Aswad
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Joined: 4/4/2007
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quote:
ORIGINAL: LadyConstanze
it's just wondering why people fall for it, building societies and nations, well there is something in it for people, an infrastructure, things are done for them, there is protection like health insurance, etc., when it comes to religion, most people do things for that reward in the afterlife or some other idea.
Which kind of wraps up the case for "the point" being what's missing from the understanding.
The word "cult" is null and void: it carries a connotation, but does not denote anything that is usefully distinct from anything else.
Asking what makes people "fall" for one is moot. People "fall" for ideas all the time, usually with little objective benefit, and often with any subjective benefits buried far down in the unspoken complexities of the interplay of ideas and reality, if any are to be found at all. We like some of those ideas, and dislike others. Love. Hope. Money. Honor. Freedom. Altruism. Fame. Status. Democracy. Responsibility. Life. Time. Justice. All just ideas with no inherent substance, right?
Ars Gratia Artis... sometimes, the thing is in itself sufficient.
quote:
As for not wanting to be a cult leader, I hate speaking in front of lots of people and even more selling stuff to them (kinda ironic since I work in PR but hey, I just develop the concept) and it's that pesky thing about feeling a bit shit if you are selling castles in the air to people who are obviously a bit handy capped and need false hope, I might as well become a Republican.
The Republican Cult is well covered already. They have their local prophets. By the Chomsky-like interpretation of prophet, they will be proven "false prophets" in time, but the biblical analogies have been sufficiently explored anyway. No way to get bible belters and reps anywhere near such insight, sadly enough. Bright side, the bugles will be more moving than the harp was.
Personally, I enjoy speaking in front of lots of people. Assuming I actually have something to say. Or sell. You might want to consider that you're speaking in front of a lot of people on this board, and potentially more in the future (it is all being archived in three places, at least, possibly more). It's not as hard as you seem to think.
For the vast majority of the world, false hope is better than no hope. The rest won't be listening, so you're not selling anyone anything they don't want. The delusions of every mother on the planet is what keeps her from strangling the kids at birth. Valuable delusions, one could argue. Similar things keep the oppressed fraction of your population from rising up in utterly selfish, widespread ultraviolence. I'm not as happy about that as I would imagine you are (being in the area, after all).
A cult is like any other endeavour. It can be beneficial or detrimental or both. Teach a lot of disgruntled school kids how to use a gun and you will be detrimental to a lot of happy school kids and teachers. Teach them that they've been chosen to be among those who will live through some hypothetical doomsday event, by virtue of the will to endure without retaliation, and you'll probably be beneficial overall to them, and certainly beneficial to the people they don't end up killing. Ghandi had a pretty neat cult going. So did Mao, Che, Jesus and Hitler. They were all beneficial to some, and detrimental to others.
More to the point, it's not actually necessary to repeat all the mistakes of the past in making one...
... just damn popular.
Health,
al-Aswad.
_____________________________
"If God saw what any of us did that night, he didn't seem to mind.
From then on I knew: God doesn't make the world this way.
We do." -- Rorschack, Watchmen.
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RE: Starting a cult - 
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