[1044] Reason Seasoning

I haven't talked religion in a long time. I just watched this "Skinny Happy People: Duggar Family Secrets" series though. My brain is kicking off down some heavily compacted trails, but I'd still like to see if there's anything new.

I'm very much in the "religion poison's everything" camp. Whatever you may wish to claim is right or wrong about human behavior, there's a familiar, comforting, and easily digested religious anecdote, adage, or idiom to summarize and excuse away any remote lesson or inclination towards accountability. At bottom, every book, every tradition, every gathering of thousands boils down to "Because God!" The unprovable, ineffable essence of what us boring nerdy types recognize as self-satisfied circular-reasoning and infinite regress. Every single religious tradition terminates the same way.

As such, you take whatever fiendish inclination between thought crime to child molesting to child torture then molesting then murdering, as long as you punctuate it with "God's will," or spin-doctor it into your next trial and lesson, it never actually has to get dealt with. And why should it? It's the same people perpetrating that get attention, power, money, and literally thousands of people crafting their day-to-day excuses to not think for themselves or find their agency. Arguably, beyond the wholesale corruption of critical thinking, the thing I hate most about religious types is the unearned pride and piety bestowed by thirsty empty sheep looking for a strong daddy.

This isn't shaping up to be a blog where I feel moved to qualify anything positive about religious experience, so don't expect this to look "balanced" or "fair" or giving much a shit about your personal story as it pertains to your Jesus. You've been warned.

Anyway, now that I deal with addiction, I get to see new, but precisely the old, patterns manifest in ways I haven't written about yet. It could be notions of "purity" and "submission" that plague the minds of those who literally can't see a paradigm that would allow them to be independent. You're at the mercy of the eldest man who I don't think it would be unfair to say you're addicted to. We're addictive creatures, trying to indulge the positive feelings at all costs. Literally, we will die to feel good, and I don't think this is framed as dangerous as it's registering to me in this moment.

I've heard a lot of, "I just don't want to deal..." from my friends as much as any client. No one wants to deal. They don't want the headache. They don't have the time. Whether they're addicted to their vape or to some desperate conception of their duty or destiny, they don't fundamentally feel situated to deal with the heart of whatever their own issues may be. It becomes very easy to get enmeshed in family issues, client issues, indulgences for their own sake, or a feverish "busy-ness" pointed in no real direction in particular. They want to feel good. Maybe not even "better" than "good" or "good enough."

That's part of the religious impulse, no? You want to feel better about the infinite. You want to matter. You want to think you've created a kind of noble and lasting example in your attempt to start a family or in how hard you've worked to get letters after your name and higher paychecks. You want to pay your respects and keep the traditions of your elders alive. You want to think someone's paying attention and keeping score. It doesn't matter if in your heart of hearts you "don't believe in anything," as one woefully incomplete phrasing tries to caricature it, it matters that it feels better to "believe in something" than your insignificance and lack of connection. Jesus is a thousand times easier to understand emotionally than "quantum" anything.

It just feels so fucking boring and disingenuous after, well I spent years reading/arguing this stuff, but with an adult brain and 15 minutes, some deeply consequential layers of this shit needs to crack. You can be a perfectly good person without anything religious making its way into the conversation or your identity. Your car takes gas, not God's will, and for whatever scientific description you want to use about the combustion engine, the same scientific principles and rules apply to what's going to make you "go" as a healthy connected individual verses an incidentally alive node in a narcissist's cult.

I genuinely wish for the shedding of religious indoctrination to happen as quick as possible. I wish the people who hold it harmless would spend more time in good faith analyzing what they think it's been teaching them. Every form of abuse is justified "because God." Every opportunity to hold someone to account is a move to kick the can all the way to Hell. You reduce yourself to the dog who got in the trash. It's never going to walk up to you, apologize, and begin picking up and putting it back in the can. It's going to live in fear, or oblivious pride, and wait for daddy to decide what comes next.

It's always and of course the religious household where you get the most abuse and allegations. If you build church bells to sound "duh" on the hour every hour, we would still carry ourselves as if noticing a cross on the wall is tantamount to a Safe Space sticker for runaway teens. Where else are you going to find the worst kind of predictable tragedies of human behavior than where there's billions of dollars and adherents fundamentally situated to pretending? They pretend they weren't abused. They pretend to know what it is to be accountable. They pretend to have an identity. They pretend with every single word meant to obscure. It's easier to say "sin" than, "He made an 8 year old suck his dick."

There's so many parallels in my thought right now, it's hard to put it together. People defend the wrong things in the exact same ways with the exact same language. Your abusive partner, Trump, religious pedophile, terrible drug use influence..."He didn't mean...." and you're off to the races of excuses and reinterpretation of words and actions that have about as definitive a meaning as you could ever ask for. Every second you experience a moment of hesitation or confusion about something you haven't studied or don't have the mental faculties to entertain..."It's part of a larger plan." Yes, someone's always Ocean's 11ing things in the background.

People will escape! Then they will still say, "You can still trust God!" As though I should be surprised that an entire lifetime spent being punished for having your own identity could lend itself to any other conclusion. No no, dear traveler, what all of these rich sex and violence addicts were doing with all of their influence and time, never being held to account, that's the "fake God" stuff. The "real God" stuff is do literally everything they've ever said and done that doesn't rise to the level of pedophilia or violence that leaves marks. Nailed it!

I get annoyed when Hussain will say something about sex or relationships that is as purely distilled "purity culture" cult shit as you could stomach. Even if none of his actions reflect that of a controlling husband/ownership dynamic, he can't shake that it just feels "right" that you have your one woman, and anything else is grounds for divorce or disassociating. This, with I guess his tongue sticking straight through his cheek, as he tells me the permissibility of having 4 wives in his culture. You see, you can't "cheat" or be "open," but you can corral four bagged women to be at your beck and call if the money's right. You don't get that stupid convoluted headspace without religion.

Let's get back to "deal with it" as a phrase. We just don't want to deal. We don't want to deal with climate change. We don't want to deal with the fallout of our toxic friends or habits. We don't want to deal with our oppressor be it at work or in abstract attacks from the government. Why deal? It doesn't feel good. No one in our various religious contexts is showing us what effectively dealing means. It's not even really an option because it can't be conceived of. What are you not "dealing with" in your "addiction?"  After a few weeks/months you can pretty much be physically fine if not in dire need to recalibrate your dopamine and serotonin over the next 2 years.

I'm interested in what moves us past this whole "religious debate" that doesn't get to the heart of making excuses and fantasy worlds verses working within our actual power. We talk about "raising consciousness" which I think looks a lot like people showing people things, but without an appreciation for how or why they learn so it doesn't really matter how often it comes up, it never sinks in. You could very easily discuss the assumptions and illusions we're situated in as conscious beings altogether to persistently derail what that next conversation space could look like. I don't need another cult-leader, rich god-guys-is-an-asshole story. Do you? Are you ripe and ready to fall for NXIVM or Scientology if your Jesus or Mohamed wears off?

These crazies, these cultists, these monetarily powerful playing on human weakness fucks think in generational terms. We can't be persuaded to get half a dozen people into an intentional community, but you have millions on the same smug team regularly donating, indoctrinating, infiltrating, and humbly requesting through speakers outside the baseball stadium that you meet them halfway in a discussion about who's more likely to burn for all eternity as though we're not literally on fire already. Blame Canada!

You don't want to deal? You don't want to accept? You don't want to try? You don't want to touch an ounce of the anger you hear from me when I type? You're the piddling middle-ground that doesn't protest when the Nazi sits at your table. You're the $10 donation affirming private air fare for your spew-daddy while your neighbor starves. You're the held-harmless "individual" "who's just trying..." every overtaxed phrase about caring for them and theirs or what it means to be "good." They're not trying. They're not just. "They" aren't real or a person. They're a water molecule without the language of "flood."

We're all part of more waves than we can conceive. You can disappear into it, or you can adopt the buoy's perspective. You can learn how to be weather and impact resistant, bob and weave, act as a warning and help others navigate. It's dangerous to give your checking capacity to anything else. You need to be able to recognize the impulse, what ignorance looks and sounds like, and feel, as deeply and radically as the ideologues do, a sense of purpose and direction. Religious thinking is arsenic sprinkled on food and you say, "Oh! Almonds! Want a bite?" It's where you go to feel good about not taking responsibility. It's where you go to celebrate addictive thinking patterns. It's how you get to Hell. "You," of course, not me, because I don't need your daddy. I don't need him molesting the kids I try to place. I don't need his money. I don't need his excuses or story for my behavior or sense of agency. 

Why the fuck do you?

[892] Death Cult For Cooties

I'm annoyed. I'm watching “The Vow,” where Scientology-lite ex NXIVM members functionally recreate Leah Remini's series with, somehow, even more exposition. I don't know if I even really appreciate the amount of catch-all nonsense cliches people employ to describe their time under the influence, but I know I'm losing my patience for this narrative that seems fit to start and end at, but how could I know!? This could happen to anyone!

The cult leader started as a multi-level marketing scammer in the 80s. If that's not enough to sound the alarm, say, because back then the nature of those organizations was less understood or you were young enough for him to consider you a target, there's more to explore. Hell, I've fallen under the allure of an MLM. I was 16, made one pathetic attempt at sending my dad to work with an energy drink catalog, cost myself like $20, and thus ended my career in “being my own boss.” I've also fallen for an Ebay scam, and believed I had a shot at girls I absolutely had no shot with. I characterize a good portion of my 16-25 year old self as something of a wide-eyed idealist verses deliberately naive.

As such, along those lines, I can empathize with these people. They had their own social and emotional issues. They were “looking for something,” and a nice-enough crowd with a persuasive personality coaxed them along. I think as someone who recognized his own capacity for manipulation and concern for the potential consequences, here's where I dramatically diverge. I start writing. The narrative used to justify the different environments that were making me miserable needed to be explored, not justified.

Part of the reason I didn't and still don't feel naive about the parts of my life that haven't gone as planned or didn't feel like they “should” was because I was actively examining them and making decisions in spite. You hear the same thing from the cult members though. They don't consider getting branded a bad thing. They don't think the bad press is anything but nay-sayers and people threatened by their growth and influence. What makes my conception of examining my life better than theirs? It seems too easy to point to the things any one member might have been convicted of, right? We were definitely drinking heavily, drugs were all around, and clearly not everyone experiences the party or sexual energy the same way.

I don't know that there's an “objective” analysis here. I think one of the reasons I insist on constantly writing, sharing, and exploring, is because with the ounce of sympathy or empathy I might have for any one member, I can't shake this sense that there's something dirty not being addressed. I can't believe they wouldn't be having the same kind of conversations I was, internal or otherwise. I can't stomach the amount of silence and circles one would need to let “everyone I know is starving themselves and exhausted” go unexamined.

Easy enough to think of the cult of Nazi Trump supporters, no? How many interviews have you watched of them just sounding dumb. And it's a deliberate dumb. It's a proud dumb. It's the kind of dumb that is servicing a disregarded maliciousness. That maliciousness is ravenous to see how much it can get away with or devour. That's what I feared about my awareness of my capacity to manipulate. Even before I had any real sense that I could go about it deliberately, I knew simple things like, smiling a certain way defused or disarmed people. Humor works pretty much always. To what end?

Maybe if most of your days are doing workshops and yoga classes, it's a little easier to be dragged along in a more-or-less agreeable way. What's the fat, drunk, gun-toting basement dwelling retard's excuse? Do you think he subjectively views his life as one worth living? Do you think there are a few, pretty easy, hard truths to wrestle with before you find yourself face-painted and shitting in the halls of Congress? There's a scene in The Vow were an old actress says her mom is second cousins with Prince Charles and he needs to do her a favor to get the Dalai Lama on the phone. Cletus T. Dickhead would certainly spell it llama and accuse him of being a pedophile. These are superficially entirely different worlds.

What unites the two is ritual lies. Shitty families operate this way too. They lie about the impact they have on each other. They lie about what holds them together as though blood is sacred enough to divine kings and soak up the mess of incest and emotional abuse. We're all shaped and shape culture, as much as we wish to deny the latter. “Generational abuse” exists as a term because we've come to understand that trauma travels over time. To the extent you are made aware of this and then proceed to ignore the obligation to examine how it's almost certainly playing out in your life, any asshole who gives you enough reason to distract from that line of inquiry is going to become compelling.

This is a big reason why I don't hero worship. I have people who I tend to admire, briefly, and then I start to let what's human about them creep in. Jordan Peterson is an easy target. I've gorged myself on the podcast 5-4 the last few days. If you ever make the mistake of letting your favorite band's members speak, you're in for a ride. Every thing and every one can be credibly criticized. They can be subsumed in your subjective estimation or they can be incorporated into our collective objective measuring. Nothing about what we should seek to understand in our enjoyment or promotion of something needs to rest in an angry or defensive space. It's disingenuous cowardice or intellectual narcissism otherwise.

Accountability is something that's just not here anymore. I think accountability is often thought of as “someone” “out there” who needs to “do something.” Like there's indeed something to be done, a hero is on the way, and whatever our obligation, it's to squawk like the morality is in sounding the bells everyone else has already been ringing. This is why your silence is terrifying to me. This is why when in the days after the literal attempt to overthrow the government, dumb as it was, gave license for these fucks to escalate further, why am I not seeing every single one of you demanding the assholes be arrested?

I can speculate that you don't hold yourselves accountable, not really, to anything of consequence or sacrifice, so it feels really hard and like some undue burden to add what you might only perceive as noise. Okay, and what else does your cult leader tell you you're not allowed to say? How many millions of psychological cults have you joined that have so many of the features of the Nazis? Dressing up fear and shame as pride? Seems likely. Wishing for death? Pretty much my constant thesis for the last few years. Deliberately isolating yourself in a deadly comfort zone from any further obligation to the world around you? Please, stop me if this shit all feels made up and reaching.