Is it possible to combine non-dualist spirituality, revolutionary socialist politics, modern insights into culture and memes, a skeptical attitude and a sense of humour? Only one way to find out.
Cult methods of organisation are nothing more than boiled-down and spiced-up versions of accepted behaviour-control and thought-reform methods used commonly against children and "deviants" in late capitalist society. Nothing that Scientology or the Moonies or the Sparts do is really dissimilar in kind from what ordinary mums and dads, schoolteachers, psychiatric nurses and prison guards are encouraged to do every day - only in degree, and in target.
Scientology, Objectivism, most varieties of "orthodox Trotskyism" (more here) or Maoism... all the same sociological features. A Marxist analysis would locate the foundation of all these political cults (and similar religious organizations) in a social base almost restricted to the middle-class intelligensia, who, in modern capitalism, are the layer devoted to ideological production on which the system depends.
The essential principle of a cult is an unchallengable ideology and an unchallengable leadership who "bear" or "preserve" the ideology. So the features of all such cults are:
A combination of all three of the above expresses themselves in moralism - since ideas are not determined in practice but are in themselves good or bad things, the logical outcome is to seek the origin of the "wrong" ideas in "wrong" personalities. Cults believe in the idea of "evil" - that ideas can be wrong in themselves - and generally lump oppositionists in that bracket. A defining feature of every cult is personal attacks against adversaries and internal critics(as opposed to, say, reasonably pointing out that it was funny for Ayn Rand to talk about the wonders of rationality when she was off her face on speed all the time). If you are wrong and you won't be convinced, the only solution is that you are bad and you should feel bad. (It's tempting to locate the social origin of cults in clever kids with a middle-class education who dream of their internal world of ideas being, not only accepted, but dominating others in the way that they feel that the existing ideas dominate them. Which would explain why I've always dreamed of having my own cult. Never mind.)
Before the snobs at Infoshop start crowing, let me note that you don't need a formal leader to be a cult. All you need is sufficient peer pressure to "maintain the consensus". Many modern anarchist "communities" fail on the tests of ideology/dogma, elitism and anathematization of contrary opinions - just look at the "uniforms" they wear (patches, t-shirts for "correct bands", body hair on women, etc), the pressure to eat the right (vegan) food and listen to the right music, etc. Also note the pressure on newbies to start anathematising the hated Leninists - identified as "the enemy within". And of course the pseudo-Leninist cults fight straight back. You can be a leaderless cult, no problem.
In passing, I want to blow away the mystical belief that "the consensus process" is always and everywhere the correct way for a group to make decisions, which in itself is an idealist and therefore potentially cultist idea. A consensus process can be a means by which a "secret" leadership group simply enforces its dominance as nastily as the most Stalinist Central Committee - and with the same level of self-serving hypocrisy. In contrast, a majority-democracy group which fully tolerates dissent in thought and word while requiring unity in action may grow a "group mind" which is always a little unsure of itself and self-reforming, which has to be a good thing. The process of decision-making is less vital than ensuring the total freedom of each individual consciousness to have opinions different from the group ideas, and to have real opportunities to change the group's ideas.
Here's a classic description of how cults operate, as opposed to their basic premises as explained above. I was thinking of making "Humour is the one thing cults can't stand" a CM aphorism. However, that's not precisely true - all cults have endless jokes about outsiders. Just not about the leadership or the sacred ideas, at least not in public. Just in passing - "cult" is not an absolute term. But the more a group is idealist, elitist and obsessed with purifying its own dogma, the more "cultish" it is. On the contrary, a real political party - or any social or cultural change organisation - values the test of practice - what people actually do - above all else. Requiring unity in action is not cultish - requiring unity in thought is.
A true collective consciousness (aka "culture") can only arise where every member of the culture gets to transmit as well as receive. A cult is closed - a culture is open. A cult is simply the prejudices and personality problems of a leadership group written large - a culture might be less of a "strike force", but it will be more flexible, more healthy, and more likely to perpetuate itself.
Even when we sleep, the web of nervous plexuses emanating from that ancient region of the lower brain remains awake, haunting our bodies with a mysterious presence. Perhaps, long before the day the central nervous system convinced us it was in charge, our way of understanding the world had been purely involuntary and autonomic, fluctuating without subtlety between poles of stimulus and response, contraction and relaxation, excitement and satisfaction. Perhaps the enteric brain remains our last link to the time before we ate the apple of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, the time before we knew death. The primeval brain of the involuntary, the abdominal brain, the brain that controls sympathy and revulsion but not ratiocination, that is the brain of the wow.
When it comes to television, the theory becomes practice: Whether on the Hot Network, E! Entertainment Television, or CBS, the splanchnic response, not the lucubrations of the intellect but the primal gut reaction – that’s what hauls in the ratings. When the new president of CNN/US, Jonathan Klein, took over last November, he introduced himself to the troops with what has become the perennial “it’s about the storytelling” speech. As Van Gordon Sauter preached in the 1980’s, news needs the emo, and executives now understand that the emo comes from the gut, the gut makes the wow, and the wow makes the money. It’s not the content that matters – food, sex, or news – so much as the autonomic form.
For the first time in human history, there is a concerted strategy to manipulate global perception. And the mass media are operating as its compliant assistants, failing both to resist it and to expose it.
The sheer ease with which this machinery has been able to do its work reflects a creeping structural weakness which now afflicts the production of our news.
a blog that my friend found very useful in terms of how he thought about the world. It's someone who started out as a Discordian and then became a hardline Trotskyite. As I was telling someone over AIM earlier, it's two components that, individually, are profoundly stupid, but combined at least have some internal consistency and interesting ideas.