How do you start a new cult? How do you enrich yourself and your posse (gang) through a new belief? How do you recruit members into your new dark religion? Let’s face it. As long as we are human beings, we will believe in something or someone. That thing or person can be an impersonal force or an animated object. And this object of our belief has to be existentially beneficial to us. It must profit us somehow, whether in the short or long term. And because we are all incurably religious, unchangingly dependable (on others, especially an authority figure), and understandably ignorant on most subjects, the stage is already set for many cults or strange religious beliefs to flourish or thrive.
There are essentially 6 straightforward ingredients to start a cult and if you persist in it, with the tenacity of a militia commander, you can very well succeed in growing your own cult into a worldwide phenomenon.
Needless to say, the first ingredient is a leader. This is obvious. Even more blindingly obvious, is to have a leader who is dynamic and charismatic. It is even better if your leader is a little wonker on the side, or mentally imbalance. This will of course rule out the insane or mentally unsound for obvious reason. But, like they say, all geniuses have a little insanity in them. So, your leader has to be a mental soloist, a frontier explorer or an emotional outlier; someone who lives on the edge of reality. Or, someone who is willing to push reality to the edge to serve his own twisted purpose.
You can find such a person in an ultra-religious meeting, a you-can-do-anything-if-you-believe seminar or a trailer park for social outcasts. The one trait to look out for is a narcissistic personality. This person must love himself more than he loves anything in this world or this entire universe. Also helpful is a bigoted outlook. This person must hate some people in some part of the world for no seemingly logical reasons. It can be the color, the sex or the race of the people that irks him to his grave. Or, it may just be a person’s demeanor, dressing or talking style. Whatever it is, this future cult leader of yours must be a people hater, period.
So, let me repeat the two traits to look out for in a cult leader. He must be a self-lover and an others-hater. Once you have found such a person (which is not too difficult to find in this materialistic, self-absorbed, power-driven world), half of your job is done. The other five ingredients will naturally fall into place in your quest to set up a successful new cult.
The second ingredient is a supernatural experience. This relates to the leader himself, and is personally exclusive to him. He must be able to come up with an extraterrestrial, divine-inspired encounter in the likes of ET and Star Trek. Your leader can take lessons from Joseph Smith who claimed that he met with an angel called Moroni who gave him two gold tablets for translation into the Book of Mormonism. Or Mary Baker Eddy who, in a lucky fall, came up with the foundational doctrine of her Christian Science Movement. She also claimed that she was miraculously healed of illnesses and was a divine messenger of God.
The third ingredient is a belief for deluded members to surf on. This relates to the prospective congregation as whole. A cult leader cannot stop with a supernatural experience without leading his members to the purpose such supernatural experience aim to bring. In other words, the exclusive encounter of the cult leader has to be interpreted and applied in the form of belief. So, the more outrageous the belief, the better. Just as grandiose is your leader, your belief must be equally, if not more, grandiose. This second task is not too hard. Just engage a credible Hollywood scriptwriter or read some out-of-this-world science friction to cook up some pseudo-theological mumbo-jumbo and you would have gleefully arrived at the sweet spot of make-believe.
The fourth ingredient is to be a copy cat. They say plagiarism is the highest form of compliment to the original works or author. So, your cult will need the extra rocket fuel to boost it into fantasy orbit by borrowing ideas from orthodox religions, in particular, Christianity or Judaism. This step is basically to add meat to your bony belief. The best and easiest way is to promote your leader as the messiah and all that he says as veritable gospel truth. It would be better if your leader could plan a divine coup and take over the Mercy Seat of God. I call this fourth step, “Dethroning the Orthodoxy”. Many false prophets have already claimed that they are the second adam, the Christ, the Savior of this world. And the second coming has arrived.
This self-propagation will give the leader the license to do anything and get away with it. Warren Jeff, the ex-leader of the Church of Jesus of the Fundamentalist Latter-days Saints, had done just that. He got away with many things because his members worshipped him as the Christ. He got away with the celestial marriages of 180 wives, a coffer of more than a hundred million dollars under a Trust that he practically controlled, and men who are prepared to take a bullet for him and women, even young girls, who are all too ready to throw their virginity at him.
Now comes the fifth ingredient. This is the ingenious part and it is embedded in this caption, “Salvation by works only.” Unlike Christianity, where we are saved by faith through grace, a free love gift from God, your cult cannot “cheapen” itself to that profession. It has to be by works or rituals and by works or rituals only. Mormonism, for example, is up to its blistered neck with rituals. They have the Mormon temple ceremony, the secret handshakes and the reception of special undergarments. The last ritual sounds like what Tom Jones would get thrown at during his mega-concerts. You see, the last thing that you want in a cult is to cut off the middle man. You need to make the leader the sole custodian and dispenser of salvation. He would have to stand in between his illusory god and his disillusioned members. Telling them that they are already saved by faith through a free gift without any say from the cult leader would give your member full autonomy (or freedom) to come to their god directly. This would make the leader redundant. This is a big NO-NO for cults to survive and thrive.
Another point to note is that it is incumbent on your leader to make the goal of salvation as unreachable as possible. The members must always fall short of the leader’s peacock-like glory. It is therefore a never-ending measuring up of the unrealizable self-professed perfect attributes of the leader. But keep all things in tactical balance. The members must not be too discouraged as to give up altogether. Your leader must be able to give timely pet-talks to further deepen the delusion, add apocalyptic end-time predictions now and then, and arouse the members with false prophesies, placebo physical healings, and self-glorying testimonies to keep the false hope afloat.
In short, it is important to monopolize salvation and to keep it close to your leader’s chest as if his life depended on it. Remember, the moment you liberalize salvation, your leader and cult will become obsolete, and your members will be free to seek the truth for themselves. More likely than not, they will find it and your membership, your secret personal property accumulation, your bank account embezzlement, and your wives acquisition will all suffer irreparable damage.
Finally, the sixth ingredient to establishing a successful cult is to always keep your organizational structure tightly controlled. The best structure for a cult is morbid authoritarianism. There must be a clear line of authority from your untouchable, unfathomable leader to his deluded Hench men and to his starved-for-truth members. Very much like a Mafioso family structure, your cult will benefit from a culture of fear, intimidation and threat of life and limbs. Always let your members know who’s the boss in the organization and never hesitate to punish, with immediate effect and stringency, any transgressors, rules-infringers and rebels to set an example for all members to follow.
In a rather twisted way, your cult leader will have to keep another insidious balance in mind, that is, the strategic balance of vain hope and villainous fear. Keep the pulse of your members close to your leader’s heart and always read the right signals coming from the congregants. When hope is down, pump it up with more delusionary sermons. When freedom is loosening out, rein it in with fear of earthly and afterlife punishments. Threats that one may lose his or her salvation for disobedience are a good measure to keep one’s member in his or her place.
So, after all is said and done, let me leave you with this quote from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn for your pleasure-gnawing, “You can have power over people as long as you don’t take everything away from them. But when you’ve robbed a man of everything, he’s no longer in your power.”
Remember that your cult is only as powerful as your next obedient member. When you lose control over your members, when they see through your gimmick and hypocrisy, you will bleed membership. So, don’t take away hope, an invaluable spiritual bait, from your members. Hope is the glue that keeps your cult “alive and kicking” and you will do well to not be miserly about dispensing it once in a while. Essentially, you can take everything from your members, their property, their integrity and their intellect, but leave a slender tortuous trail of hope behind for their feeble picking. Once this is done, no matter what happens, your members will be more than prepared to risk their lives for you.
Dear cell, please bear with me on this very peculiar letter to you. I am just trying to make use of "reverse psychology" to belabor a sore point. I know this is unconventional, even highly provocative at times. But I believe in the diversity of teaching and this is just one of them, I guess. It is hope that those who read it will get the not-so-cryptic message. My main motivation for writing it in this twisted way is to vent my pent-up frustration after having read so many accounts of how seemingly intelligent people can believe in such outwardly dumb things!
No comments:
Post a Comment