Intro to THE WORLD CULT & YOU: YOUR PLACE IN IT & YOUR WAY OUT OF IT

Sol Luckman

At the mention of the word “cult,” you might notice a kind of automatic revulsion, a possibly slight knee-jerk shiver that just rises up out of you, seemingly out of nowhere.

Preview & Read Excerpt

Enjoy w/ Your Free Trial

Alternatively, you might find the word itself off-putting and observe that you’re automatically inclined to dismiss it out of hand.

I wish to start off this ebook of essays on cults and cultism by suggesting that these reactions themselves are evidence of cult programming.

Through deep cultural “hypnosis,” as with the term “conspiracy theory” allegedly introduced by the CIA to cover up their own shenanigans by putting people off the scent of their wrongdoing, “cult” has been cleverly programmed to make you instantly connect the word to the most egregious, nauseating examples of this pervasive social engineering phenomenon that can actually be—and indeed, usually is—far more nuanced and insidious.

Some would say that society at large is a massive cult, one designed to entrain (through a variety of means both subtle and not so much) its members to restricted expressions of thought, belief, and action.

The more I’ve considered this topic as dispassionately as possible while examining my own cultish connections, the more I’ve come to agree with the perspective that human civilization could be accurately described as, in fact, a World Cult.

If you ask me, it could hardly be more obvious that some kind of powerful mesmeric force is remote-controlling the vast majority of human beings, including many of those entrenched in so-called truther communities.

But even if we take a less wholesale approach to the subject, it’s clear society is—at the very least—largely made up of innumerable cults: religious ones, social ones, gendered ones, political ones, exopolitical ones, financial ones, ideological ones, cults of personality.

The list, like Bilbo’s endless road, goes ever on and on— and sadly, it just gets slipperier and slipperier.

All cults, textbook or otherwise, cultivate essentially mindless (or other-mind-ness) acceptance of sometimes unproven, often patently absurd and usually self-destructive ideas and accompanying acts. (See 2020-22 for a, um, pointed lesson in how shockingly effortless it is to induce worldwide cult formation with a staggering range of disempowering consequences that are continuing to do damage to the world and its people to this day.)

To be absolutely clear on this critically important point, the real danger with cults isn’t their leaders, however delusional and/or despicable; it’s their robotic foot soldiers who blindly believe in them and blithely do their dirty work—often against other cult members and usually without an iota of self-consciousness as to the inhuman(e) savagery of their behavior.

As I’ve observed by being on the receiving end as the unwelcome messenger to an extended “community” of cultists, the ferocity with which cult minions will defend their leader’s “truth” without so much as considering the “truth” of others is truly barbaric, making such genocides as the Crusades understandable.

This all-too-common sort of reaction in cultists to being called out is a particularly nasty plot twist that has turned into little more than a cliché as lobotomized minions gleefully go to work throwing each other under the cult bus to please their megalomaniacal mind controller(s)—for precious little, except mental slavery, in return.

To which I respond by quoting Kahlil Gibran, who perfectly characterizes the zombified state of so many hypnotized cultists who seem straight out of The Walking Dead: “Life without liberty is like a body without spirit.”

In addition to these few words, I offer the selection of (darkly) humorous original memes sprinkled throughout this text as possible points of departure for your own exploration of your personal relationship to cults and cultishness in what strikes me as their Golden Age.

I myself have been tricked into ignoring my own eyes and ears in favor of what I wanted to see and hear in what was—in retrospect—undeniably a “community” with an overwhelmingly cultish vibe.

And believe me when I say I paid the price for my own denial of what was right in front of me the whole time. Bizarrely, we benighted humans tend to learn as we burn …

I flatter myself that my “coming out of the cult closet,” as it were, has been of value at least to some. A number of people with their own cautionary tales of this and other cults have come forward privately with gratitude and further insight, and I wish to thank them in return for their bravery in sharing the wisdom of their painful experiences.

Below are a few questions well worth asking yourself if you’re truly seeking to be sovereign in mind, body, and spirit.

Otherwise, best of luck to you in the Clown Show!