Kingdom of Cults, Part 1

Why are we so in thrall to suicidal leaders bent on power and control?

Photo (edited) by Jose Francisco Fernandez Saura

I’ve tried. I’ve tried not to blame anyone in particular for the state we’re in, beyond the broad category of ‘industrialised people’. We’re all complicit and I know that. But part of that complicity, I now realise, is allowing the worst of us to carry on being the worst of us. It’s too late for such tolerance. 

We’re in an emergency. The world around us is accelerating towards a lethal state. So, to focus our minds, let’s imagine we’re in a more immediate and obvious emergency.

There’s a slow building house fire in our home. Everyone who knows anything about houses and fires agrees on this. We can Google the signs we’re seeing. There’s page after page detailing the exact experience we’re having. There are lists of causes and possible responses. We could do an entire degree on it if we had the time.  

The guy who installed the smoke alarms that are now blaring told us exactly what to look out for. All around us other houses of similar design are going up in flames. Some of the owners are starting to douse the flames here and there. We’re getting desperate messages from friends overseas. They describe the horrific deaths of families in more vulnerable homes. After some delay, we’re trying to ensure our safety. 

But the chain smoking landlord keeps coming round. Between fits of coughing he tells us, with his eyes watering, that everything is fine. We shouldn’t worry about it. Fire isn’t as hot as we were taught at school. It’s not as hot as the so-called scientists go on about. He shows us some clips on his phone. There are people enjoying Photoshopped house fires. They’re smiling and buying things. 

He says the fire alarm guy was too alarmist. There’s been false alarms before. So the best approach now is to treat everything as a false alarm. He keeps spending more of our rent money on petrol. He’s stockpiling it next to the smouldering television. He’s blocked most of the doors and locked the rest. He won’t give us the keys. He says our house is not as flammable as the Chinese neighbours’, so there’s nothing he can do. 

We find out that the landlord works for the petrol company. He’s invested in a gas mask factory and a fireproof holiday home in a remote corner of New Zealand. His reassurances are still strangely convincing. 

Friends and family keep telling us to calm down. They’re busy and don’t want the drama. They find the landlords comforting. They’re happy for them to go on managing things. The thermostat is melting. The temperatures rise to something we’ve never experienced. Someone reaches for the telly remote. Bake Off is on… 

Maybe the landlords didn’t start the fire. But when the bubbling corpses of our children are slipping through our charred-sausage fingers we might consider them to have some responsibility. 

So who are they? Why are they so keen to kill our grandchildren? What drives them? What can we do about them? 

Well to my mind, looking at the UK and my adopted home of Aotearoa New Zealand, they’re mostly centre-right politicians. By which I mean most politicians. They’re the ones right now choosing to continue or reinstate oil production. They’re building roads. Expanding cities. They’re forever trying to “cut red tape”. Thie means reducing any semblance of control over rabid capitalist exploitation and destruction. 

They're lively enthusiasm for cuts and violence towards the poor is roughly equivalent to Jack the Ripper. They have the same morals and impunity. 

They’re probably people you’ve voted for. 

Which is odd.

Why is “Vote for Armageddon” such a draw card in supposedly secular democracies? 

These are the people referred to in the claim that: “We have all the answers. We just  lack the political will”. They lack the will to do the right thing in much the same way that Napoleon lacked the will to stop invading European countries. Even if we had the answers, they’d still keep on running out the clock by asking stupid questions. Their delay couldn’t be more predatory if it was a famished Bald eagle.

We could debate individual policies, and we should. But what I am talking about here is a general direction. The direction towards spiralling chaos. Towards World War III, mass migration and starvation. Towards a slow agonising death for you along with everyone and everything you care about. Towards the extermination of billions of innocent people and even more innocent forms of other life on our planet. 

Oh, and interestingly, the destruction of all the civilised riches these politicians claim to value. 

This is especially and most bizarrely true of those who call themselves “conservative”. How can “conservative” mean hastening the destruction of all life on Earth? Surely it won’t be long before they pop little skulls on their hats and call themselves things like the Death’s Head Party. At least then we’d all know where we stand. 

In the absence of which we’re left to work out for ourselves: what on Earth could motivate them in such perverse ways? 

Let’s take a look at some of my favourite ways to explain their behaviour to myself. You might have your own pet theories, in which case let me know in a comment. These are the ones I’m keen to work through. Let’s not be lazy, let’s seriously investigate. 

They’re stupid bastards

We’ve all expressed this one. Countless times you must have listened to Sir Hugh Fawking-Racist III. He's spewing on about a return to patriarchal family values. He exiled his children to a brutal boarding school in West Sodomy, Surrey at the age of eight. He then divorced their mother so he could sexually assault the au pair. 

His portfolio of unethical investments is so jammed up his pile-infested arse he can barely pronounce the words “benefits scum” clearly enough to wake the Baronet behind him. 

“Fuckwit!” You think, and you may well be right. But then, the people we’re most worried about aren’t all products of such mind-numbing privilege, inbreeding and ignorance. Some of them hold genuine qualifications from the tougher universities on Earth. They’ve done complicated, high powered jobs in corporations. They’ve made themselves rich, or at least managed to stay rich. They read latin so they can quote it to prove they’re better than you. So stupid doesn’t cover it.  

They’re evil bastards

I have to say that one of the things that always had me leaning to the left on politics was quite simple. The people on the right seemed to be evil bastards. They’re habitually in favour of things we all get told are bad from the moment we can talk. They don’t want to share, as in pay taxes. They like killing people in wars and stealing their stuff. They tend to want to bully any and all minority groups. They delight in greed. 

Of course, the power mongers of the extreme left commit their own atrocities. But this general depravity exists even among the mildest right wing foot soldiers and supporters. 

What’s most baffling to me is that this so frequently overlaps with the profession of a Christian faith. A faith that preaches the exact opposite to almost every action these people take and the opinions they hold. 

The solution? As Bill Hicks might have put it, perhaps they're demons sent to Earth to lower the standards. Or maybe they’re possessed by demons. They’re compelled to carry out the will on Earth of dark powers beyond our imagining. They’re cursed to do so in the physical form of middle aged men with collapsing chins and ageing blue rinse harridans who look like their radioactive lipstick was administered by chimpanzee. No wonder they're angry. They’re not even allowed to look like proper demons - those chain wearing bodybuilders with red skin and flaming swords. 

I confess a certain sympathy for this view. I’m interested in the spiritual side of life. Even my overly- rational autistic mind must allow for the possibility of intrusions from beyond the veil. 

But no. I’ve been a tourist at Auschwitz. I know that those things most evil are not the work of magic. They are the work of the machines in human minds and hands. Besides, I’m a Dungeons & Dragons kid. Say we were dealing with a supernatural threat. Then a balanced multi-verse would have provided some supernatural power to tackle it. 

I don’t see any battles of wizardry going on, do you?

So we must go deeper in our search for the truth. 

Which is what I will be doing in Part 2 of this post, next week.