As we roll into the New Year, a few things occur to me:

1. New Year’s Resolutions are pointless; pretty sure we all know that by now. It’s just one of those weird rituals we thought we needed to perform. Huh… Turns out, this goes back several thousand years to the Babylonians… Wild. I had no idea.
   • From History.com
   • From National Geographic
2. The United States is reaching some pinnacle of racist lunacy with the most recent set of elections.
   • This is not to discount the unhalted history of racism within this country, never mind its imperialist actions over the last century-ish.
   • I attribute much of this lunacy not just to the White Male Christian Nationalism, but to anyone inclined towards belief for the sake of the supposed leader, as any cult is prone towards.
3. Rituals can be a welcoming thing to people of all societies, and can range from the religious to the very personal, like how you celebrate a holiday with your family that might not be “normal”.
4. Two items from my past are bubbling up in my memory that bears some relation:
   • When the news about Heaven’s Gate had come out, one of my co-workers and I considered how easy it could be to develop a cult, especially given the popularity of Scientology and Mormonism, as examples. It was a morbid way of dealing with the mass-delusion that led to unnecessary deaths, but ultimately our discussion went hardly anywhere as real life was far too eventful for us to concoct pointless lunacy.
   • Different co-worker and a friend of his wanted to create a mobile game, but they needed some kind of altered history backstory to work with. I built them a history basically from Egypt forward. This, too, would not materialize, though I did put more effort into this and may have those notes somewhere…
5. Currently, I’m watching People Investigates Cults on HBO (Max.com), and am still fascinated how people can be so invested in what should seem like obvious lies, but humans are not wholly complete individuals who read between the lines. I am also not above being conned or distracted by biases, etc.
6. Rawls’ Original Position – this is something I’ve heard about very recently, but it has sense of world-building that I’ve already considered above, plus my couple-hundred pages of notes for fantasy books that will likely never reach fruition. Anyway, ROP is this philosophical idea that was “designed to be a fair and impartial point of view that is to be adopted in our reasoning about fundamental principles of justice… The main distinguishing feature of the original position is “the veil of ignorance”: To ensure complete impartiality of judgment, the parties are deprived of all knowledge of their personal characteristics and conceptions of the good, and of social and historical circumstances.”
   • There’s way more to this and I’ve already started another post to get into more detail.
7. Could I, if I were so inclined to, start a cult?

Alright, the short answer is no. I lack both the confidence and charisma to pull something off as complex as a cult, as well as the urge – it sounds like a ton of work. I also lack the belief that my own ideals would lend itself to a cult or a religion or anything beyond philosophical discussions and maybe partially applied to a person’s life. I lack the clarity of thought to remain consistent in a single belief system, largely because I don’t believe humanity has the capability of truly having any sort of revealed knowledge and are instead continuously grasping at straws to try to get through this monumentally confounding existence. I also lack the sheer narcissism to want that much attention placed upon me. Those of you that know me are well aware of my social anxieties and preference towards smaller groups and more time alone. Also, I like to think by now I’ve established my own “brand,” as it were, as someone who values people being people, and not being harmful to one another, and I think there are levels of being looked upon by others as becoming harmful.

If you know anything about cults, even if you think I’m some gift to the universe, you need to be a certain type of person to lead something like that, and to demand loyalty from people like some sort of crime boss. Too many of these groups want you to cut all ties to your past, to your family, to the very things that have made you who you are – this is unhealthy to me. I can understand if that past caused you great harm and torment and you have chosen to turn away from those things, but for someone like myself to demand you do that in order to serve my whims? I just can’t fathom that. Even in my wildest dreams of cosmic, comic-book level power, I don’t want to have soldiers, I would want to bring peace, progress, and prosperity.

Look, I don’t want to pretend to have a sense of false humility, I think I’m humble in large part because of my experiences and my depression. I have always lacked a real sense of accomplishment, and continue to this day to be horrible at accepting even the simplest compliments, including from my children. I like being someone that people can talk to, or maybe can learn some ideas from, but who do you know that would be willing to set themselves above a bunch of other people and go so far as to suggest they could be the Messiah? They could be the absolute chosen one of any faith or their own made-up religion (Heaven’s Gate comes back to mind).

When I was a teenager, I once explained to my mother and a friend of hers that religions are just cults “that made it” – which is itself a throwback to a B.C. comic for anyone old enough to remember those… but, functionally speaking, a religion is just a cult with some clout. Anyway, when I suggested that they could look it up in the dictionary to see my point was valid, I was told by someone, “I’ll write a letter to the dictionary people.” Even when I still believed I was a pot-stirrer.

What does baffle me sometimes is the people who seem to be most affected by a given cult or religion, even after they’ve seen the utter lies and destruction brought upon their lives by said cult/religion, they still adhere to some of the basic beliefs. People in cults based on Christianity escape and may often find themselves a new church, as in the cult was lying but the basic tenets of Christianity must still be real.

I know people who are or have “deconstructed” from their faith, and I know others who have never taken their faith nearly as seriously as those I grew up around, as those who would be prone towards believing in a cult, as those who would vote against their own self-interests because the man they’re voting for lies as much as he breathes but they believe him anyway.

I grew up during the Evangelical heyday of the 1980s, and I say it this way because of the rise of the televangelist. Thanks to people like Oral Roberts, Jerry Falwell, Kenneth Copeland, etc., there was this boom of their presence across the airwaves, at least that’s how it’s seemed to me over the years. I’m not prepared to go into a whole lot of detail about the evangelical movement, but rest assured we can thank it and people like Ronald Reagan for causing mass destruction to this country that has led us to where we are right now; with a right-wing President and a whole bunch of racists who claim “God” and “Jesus” and are super-excited about halting social progress and instead embracing a past that can only be romanticized by racists and the wildly ignorant.

All this, and more, is to say I clearly have developed a bias of sorts about the Evangelical Movement, but that can be discussed at a later time, as there is also evidence as to why this is such a damaging belief system for a bunch of people…

Going back to the baffling, I also couldn’t see myself forming any kind of cult because I would have a hard time accepting people into an organization who did so based on some blind faith. Sure, I have some things to say that might be worth hearing, but I don’t have all the answers. Hell, I barely function as an adult, how could I possibly know how you should live your exact life? Ridiculous. I don’t think I could lead anyone anywhere besides my general thought around, “Take whatever you need from wherever you need it, and drop the rest.”

I suppose, in retrospect, I have enough narcissism to post things here and to have the podcast, but that’s largely to hear myself talk and flesh out some semblance of an over-arching personal philosophy that could be beneficial to others. However, even in that, what I’m after is something more broad to maybe help provide insights into the particulars of your life without actually suggesting every situation that has “X” requires you to do “Y”.

I don’t find comfort in rituals; I find them interesting but largely unchallenging. They are, to me, almost a moment of stagnation, wherein your particular sense of a thing is complete, so you act out a certain series of steps to help continuously remind you of what that thing is. I don’t mean to suggest rituals are in and of themselves evil or banal, but if new knowledge comes into your understanding, won’t a given ritual stop having the meaning it once held for you?

I suppose that’s another reason I couldn’t form a cult, I find too many ideas or too many of my points can lean in one direction or another, and often it sounds to me like I’m being “wishy-washy,” or at least honest about an immediate counterfactual (if that’s even the right word) which would force me to then alter my statement or admit it’s not enough to base reality upon. I like to think it’s the latter, wherein I see the flaw or a possible rebuttal almost immediately after voicing said statement, which goes back to a sense of humility, and that stagnation or blind faith is unhelpful at best and super dangerous at worst.

Anyway, I realize this may come across as a poorly put together stream of consciousness diatribe that you come to expect from the podcast, at least the Fillings or Route Canals, but it struck me as something worth writing down…

I do hope that you’re all doing as well as you can given the circumstances we’re all plagued with as a community and you are plagued with personally, and I still believe that humans are more capable than we seem to be showing of late. I just wish I could get that message out more.

P.S. Oh yeah, all the sex stuff. No thanks. I’m beyond the level of horniness required to be that involved with multiple partners just normally, but to have myself a kind of harem? I’ll pass.