As I’ve mentioned previously on this blog, I was raised in a cult in Northern California where manipulation, totalitarian control, and emotional, physical, and sexual abuse were everyone’s daily reality.
Needless to say, I have spent the rest of my life since then making a study of cults, abusive systems of mass manipulation, thought control, and totalitarianism. I’ve always been fascinated by the question of how and why people get into these situations.
It’s fascinating to explore the parallels between this subject and my exploration of religion, philosophy, esotericism, and altered states of consciousness. We wouldn’t tend to think these two fields are related, but it turns out that they are.
Most cult experts tell us that people get into cults at vulnerable times in their lives when the person’s identity, family structure, social foundations, and support networks are failing.
People get into cults when they leave home to go to college, when they get divorced, when they leave college and go out into the world, and when they’re exploring religions and philosophies to discover their own beliefs.
People get into abusive relationships when the victim is lacking confidence, social support, financial independence, or when they’ve already experienced abuse from someone else.
Strong, confident, supported, connected people don’t get into these situations—or do they?
The population of Nazi Germany fell under the totalitarian system controlled by a few well-educated leaders. The leaders were able to carry out this control on a mass scale—and they were certainly not the only ones. How was this possible?
One of the harsh truths of a disaster like the Nazi Holocaust is that it wasn’t carried out by a nation or an army or even a political movement. It was carried out by individuals. Every cult is made up of individuals—each one acting autonomously to accomplish his or her own agenda.
I once read an absolutely mind-blowing quote by a brilliant man on the internet. I have to unfortunately conceal his identity due to the nature of the environment in which I read this quote.
He said, “Power can only be given away. By the time anyone tries to take it, we’re already in trouble.”
This was such a lightbulb moment for me. It clarified so many things about this process that I didn’t understand before.
No one ever takes power. That would not be possible. Human beings are stubborn. We don’t like anyone telling us what to do. If you hold someone at gunpoint and try to force them to do something against their convictions, people will rebel and fight back. People would rather die than give up that kind of control.
So the very first task of any would-be controller is to convince the victim that they want to be controlled in the way the controller says the person wants to be controlled. This is relatively easy when the person lacks confidence and has no idea how to live their own life. They’re vulnerable to someone who appears to know the answers and offers to either show them the way or do it for them.
The same is true when the process takes place on a mass scale. In the case of Nazi Germany, the German people were coming out of a very dark time in the years after the loss of World War 1. Germany was impoverished, beaten down, and German morale was at its lowest.
The German people were ripe for someone to come along and tell them that they were morally, genetically, and in every other way superior to those around them. The Nazis provided the Germans with a vehicle to materialize this view and that’s exactly what the German people did.
We all go through the same process on an individual basis at the spiritual level. We all ask ourselves, “Who am I? What am I doing here? What does all of this mean? What is my life even all about?”
When we’re young, impressionable, vulnerable, or in a state of change, we’re ripe for someone to come along and pump our heads full of all kinds of answers to these questions. We’re hungry for someone to give us the answers we so desperately seek.
When we lack any internal identity of our own, we seek to validate ourselves through superficial externals like belonging to a group. We wear certain clothes that show we belong to a certain group.
We style our hair a certain way or espouse certain political beliefs.
We celebrate those who belong to our group and denigrate those who belong to any other group other than our own.
We see this a lot with groups and individuals who highlight and emphasis external characteristics over any deeper internal value.
If someone thinks their race, gender, ethnic affiliation, sexual orientation, job, relationship status, or political view is the most important thing about them, they’re really announcing to the world that they have nothing internal that truly identifies who they are.
They’re wearing this fact right out there in their physical appearance to let the whole world know that they have absolutely no clue who they are or what they stand for. That’s why they need this superficial, external affiliation—to tell themselves and everyone else who they are and what they stand for.
People who do have an internal core of identity, character, and personhood don’t need or even want these external affiliations. I recently saw a YouTube creator make an announcement about this on his channel. He stated that he didn’t want YouTube to promote his channel as part of its push to promote “black content creators”. This man didn’t want to be known as a black content creator. He wanted to be known for his content—not his race.
People who have this internal seed of identity have no need to broadcast their affiliations to the world. They value themselves for other, deeper, internal qualities that are far, far more important than what the person looks like, who they’re in a relationship with, or who they vote for.
This core of identity can only be found by searching for it. We have to do the hard work of exploring ourselves and our world. We have to have a lot of hard, painful experiences, learn a lot about ourselves, cry a lot of tears, kiss a lot of frogs, grow a lot, and discover who we actually are on the inside.
The sad truth is that no one can do this work for us. We can sign up for any religion in the world. We could join a cult or a corporate organization or just about any other group on the planet. None of them will give us the answers we seek. Those answers are only found within ourselves. Our own internal landscape is the terrain we have to cross to find these answers.
Joining a religion will never give us those answers. It might make us feel like we’re part of a community of like-minded people, but that’s an illusion. There are no like-minded people because no one else knows what’s in your heart and mind.
No one can give you a relationship with the divine and no one can give you a relationship with yourself. The true seeker always walks alone and that is such a lonely, scary place to be. This is the price of admission. It’s the only antidote to the fear, doubt, and isolation of not knowing who we are and why we’re even here.
If we join a religion, we will never be completely satisfied with those answers because we didn’t discover them for ourselves. We will always harbor some small kernel of doubt in our innermost gut that asks, “Is this really true?”
Some cults use psychological techniques to supposedly explore the individual’s mind and find out what makes them think, act, and feel a certain way. Even some abusive relationships do the same thing. These techniques always turn out to be manipulative because no one outside your own head can understand what’s going on inside it.
We can only put those doubts to rest by exploring and discovering the truth for ourselves. We have to venture out into the wilderness and face ourselves. We have to go to battle against ourselves and win those answers.
Once we do win that battle and cross that terrain, the life waiting for us on the other side is far more fulfilling than anything we could ever have imagined possible. This is where life really starts to work. This is where we lock in with our God-given purpose in life and actually start doing what we came here to do.
Everything on this side of that wilderness leads to confusion, despair, self-destruction, and death. Everything on the other side of that wilderness leads to life, productivity, connection, and happiness.
There is no other way. This is a harsh but unavoidable fact of life. None of us can escape ourselves. To know ourselves and find happiness within ourselves, we have to explore ourselves. No one can do this for us.
What we have to remember always, always, always is that there is nothing more pleasing to God than the true seeker. You may be in doubt right now. You may be in despair right now. You may be full of fear and uncertainty.
There is nothing more pleasing to God than the true seeker. God is saying about you right now, “Look how much this person loves me. Look how much this person desires me. Look how much this person is willing to go through and suffer just to be in my presence.”
The seeker’s path is one of the holiest vocations anywhere in human experience. It’s the genuine desire for truth, the divine, and to be one with God. There is nothing holier than that. Never let anyone tell you otherwise.
_______________
All content on the Crimes Against Fiction Blog is © Theo Mann. You are free to distribute and repost this work on condition that you credit the original author.