not possible to be "omni-cultural" if one is not also "cross-cultural."

 

Again, to define the concepts of the "cult" and the "culture" as we may now better understand their inter-relationship:

 

cult: a small group of people, with varying politics and cultural origins, who work together to forward a single specific philosophical cause upon which all of them agree. This cause can be made known publically to all, but its inner-core kept secret, or vice versa, or both or neither also. Often, the inner-core is secretly the opposite of the apearance on the face. As we have discussed, the most effective form would be to propose a cultural mainstream based around perpetual creativity of an infinity of various new hierarchical systems, where everyone would be having new (to all) ideas all the time.

 

culture: the concept of a mass-awareness that is divided into a stage on which are constantly battling strange, alien archetypes which people can only understand through the vaguery of symbols. For example, the Venus concept, expressed as the Barbie Doll, is a stereotype, a niche within culture - in this case a culture whose target market would be those making model-toys for young girls. So, too, are larger cultures alike the ideal molds for these stereotypes of fashion. In this case, thousands of young women are growing up being conditioned into the stereotypical dress-code of the Venus ideal model, as expressed by the changing fashions of the Barbie Doll toy. The plastic dolls are the model forms, the cultural niches, immitating the higher, more ideal form, the archetype of a culture.

 

Thus, to achieve unto the level of a religion, a cult must first acqiure a greater number of followers for its culture (or its host culture) than there are for any of the other cults comparable to it in its field. Only by acquiring the most number of followers for its culture can a cult achieve religious status. Cults are the microcosmic form of macrocosmic cultures.

 

- Jonathan Barlow Gee

Saturday, August 13, 2011

Tallahassee, Florida