How To Recognize The Cult Mindset In Yourself And Others, by Stella Morabito.
Consider for a moment today’s culture, which is saturated with the constant agitation of political correctness. It rarely allows for any real discussion or debate without automatic vilification of those deemed politically incorrect….
We can’t deny that political correctness has a lot of disruptive effects on discourse, such as inducing self-censorship that can cause us to feel socially and mentally isolated; manipulation of our basic fear of ostracism through the threat of smears; promotion of mob rule; and an authoritarian nature that promotes the power elites who use it.
Wait, those features are all rather cult-like, no? This acceptance of the anti-thought nature of political correctness is pretty much everywhere: 95 percent of the mass media promote it, 95 percent of celebrity culture promotes it, and obviously, on college campuses, the academics are 95 percent in compliance with political correctness.
You can’t deny that cult-like tribunals against “wrongthink” are pretty much everywhere — in the media, in celebrity culture, in our legislatures, among judges, in human resource departments all over the corporate world, and most obviously, on college campuses, where youth are scared to death of being ostracized for expressing a politically incorrect thought. …
Cults are not defined by beliefs, but by their methods:
The only people who profit from such conditions are powerful elites in their never-ending quest to control the lives of others.
I offer a few notes about cults from Singer’s book, “Cults in Our Midst“: …
- Cults and cult-like thinking always proliferate at times of great social upheaval, when people feel displaced.
- Cults always serve a powerful elite, with recruits manipulated from above to profit those elites, who employ coordinated persuasion programs.
- Cults always have a hidden agenda that is never exposed when recruiting. They isolate their recruits from other points of view in order to control and manipulate them.
- Cults control language in order to blunt independent thought. They cultivate dependency, debilitation, deception, dread of separation, and desensitization in people, all of which makes it harder for them to walk away.
- The main goal of a cult is simply to grow, grow, grow. There is no end in sight in terms of recruitment or fundraising or power.
- Cults make a point of getting footholds in the institutions of society — including government, media, and education — in order to get mainstream credibility.
- Cults are very organized in suppressing critics and criticism. …
Is it possible that the entire education establishment and our school boards are immersed in cult-like behaviors? …
How about socialism? Does the socialist movement have features of a cult? After all, socialism pretty much requires a centralized power structure that can’t help but be authoritarian. It ends up placing all power into the hands of a few elites. It’s tailor-made for creating mass dependency and the groupthink that goes with that.
Yep. The cult of political correctness has pretty much taken over the West, though it is getting some competition from the much stronger and older Islamic cult.
How do we deprogram society? Freedom:
A prime lesson of the Jonestown tragedy is that our freedom of thought is a sacred right of all human beings. …
Singer concludes it with these words of great wisdom:
A free mind is a wonderful thing. Free minds have discovered the advances of medicine, science, and technology; have created great works of art, literature, and music; and have devised our rules of ethics and the laws of civilized lands. Tyrants who take over our thinking and enforce political, psychological, or spiritual ‘correctness’ by taking away our freedoms, especially the freedom of our minds, are the menace of today, tomorrow and all eternity.
via Tip of the Spear
