There Are No Words

 

     

     

     

    

Suicidal Tendencies: I'm 100% Positive - This Country Needs Deprogramming More Than A Hole In The Head

Interesting. Everyone's pumping this study that says more Americans are committing suicide than dying in car crashes - as though this is news - when I have hinted, implied, and said directly, that what we're doing makes life less than worth living. The last time I did so, one week ago, I wrote this:

I'm not supposed to be doing this. "This" being whatever I'm doing now. I had a life and it got derailed by cultism, and now I'm stuck with this,…thing I cope with - that passes for my life - but I know better. 

My life will never be the same. 

This angst is what most don't talk about when talking about cultism. They're so concerned about the cult's freedom, always with the cult's concerns, but what it takes from the unwilling? 

If it comes up, I've never heard it.

As I said, contributing to my angst is the fact that, whether I look to the American Left or Right, I can't find many people who agree with me - on much of anything - but I can in Canada:

About 70% of the American deficit is “bought” directly or through the banking system by the Treasury’s 100% subsidiary, the Federal Reserve, and the minimal interest paid on it is recycled back through the Federal Reserve to the Treasury, so the cost of borrowing is zero. It is the ultimate Ponzi scheme, the fiscal nirvana of endless, mountainous debt, rendered easily bearable because it doesn’t cost anything. It is a fraud, a mirage. It all possesses the hypnotic allure of the Gotterdammerung — as the Gods ascend to a burning Valhalla. If this administration is re-elected, Canada, as it has for the entire mighty spectacle of the inexorable rise of the United States, will have the ring-side seat for a disaster. Prudent, hesitant Canada, ran 14 federal government surpluses in a row. We are the pigs in the brick house — it isn’t a heroic position, neither daring nor stylish, but Canadians are peering through the portals of their stout solid home, transfixed and astonished. 

The fact that Willard M. Romney is still running almost even in the polls despite his demiurgic implausibility as a candidate, afflicted by a one-person pandemic of foot-in-mouth disease, illustrates the concern of the American voters. Either Romney lucks through and numerate sanity starts to return to American public life, or the most self-destructively incompetent regime since James Buchanan brought on the Civil War, will come back and stoke up a truly spectacular inferno that will purify America in a mighty economic Jonestown. There will be no more tugging at a trouser leg from Canada — either a comradely pat on the back, or a neighbourly blast with a fire extinguisher, but this operatic crescendo can’t continue for one more full act.

Do you see the cultism? Here, let me yell it out for you:

"The ultimate Ponzi scheme." 

 "It is a fraud, a mirage." 

 "The hypnotic allure of the Gotterdammerung." 

 "The ring-side seat for a disaster." 

 "Willard M. Romney is still running almost even in the polls despite his demiurgic implausibility as a candidate." ("Demiurgic" is a word from Gnosticism.) 

 "Self-destructively incompetent." 

 "Jonestown."

Yes, I'd say our Neighbor to the North is pretty-much seeing what I see - just NewAge everywhere - and they know us pretty-fucking-well. As Paul Thomas Anderson's new film, "The Master," and all the other recent cult-themed movies are telling us, we are now a society using cult-derived thought processes, which are driving us to abandon our freedoms and collectively rain on our own parade.

And oh - that suicide study? I should mention I found it while looking at Instapundit:

    

 That, too, always makes me want to die a little,...

Naked (Wondering What's Under Those Pajamas,...)

Now this is weird: 

 Pajamas Media has an article called "Cults: The Mind Enslaved." 

It's not like PJMedia to wander into my neck of the woods, and as with so many others, it's an article on being a full-blown cultist as opposed to the much more prevalent phenomena of being surrounded by cultish thinking - so it hardly applies to most people - but, still, it's welcome:

Nobody joins a cult; people are attracted to cultic groups by an apparent good. This could be legitimate elements borrowed from a non-cultic faith, the “high” experienced at a self-help conference, or the camaraderie and affection offered by a new group of caring people. These attractions fill a need experienced by a vulnerable recruit. The benefits prime the new member to identify the cult as the source. 

Cult members invariably begin to experience a discrepancy between cult teaching and what he or she observes. Mr. Goldman spoke of knowing LaRouche published antisemitic literature while the leader claimed to have a special love for Jewish people. Confronted with inconsistencies, the subject must choose between personal thinking and the cult-knowledge with all its perceived benefits. Once a person consciously repudiates his or her own mind, defending against intruding reality becomes imperative. As the cult-thought becomes more and more invasive, the member no longer lives life based on the normal ebb and flow of information, analysis, and personally selected behavior. Instead, the subject defaults to free-standing dictums that have no root in reality. 

The mind continues to receive sensory input from the world and this causes “dissonance,” a struggle between suppressed reason attempting to reassert itself and the post-analytical intellect. … 

The Cult Mind frequently violates conscience, that internalized voice of universal right and wrong. For Jason Beghe, it was continuing to recruit for Scientology when he saw that expensive training was not helping him. For David Goldman, he knew assisting an antisemite spread the “Jewish Banking Myth” was wrong, but he was not willing to substitute reality for the emotional comfort of LaRouche’s inner circle. 

The need to limit contact with people who live according to reason explains alienation from family, friends, and non-members. Living extensions of the Gnostic group-mind are only comfortable with people who affirm the illusion in which they live. Within a cult, subjects serve to continuously monitor one another’s level of blind adherence to cult ideology and to suspension of critical thought. Deviations such as questioning or criticism are met with social sanctions that vary in intensity depending on the cult. Anyone who threatens the unity of thought is deemed an enemy. Such a person threatens the essential psychologically dependent state that constitutes the essence of the cult. 

The Gnostic Mind is often compartmentalized and people who eschew reason in one area of life are able to function at high levels of professionalism in others. The more dangerous cults are precisely those whose members seem relatively normal on the surface because they offer fewer external warnings to the vulnerable.

Yep, all that sounds about right, but I still can't help wondering why is PJMedia covering it? And why now? Tom Cruise's troubles? Moon's death? A warning on Mormonism?

Or maybe it's just a fluke. A one-off. Or,…maybe cultism is being seen as the very problem I've been saying can't be ignored.

No, I doubt that - the framing of this issue as someone else's problem - something you don't concern yourself with until it's too late (which, by then, is too late) is still too prevalent.

 I'm just going to be glad it's there and let it go, as so much has gone before,...

 

Don't Lose Faith: Reading Between The Lines On Mitt, Mormonism & The Reporting Of The New Yorker

In the eighteen-twenties, in Palmyra, New York, a man named Joseph Smith—who had already been arrested for “glass looking,” the phony detection of underground treasures—said that an angel named Moroni had directed him to a set of buried golden plates, inscribed with an ancient script, which, after various stops and starts, Smith and a friend had translated into a Biblical-sounding English. 

The plates contained the Book of Mormon,...

The Book of Mormon is, in any case, only one of many pronouncements that Smith offered his new troops, apparently improvising as he went along,...

Smith held (especially in the sermons he preached toward the end of his life) that God and angels and men were all members of the same species,…

…The doctrine of God-as-Man divided Smith’s cult from the others,…

…Mormonism does have a definite Gnostic aroma,…

…Mormonism was the great scandal of American nineteenth-century religion, somewhat as Scientology is today, though Mormons understandably dislike the comparison.

Wherever they went, they infuriated the non-Mormon locals, and also managed to infuriate one another: the early history of the movement involves a bewildering series of excommunications, internal banishments, and the increasing threat of violence to enforce new rules as Smith received them. Smith was eventually martyred by a mob in Carthage, Illinois, while in the local jail awaiting trial for treason. Which of his doctrines enraged the mob is hard to grasp, but it may have been sex more than heresy.

The success of a new religious movement depends not so much on the mystical visions of its founder as on the executive energy of its first evangelist,…Brigham Young inhabited this role for the Mormons, and about as fully as any apostle ever has.

Young,… is one of the few nineteenth-century public figures to be routinely on the record saying “frigged” and “shit.” Yet the figure who emerges in the biography starts off more like Jim Jones or David Koresh. He preached a brutal doctrine of “blood atonement”…a “chilling perversion of the golden rule.”

For a time, he tolerated a group of frontier thugs who acted as personal emissaries, and, despite Smith’s gestures toward universalism, imposed a hard anti-African and pro-slavery line. (Blacks were excluded from the priesthood and from temple ceremonies.) Young was in power at the time of the Mountain Meadows Massacre, in 1857, in which more than a hundred peaceful non-Mormon emigrants were disarmed under an elaborate promise of safe conduct and then murdered en masse. “The attackers mercilessly shot, stabbed, and slashed the throats of emigrants who pled for their lives,” Turner recounts, in an event he describes as “a heinous crime executed after careful deliberation and subterfuge.” For all that, the killers “appeared to remain not just in good standing but in Young’s own personal favor,”...

Smith taught that Gods and men were one species; Young made this idea a practical guiding principle.

Mormons effectively turned away from spiritual adventuring toward the gospel of prosperity. . . . Merchants who invested in the enterprise displayed a [Zion Co-operative Mercantile Institutions] sign on their storefronts, consisting of an ‘All-Seeing Eye’ ,…the Z.C.M.I. in part reflected the socialist,…doctrines that Smith had taught,…

The Mormons in Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s “The Book of Mormon”…are well-meaning naïfs, essentially sweet and admirable—though, to be a little heretical myself, this may be evidence, along with much of “South Park,” of Parker and Stone’s wanting to take credit for being bold without ever taking the risks or responsibility that come with being brave.

All of which leads to the inevitable question: To what degree is Mormonism responsible for Mitt Romney? Is there a thread, dark or golden, that runs from Moroni to Mitt? …The most striking feature of Mitt Romney as a politician is an absence of any responsibility to his own past—the consuming sense that his life and opinions can be remade at a moment’s need. Romney, according to Romney, never favored the individual mandate, or supported abortion rights, or opposed the auto-industry bailout, or did any of the other things he obviously, and on the record, did.

When, in 1978, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints abandoned the rule prohibiting blacks from serving as priests, one church leader, Bruce McConkie, explained, “It doesn’t make a particle of difference what anybody ever said about the Negro matter before the first day of June 1978.” You could find, or think you’ve found, a similar logic behind Romney’s blithe amnesia when it comes to the things he used to think and say.

Romney is better understood as a late-twentieth-century American tycoon than as any kind of believer,…It’s unfair to say, as some might, that Mitt Romney believes in nothing except his own ambition. He believes, with shining certainty, in his own success, and, more broadly, in the American Gospel of Wealth that lies behind it: the idea that rich people got rich by being good, that the riches are a sign of their virtue, and that they should therefore be allowed to rule.

Then again, almost every American religion sooner or later becomes a Gospel of Wealth. 

-- All bolds mine, with quotes from the (mostly positive) New Yorker Magazine review of four books on Mormon history, "I, Nephi," by Adam Gopnik.
 

The Only "Change" The Dems Need Is To End Their Fascination With The Beliefs Of The 70's

"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.

Hat Tip: Mystic Bourgeoisie - who wears a mighty big hat - and adds:

"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.”

Bite

Courtesy of the Mystic Bourgeoisie (he's gone off and started doing that "brilliant" thing again,...)

The Leaders Believers Deserve

"Of Jimmy Carter, Schlesinger says he 'could not bring myself to vote for a man who believes that Adam and Eve once existed and,...he has seen flying saucers.'"

"Reagan told [Jim McCartney of Knight-Ridder] that Chernobyl had been predicted in 'the eighth chapter of Revelations.'"

"Al Gore speaks with 'a holistic, even mystical, fervor' about everything from Gnosticism to,...'a redefinition of our relationship to reality.'”

- From Maureen Dowd's review of Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr's diaries, which details many of the new age/occult/religious beliefs of the nutcases who've held power, courtesy of The New York Times.