It's a beautiful day. When will it be over?

The cults are a way of ignoring reality and being surrounded by people who agree with that.  There's also the point where whoever's really in charge has to recognize at least some basics of reality and that helps them stay in charge.

But there's no way to know how much is required.  Are the rulers blatantly lying to their subjects?  Are they lying to themselves to avoid any contradictions in thought which can never ever cause problems under any circumstances?  Is everybody involved just so ruled by emotion that they never notice?

That last one at least seems quite likely, it's how they get to be part of a cult in the first place.  And this all requires denial of individualism.  If one or two people who aren't in charge have abilities that the rest doesn't have, they have to stand out from the rest.

If the cult get big enough that more than one person needs to run things, I'd assume the leader has to pick them for their personality.  A conspiracy to replace the leader would probably have to do the same but it would be less important, they'd just need bodies to throw at whoever's defending the leader.

Naturally this is all speculation, I don't have any actual experience in cults or the kind of people who would get into one.  People with actual abilities can at least rely on them to look elsewhere for work.  I'm sure it's possible to seduce someone who can fix a car or something like that, but just having abilities would help them resist.

This could also result in projection, saying that anyone who disagrees with you is part of a cult.  Trump was certainly the most dislikable POTUS of the modern era [Biden doesn't count, I'm talking about a real POTUS] but ability could be recognized.  You didn't have to like the guy to recognize his accomplishments, but the cult members said anyone who thought that was in a cult.

It's one reason I always cite the military as the best example of real-life collectivism, they do it by recognizing the individual.  They even respect the abilities of their enemies.  Leftists seem to be proud of deliberately ignoring anything that doesn't come from someone they like, which probably qualifies as only listening to fellow cult-members.

At least that much is plausible and understandable, but how do you get into demigods and spaceships and deciding that you're one of them?  It's not something you'd think up on your own and I really can't imagine how you'd get the idea from watching a movie or something like that.  It's got to be something more subtle, but deliberate.

Whatever it is, I definitely think Hollywood and the school system has been pushing this for a long time.  They're not growing the seeds but they're planting as many as possible everywhere they can.

So now there are cults like this, there's people who unquestionably say 1/6 was worse than 9/11, who idolize the destruction of the USA.  At least the 9/11 terrorists were fighting for their "culture" and actually killed people, that's nothing compared to January 6, 2021.

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