Not all cults are created equal—and the most conspiracy-obsessed demand blind faith, fanatic loyalty and zero remorse. A merciful few last but a generation, discredited and self-disgraced by failure, cruelty, internal contradictions.
Cancers on civilization and attack dogs on reason, pernicious cults plague history, among the most destructive menaces to humanity after war, pandemics, intolerant religion and right-wing balderdash. Except for minor-league cults (on movies, celebrities, video games, sports, miracle potions, and romance novels), a take-no-prisoners cult is a unified army of the fixated and self-righteous who invoke invisible powers, screw-ball notions (like Christian nationalism), boast special input that truly unravels reality, and traffic in irrational conspiracies. The quest is simple: to insist, by arms, sleaze or election, one narrow belief system acts as commander-in-chief. Majority rule must evaporate because cultist, faith-alone “election” emanates from higher powers that trump mere transient, humane aspirations like compassion, goodness or justice.
After all, what dominant (likely hypocritical) world religion didn’t start life as an off-stage cult loaded with ludicrous, non provable claims and run by manically-controlling organizer-propagandists? Or posit that any sinner can save his mysterious soul by studying one Good Book, window to grander mysteries of the universe—unbothered that all is predestined before birth? Humanistic cults equate divinity with love, peace and forgiveness, but who, with fire and brimstone, still threaten mass species extinction because a few yokels break the rules.
How about the medieval (and later) Cult of Holy Rituals, promising that strict adherence to a priest’s rule book cured diseases and brought happiness, in this life and beyond? In politics, for centuries the cult of infallible, divine kingship ruled the roost, though finding hard evidence that monarchs had either quality is harder than knowing which first nervy rogue bragged he could alone fix everything. Cults prove(d) one tribe was better than all others and cults of violence proposed that killing neighbors would make everyone safer. Once Europeans backed the Cult of the Noble Savage (re violent warrior cultures?) and before that doubted the earth was a globe that circled the sun—Cult of the Flat Earth folly. In medicine, a novel cult proposed that injecting a smidge of disease would protect multitudes against the worst plagues of mass mortality. Vaccination was a cult redeemed, fleshed in by unimpeachable science and experimentation validated when billions survived—making life more than marginally better than death. The current regression on vaccines is the least defensible MAGA cult obscenity.
You get the idea. All cults start rogue but only successful ploys finish as revered. Especially in America, religious fundamentalism came over with the Mayflower, flourishing ever since, fueling today’s myth that a humanoid Christian God blesses America as the special, most worthy country (in great part thanks to immigrants). Even though transcendent Jewish Jesus lived 2000 years ago and spoke no English yet still inspires a manifestly man-made book as literally, eternally true. On such logical fallacies emerge fundamentalism, the gullible side of human nature that refuses to tolerate complexity, philosophic nuance, and linguistic ambiguity.
Most cults have short shelf lives
The good news about notorious, modern western cultural/ political (and religious) cults is how suddenly they self-destruct. The most infamous 20th C fascist/authoritarian cults were defeated the same generation they appeared, namely Germany and Italy deposed by horrendous war defeats (and now sensible democracies). However, dictator Franco in Spain lasted three more decades before that country ultimately shifted to democracy. A despotic, unified USSR tyranny lasted even longer, lately renewed with deadly fierceness by the cult of Putinism; China has yet to move beyond its top-down, Maoist communist/authoritarian cult movement. Ditto, the Cult of American Imperialism (in play since1848), driven by the Cult of Manifest Destiny, thus racial superiority—still fueling the USA as global military, cultural and economic octopus. Though highly profitable for businesses, the price for “peace-making” militarism is staggering, even obscene. Genocides typically demand irrational cult presumptions.
The worst political cult here remains white supremacy, with colonial power-grabs that wiped out Native Americans (though not by choice as African slaves had then to be imported to provide critical workers). The need for “the other” as workers usually precedes, as advanced today, the horror that “outsiders” have invaded our shores. First come impoverished workers, both white and colored, then the tipping point when the anxious (white) majority is aghast to find “criminal foreigners” dare to share our sacred Garden of Eden. One tribe’s labor needs is a later tribe’s bogeyman, mandating nearly as much cruelty to deport as it took to enslave and ship across oceans.
Doesn’t cultism contradict thinking for oneself?
No definitive cult, especially in unabashedly individualistic America, embraces the term “cult”—laden with negative connotations of coercion, mind control and exploitation. Mandates for blind obedience to all-powerful authorities intolerant of dissent, with its own ordained rituals to isolate marks from social norms or testable truth—that’s what denigrates mind-numbing, integrity-sucking cultism. Ominous cults, namely fascist armies, murderous gestapos or Mafia-style gangs, integrate religion, culture, ideology and politics, evidenced by MAGA—force-fed by a volatile, narcissistic propagandist who loves conflict and violence.
When isolated from rational adults or quality education, cultists desperate for group identity embrace what start as flakybeliefs. Dissent, even skepticism, gets one cast out as heretic as the preposterous is normalized. Thus Trump, a convict riddled with moral flaws and bereft of economic or policy mastery, is elevated as the perfect tycoon who “alone can fix everything.” Cultism is immune from the absurd improbability that a wayward god would anoint this messenger. Once suckered, cults can exploit members financially, psychologically, emotionally and sexually. For the alienated or unbalanced, cults provide the shield of communal comfort, fixed dictates, and guarantees for a better life, wherever. As with Jim Jones’ Peoples Temple fiasco, extreme cultists with no apparent way out forfeit existence, making suicide a dubious “solution” to intolerable fears and anxieties.
MAGA falls short of that threshold for membership, though risking one’s life in the service of the cause is hardly out of the question. Bottom line is obedience to what Trumpster says at any time (however contradictory or changeable), along with subsidizing their hero with specious donations. Two core MAGA cult drivers—monumental lying and a buffet of outrageous conspiracies—reinforce the specialness of the cult (only members really know what’s true) even if that means swallowing ludicrous conspiracy nonsense (“they’re eating the dogs, they’re eating the cats”), as the outraged buy into the outrageous.
Good theories (and a dark view of human nature) explain the hypocrisy of overtly moralistic, judgmental fanatics blindly accepting the immorality of leadership and a lawless, immoral agenda. The Confederacy, the most pernicious cult before Trumpism, not only defended slavery but insisted its religious figures find spiritual justification to approve owning human beings. Or backed rebels to betray agreements gifted by saintly forebears to honor the Union and the Constitution. Like moralistic 20th C authoritarians, the south committed atrocities, with horrendous prison camps, let alone condoned frequent whipping and sexual abuses without doubting its Christian purity. Likewise, evidence shows MAGA cultists are “Callous and manipulative . . . [with] ‘malevolent personality traits’,” thus explaining why Trumpers “view favorably a political figure with a history of business failures, bankruptcies, misogynistic statements caught on video, use of charity money for a self-portrait, etc,” Not to mention, a multiply-convicted felon brimming with criminal intent who laughs at prison accountability.
The certitude of the righteous allows cults to forever abandon moral means justified by the noble end – rule by a rich, self-declared elite of owners who know better. Notably, the South never held a regional plebiscite to assess whether the majority favored secession (or slavery for that matter). Worse still, the Confederate cult didn’t end with defeat, supplanted by the “Cult of the Lost Cause” that romanticizes the good old pre-War days, minimizing the horrors of slavery and contorting secession as a noble, heroic struggle against Northern aggression (hello, Ft. Sumter?).
Thanks to its own greed, egotism, buffoonery, incompetence, and ruthlessness, the MAGA cult is already splitting apart, squandering its overweening power. When Trump departs, likely in disgrace (again), the cult faces the impossible task of finding leaders who can justify the corrosive cult within the cult: white supremacy and shameless distortion of history and genetics, that ethnicity and skin-color obviate rights to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Mere empty words as long as cultist irrationality holds sway. Next up: how may the MAGA cult end.
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