Not long ago, I watched the documentary on Mother God, a narcissistic and particularly craven con woman, who at one point is chased out of Hawaii by angry locals for proclaiming herself -- a white savior -- the reincarnation of the Goddess Pele. Her particular concoction of enlightenment was cobbled together equal parts Buddhism, New Age Spiritualism, and Heaven’s Gate, but she nonetheless over the course of the COVID Pandemic duped a small band of worshipful followers that preserved her mummified remains after her death, hoping in vain she would eventually be picked up by aliens and whisked off to another dimension.
A footnote I picked up on in her flim-flam that rang true with me was she had a small host of Gnostic Saints, among them Robin Williams. Williams, for all his personal turmoil, was a beloved and deeply authentic person, imbued with the gift of laughter and a heart that was surely too three sizes too big. That someone so cherished could be seen as identical to a blatant fraud to me is both the caustic irony in the tale, but also the most believable part.
It’s no accident that cult leaders focus on ‘love-bombing’ their victims, latching on their insecurities and telling them they are accepted and they are the only one who have their best intentions at heart. I believe humans are hardwired to need connection and belonging and the dark psychology of manipulation and control is rooted in insisting you are the only one who has the answer key to solving their problems for them. It represents a human form of ‘reject all previous instructions’ that has been found to work so well in getting AI chatbots to reveal themselves. The negative emotions of anger and fear are found to work as a deeply motivating directive, and I think the potentially fatal error in confronting this adequately has been the lack of culture jamming. Saying “I think we should improve society somewhat” is not going to cut it when the Dear Leader has sweeping bold promises to conquer their demons -- even if those promises are vague, contradictory, or outright fiction (I will return to this thought in a later piece.)
Surely we are in a time of cults and prophets, one of those inflection points where there is a lot of uncertainty and change. All religions offer some path toward eternal life, the ones that have always appealed to me most are the ones where, upon death, your soul is weighed against a feather. Maybe the best parts of you go on to live forever, maybe you are sent back to fix your mistakes, maybe Bill Hicks was right and we exit the rollercoaster on the other side and that’s the end of the ride.
Life is a long trail of coincidences forming a sentence, and I don’t think any of it happens in a vacuum. I think the highest wisdom -- advice that we are broken, disaffected, or abused of comprehending -- is our ability to find in ourselves daily to not only reject the daunting stream of lukewarm bullshit life tells us to take as a given but completely turn off the faucet. We may not be a comedian on the level of Williams, but we can find laughter and childlike wonder in our heart; we may not be a visionary artist on the level of Basquiat but we can find the beauty in our surroundings; we may not be a voice of justice on the level of a Greta Thunberg, but we can stand in the face of the injustice in our community.
Jack London is one of my favorite authors, the one major non-fiction work he wrote was “The People of the Abyss,” which describes the destitute and the poor in London at the turn of the 20th Century, then the height of the British global empire. London fails as a documentarian, however, because a few times he is so moved by the desperation he sees that he removes a pound he’d sewn into his clothing for himself. He concludes at the end of the book that the conditions he’d seen are the result of mismanagement, and the people he met would have been better served having been born in hunter-gatherer tribes who have lived the same way since the dawn of humankind.
In a few months you will hear a lot of heedless atrocities carried out “in the name of God.” If you measure it based on what is worshiped, what the servants of this deity fill their days with, it must surely be a Mad God of Suffering. I do not pretend to stand on the threshold of the cosmos and persuade you that heaven is real, but our capacity to make heaven or hell on this earth is constrained entirely on an altar of greed and cowardice and the men who proclaim themselves divine rulers.