Would You Like To Join A Cult?
Joining a cult always seems to be one
of those things that sounds a lot better on paper than it is in
reality. Sure, there's the bland guitar playing, the endless chanting
and the inevitably dramatic tragically premature end to your life
that will become part of the cultural consciousness for fifty years
or maybe less, but there's the downsides too. Apparently. I can't see any myself.
Joining a cult is an attractive proposition for many reasons.
Cults know how to make you feel special. When you join a cult, you're never just a number. A cult will never ask you to ring them, then keep you on the line for hours at a time telling you that your call is important to them. When you deal with a cult, real people will spend countless hours grooming you before you join and then indoctrinating you once you give yourself over to whatever truth they believe themselves to hold. In real life it's sometimes difficult to know if anyone would notice if you dropped dead in front of them.
- Cults provide enjoyable communal living. Almost every cult encourages its members to bed down like a pack of sleeping puppies. You won't have been so cuddled since you were a baby. That sort of thing really takes the edge of inevitably having to down a flask of bucolic plague.
- Cults absolve you of your every day responsibilities and cares. You no longer have to worry about getting the rent money, making sure you get cereal at the supermarket, or having drinks with that tedious Susie and George because Susie is your husband's boss. Instead you are allowed to simply sit back, enjoy borderline starvation which primes your mind for taking in messages on a subconscious level and devote your life to obsessing about just one man or just one end time.
- People join cults because it's actually sometimes easier to become the mindless slave of a charismatic leader and devote your life to some ideal which makes less coherent sense than 'Supercalafragilisticexpealadocious' than to actually muddle on in the 'real' world in which a large part of the population end up doing tedious jobs in return for the ability to live tediously average lives.
Real life often lacks real purpose, but the life of a cult member is suffused with purpose. One could say that the same is true of any belief system. It is not the belief which is important, rather it is the sense of meaning which following the belief brings. That's why atheists tend to be a miserable bunch of so and so's hopelessly, bitterly searching the galaxy for meaning and endlessly debunking every glimmer of occult hope with science, whereas Christians can quite happily beam at a person and tell them that they're going to hell.
May as well join a cult.
