Cults, Conspiracism, Puzzles, and Toxic Esotericism
(I wrote most of this several months ago, but have had trouble organizing it and wrapping it up, and feeling like it is a coherent piece. However, I am posted it as is because no conversation that is truly timely or important is going to give us a sense of closure. In these times, openings are most important—therefore, I intend it as a bit of an experimental piece, not meant to dismiss or devalue the very real trauma that people carry who have escaped abusive cults.)
When most people think of “Doomsday cults,” they think of Heaven’s Gate or the People’s Temple (of the Jonestown massacre). However, I believe that apocalyptic cults are mainstream today. You can’t throw a stick without hitting one. You even might be in one!
Everyone who fancies themselves a ‘critic’ seems to love to point out how the political or social group they don’t like is dogmatic and similar to organized religion—usually the comparison is to a favored bugbear, Christianity—you see this from pundits and authors on the right and left. And yes, it is certainly worth noting that the mythos of a religion that actually started out as a Death Cult/Cult of Martyrs is now firmly seated in the American psyche, pulling emotional and ancestral strings. But when I see the mudslinging so often from various different positions, and notice that it fails to engage in self-reflection, I wonder if it misses the opportunity to consider: what if a lot more of us than we might think are members of cults in these times?
I think the multi discliplinary study of cults & coercive control is one of the only ways to make sense of the political, social, and emotional world around us today. However, we don’t quite get there by simply just flagging other people as cultists and calling certain politicians cult leaders. We have to also deeply self-reflect on our own wounds: our narcissism, our despair, our resentments, who we admire and pedestalize (and maybe unnecessarily give our power away to) and more. This is especially important because one of the paradoxes of cult dynamics is that some cults flourish in places where there may actually be some sort of popular sentiment that imagines itself as contrary to dogmatic or pietistic thinking. For example, many New Age cults have started in environments where there is a lack of organized religion.
Especially in the “Age of Influence", it’s very likely that many of us are experiencing cult dynamics, even in fragmented forms, in our daily lives. Remember one of the slogans of cult experts: Nobody joins a cult! People only find themselves within a cult, after the fact.
This is one reason I try to track any pathological cult-like dynamics within groups to which I actually have a relative amount of allegiance… like for example, environmentalism, or social justice circles…academia… I don’t think my own darlings are immune.
Some cults are overtly apocalyptic, like the mythos of the Hale-Bopp comet in Heaven’s Gate. But many are covertly apocalyptic. Any ideology that imagines some sort of ultimate standoff or battle between forces that they deem ‘good’ and ‘bad’ is apocalyptic! Perhaps that battle is brewing, perhaps it’s already begun or it lies somewhere in the future. The mythos doesn’t have to be about the ‘end of the world.’ Sometimes it’s the social expression of extreme paranoia or a seige mentality, as in the case of Jim Jones… in extremely fearful minds there is literally a feeling of one’s world being smaller and constricted (and this is true of trauma as well, like the trauma experienced by victims of human trafficking, coercive control, and abuse). It can literally feel like the world is ending around us because the capacity we have to imagine ourselves and our relationship to the world has been severely constrained.
Here are ten warning signs from the Cult Education Institute that your membership in a group may not be in your, or any group members’, best interest:
Ten warning signs of a potentially unsafe group/leader.
Absolute authoritarianism without meaningful accountability.
No tolerance for questions or critical inquiry.
No meaningful financial disclosure regarding budget, expenses such as an independently audited financial statement.
Unreasonable fear about the outside world, such as impending catastrophe, evil conspiracies and persecutions.
There is no legitimate reason to leave, former followers are always wrong in leaving, negative or even evil.
Former members often relate the same stories of abuse and reflect a similar pattern of grievances.
There are records, books, news articles, or television programs that document the abuses of the group/leader.
Followers feel they can never be "good enough".
The group/leader is always right.
The group/leader is the exclusive means of knowing "truth" or receiving validation, no other process of discovery is really acceptable or credible.
A couple of the points from their list of warning signs about a loved one’s (or your own) behavior are quite chilling:
Dependency upon the group/leader for problem solving, solutions, and definitions without meaningful reflective thought. A seeming inability to think independently or analyze situations without group/leader involvement.
Increasing isolation from family and old friends unless they demonstrate an interest in the group/leader.
A dramatic loss of spontaneity and sense of humor.
Former followers are at best-considered negative or worse evil and under bad influences. They can not be trusted and personal contact is avoided.
Kind of cringey to read in today’s political climate, isn’t it? I’m not just talking about Trumpism, either. Unfortunately, aspects of the left are also suffering from the fog of cultism. Also, these are some of the same symptoms of abusive. controlling relationships, which are cultic dyads (cults of two people). At the same time, it’s important to acknowledge that just because a group is “culty” doesn’t mean it is causing the same amount of political or social harm as another “culty” group. Some cults are obviously worse and more harmful than others. This post is more about the fact that the emotional and social and political dynamics that create these groups can, literally, happen to anyone, of any worldview and any politics. As the Cult Education Institute suggests, it’s just a good idea to develop a good bullshit detector. And keep these lists handy!
Our penchant for cults, groups where everyone pretty much thinks in a similar dogmatic way, believes in a cause purported to be larger than themselves, and sees outsiders as very different from themselves, is probably pretty deeply seated in our evolutionary history. It would make a lot of sense as a sociobiological survival strategy that has applied to the survival of our bodies and species at times, but lives on often as a means to perpetuate and ‘survive’ aspects of our own egos. In more recent and culturally contextual history, imperialistic nation states demonstrate many characteristics of cults, as does the project of white supremacy and advantage. I mean, to be practical, wars couldn’t be won without a cultic mentality. Not that I want wars to be won…or lost. But everyone believing the same thing and following one person or idea and being willing to go to great lengths to sacrifice for that and like “turn against their brother” and shit… well, that’s a level of organizing that some would envy.
Many cult theorists acknowledge four main characteristics of a cult: 1) a charismatic authority (in destructive cults they are often narcissistic, though if one buys the argument that narcissism is one of the big social problems of our time, perhaps all cult leaders are narcissists). 2) some sort of transcendent belief system 3) Systems of control and 4) Systems of Influence
The charismatic leader (and I would add the title “Influencer” in order to reflect the immense power of social media) is a keystone part of cult processes. More specifically, it is the relationship that is forged between a leader/influencer and their follower that can set the emotional and relational groundwork for cult dynamics and processes. What is charisma? It’s basically charm. It’s from a nearly identical Greek word meaning “favor” or “grace.” In Christian theology, it refers to power conferred upon someone by the Holy Spirit. Basically, charisma is the relational power and allure that a person (or even the idea of a person) can have over others. It has everything to do with their capacity to influence—and the tools for influence can be myriad—love bombing, reminding people of their mortality, appealing to someone’s guilt, shame, or rage about something that is socially taboo to discuss. Blackmail. Making someone’s enemy your enemy, swearing to protect them in ways that activate their childhood wounds. Oh, there are so many ways! When followers or devotees identify deeply with a leader or influencer and believe pretty much everything they say (no matter how noble the alleged cause), we’re entering cultic territory.
(I can’t emphasize enough that an important dynamic here is allowing someone else to speak for you. Don’t do that! Harmful cults/groups can capitalize on something that is repressed in a widespread way. When a leader says “shocking” things or acts “fearlessly,” people who may be too afraid to do/say those things (because they will have perceived repercussions) rally behind that person. We can’t be afraid of disagreement! We need to deprogram ourselves from the visceral reactions many of us have to disagreement. But to the credit of those of us who may balk at even a well mannered dissenting comment, I rarely even see actual disagreement these days, like expressed in a secure way! I either see total agreement or aggressive arguing with abuse and gaslighting. We should NOT be teaching our children that they should fear speaking up unless they know something “for sure.” It just creates a stupid cycle of Googling. The internet is not the source of truth, though it can be the source of lots of information. I keep hearing from my professor friends that the younger gen often fear speaking up in class because of the politicized expectation that if what they say is wrong, then they’re a bad person or have failed somehow.)
With these very charismatic leaders, we often give our power away to them because there is actually, in our emotional bodies, a very reciprocal and fair transaction going on. In exchange for our unquestioning devotion, these leaders not only champion an oversimplified battle between what we see as good and evil, but they give us a sort of permission to reframe or entrench our moral compasses in radical ways that may not be or have been socially acceptable to us previously or otherwise. Therefore, they have immense power to mobilize people into basically something like an ant or bee colony—which is a complex adaptive system. In these systems, individual freedoms are reduced and traded for an enhanced and more powerful group-level agency, which, in the human world, a group leader can then utilize toward their own agenda. This is why I find it so funny when people call a majority of their fellow Americans “sheep” or “sheeple.” Dude, sheep are really fucking organized. Are you jealous of them or something?
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Terror Management Theory & Militancy
Anthropologist Ernest Becker popularized the age-old idea that our knowledge of our mortality, and our contemplation of our own death, is a prime motivating factor in life—a fountain of inspiration and creativity even, a driver of our need for meaning. Some scholars who continued his work, who are part of the Ernest Becker Foundation, formulated a theory called Terror Management Theory. The basic premise is that many systems of meaning like worldviews, religions, big cultural narratives or mythologies, are part of a strategy to quell existential terror—a coping mechanism. Moreover, participating in culture can allow us to achieve a sort of life after death. Personally, I think this is an overly cynical viewpoint and my own work is very centered around the notion that human worldviews can—as in, they have the potential to—be expressions of ecological processes and homeostasis (although we have to be careful because this could become just another totalitarian tactic to authorize any discourse). I do think TMT holds some really powerful insights though, particularly as its been applied to politics, eco-social disasters, and populism.
One of the most compelling parts of TMT to me is that scholars talk about how, during times of mass fear, people seem more easily persuaded by charismatic political/movement leaders. Part of the mechanics of how this work are wrapped up in performed social cues called “death reminders,” which can create what is known as "mortality salience”; the heightened awareness of one’s mortality. When charismatic leaders invoke symbols or images of mortality through their speeches, rhetoric, and now, tweets (i.e. in the form of talking about bodily threats like “terrorism,” or in more subtle ways that touch upon say, the crisis of social identity among white men, or factory workers, etc.) people are actually more likely to be influenced by them and support their policies which are unsurprisingly often conservative, anti-immigrant, racist, transphobic, etc. Ironically, xenophobic political narratives about “terrorism” and in general, the “other,” are very successful at terror management.
Tracking the manifestation of terror management in human behavior is not necessarily easy, predictable, or uniform. For example, there has also been some fascinating recent research on the psychological effects of COVID-19 through the lens of TMT, arguing that the awareness (whether conscious or more subliminal) of the volume of death occurring “plays a central role in driving the attitudes and behavior of even those who believe that the dangers of the virus have been vastly exaggerated.” Therefore, the vehemence and anger inherent in anti-mask views is also a terror management response. Some TMT scholars notice that after national disasters (of an ecological or social nature) there is a default conservative shift, such as what we saw post 9/11. However, others have pointed out that in the case of COVID, there has been a further entrenchment of existing views, resulting in extreme political polarisation.
What then can foster immunity to political and social coercion and manipulation? Building Self esteem, say scholars at the Ernest Becker Foundation. Unfortunately, a rather febrile sense of self esteem, and fragile pride, is what is provided to us by a lot of alarmist, populist politics that plays on our fears and anxieties. It’s an easy quick fix to existential angst. But there are ways we can cultivate self esteem that are much more resilient. For example, learning a new skill or craft, connecting with nature on a regular basis, interacting with other species in respectful ways, reading a book, doing some sort of regular somatic practice… But make no mistake, we can’t do it alone and it’s not just on our shoulders, however the privilege-bloated ‘self help’ world might try to convince/gaslight us otherwise. Especially those of us who have had our self esteem systematically eroded by kyriarchical processes, far before we were even born and even had a self. So yeah, it’s a tough scene out there. Especially with the cultiness of social media. Which we’ll come back to.
The Element of Gamification: Or, why consensus reality is outdated tech
Of course, by now most people are starting to take QAnon seriously as an apocalyptic cult with some serious cultural sway, and there has been a lot of really brilliant commentary on why it is so alluring, including analysis that highlights its game-like qualities.
The linked essay, written by a game designer, draws on the similarities between QAnon devotionalism and Alternate Reality Games/LARPing. It is is making the rounds online and for good reason—it's brilliant and the best thing I've read on this topic in a long while, without falling into the trap of dehumanizing and brushing aside the people who are a part of this movement.
Here is an excerpt:
In one of the very first experience fictions (XF) I ever designed, the players had to explore a creepy basement looking for clues. The object they were looking for was barely hidden and the clue was easy. It was Scooby Doo easy. I definitely expected no trouble in this part of the game.
But there was trouble. I didn’t know it then, but its name was APOPHENIA.
Apophenia is : “the tendency to perceive a connection or meaningful pattern between unrelated or random things (such as objects or ideas)”
As the participants started searching for the hidden object, on the dirt floor, were little random scraps of wood.
How could that be a problem!?
It was a problem because three of the pieces made the shape of a perfect arrow pointing right at a blank wall. It was uncanny. It had to be a clue. The investigators stopped and stared at the wall and were determined to figure out what the clue meant and they were not going one step further until they did. The whole game was derailed. Then, it got worse. Since there obviously was no clue there, the group decided the clue they were looking for was IN the wall. The collection of ordinary tools they found conveniently laying around seemed to enforce their conclusion that this was the correct direction. The arrow was pointing to the clue and the tools were how they would get to it. How obvious could it be?
I stared in horror because it all fit so well. It was better and more obvious than the clue I had hidden. I could see it. It was all random chance but I could see the connections that had been made were all completely logical. I had a crude backup plan and I used it quickly before these well-meaning players started tearing apart the basement wall with crowbars looking for clues that did not exist.
These were normal people and their assumptions were normal and logical and completely wrong.
In most ARG-like games apophenia is the plague of designers and players, sometimes leading participants to wander further and further away from the plot and causing designers to scramble to get them back or (better yet) incorporate their ideas. In role-playing games, ARGs, video games, and really anything where the players have agency, apophenia is going to be an issue.
This happens because in real games there are actual solutions to actual puzzles and a real plot created by the designers. It’s easy to get off track because there is a track. A great game runner (often called a puppet-master) can use one or two of these speculations to create an even better game, but only as much as the plot can be adjusted for in real time or planned out before-hand. It can create amazing moments in a game, but it’s not easy. For instance, I wish I could have instantly entombed something into that wall in the basement because it would have worked so well, but I was out of luck!
If you are a designer, and have puzzles, and have a plot, then apophenia is a wild card you always have to be concerned about.
QAnon is a mirror reflection of this dynamic. Here apophenia is the point of everything. There are no scripted plots. There are no puzzles to solve created by game designers. There are no solutions.
QAnon grows on the wild misinterpretation of random data, presented in a suggestive fashion in a milieu designed to help the users come to the intended misunderstanding. Maybe “guided apophenia” is a better phrase. Guided because the puppet masters are directly involved in hinting about the desired conclusions. They have pre-seeded the conclusions. They are constantly getting the player lost by pointing out unrelated random events and creating a meaning for them that fits the propaganda message Q is delivering.
There is no reality here. No actual solution in the real world. Instead, this is a breadcrumb trail AWAY from reality. Away from actual solutions and towards a dangerous psychological rush. It works very well because when you “figure it out yourself” you own it. You experience the thrill of discovery, the excitement of the rabbit hole, the acceptance of a community that loves and respects you. Because you were convinced to “connect the dots yourself” you can see the absolute logic of it. This is the conclusion you arrived at.
…
2: The Eureka Effect
Puzzle-solving is a special way to learn and it encodes information into the brain in a different way than other learning. Puzzles and knowledge gained through our own efforts are incredibly rewarding and also come with a hit of dopamine, the brain’s pleasure drug, as a reward.
As far back as 1978, it has been known that having an “Aha!” moment increases retention of memories.
…
Basically, that “A Ha!” moment when puzzle solving (even when incorrect) is extremely pleasurable and also may help encode what we learn in a new way.
It also helps reinforce the desire to seek out and solve new puzzles.
In other words, solving puzzles is extremely rewarding from a biochemical standpoint and the thoughts we gain from them are special to us.
I've been interested in games and ludology for a long time, and it's always been really wrapped up in my study of the humanities, semiotics, and specifically, religion. Back then I read the new media scholar McKenzie Wark's book "Gamer Theory" which I think its safe to say was way ahead of its time. Wark talked about how we now (at that time in the 2000s) live in "gamerspace" and this was also when people were starting to talk about the "gamification" of reality. Interestingly, Wark argues that reality is an imperfect game, and the games we create (especially those that become cultural phenomena) -- from Go thousands of years ago to Pokemon Go ten years ago -- are actually idealized versions of reality because of their structure, rules, and limited amount of variables. Games are like mazes while reality is like a labyrinth. Games are actually, in a sense, emotionally utopian -- even the violent ones that people whip up moral panics about. Utopian, in this sense, simply means that they more perfectly fulfill our desire for task completion and puzzle solving than reality does—so its a very solipsist sort of utopia. The ethics that the game contains don't matter as much and can't hold a candle to the power of the gaming experience, which is all about feeling, affect, imagination...
Indeed, games can be healing. They can also be a way to shore up power or “feel good” at the expense of others, the latter two outcomes of which are not cool. Reality, on the other hand, is an imperfect game (Wark argues), that constantly disgruntles most of its players or users.
Depending on our level of self-esteem and our histories with trauma, we may engage with certain kinds of games more deeply and with more piety (I think). However, this is not to demonize "games." To the contrary, it's to say we take them more seriously.
However, I think that digital and new media/transmedia (and capitalism in its current form, especially through the creation of enchanted objects, "the internet of things," biometric devices, etc.) has only allowed people to express something that's been at the core of homo sapiens sapiens for a long time. Games -- players choosing among different options in order to maximize returns or rewards (variously defined) -- and puzzle solving are a deep part of being sentient mammals with the evolutionary history and path that we have. Capitalism loves gamification — it sells! Think about Facebook, or Fitbits! Anywhere where you earn returns, points, yields, badges, likes! Think about stock trading or cryptocurrency! Gamifying things—making things synthetically “enchanting,” giving people something to TRACK that’s not paw prints on the ground, giving people the ability to choose options that return rewards within a particular platform or product, is how we make money and entrench species isolation, right?! In this context, consensus reality is out of fashion. Outdated tech. Though I love social media for a lot of reasons, we have to note that it, with its heirarchy of “influencers” and “followers” it is a cult-machine. Which is not to say it’s evil and it’s not to spin up drama either. “Cult” shares a root with “culture” and “cultivate.” It means to tend to something. Religious studies wouldn’t get that far if it operated from the premise of “cults = evil.”
I'm not immune to this potent tonic—this religious devotion to some kind of play, this cherishing of the ludic or the forensic, even orienting one’s conception of self around it. One of my games of choice for the last handful of years has been naturalist interpretation, tracking, "survival skills." Hey, excelling at these things is easier than the imperfect game of the human-centric social and political world, especially for queer and neurodivergent people. Other people game the psyche, the body, disease. And what if to game was not a term of diminishment? But what if it meant that what we are choosing to see as a game is kind of how we survive -- how we protect what we love? I think Ludology/Psycholudology is a field whose time is way past due.
It is no coincidence that game-like mechanics are also a really core part of a lot of esoteric, gnostic, and occult religious movements that engage in narratives and exegesis about "hidden" meanings and secrets within things (such as canonical texts, etc.) Puzzle solving as a world-saving act—how very human of a fantasy! (Or Corvid, they solve puzzles too but I doubt they fantasize about saving all birds with this skill). It is no coincidence that the DaVinci Code by Dan Brown was a pulp literary phenomenon and that Harry Potter and Avatar made people long to live in a fictional reality -- Understandably so, I might add! Viral fiction, especially speculative, fantasy, and sci-fi, has strong game-like elements.
As a teen, I was very enchanted by symbolism, by the gnostic, by the esoteric. And if you have read any of my writing on here or Queer Nature, you’ll know I remain an insufferable mystic to this day. Why the early obsession (that has definitely ebbed a bit since?) Well, for one thing, based on my understanding of developmental psychology and neuroscience, it’s probably very healthy for adolescents & young adults to have their meaning-seeking/pattern recognizing capacities on overdrive. There are a gajiullion reasons for this. On a mythic level, take Michael Meade’s idea that the visionary nature of youth that is able to see the hypocrisies and inconsistencies in society and norms is necessary in order for cultures to not stagnate and become dogmatic. “Burning it all down” — at least ideologically, is a necessary phase of the cycle of cultural decay and regeneration. Evolutionarily, too, seeking new meaning and novelty in our environment (which now includes very human-focused symbols, texts, and subtexts) had obvious survival advantages for our nomadic ancestors.
Reinterpretation and exegesis, at least in the era of written language and books (only the last several thousand years), is an act that can trigger cultural change, renaissance, reimagination, or paradigm shift. That’s not small potatoes! This cultural impulse is not very honed, being relatively new to us as humans, and I believe it can go malignant and run amok pretty easily.
Notably, an enchantment with symbols, the encrypted, the hidden, the ‘secretly connected’, is one of the easiest and most readily accessible and generalized forms of cultural and cosmological fugitivity. The fringes of logic, rationality, believability, are very fertile places—even more so perhaps for marginal subjects, (and, more troublingly, those who feel they are marginalized, whether the rest of society agrees with them or not.) They are not fertile places because of the information we learn there per se, but because of the experiential feeling, the experience of finding our way there, of following a trail. (Trailing is, after all, one of the most basic ways that the landscape, the earth, allures us.)
And when you grow up queer in a small rural town like me, secrets gather an allure. You become comfortable with them, familiar even—interested in seeking them out in the world beyond yourself. A tracker of secrets, maybe? I do think that people who buy into high levels of conspiracism, which is a type of fringe thought, have certain levels of attachment (and related core wounds) to secrets, to mystery, not all of which is always healthy. They could possess these for tons of reasons. Not just being closeted queer or trans people. They could possess these inclinations due to trauma, abuse, living under political terror… knowing that they’ve sold their souls to be close to power… the list goes on. The thing is, we have to learn to be discerning about what trails we follow, about what we may believe may be “out there” beyond our immediate perception. Because this is theology… this is literally something that holy wars are fought over, nothing less.
(I mean I guess I still think everything is “secretly connected” in a sense. Why else would I be so interested in ecology? Also, there are so many mysteries in the universe beyond the human!)
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Some cults have powerful game-like qualities—Scientology, NXIVM, QAnon—ESPECIALLY those with aspects of multi-level marketing/pyramid scheme structure. As noted above, many cults in today's landscape (and perhaps some could argue, ever) are apocalyptic. This doesn't denote just the "end of the world," it denotes an imagined battle between good and evil and/or some sort of unveiling of "truth" that will bring bad actors to justice. Add in the Internet, Google, and widespread access to these "investigative tools" to an apocalyptic cult with strongly conspiratorial & esoteric/occult like qualities, and well, there's not much hope for our poor little puzzle-solving, game-playing brains (also, some manifestations of internet cancel culture are very game-like).
So, choose your game wisely.
