Last week I continued my process of elimination. I talked through some possible reasons why the powerful are so intent on exterminating all life on Earth. Having exhausted all the most obvious explanations, I come now to my last and best guess. I’ve spent more than 20 years trying to talk people, including myself, back around to a sane way of being in the world. I’ve come to a startling realisation.
They’re cultists
We’re living in a global cult called Industrial Civilisation. It's a terrifyingly warped take on life. It has re-ordered and limited our entire world view around itself. Today, billions of people all over the world are more out of touch with reality than the Kardashian’s bank accounts.
It’s not just the right wing. You might consider reaching for socialism or even communism at this point. They aren’t alternatives to this cult. They’re factions of it. They’re just different flavours of colonialisation and industrialisation. It’s the same basic materialist, industrialist dish. It's just seasoned with slightly different rituals and mass executions. Right wing or left wing, it’s the same old turkey. At best, you’re getting the leftovers.
The Osho cult was led by Chandra Mohan Jain. A.K.A the Bagwan Shri Rajneesh. Imagine if it had a few hundred years to build up steam. Him and his Rolls Royce collection departed quite radically from normative behaviour. But say his shtick happened to be useful to the expansion of a certain kind of power and wealth. So much that his cult gained effective control over several global powers. For centuries. Right now we’d all be wearing saffron robes and giving each other snazzy new names. We'd be doing hairy group sex and poisoning the salad bars of anyone who disagreed. You might see that as an improvement on where we are today. But that’s beside the point.
I'm a frustrated sustainability professional. I spend every day trying to influence people who fail to see the disaster we’re cruising towards. This is because I, and most of my colleagues have been approaching this wrong. We’ve wasted decades trying to lay out such absurdities as the ‘business case for nature’. We might as well have worked up ‘the rapists case for virginity’.
The closest analogy for what we are actually trying to achieve is this. We’re trying to deprogram the devotees of a powerful suicidal cult. This is tricky. The cult we’re dealing with has metastasized. It now has unprecedented reach and influence. It’s swallowed most of the other cults. Like that funky desert one that Jesus guru started back in Israel a couple of thousand years ago.
Telling cultists their ideas are mad doesn’t work. If it did there wouldn’t be cults. The key thing about crazy people, after all, is that they don’t know they’re crazy. I've known several Osho refugees. Many still believe he was the best thing that ever happened to them. Awkwardly, they may even be right.
Cults provide reassuring simplicity. They offer a sense of certainty at odds with messy reality. They suspend elements of morality for select groups. They have sex and exploitation, often followed up with guns. Doesn’t that sound a good fit for the industrialised colonial agenda to you?
So how do we coax people out of this cult? It’s hard. We have to painstakingly walk them back through all the steps that led them a wee bit far down Silly Street. This walk may have begun with their ancestors hundreds of years ago.
It’s made even harder because sustainability professionals are in the same cult. Many of us are doubly enmeshed. We’re labouring under the delusion we're somehow outside of it. One of the most powerful things a cult does is convince the devotee they are free. The devil’s best trick is to convince people he doesn’t exist.
Cults most often disband when the guru gets caught acting against their own rules. Thankfully, this happens with startling regularity. Power corrupts. Absolute power makes you start fiddling around in the underwear of underlings.
We’re up against a cult that has outgrown all that. Its leadership is now diffused all over the place. It’s long since overrun most religious ethics, replacing and displacing it with its own amorality. It’s all business. To put it another way, abuse is now such an intrinsic part of this society the #metoo movement should be recruiting faster than the US military.
In our casino civilisation business and money literally Trumps all else. His name is another one of those times when the Universe is desperately trying to tell us something.
My partner grew up in a Christian household. Her Mum complained when the school did yoga. They considered Dungeons & Dragons the work of Satan, rather than a nerd called Gary. Their book collection includes The Kingdom of the Cults by Walter Ralston Martin. This, hilariously, describes every other religion, including ones much older than Christianity, as cults.
Once a cult gets big enough or lasts long enough, it forgets it’s a cult.
That’s what we’re living in.
Maybe the politicians aren’t stupid. Maybe they aren’t evil. Maybe they aren’t even self-righteous, cynical bastards. Maybe they’re all of these things. But most of all they are cultists. Along with us, they’re enveloped in a worldview that is demonstrably insane. It's impervious to direct appeals to logic and wisdom. So environmentalism has been as effective as explaining the benefits of traffic calming to someone on a four day ketamine binge.
Which puts the onus back on us. It’s up to us to start the long, multi-generational trek back to a saner relationship with the natural world.
That’s what I’ll be looking at in Part 4, next Monday.
Bulls eye. The trek might need to be a sprint if we want the outcome to be benificial. Looking forward to your thoughts on how a new philosophy, politics and economy can be grown to fill the void we're both dreaming about.
This civilisation is a stereotypical "Cargo Cult".
I sailed up to Vanuatu 3 times from Aotearoa NZ, I read about the Island Nations culture before heading up to ensure I was culturally sensitive, my Māori friends taught me that was important decades ago.
In Vanuatu there's a cult called "John Frumm", it still exists today. Another Indigenous nation steamrolled by colonialism.
It reminds me that Religions of all kinds deflected the evolutionary process into a one-way cul de sac.
https://anthropologyreview.org/anthropology-glossary-of-terms/cargo-cult-religious-movements-claiming-to-obtain-material-goods-cargo-for-indigenous-people/#google_vignette