Last week I mentioned a documentary about the Church of the SubGenius, which started out in Dallas, Texas, as a mail-order pamphlet satirizing things like The Watchtower, distributed by Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Jack Chick’s comic tracts.
“Send us a dollar!” was one of their many catchphrases. And people did.
These were not just nerds. They were what Ruxandra Teslo calls Weird Nerds. People who went out of their way to tweak the mundanes. Back in the day, I called the UK campus in Lexington a weirdness drain, because so many kids from the eastern half of the state would just sort of drift down there from the mountains. Specifically those kids who could not or would not fit in to small and generally conservative rural communities.
Before the Internet, it was hard to find people of similarly nerdly interests. Mass media was strictly one-way then. Comic book shops were beginning to be a thing, but only in larger towns. As a kid, I got my comics from a spinner rack at the pharmacy or the grocery store. There was no socializing around the spinner rack. Later, in high school, I resorted to mail-order catalogues to find the older or more obscure stuff. I was a fan of Milo Manara at the time.
Communities did exist. There were letters columns in the backs of comics, where people would doxx themselves. That was geekery of another level, in my eyes.
Gaming was somewhat different. Yes, there were those D&D cartoons with Willie Ames, but the games themselves were inherently social and interactive. You sat around a table with pencils and paper and dice and told a story, in the moment. That was my entry into fandom. Conventions came later. Fan fiction came later. And I never fully embraced the tribal versions of fandom. I guess I’m not much of a joiner.
I’m fascinated by other people’s cults, though, in much the same way that my wife is fascinated by other people’s crimes.
Rael: the Alien Prophet
The first episode of this series (or any of these cult series) is about the early days when the charismatic leader is trying to break people out of their society’s conventions and their personally conformist behaviors, which are often genuinely destructive to individual health and happiness. The Raelians were focused on body positivity and breaking religious taboos around nudity.
Raël: Take the mirror and use it to look at your anus. Don't be ashamed. Look at this part of yourself that you've never looked at.
Jean-Pierre: It's true! You never look at it. ( chuckles ) ( inaudible ) What did this practice do for me? It changed my personality. At one time, if you looked at my girlfriend a certain way, I'd smash your face. I was a real brute. I was a fighter, a warrior. I'd been trained for that. It's stupid, but that's who I was. I was an idiot, really, to put it bluntly. And then... ( exhales ) ( calm music ) My children saw the change in me, too. I wasn't the tough, demanding, hard father. I became the gentle father they could rely on.
Read more at: https://tvshowtranscripts.ourboard.org/viewtopic.php?f=2148&t=67610
But Rael “the messenger” was in fact a narcissist, so of course these practices led to polyamory, which then allowed Rael to build himself a harem and to fleece his flock financially. As they were consciously or unconsciously designed to do.
Freemasons
John Dickie’s book The Craft: How Freemasons Made the Modern World is a thorough history of the original fraternal society that could have been a cult, which marketed itself as a cult, and was assumed to be a cult by various churches and governments. This led to persecution and even torture by the Inquisition, though not as much as the Freemasons claimed in their various memoirs, pamphlets, and advertisements.
Freemasonry’s secrecy is like a well. The men who built it know how deep it is. The rest of us can only peer over the wall that surrounds it and wonder. While we gaze downwards at the water, speculating on what might lurk below, the black surface reflects back our anxieties
There’s a long chapter about why women were not allowed (except in France) and how that played into the persecution (because What if they’re doing gay stuff in there?). There are also many mentions of alcohol as a social lubricant.
But how do you go from a late-medieval labor guild for “practical masons” to a boozy bourgeois club for social climbers? First, you need to make it cool, and profitable, to be a member. In post-fire London, when the entire city had to be rebuilt from stone and not wood, that meant recruiting famous architect Christopher Wren, who was stone-cutter adjacent because of his expertise in geometry and drafting, and then his son, and then other suppliers and investors. It was a 1600s construction industrial complex. There was also a great deal of overlap with the prestigious Royal Society of scientists and natural philosophers.
Then you write a constitution. The rules and specifically the rapid rotations of the officer corps (one-year terms!) are what keep a single charismatic individual and his hangers-on from taking over and completing the transition to a full-on cult. You need not just rules, but rules for how to change the rules, rules that decentralize decision making and resist being subverted by selfish psychopaths.
The US Constitution, and later the Bill of Rights, are direct descendants of Masonic constitutions.
Rotary International
A few weeks ago I poked some gentle fun at my fellow Rotarians,
but I have never sat y’all down and explained what Rotary actually is. Out in the world, I get that question fairly often. Most people have an intuitive idea that it’s some kind of club, maybe like the Elks that have an onsite bar and private swimming pool here in Greensboro, or like the Loyal Order of the Water Buffalo in the Flintsones. These are one step removed from Freemasons. There is ritual for the sake of social bonding, but the ritual is watered down to almost-parody.
Or they might compare it with the Jaycees, which I just now learned stands for Junior Chamber of Commerce. Maybe a better comparison would be the Lions (started by a Freemason), which is about the same size as Rotary (a million + members), and also started in Chicago as a business networking group that rapidly expanded into doing public service.
That’s both direct service like handing out meals at a homeless shelter and raising money to give to other more specialized charities. All of these are fractal organizations, with local chapters that make largely independent decisions at the local level, which leverage their numbers and wealth at a national or global scale. Rotary helped organize the United Nations, and started the first polio eradication campaign in the Phillippines during the 1970s; its success caused WHO to jump on board, and now wild polio exists in only two countries (Afghanistan and Pakistan). The Lions are best known for their vision campaigns, which have expanded into neglected tropical diseases like river blindness.
All of these organizations are essentially two steps removed from the Freemasons. They have all dropped the elaborate formal rituals of initiation and advancement. In Rotary there’s not even the token requirement to believe in a “higher power.” All we have left is the 4-Way Test, which we say during every meeting after the Pledge of Allegiance:
Of the things we think, say, or do:
Is it the Truth?
Is it Fair to All Concerned?
Will it bring Good Will and Better Friendships?
Will it be Beneficial to All Concerned?
There’s a 7-Day Letter that opens a period where people can object to a prospective member, a Red Badge for new members, and a Blue Badge for confirmed members who have completed their onboarding tasks. That’s it. There are a bunch of awards for individual and group achievement, but those are optional.
For dedicated lone wolves like me, even that feels a little churchy at times. I fully recognize that I am the weird one, though. Next issue we’ll dig into human social behavior at a slightly more scientific level.
In the e-mail, I had typed the 4-Way Test from memory and accidentally repeated a line. Corrected on the web page from the commemorative plaque on my living room bookshelf. Sorry for the error.
This seems relevant. And I really like the phrase "cultic bubble."
"Yes, I inhabited the same moral straitjacket as my Evangelical fellows, but my love of beauty meant I could never buy the purity-spirals that animated my cultic bubble."
https://jdanielsawyer.substack.com/p/why-must-the-anointed-despise-beauty