The Wall Street Journal's investigative reporter, John Carreyrou, is asking this bizarre question of Theranos' Elizabeth Holmes, though the answer is provided in his own reporting on the Silicon Valley start-up:
"Visibly angry, Holmes told the gathered employees that she was building a religion. If there were any among them who didn’t believe, they should leave. Balwani put it more bluntly: Anyone not prepared to show complete devotion and unmitigated loyalty to the company should 'get the fuck out.'"
"Three hours south of San Francisco,...essentially everything that became known as New Age was invented, developed, or popularized at the Esalen Institute. Esalen is a mother church of a new American religion for people who think they don’t like churches or religions but who still want to believe in the supernatural. The institute wholly reinvented psychology, medicine, and philosophy, driven by a suspicion of science and reason and an embrace of magical thinking...It was a headquarters for a new religion of no religion, and for 'science' containing next to no science."
Is that not the very definition of Theranos? Is it not also obvious why - in 2007 - I once wrote:
"Whether it's the racism (which I've spoken about for years) the adulterous white bullshit mayor, or the adulterous white bullshit mayor's love for cults, or the general lack of respect for morals, or the general lack of any good sense - or, really, anything else - personally, I'm sick of the bullshit 'no one wants to touch' in San Francisco. That city's been hiding the fact that it's a sick, evil, and toxic place - filled with cults that are spreading their corrosive magic-thinking ('you can believe whatever you want to believe') and making normal people miserable - for a long, long, time.
It's no wonder blacks have been leaving, like Jews from Nazi Germany, for years.
San Francisco (the home of est and the Landmark Forum) is filled with white cultish bastards, and living there - especially with that sick, sick, woman - almost killed me. I'll never get over the horror. And I'll never stop talking about it. And why should I?"
And I'd never even MET Elizabeth Holmes!!! But I'd married a woman who also risked lives for the cult's beliefs - and I'd lived in the San Francisco Bay Area for 30 odd years - so, I'm more-than-willing to accept NewAge as their reasoning, when I hear it so clearly expressed.
How others miss the spread of American cultism is, now, the only "how" I need an answer to.
"By trying to turn them into liberated individuals, Esalen was removing the one thing that gave them power and confidence, in their struggle against racism - their collective identity as blacks."
"The rhetoric of Web 2.0 has its roots in the New Age cults popular in Northern California in the 1960s and 1970s. Tim 2.0'Reilly was influenced by the 'human potential movement' at Esalen. Many prominent Valley techies and business pioneers were influenced by Werner Erhard's EST. And these, in turn, drew on a hodgepodge of influences including Reich. The cult-like thinking and playground hostility is evident to anyone who criticises the fad du jour. EST recruiters would silence critics with, 'That's enough of your rationalist bullshit!' - and the damning condemnation, 'You don't get it!', comes directly from the cult."
-- Andrew Orlowski, explaining (further) why the world's going to shit, and why few but TMR seem to acknowledge it (you're soaking in NewAge cultism: like in the movie, The Matrix) your only hope being on The Register.
"It is entirely possible that in the long run historians will regard the entire New Left experience as not so much a political as a religious episode,...." [Underlined emphasis TMR's]
-- Tom Wolfe, who nailed the current Democratic Party's "spiritual" obsessions in his 1976 essay "The 'Me' Decade and the Third Great Awakening", for New York Magazine
Everyone should read Wolfe's essay - not just because it's a hysterical comedy of errors - but as a very informative "spiritual" romp through the worst American decade in the modern era, which was the moment of inspiration for the latest wave of NewAge believers, the current Democratic leadership's cultism, and even John Edwards's confession he was "narcissistic" (in love with himself) when he fell for the "enlightened" Rielle Hunter.
If, like me, you find the Left "out there," then it's all right here. Dive in - but be sure not to have eaten for, at least, an hour.
"If the final sentence above doesn't alarm you, you haven't been paying sufficient attention. For your penance, say six Hail Marys and six Our Fathers, commune with your Inner Light for five hours, sign up for A Course in Miracles at your local Unity Church (or New Thought church of your choice), watch seven episodes of Oprah co-teaching with Eckhart Tolle, register your kid in a Walden School -- then go back to the first post here and read through the entire Mystic B archives! If that last bit doesn't work, swear an oath of lifelong celibacy and stay out of the gene pool.”
"The rhetoric of Web 2.0 has its roots in the New Age cults popular in Northern California in the 1960s and 1970s. Tim 2.0'Reilly was influenced by the 'human potential movement' at Esalen. Many prominent Valley techies and business pioneers were influenced by Werner Erhard's EST. And these, in turn, drew on a hodgepodge of influences including Reich. The cult-like thinking and playground hostility is evident to anyone who criticises the fad du jour. EST recruiters would silence critics with, 'That's enough of your rationalist bullshit!' - and the damning condemnation, 'You don't get it!', comes directly from the cult."
"It is entirely possible that in the long run historians will regard the entire New Left experience as not so much a political as a religious episode,...." [Underlined emphasis TMR's]
Everyone should read Wolfe's essay - not just because it's a hysterical comedy of errors - but as a very informative "spiritual" romp through the worst American decade in the modern era, which was the moment of inspiration for the latest wave of NewAge believers, the current Democratic leadership's cultism, and even John Edwards's confession he was "narcissistic" (in love with himself) when he fell for the "enlightened" Rielle Hunter. 
"If the final sentence above doesn't alarm you, you haven't been paying sufficient attention. For your penance, say six Hail Marys and six Our Fathers, commune with your Inner Light for five hours, sign up for A Course in Miracles at your local Unity Church (or New Thought church of your choice), watch seven episodes of Oprah co-teaching with Eckhart Tolle, register your kid in a Walden School -- then go back to the first post here and read through the entire Mystic B archives! If that last bit doesn't work, swear an oath of lifelong celibacy and stay out of the gene pool.”