@me – well, too, not only animals, but sheep! haha. It’s always funniest to me when people mock things out of ignorance. “Thinking themselves wise, they became fools.”
If it wasn’t sheep, they would find something else wrong. They will find something wrong with any study that doesn’t come out the way they want it to…and dismiss any critiques of studies that come out the way they do want them to, even if the studies are obviously flawed.
I’m not at all a cult expert, but as an interested lay person who has read both Lifton, Singer, Ross, and Hassan, I think the importance of “saving face” can hardly be overestimated. How cult members respond to a major crisis depends heavily on how easy or difficult it is backpedal without too much public humiliation and loss of face. Those who haven’t made too much of a public commitment tend to just slip away quietly and pretend nothing ever happened. The people you really need to worry about are the ones who have made a strong commitment in public, invested everything they have in the cause, burned all bridges behind them*. These are the people who tend to double and triple down on their commitment and keep fighting to the end. Beyond a certain point even forcing Kool-Aid mixed with cyanide down your children’s throats before drinking it yourself may appear less unacceptable than admitting you yourself and the world that you weren’t too clever to be taken in by a cult after all, that you have dedicated your life to a lie, that the people you have been attacking and vilifying for opposing the vicious cult you’re in were right all along, that you are the bad guy, that you have gotten your hands irredeemably dirty in service of an unworthy cause etc. etc.
Of course TRAs do not follow a single leader like Jim Jones, nor are they all physically gathered together in one place, which makes a Jonestown-like scenario seem far less likely. Still, I think there is a real danger that single individuals or even small groups of dedicated gender fanatics are going to do something crazy if/when the real world finally starts closing in on them. Still, while I sincerely hope I’m wrong, I’m not as optimistic as many others that the trans craze is going to start dying down any time soon. It reminds me too much of the way people kept predicting that Trump’s followers were going to start abandoning him on mass every time he said or did something outrageous (i.e. every time he said or did anything at all). While Maya’s and Allison’s victories, the closing down of the Tavistock etc. are certainly good news, the institutional capture seems to continue pretty much unabated, and as we all know, all of Trump’s supposedly career-ending scandals didn’t prevent him from gaining votes between 2016 and 2020.
*Of course the Internet has made it a lot harder to pretend you never said what you did or that your words have been misremembered, misinterpreted, misconstrued etc.
Also, while comparisons to People’s Temple – like comparisons to Nazism – should be used with caution, it doesn’t mean that any attempt to extract any lessons from the history of People’s Temple or Nazism that are applicable to current affairs is inherently fallacious in principle. In the case of People’s Temple, they were first and foremost a social justice cult thinly disguised as a Pentecostal Church. As I understand it from reading Tim Reiterman’s The Raven it was pretty much common knowledge within the Temple that Jones’s miraculous healings and psychic readings were simple deceptions* to lure people to the church so they could be exposed to the Temple’s teachings about racial integration and Communism. There are recordings of Jones openly deriding and even stepping on the Bible.
The Temple’s mixed race policies and uncompromising stance on racial integration earned them considerable support from large segments of the political Left including Leftwing media, and one of the main reasons Jones managed to get away with his endless scandals** for as long as he did, was that the Temple and their apologists were successful in portraying any criticism as part of a racially motivated rightwing conspiracy to discredit the group because of its progressive values. Sounds familiar?
* Very much like the ones Peter Popoff was exposed using by James Randi.
** Considering the obvious self-destructive tendencies of this guy, and his pathological compulsion to get himself into trouble, it’s hardly surprising that his final act would be to take all his followers with him in an act of mass-suicide.
I came to the conclusion a while ago that we will both convince the world of our position and go down in history as a bunch of cranks who thought the sky was falling. Which is to say that anyone who wasn’t an active TRA (that is an actual activist) will convince themselves, that no one ever actually believed ideas like, say, that two year-olds can know they are trans, or if anyone did they were just a tiny handful of fanatics, and of course everything just naturally sorted itself out without any conscious effort on the part of anyone. Just because people can be nudged, or indeed forced by encounters with brute reality, to behave in a generally rational way doesn’t mean they will give up their comforting delusions. Indeed, I suspect that in general it is the price they charge for their concessions to rationality.
It might be a good idea to find an expert on cults and how they behave when they find themselves under serious attack.
“Imagine testing drugs on ANIMALS to try to figure out their impacts on HUMANS!!! Why! I never!”
Ay Caramba.
“I am not an animal! I am a human bean!”
@me – well, too, not only animals, but sheep! haha. It’s always funniest to me when people mock things out of ignorance. “Thinking themselves wise, they became fools.”
If it wasn’t sheep, they would find something else wrong. They will find something wrong with any study that doesn’t come out the way they want it to…and dismiss any critiques of studies that come out the way they do want them to, even if the studies are obviously flawed.
Wasn’t Prusiner dissed for years about prions, pathogenic proteins, and sheep . . . how did that one turn out?
Look out for anyone who suddenly starts buying in large quantities of Kool-Aid…
I’m not at all a cult expert, but as an interested lay person who has read both Lifton, Singer, Ross, and Hassan, I think the importance of “saving face” can hardly be overestimated. How cult members respond to a major crisis depends heavily on how easy or difficult it is backpedal without too much public humiliation and loss of face. Those who haven’t made too much of a public commitment tend to just slip away quietly and pretend nothing ever happened. The people you really need to worry about are the ones who have made a strong commitment in public, invested everything they have in the cause, burned all bridges behind them*. These are the people who tend to double and triple down on their commitment and keep fighting to the end. Beyond a certain point even forcing Kool-Aid mixed with cyanide down your children’s throats before drinking it yourself may appear less unacceptable than admitting you yourself and the world that you weren’t too clever to be taken in by a cult after all, that you have dedicated your life to a lie, that the people you have been attacking and vilifying for opposing the vicious cult you’re in were right all along, that you are the bad guy, that you have gotten your hands irredeemably dirty in service of an unworthy cause etc. etc.
Of course TRAs do not follow a single leader like Jim Jones, nor are they all physically gathered together in one place, which makes a Jonestown-like scenario seem far less likely. Still, I think there is a real danger that single individuals or even small groups of dedicated gender fanatics are going to do something crazy if/when the real world finally starts closing in on them. Still, while I sincerely hope I’m wrong, I’m not as optimistic as many others that the trans craze is going to start dying down any time soon. It reminds me too much of the way people kept predicting that Trump’s followers were going to start abandoning him on mass every time he said or did something outrageous (i.e. every time he said or did anything at all). While Maya’s and Allison’s victories, the closing down of the Tavistock etc. are certainly good news, the institutional capture seems to continue pretty much unabated, and as we all know, all of Trump’s supposedly career-ending scandals didn’t prevent him from gaining votes between 2016 and 2020.
*Of course the Internet has made it a lot harder to pretend you never said what you did or that your words have been misremembered, misinterpreted, misconstrued etc.
Also, while comparisons to People’s Temple – like comparisons to Nazism – should be used with caution, it doesn’t mean that any attempt to extract any lessons from the history of People’s Temple or Nazism that are applicable to current affairs is inherently fallacious in principle. In the case of People’s Temple, they were first and foremost a social justice cult thinly disguised as a Pentecostal Church. As I understand it from reading Tim Reiterman’s The Raven it was pretty much common knowledge within the Temple that Jones’s miraculous healings and psychic readings were simple deceptions* to lure people to the church so they could be exposed to the Temple’s teachings about racial integration and Communism. There are recordings of Jones openly deriding and even stepping on the Bible.
The Temple’s mixed race policies and uncompromising stance on racial integration earned them considerable support from large segments of the political Left including Leftwing media, and one of the main reasons Jones managed to get away with his endless scandals** for as long as he did, was that the Temple and their apologists were successful in portraying any criticism as part of a racially motivated rightwing conspiracy to discredit the group because of its progressive values. Sounds familiar?
* Very much like the ones Peter Popoff was exposed using by James Randi.
** Considering the obvious self-destructive tendencies of this guy, and his pathological compulsion to get himself into trouble, it’s hardly surprising that his final act would be to take all his followers with him in an act of mass-suicide.
[…] Originally two comments by Bjarte Foshaug on These two loudmouth mammals. […]
I came to the conclusion a while ago that we will both convince the world of our position and go down in history as a bunch of cranks who thought the sky was falling. Which is to say that anyone who wasn’t an active TRA (that is an actual activist) will convince themselves, that no one ever actually believed ideas like, say, that two year-olds can know they are trans, or if anyone did they were just a tiny handful of fanatics, and of course everything just naturally sorted itself out without any conscious effort on the part of anyone. Just because people can be nudged, or indeed forced by encounters with brute reality, to behave in a generally rational way doesn’t mean they will give up their comforting delusions. Indeed, I suspect that in general it is the price they charge for their concessions to rationality.