You needn’t be put off by the oversimplification.

I’m not referring to clergy opposing draconian state policies or participating in liberation movements. Rather, I’m referring to the influencer/ would-be guru phenomenon present online today, combining those elements to “guide the lost towards their salvation”, slowly dragging followers down any chosen path, including political extremism.

Why a potential cult? The “guidance” provided is all-encompassing: the human condition and the functioning of the world, neatly packaged by a charismatic person. Try to find facets of your life, even minute, that are not affected by one or both. Once adopted, the guidance seeps into every aspect of your existence, from your ability to process information to your deepest emotions in relation to others and the world.

Many people, especially in secular countries, feel alienated by the tapestry of options in terms of spiritual beliefs. As seekers, they may delve into material (books, videos) speculating on the nature of reality and comparing different spiritual traditions. This can start out as innocuous, for instance if the author of said material is knowledgeable on the arcane, having read an extensive bibliography.

Consider starting out as mildly interested in someone’s views or research on spirituality, philosophy, self help and so forth, joining their audience.

Gradually, you discover they are experts on everything, from the smallest detail of daily life to geopolitics. Such is the intoxication of fame that a person with genuine knowledge in one field, or a genuine talent, starts believing they can shepherd a group of admirers (not all of them mentally well), leading them in a communal search for “the truth” about the world. That temptation should, of course, be resisted – more often than not, it isn’t.

Later on, it becomes apparent they’re not exploring along with everyone else – they now possess said truth, and if you doubt or reject it, shame on you, ever so subtly. The more famous they become, the surer they are of their positions, even if they change them on a dime. They are would-be gurus, although out of affability, you don’t suspect them of such intentions.

Their message becomes increasingly prescriptive.

They’re now telling you how to vote, who to avoid in your community, what decisions to make regarding your health. They’re warning you against enemies you didn’t know you had, with the constant prodding that you’re in danger. An IV drip of contempt for your human environment seeps into your veins. You end up in a state of urgency and paranoia, contemplating doomsday scenarios, or alternatively, smug and unreachable, convinced of your superiority. Your openness to the world becomes narrower and narrower, and your “enemies”, increasingly numerous.

You’re on a mission.

Now that you’ve got superior knowledge, you must choose between remaining with the saved or joining the enemy camp, or the amorphous blue-pilled mass you originated from.

Then, le coup de grace: your soul is at risk. Your eternal life, your spiritual sentience. You risk being zombified, irreparably corrupted, possessed by malevolent entities. You risk your individuality, your best qualities as a human being. The world is against you. Worry not, as you’re safe within the fold, fighting the good fight. It now defines your existence.

While point A was curiosity or affability based on shared values, point Z may comprise the following (no pun intended):

  • Group members are the only purveyors of truth on the planet;
  • Group members have the only viable survival strategy for the future;
  • Their survival is constantly threatened by nebulous forces, such as a global cabal;
  • Their political opposition is beyond redemption/ evil;
  • No institutions and experts are to be trusted; the value of the accumulated global knowledge goes out the window;
  • Most of the global population consists of soulless automata (not to be trusted or listened to);
  • No laws or moral absolutes are set in stone, apart from those of the group (anything can be legitimised, up to mass murder);
  • The norms members were brought up with, such as civility and tolerance, no longer apply, since they are at war;
  • Members have a special destiny/ mission in the history of their nation/ of the world;
  • Members must save the feeble from degeneracy and corruption;
  • There is a war on members’ souls and happiness (a narcissistic perspective);
  • Members are angels/ spirits of light fighting the forces of darkness.

The least damaging outcome is for these people to take your money. Money can be replaced. Instead, they run off with your mental faculties, at least temporarily. Your reality testing. This can render you antisocial on false grounds, to the point of causing you problems, all the way up to serious criminal behaviour, like inciting violence, harassing, threatening or physically attacking “the enemy”.

God-endorsed violence, alchemical arson

Politics is about negotiation. Give and take, compromise, settle, after having articulated your principles and aspirations eloquently. Now, would you compromise and seek peace with demons? With those who want to exterminate you?

Extremists, as they seldom reach power, encourage bypassing the political process altogether, ramming their point across through civil unrest. They won’t tell you the government is incompetent, tone-deaf or communicates poorly between departments. They’ll tell you the government hates you with a passion and wants to see you dead. Often supra-national conspiracies are invoked, driving adherents to think they are fighting for their survival in real time. The use of notions such as good and evil, light and darkness etc. are paramount in the radicalision process. An imminent catastrophe is invoked.

This is a direct quote from a far right guru, describing divine intervention in an anti-immigration riot and praising arsonists:

“The Irish government, as part of its plan to exterminate the Irish race on behalf of the European Union and the globalists, have been moving huge numbers of military-aged men from all over the world, under the auspices that they are refugees from the Ukraine, when almost none of them are from the Ukraine, and they’re settling them in working class communities, because they see the working class with such venomous hatred it’s almost incomprehensible. The people in Coolock (…) are descendants from the Vikings (…) and don’t give me any shit that they were immigrants too; their ancestors were Europeans.”

One could and should interrogate each of those claims – however, the audience takes them for granted, as they did with the claim that Soros had sponsored an anti-far right demonstration earlier this year (note to self, Google if Soros is still alive). These are ossified tropes thrown around by the far right for years, generating a Pavlovian reflex.

He goes on to describe an act of arson, when locals set fire to a former paint factory where refugees were to be housed, as “primordial and alchemical fire” and a revenge of their ancestors, as the area had experienced a major fire decades prior and politicians hadn’t cared. He mentions the factory’s name, Crown Paints, crown translating as “corona”, and references Covid19, which was used to “break people”. The crown was also, apparently, a symbol of the establishment going up in flames. He then mentions Thor’s Grove and how the old gods were literally alongside the rioters.

As a small mention, maybe Thor couldn’t make it to court, to help the 20 people (so far) being charged with offences for participating. Maybe he was busy.

This is how far someone can take the spiritual improv to justify race-based violence and arson. The end result is inevitable: more violence, perhaps resulting in deaths, and a direct link made by investigators with the consumption of such content (stochastic terrorism). Then it’s game over. Anyone with a working brain should be able to foresee that, whether it takes weeks, months or years.

“Demon-possessed” political opposition

A useful question regarding someone you follow: would they be able to make the same claims in front of non-group members and be taken seriously? Would they be able to explain those claims in a rational manner, before anyone, the way an academic would? Or is it only the initiated who understand? If not a village, but the rest of the world finds those claims insane, doesn’t that tell you something?

This year has been a litmus test for public figures who had claimed they were identitarian, socially conservative, against the “woke” left etc. – but otherwise, preserving a base empathy level. Though the signs were there, one didn’t expect some to embrace fascism or endorse the crime of crimes: genocide. However, to support their parties and candidates of choice, they fell in line with the blind acceptance of mass murder and apartheid perpetrated by the state of Israel.

Since it’s election year in many countries, the sheer amount of bile against refugees, Muslims, immigrants and non-whites in general was off the scale – coupled with the endorsement of western and western-backed wars, which cause devastation and create refugees in the first place. The supremacist, colonialist mindset has never died.

In May, an anti-immigration march was held in Dublin, with protestors shouting “out, out, out!”, obviously energised by warm feelings of love for their country. There was a counter-protest by anti-racists (who, judging by a larger demonstration in 2023, and election results, far outnumber the racists in Ireland).

Before the anti-immigration march, a public figure who focuses on spirituality, also quoted above (whose name I won’t use for personal reasons) told fellow attendants, with a sense of urgency, to engage in spiritual protection by not making eye contact with anti-racists, as they were possessed by demons and demons could pass from person to person.* He claimed that those wearing a keffiyeh, in support of the Palestinians, or waving a Palestinian flag, were particularly possessed. The comment section agreed.

*Slight correction here: the demons did not intend to possess the racists, but merely to feed off their reactions to being called far right, by drawing energy from them through the retinas of anti-racists.

My reaction should’ve been revulsion – instead, it was utter astonishment. How do you get to the stage of saying something so deranged to a crowd and having it acquiesce?

The peace and inclusion demonstrators were a crowd of about 200 complete strangers. How is someone able to point the finger and declare, sui iuris, that every single one is possessed by an entity?

Demonising your political opposition is supposed to be a metaphor. This public figure used the trust of his audience in his knowledge and good intentions. They absorbed the message as any other musing or caveat, not realising what was happening. When someone talks about spiritual matters constantly, cites a bibliography and discusses various traditions in detail, as well as moral issues, people don’t expect them to weaponise those beliefs in such a cheap, opportunistic manner. Not that I pity the racist audience much, but still.

This isn’t about the existence of demons (anyone is free to believe what they want), but the use of the notion to instantly tar 200 strangers protesting racism and war. Furthermore, calling peace protestors possessed, while praising those who support mass murder and apartheid, is the ultimate inversion of reality.

In such environments, one could claim anti-racists were misguided by not opposing immigration; that they were ignorant; even that they were brainwashed. It would’ve fallen within the acceptable range of discourse. Wrong, of course, but not unusual. This was point Z. “Your political opposition is possessed by demons”.

It was identical to a form of information control, as described in Steven Hassan’s BITE Model: inducing fear to ensure members don’t interact with detractors in any way. Mere eye contact with detractors was portrayed as very dangerous. Imagine speaking to them or accessing dissenting material. Heaven forbid. Instant pea soup, for those who get the reference.

It was a way of calling “the enemy”, as in people with differing views, no longer human.

I’m not claiming this person runs a cult*, as first of all, I’m not familiar with the dynamics of the group, and had stopped interacting with their content years ago, when it was veering too much to the right. This, however, was a blatant cult tactic, with no room for interpretation.

*Later edit: I take that back. The same person recently encouraged followers to isolate themselves from society, to avoid the woke and the jabbed, also praising racially motivated violence and claiming divine forces had been involved in a riot. If it quacks like a duck…

The “silent majority“ versus “brainwashed masses” alternation

Public figures who engender extreme political beliefs mixed with religion or spirituality often distance themselves from the cult hypothesis by claiming they and their followers speak for the silent majority, on the political front. I’m referring to right wing extremists as an example.

We’re not cultish; we’re not extremists; many people – most people even – think the same way; they’re just too afraid to say it publicly. If we don’t get rid of immigrants, there will be civil wars all over Europe; Europe will burn.

Lo and behold, that silent majority doesn’t materialise in the voting booth. You’d think it would, right? You’d think there would be a flood of people silently and privately voting for the fringe candidates they are supposedly so desperate for, to avoid civil wars. It would be Noah’s flood on steroids. There would be a queue the length of the Chinese wall.

This year, the UK voted the Tories out (not that Labour are much different nowadays, necessarily); Reform gained a few seats in Parliament, yet the country overall voted for the declarative left. France voted in a leftist coalition to keep the far right contained. Northern Ireland voted for Sinn Fein, with the DUP seeing a major drop. As to a couple of far right candidates in Ireland’s local elections, acclaimed online, they got 2% and 1% of the vote in their constituencies, respectively. Again, where’s the fire (apart from the arson incidents mentioned above, of course)? And where’s the silent majority…? Not in the voting booth, that’s for sure.

When their predictions or hopes for power fail to materialise, extremists suddenly stop invoking the silent majority and flip the narrative to “the masses are brainwashed by the woke agenda“. This completely contradicts the first narrative, taking away their claim of legitimacy, yet audiences somehow don’t notice. They want to think they’re not fringe – at the same time, the thought that they are persecuted for speaking the truth, and awake while the masses are asleep, is equally appealing.

Pick one.

The joke

The big joke is that such enlightened thinkers are helping their followers escape the box of social conditioning, propelling them into freedom of thought. Instead, they deconstruct their followers’ reality to the point that any information coming from outside the group is a possible ruse, including the shape of the earth and existence of the moon. Anything goes. It’s a mind space where empiricism goes to die.

They instill black and white thinking, akin to cults.

Examples:

  • Anything that comes out of academia is a lie;
  • No institution is to be trusted at any time;
  • All mass protests – that we disagree with – are caused by artificially-induced agitation;
  • History has overall been faked;
  • The cosmos is entirely different to what we have been told;
  • Health professionals are not to be trusted;
  • Anyone who achieves notoriety for their courage is a false hero given to the masses to worship;
  • All MeToo cases are fake and designed to divide the sexes;
  • There are no good people in the police (ever);
  • All courts are corrupt by default;
  • Countries are controlled by the woke agenda;
  • All charities are fraudulent (there are no worthy humanitarian causes);
  • Education is entirely designed to brainwash people;
  • All major events are false flags etc.

They then replace the resulting vacuum with theories of their choice, herding their following onto any desired path – at times opportunistically, into political extremism. Their theories are accepted based on hunches, feelings, biases, phobias, predictions, fevered fantasies: never on the basic reality the world agrees upon.

When you’ve lost all your bearings, as in the tools needed to process reality, what does it leave you with, on a daily basis? Conferring with the guru, group and whatever resources they recommend, of course. Trusting the news sources they tell you to trust, eliminating others.

Instead of getting out of the box, you perceive the whole world as deceptive and menacing, hence restricting yourself into a much smaller box, filled only with the few “certainties” you have, most, if not all, group-endorsed. You hate the sections of the country/planet the group tells you to hate – entire nations, ethnic groups, races, religions, other political affiliations. They’re all out to get you, steal from you, make you gay, impose themselves on you somehow.

Instead of building bridges, you burn them. The guru congratulates you for your bravery of denouncing invaders and evil doers; standing up for yourself by rejecting the world. You are victorious, the guru says. You should be proud, on your tiny rock at the edge of the precipice. The more bridges you burn, the safer you are.

Instead, you become isolated, depressed, fearful, unable to truly connect with people outside the group, filtering your interactions through your new dogma.

You’re not free. You are, in fact, more mentally trapped than you’ve ever been.

Angels of light

A useful question: does a person you follow often armchair-diagnose people they resent, without a psychology degree and without having met them, to make their followers discount those people’s views or class them as irredeemable?

About nine years ago, I started this blog to discuss people with no psychology studies (let alone degrees) claiming to lead the global “fight” against narcissists and psychopaths, seeing themselves as angelic creatures fighting evil (with an actual prospect of winning, whatever that might mean). It was both delusional and exploitative of victims of abuse, not to mention very reminiscent of a cult, in the way these communities handled themselves and their paranoid attitude towards outsiders. It was quasi-religious.

The key word here is delusion. Hubris. They were driven by the missionary zeal to become authoritative on a subject on which they were mediocre at best. Intoxicated by their own presumed importance and thoughts of future adulation as saviours.

They lacked the following:

  • Studies on the subject;
  • An accurate understanding of expert material, lumping all Cluster B disorders into a mire of “these people are evil”, showing a lack of respect for the field of psychology, which they claimed to operate within;
  • An actual claim of original material (they had plagiarised the vernacular, mainly from Prof. Sam Vaknin, who had established the language used today to discuss narcissistic abuse). They spun their own interpretation, repudiating Vaknin at the same time for having NPD, which to them was akin to being the devil;
  • A realistic view of themselves, as flawed people whose own issues had contributed to their predicament;
  • The sobriety to avoid claiming omniscience through personal experiences;
  • Caution and empathy for their readers, in case their improvisations and generalisations caused more harm than good;
  • The rigour and intelligence to understand that having a disorder was not to be confused with spiritual notions such as evil, however a person’s actions may come across;
  • A sense of humility based on all of the above;
  • A sense of appropriateness, so as to not seek fame and expert status undeservedly;
  • The realisation that managing to popularise a concept through SEO and other technical skills didn’t render them the ultimate experts.

You have a group of people congregating based on a shared interest, bonding emotionally (despite 99% being virtual strangers) and becoming invested in a cause, to ultimately see themselves as the exclusive purveyors of truth, gatekeepers of said truth and fighters for a better world.

Sadly, some who criticised this pop psychology hubris have since indulged in it, for political purposes, armchair-diagnosing their political opposition, however averse they were in the past to such practices. It feels like being back in Peaceville all over again (for anyone who gets this reference to the now inactive community, Psychopath Free). The mediocrity, the gratuitous weaponisation of the DSM to pander to an audience, the self-righteousness and merger of psychology and spirituality to portray oneself as virtuous.

Side-show unseriousness. Yuck.

Tainted blood and “pure blood” (the holy unvaccinated)

The broader the imagined enemy pool, the greater the likelihood that you’re in a toxic group seeking to mentally isolate you. For some groups, the enemy, or as they say in Scientology, the mass of PTS (potential trouble sources), is the entire population who got the Covid19 vaccine, namely more than one billion.

They are firmly convinced that the vaccine caused personality modifications to the “jabbed” (now a distinct category on this planet) and that “the jabbed” are worth steering clear of, however difficult that might prove. Their ideas, in any case, should be cast off, since the vaccine affected their mental faculties.

Would-be gurus seized the dissatisfaction with the way the pandemic was handled, and the justified fears about an experimental vaccine, weaponising them against political opponents. It’s the left. The woke want you all jabbed. They want you genetically modified, just like the franken-tomato.

We know from precedents (like polio) that a vaccine may need revisions before becoming completely safe, and that side effects may only become noticeable with time. At the time, there was no… time. The worries around such a new one were completely justified. We also know now, belatedly, that the vaccine did not reduce the risk of passing the virus to another person. Hence it should’ve been a personal choice, free of stigma, as opposed to socially mandated. And yes, it did kill people, who might well be alive today had they not taken it.

However, some “spiritual teachers” claim the vaccine affected a person’s mind and soul by design, or modified them genetically. Their audiences discuss how the vaccine changed their family members’ personality. While I’m happy that these people don’t have sepsis, blood cancer or anything else affecting their blood, those who refer to themselves as having pure blood and being superior to the jabbed are delusional.

For gurus, it’s a fine recruitment tactic, as it reassures the follower that he/she is special, superior to the masses, for having refused a risky medical procedure. The masses are damaged goods. They will deteriorate and perish, while the saved ones alone, the chosen few, will see a new dawn. Yes, this is a cult tactic, 100%.

Full circle

Some public figures, like former Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson, use their credentials to lure unsuspecting people, garnering public trust on a mass scale, gradually lacing their rhetoric with religious notions and emotionally intoxicating their audiences into following their every directive.

Today, Peterson, who claimed to have saved many young men from the far right in the past, works for The Daily Wire, a right wing propaganda machine in the US. “Give them hell”, he tweeted at the state of Israel as they were starting their months-long mass murder and demolition spree in Gaza. Here’s where the moralist, the tortured soul suffering for the world and the Christian ended up, dragging his supporters down with him. The man became the very thing he used to decry, and the antithesis of what he once claimed to stand for.

The mere notion that someone upholding Christian values supports war and genocide is unthinkable. But here we go. People would rather distort the religious teachings they hold dear, or ignore them altogether, to keep respecting or adulating a morally decayed public figure.

As a closing thought, it’s awfully suspicious that many of these people, as opinionated and passionate as they seem, change their tune opportunistically, when the chance of capturing a more radicalised audience arises.