About religious cults and government. (Off-topic).
I don’t talk about myself here. After all, this blog is about art, not me. I decided to make an exception today.
I have two older brothers, one of whom I remain close to. In the seventies, they both belonged to a cult called “The Brotherhood of the Spirit” or “Rapunzel”, a commune located in Massachusetts. I unhappily watched them, a teenager at the time, as they handed over our recently-deceased grandmother’s hard-earned inheritance money to the “community” where their flamboyant leader, Michael Metelica, would allow them to eat rice and beans and live in shacks without plumbing just so he (Michael) could buy million dollar recording equipment, Harleys, eat like a king and fly all over the world giving interviews–all with the toiling members’ money. My father, who handled their inheritance, knew the money was going to be “flushed down the toilet” as he said, and expressed sadness that there was nothing he could do to stop it. Indeed.
I hate cults. I hated them even then, when I was a kid. Although I didn’t know what a cult was at the time, I did know that my brothers seemed to be in some kind of loopy, irrational fog. And it was deeply upsetting to me.
Recently, my oldest brother, Mitchell, confided that when he left the cult, he had to go through extensive deprogramming and exit counseling to acclimate himself again to normal life, to clear the haze. I had mentioned to him that I became interested in cults because of him and David, and had been reading about Children of God and Scientology. “Children of God?” he quipped. “Never heard of ‘em. Give me their contact info–give me a cult and I’ll join it.” (Mitchell’s humor is sometimes with a bit of self-deprecation, but I did laugh.) I had never known he went through deprogramming; I only knew that, after my younger brother left, he reluctantly and slowly followed suit. He recounted a story I don’t consciously remember, but it sounds vaguely familiar. Michael had a band called “Rapunzel”, and he put endless amounts of money into both equipment and promotion for the band. Thousands, maybe millions, were spent on Michael’s whims and desires, while those like my brothers lived like paupers. We both–Mitchell and I– went to watch Michael’s band play in the Village in New York City. “Mitchell,” I announced bluntly, “they totally suck.” At the time, he said, he was horrified by my opinion. But during his reprogramming, he kept coming back to my comment and it gave him great comfort, he said. “My clear-eyed little sister saw what I denied to myself,” he told me recently. “Yeah, it was a little thing, but it encapsulated so many other things for me.” He told me that in the ensuing years, my contemptuous (and honest) dismissal of Michael gave him great pleasure. “It was like you were begging me, ‘come ‘on, we both have the same taste in music, good taste, we know our music, and how can you abandon all of that for what is so obviously terrible?’” He said it was almost as if I was pleading with him to see the band for what it was, a local little hack band led by some twit with a tophat and Civil War style waistcoat.
Because of my brothers’ experience in Brotherhood of the Spirit, I long ago developed an interest in cults and mind control. After all, my brothers are exceptionally bright. Mitchell’s IQ must be near, if not in, genius territory. So how do people get caught up in them? “Nobody wakes up and decides they’re going to join a cult,” I once read somewhere. “They join a religion, a cause, a community, a church. But never a cult.” So I have long made it my business to read all I can about cults.
To that end, I recently watched a YouTube video where an elite member of the academia lambasted the United States and lauded Europe–the latter had put governmental panels into place to monitor religious groups to ensure they were “protecting the Constitution”. Germany, in particular, had put pretty severe controls and monitoring in place to oversee Scientology. I am certainly no fan of Scientology’s, but neither do I want some governmental panel overseeing religious activities in the United States. I posted something to that effect in the YouTube thread, and the man who posted the video went ballistic on me, ranting about “death panels” (huh?) and that, if IBM pulled the same human rights abuses as Scientology, they’d be sent to prison. To follow is my response to this poster:
Hi Mark,
The example of IBM is an interesting one because it highlights the complexity of this debate. While it is a similar principal, it is definitely not apples to apples. As far as I can remember, armies have never marched across Europe fighting over the labor practices of an electronics firm. But for the sake of religion, they have. If IBM was to pull a stunt like this, the ensuing media coverage would set the free market in motion and it would consequently be shut down as purchases of their products would virtually cease. This is an example of how we can look at the same thing, and see many points of view.
You bring up death panels, a topic which highlights a recent ideological debate we are having in this country. As a debate it’s a very appropriate one; however, it’s not just about death panels but who we are and what things we value. When one looks at the different news media outlets, you’d swear it was two issues being discussed here…it’s almost as if we’re two different countries. If you salivate at the thought of catching another segment of Oddball, and simply must have another slice of Rachel Maddow, then you see only one side of the health care issue. If your heart skips a bit whenever Sean Hannity introduces his “great great great great great American Panel,” then you only see one side of the health care issue. (If you watch Glen Beck, after about thirty minutes you want to put a bullet in your brain because there’s absolutely no reason to want to continue living.) What we have is a debate that is sizing up the direction of the country with health care as merely a sideshow.
The health care debate is applicable because we are talking about religious freedom, as well as the role of government in it. There’s an advocacy for adopting the European style control of religious freedom. It’s always a bit amusing to watch some folks’ fascination with anything European. From the birth of this country until today, for some reason that continent is held up as a standard we should emulate. This is a continent that has repeatedly, and for thousands of years, tried to destroy itself over sectarian, religious and power grabs. It is only natural that post WWII, when total destruction really was at arm’s reach, that Europe decided to try to neuter individual freedoms in the name of protecting itself from self-destruction. They have embarked upon a vigilant and conscious effort to rid themselves of nationalism and religious beliefs and impose economic boundaries. Why anyone would want to model a society after a continent that brings Barry Macquire’s Eve of Destruction to mind is beyond me. Whenever a society decides to neuter out all excesses that it deems destructive, it will invariably, too, crush those impulses that are good. You’re in essence handing unlimited power to bureaucrats without individual power–the species is not wired with that kind of wisdom.
An example of this from the field of religion: Germany is being lauded for cracking down on Scientology. The founder of Protestantism, Martin Luther, is from Germany; he rebelled against the Catholic church by posting the tenets of his beliefs on the doors of Germans in the sixteenth century. Now, there’s nothing inherently evil about Protestantism, but in its time, it was considered heresy and a hanging offense. Further, I am not sure the Unitarian Church would have gotten off the ground in this country if we had practiced government overseeing of religious beliefs. The Unitarian church is certainly a hodgepodge of beliefs that run counter to traditional Christianity. We see this debate in our country today. Those of the liberal persuasion are hell-bent on unleashing the social engineering dogs upon the land. All with good and sincere motives, at least on paper. They wish to create the perfect society where nobody does any harm to anybody. I live in Vermont, ground zero for this mindset. Here, people lay on the ground at night, staring at the stars, and dream of turning Vermont–then the US–into Canada and Europe. It’s against the law here to throw a cigarette out the window; it’s also against the law drive your own car in your driveway without your driver’s license on you. This is just one example of government intervention running slightly amok. But many in the Vermont government would love to outlaw fatty foods altogether and cigarette smoking in one’s own home, all in the name of protecting us from ourselves.
Similarly, destroying Scientology by any intervention must certainly sound like a great idea to a lot of people, just like equal pay for equal work sounds wonderful until you try to write a law for it. You will open up a Pandora’s Box with government invention by telling people what they can believe in and what they cannot believe in.
Another one of my favorite examples of this Pandora’s Box, or what is otherwise known as the “Be Careful What You Wish For” principle, can be illustrated by abortion. My comments here are not to come down on either side of this issue (I am pro-choice, but that is irrelevant), but to merely provide an example. The premise is that at least in the first six months, the fetus is simply a bag of cells and one can do whatever one wants to do with it. That is the law. However, I simply cannot wait until genetic engineering takes off and we can practice a twenty-first century form of Eugenics. I can’t wait until they figure out how to make the more perfect human by biogenic engineering. What are we going to do when our neighbor across the street–with more money than we have—can afford to engineer an IQ fifty points higher in their children than ours? Or how about a more perfect body—more beautiful or athletically inclined? The law will have to step in and start to define exactly when life begins or you’re going to have total societal chaos.
The human mind won’t stop where you want it to. The beauty of life is encapsulated by the human spirit being unleashed, allowed to love and create untethered. The best governments devised by man are those that will allow the human spirit to be unchained with warts and all. This is not always pretty, just like democracy itself isn’t always pretty, just as the human spirit is rife with imperfections. Those governments designed by those who theoretically feel that they know what is right and wrong never stop to understand the psychology of the human mind. It is why pure socialism crashed against the Cliffs of Dover. We will not work for other people unless we primarily work for ourselves, but boy does socialism look great on paper. (Ironically, the communes so prevalent in the seventies were based on the socialist philosophy and they all crashed and burned. It boggles the mind that there are still so many people who long for socialism but refuse to learn from history–history that includes those so-called idylls called communes, the little communities where the leaders lived like kings and the people squat into the earth to indelicately relieve themselves). So many theories work really well until you’re forced to inject people into their middles–and that’s when they start to fall apart, because they are not built around the individual. if individuals are not strengthened by the acts of government, society will certainly accomplish less than it might have.
Intellectual think tanks love to look at life from the point of the collective good, the same think tanks that treated Mussolini in the twenties as they treat Obama today. I maintain that the strongest, healthiest, richest societies are built from the individual up and not from the government down. That said, this is the crux of my point: the elimination of cults could not be anything but a good thing. They enslave minds. But we are ignoring the right of the human being to make a mistake. Take it up with God or Darwin, this is how we are wired. A fundamental human right is that we are to live our lives, revel in our successes and learn from our mistakes. And no, it’s not always pretty. But there is a reason why America attained the status in the world it enjoys even now. It is the best country in the history of the world because it unleashed the spirit of creation–a mindset that runs counter to creating panels who make decisions about what you should or should not believe in, something not in keeping with the principles that make a life worth living. In a complex world, still everything eventually breaks down to simplicity. A mistake often made is the belief that, the higher the IQ, the more brilliant the ideas–when many times this is patently untrue. The principles that guide the best governments and the best lives lived are fundamentally simple: love, empathy, respect, etc. This is why, when it comes down to the art of wisdom, it does not reside in those with the highest of IQs, but those with the best fundamental understanding of life itself. That’s why a simple rice farmer in Thailand may indeed be wiser than Stephen Hawking.
How to fight a the abuses of Scientology or Children of God? You’re doing it right now. As are other brave souls in the media. When you add the power of the internet, soon, only those living in a cave with eyes covered and ears jammed with cotton would weigh–even for a nanosecond–the possibility of joining the likes of, say, Scientology. Take a bow, you’re a big part of that. That’s how you fight cults..by shining light on them…not with the heavy, imperfect hand of government.
I see from your video that you have a V for Vendetta mask prominently displayed, and I know that’s the mask that Anonymous uses in their protests. In that movie they riot against a conservative fascist government–a government telling people what to think. They masked themselves in London and eventually the House of Lords blows up. Forming a government panel to tell to people what they should and should not believe in would be making the very same mistake.
