The Age of the Cult
Opinion
Firstly a clarification of what I mean by Cult. The Oxford, Britannica, and Cambridge dictionaries all define it as something religious.
Personally I think this hides the reality that cults are all around us.
The definition I prefer is from Wikipedia:
Cult is a term, sometimes considered pejorative, for a relatively small group which is typically led by a charismatic and self-appointed leader, who excessively controls its members, requiring unwavering devotion to a set of beliefs and practices which are considered deviant (outside the norms of society)
For a starter, there seems to be a growing number of cults appearing in Medium.
Most of them are not announced to be cults.
Most just come across as followings.
We can tell when a writer’s or tribe’s following is becoming a cult, when we dare to comment in their forum, to a story of theirs, or a comment made by one of their followers, in any way that does not heap adolation on the leader / author, or the tribe, or if our message, backed by proof, or inarguable logic, is seen to dilute, or distract from the message of the leader, or the tribe in any way, then we come under attack, sometimes by the leader, usually by the following.
Anyone who knows what I write about, and how I write about it, probably knows I often write long replies in responses.
The nature of the energy problem is that it is fiendishly complex, affecting everything we know, and not truly covered by profit driven business or profit driven science, so folk don’t usually know much about it, so I have to make the effort to explain as little of it as I think is necessary to get my point across, but the complexity of it dictates that my post is long. I usually apologise politely for rambling, but actually in most responses I wasn’t, it was the minimum I could say to get my point across in a way anyone should understand.
The authors writing about whatever it was that prompted me to respond usually acknowledge the effort I put in, even if they don’t agree my point.
But sometimes they respond by just saying “It’s too long”, or “Not relevant”, or a “Distraction”, to me this is a red flag, that the real message of theirs that I was commenting on, was not actually what it said on the tin.
Even worse when one or two PM me, to have a private discussion, to try to brow beat me in private, where no-one can see. That is the final straw, when someone tries to move things away from public view. Never Good!
The real message was more like “Look how clever I am, and worship me”.
They don’t like when we point out that something fundamental is wrong or missing from their show of cleverness.
Missing out the effects of energy is always a big faux pas, imho, not clever at all.
The Bigger Cults
Governments, big companies, Regulatory standards bodies, Local Governments, Sometimes even judicial bodies, we see them all becoming just cults, in my opinion.
Hell, the whole of “The West” is a Cult.
In fact, the whole world is a cult, in terms of the way we handle energy, look how little information there is, on how to actually fix the energy problem. But there are plenty of folk and tribes making headlines pretending to fix things.
Political discussions that always talk about the symptoms of problems, never the cause (Energy!)
Protests, that serve to slow down traffic, with the effect that those cars held up burn up twice as much fuel as they needed to get to their destination wihout the holdup. Vandalism of various items and areas that requires fossil fueled business and time to put right again. None of it fixes the problem, just makes it worse, because they are dealing with symptoms, never the cause.
News agencies like GB News, BBC, even Al Jazeera sometimes, (In their coverage of the Ukraine problem, for example), they are not interested in giving us news, just grabbing our attention. “Look here, isn’t it mesmorising?”
What drives them / us all?
Profit.
Which is entirely dependent on extracted energy, as I’ve shown in many places.
They talk often enough about fixing the problem, all the while, making profit, as admittedly we we all need to do currently to some extent, just to survive. I won’t go ranting on about how to move on from it that, I’ve done plenty of other stories on It. Suffice to say, if we want to really make a change, we have to starve the profit monster.
It starves, almost instantly when we start handing out the solar backed stimulus. Never forget when oil prices went negative, that was the real miracle, which has been hushed up.
Kill the profit monster, and we’ve finally broken our addiction to extracted energy, and pretty much all motivation to cultivate… cults.
The Danger of Cults
Last word I would say about cults, is to watch out, if you are a member of any, they will expect sacrifice, even the ultimate sacrifice, when the shit hits the fan, and the shit will hit the fan soon.
Because the way we handle energy itself is a giant Ponzi, the biggest Ponzi of all, systemically linked to everything, then everything confined within this system, all profit driven business also has to be Ponzi.
This means that all profit driven business, all activities which are profit driven are physically unsustainable. Anything we can think of, which can’t survive when profit dies, has to die also.
Many of those things will fail, even before the radical action of issue of solar stimulus happens, because profit is dying already. It has been since the seventies. It peaked, when availability of oil peaked. Hence the reason we no longer have concorde, the space shuttle, reliable public transport, free public health, hell even commercial air flights are becoming difficult.
When the cults fail, all of them, all within every cult will be expected to sacrifice themselves, to save the leader, or leaders.
We saw most recently what happens when the Ponzi the cult is based on, the things that gave it energy, always from extracted sources, the cult can be continued no longer, many people die.
Now look at what we in the West, and actually, Russia, are doing in Europe, with the escalation and ramp-up to widespread war in Europ.
The West is a Cult.
Russia is a Cult.
All of them are fueled by unsustainable extracted energy.
Widespread war in the world now when the climate is already screaming due to our continued use of extracted energy, is the end of all cults, when we will all have to make the ultimate sacrifice.
The leaders might think they will survive, but they won’t. No-one survives, when the world of life physically ends.
So we should shun these cults, starve them of attention and profit, stop contributing to the profit driven system where possible, demand the money issuers hand out the solar stimulus necessary to kill the profit monster, and break our addiction to extracted energy.
Appoint something superhuman and immune to cults, to handle everything, including the issue of money — Ai.
It can’t do any worse than humans.
