From Stella Morabito writing at The Federalist:
How To Recognize The Cult Mindset In Yourself And Others
“How many more Jonestowns and Wacos will have to occur before we realize how vulnerable all humans are to influence?” That is the key question of cult expert Margaret Thaler Singer’s excellent book, “Cults in our Midst.” Her work serves to prevent the tragedy of people being psychologically manipulated into blind obedience that harms and even kills. It should be required reading for everybody, because too many people are ill-prepared to resist undue influence and coercive persuasion.
In my retrospective of the Jonestown Massacre, I noted that Americans don’t seem to have seriously contemplated the harsh reality and consequences of coercive thought reform. It can easily destroy lives and rob people of the capacity for independent thought if we are not vigilant about how it works. Yet many are loath to admit that brainwashing is an actual reality to which we are all vulnerable.
A bit more - Stella gets in to the heart of her thesis:
The Cult of Political Correctness
Consider for a moment today’s culture, which is saturated with the constant agitation of political correctness. It rarely allows for any real discussion or debate without automatic vilification of those deemed politically incorrect. Sadly, this is especially true in the very place where there is a tradition of people expecting to engage in real debate: the college campus.
We can’t deny that political correctness has a lot of disruptive effects on discourse, such as inducing self-censorship that can cause us to feel socially and mentally isolated; manipulation of our basic fear of ostracism through the threat of smears; promotion of mob rule; and an authoritarian nature that promotes the power elites who use it.
Wait, those features are all rather cult-like, no? This acceptance of the anti-thought nature of political correctness is pretty much everywhere: 95 percent of the mass media promote it, 95 percent of celebrity culture promotes it, and obviously, on college campuses, the academics are 95 percent in compliance with political correctness.
You can’t deny that cult-like tribunals against “wrongthink” are pretty much everywhere––in the media, in celebrity culture, in our legislatures, among judges, in human resource departments all over the corporate world, and most obviously, on college campuses, where youth are scared to death of being ostracized for expressing a politically incorrect thought.
Consider also how many Americans mindlessly parrot the perceived popular opinion along with its empty talking points that are never up for debate. In fact, there’s very little debate happening today. When real debate happens, it gets shouted down or pushed into a corner of the internet dubbed the “intellectual dark web.” Increasingly, our minds seem to be operating in a dangerous state of isolation, especially with increasing censorship and control over our conversations by mass media and tech titans. How is such constant censorship not cult-like?
A long read but well worth your time - a lot to think about given today's culture and times.
Never been politically correct. I can shut my mouth and do when needed but I refuse to buy into the groupthink that passes for intellegent discourse these days. People these days are slaves living on the progressive plantation. They think what their masters tell them to think, they say what their masters tell them to say, they do what their masters tell them to do. We will have an awakening at some point in the future and it will be a lot of fun to see. I think that the coming cycle of global cooling will be a wonderful wake-up clarion.
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