Guest post: Subordination of human experience to the claims of doctrine

Dec 11th, 2024 | By
Category: Notes and Comment Blog

Originally a comment by Bjarte Foshaug at Miscellany Room.

We have all heard trans activism, or wokeism in general, described as a cult. On the other hand there are people who seem to suggest that because these movements don’t exactly meet the formal definition of cult, there is nothing to learn from the study of cults that’s at all relevant to the issue. Regardless of whether or not you think TRAs are a cult, I hope we can all agree that this is not a very compelling argument. Even if we accept the premise, the conclusion clearly doesn’t follow.

Robert Jay Lifton provided what still seems to be the most widely accepted definition of a cult in his article Cult Formation in 1981:

Cults can be identified by three characteristics:

1. a charismatic leader who increasingly becomes an object of worship as the general principles that may have originally sustained the group lose their power;

2. a process I call coercive persuasion or thought reform;

3. economic, sexual, and other exploitation of group members by the leader and the ruling coterie.

The most obvious way in which trans activism differs from this definition is that there is no clearly identifiable single leader with the authority of someone like Jim Jones or L. Ron Hubbard*. Also, while there is plenty of exploitation going on, I think there’s a fair case to be made that it’s less coordinated or organized than what we have seen in the case of, say, Scientology. Rather than one large confidence scheme, there are many smaller ones.

My focus in this analysis is on Lifton’s second characteristic. Perhaps the real issue isn’t whether or not TRAs are a “cult”, but whether or not they engage in thought reform (or “brain washing”). The latter does not presuppose the former. After all, Lifton’s original work on the topic was about the re-education of political prisoners in Communist China rather than cult indoctrination. In Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism (1961) Lifton breaks down the thought reform process into 8 “themes”. So let’s see how well these apply to gender ideology.

1. Milieu Control

The most basic feature of the thought reform environment, the psychological current upon which all else depends, is the control of human communication. Through this milieu control the totalist environment seeks to establish domain over not only the individual’s communication with the outside (all that he sees and hears, reads and writes, experiences, and expresses), but also—in its penetration of his inner life—over what we may speak of as his communication with himself.

The applicability to gender ideology is obvious. What are the endless cancellations, dis-invitations, de-platformings, and book-bannings, not to mention mandatory DEI programs (all presupposing a gender ideology framework), demands for “safe spaces”, the endless days, weeks, or entire months dedicated to “trans something“, etc., other than milieu control on an industrial scale? If you can just coerce people into talking and acting as if they held the required beliefs and opinions, they have a stake in defending them which creates an incentive to make themselves actually believe them (“I’m not the kind of sucker who would cave to external pressure, so if I did say those things, they have to be true!”). The justification spiral does the rest.

2. Mystical Manipulation

The inevitable next step after milieu control is extensive personal manipulation. […]. Initiated from above, it seeks to provoke specific patterns of behavior and emotion in such a way that these will appear to have arisen spontaneously from within the environment. This element of planned spontaneity, directed as it is by an ostensibly omniscient group, must assume, for the manipulated, a near-mystical quality. […] Included in this mystique is a sense of “higher purpose,” of having “directly perceived some imminent law of social development,” and of being themselves the vanguard of this development.

Among Lifton’s themes this is probably the hardest one to pin down since the manipulation, in order to make the planned behavior seem spontaneous, by necessity has to rely heavily on non-verbal social cues. Rainbow flags, gender-neutral restrooms, casual use of preferred pronouns or Genderspeak in general (#6) etc. may be among the less subtle ways of signaling what the officially “approved” beliefs and attitudes are. The part about “having ‘directly perceived some imminent law of social development,’ and of being themselves the vanguard of this development” seems to fit nicely with TRA rhetoric about being on the “right side of history”.

3. The Demand for Purity

In the thought reform milieu, as in all situations of ideological totalism, the experiential world is sharply divided into the pure and the impure, into the absolutely good and the absolutely evil. The good and the pure are of course those ideas, feelings, and actions which are consistent with the totalist ideology and policy; anything else is apt to be relegated to the bad and the impure.

Again the applicability to gender ideology is obvious. It doesn’t matter how far you go out of your way to stress that trans-identified people are entitled to the same rights, protections, dignity, and respect as everybody else. Unless you are prepared to uncritically accept the whole package of sex denialism, gender realism, the self-ID criterion of womanhood, the affirmation-only approach to gender dysphoria, the forced teaming of “LGB” and “TQ+” etc., not to mention tons of highly dubious postmodernist philosophy, Queer Theory, identity politics, social constructivism, standpoint epistemology, linguistic determinism etc. (#5), as part of the deal, you might as well be advocating for re-opening Auschwitz and resuming the mass-production of Zyklon B!

4. The Cult of Confession

Closely related to the demand for absolute purity is an obsession with personal confession. Confession is carried beyond its ordinary religious, legal, and therapeutic expressions to the point of becoming a cult in itself. There is the demand that one confess to crimes one has not committed, to sinfulness that is artificially induced, in the name of a cure that is arbitrarily imposed. Such demands are made possible not only by the ubiquitous human tendencies toward guilt and shame but also by the need to give expression to these tendencies. In totalist hands, confession becomes a means of exploiting, rather than offering solace for, these vulnerabilities.

This fits nicely with the obligatory public displays of owning up to your “cis privilege” and how you, as a member of the oppressor class, can never understand what trans people are going through, how nothing you can possibly do to compensate for this alleged shortcoming will ever be enough etc. The same goes for the obligatory groveling apologies and self-denunciations (very similar to the “self criticisms” demanded in Mao’s China) required by anyone accused (rightly or not) of insufficient ideological purity (#3). Having conceded that the TRAs were right and you were wrong, you once again have a stake in proving your commitment to “doing better”.

5. The “Sacred Science”

The totalist milieu maintains an aura of sacredness around its basic dogma, holding it out as an ultimate moral vision for the ordering of human existence. […]. While thus transcending ordinary concerns of logic, however, the milieu at the same time makes an exaggerated claim of airtight logic, of absolute “scientific” precision. Thus the ultimate moral vision becomes an ultimate science; and the man who dares to criticize it, or to harbor even unspoken alternative ideas, becomes not only immoral and irreverent, but also “unscientific.”

Once again gender ideology gets full marks. Obvious examples of sacred science include the “sex spectrum”, the idea that a person’s “brain sex” (a.k.a. “gender”) can be different from the sex of their body, the alleged infallibility of a person’s ability to know his/her own brain-sex, the idea that the only way to solve the supposed mismatch between gender identity and physical sex is medically “correcting” the latter, the idea that “changing sex” is even possible etc. Other examples might include the claim that the “sex binary” is a recent Western invention and remains alien to indigenous peoples uncontaminated by Western cultural imperialism. And, once again, all of it ultimately rests on tons of highly dubious postmodernist philosophy, Queer, Theory, identity politics, standpoint epistemology, social constructivism, linguistic determinism etc.

6. Loading the Language

The language of the totalist environment is characterized by the thought-terminating cliché. The most far-reaching and complex of human problems are compressed into brief, highly reductive, definitive-sounding phrases, easily memorized and easily expressed. These become the start and finish of any ideological analysis. […] Totalist language, then, is repetitiously centered on all-encompassing jargon, prematurely abstract, highly categorical, relentlessly judging, and to anyone but its most devoted advocate, deadly dull: in Lionel Trilling’s phrase, “the language of nonthought.”

A complete analysis of the TRA use of loaded language would fill, not just a whole book, but an entire library. Not only are thought-terminating clichés (“Trans Women are Women!”, “Trans Men are Men!”, “Non-Binary Identities are Valid!”, “Trans Rights are Human Rights!” etc) ubiquitous, but hardly anything they have to say makes sense except in the light of a million unstated (and very shaky) premises and impossibly sloppy inferences. Even the most central premises of their arguments, including such obviously relevant “details” as the definition of “woman”, what is meant by “trans rights”, and how said “rights “ are supposedly violated by, say, women’s right to female only spaces, are best left unspecified. Apparently simple words and phrases like “trans”, “cis”, “gender”, “gender dysphoria”, “man”, “woman”, “(non-)binary”, “trans rights”, “transphobia”, “trans medicine/healthcare”, “LGBTQ+” etc. are all short-hands and Trojan horses for tons of extremely dubious truth claims, value judgements, tortured inferences, circular definitions, “bad puns” etc. that have to be accepted unconditionally and without asking for specifics. E.g. it is always framed (without the analysis to back it up) as a matter of being for or against “trans rights”, the right of “trans children” to “healthcare” etc. as if the specific content of said “rights” had already been more firmly established than the laws of thermodynamics, when, in fact, this is very much a point of contention. Woke standpoint epistemology and the obligatory admonishments to “educate yourself” (which is “not the responsibility of marginalized people”, remember!) provide a blanket excuse for not bothering with evidence and placing the burden of proof squarely on your opponents.

7. Doctrine Over Person

This sterile language reflects another characteristic feature of ideological totalism: the subordination of human experience to the claims of doctrine. This primacy of doctrine over person is evident in the continual shift between experience itself and the highly abstract interpretation of such experience—between genuine feelings and spurious cataloguing of feelings. It has much to do with the peculiar aura of half-reality which a totalist environment seems, at least to the outsider, to possess.

Once again, the applicability to gender ideology is only too obvious. If all your senses, as well as instincts evolved over millions of years to identify potential threats or mates, are telling you that that 7 feet tall, broad-shouldered, square-jawed, bearded person in the pink dress and blond wig is an obvious male, but the doctrine requires you to see “her” (with her “lady-cock”) as a “woman”, you have to reject the evidence of your senses and not only pretend to see a woman, but work to make yourself honestly mean it.

8. The Dispensing of Existence

The totalist environment draws a sharp line between those whose right to existence can be recognized, and those who possess no such right. […] Surely this is a flagrant expression of what the Greeks called hubris, of arrogant man making himself God. Yet one underlying assumption makes this arrogance mandatory: the conviction that there is just one path to true existence, just one valid mode of being, and that all others are perforce invalid and false. Totalists thus feel themselves compelled to destroy all possibilities of false existence as a means of furthering the great plan of true existence to which they are committed.

Labeling opponents as “TERFs” and “transphobes” (#6) does not just offer a convenient excuse for dismissing anything they might have to say in advance, without addressing the actual substance of their arguments, but serves to mark them as beyond the pale, even undeserving of life (“Kill TERFs!”, “Die Cis Scum!”, “Die in a Grease Fire!” etc.). Any concern about, say, allowing biological males to self-identify into women’s changing rooms or medical experimentation on vulnerable children and teenagers is not seen as sincere, but only as an arbitrary excuse for blind, genocidal hatred and evil for the sake of evil. Anyone who fails to take on board all the baggage supposedly implied (for reasons best left unspecified #6) by “trans rights” is not just seen as misguided or wrong, but as a naked existential threat with whom no negotiations, compromise, or even peaceful co-existence is possible, someone who simply has to be crushed and defeated by any means necessary.

Lifton goes on to write:

The more clearly an environment expresses these eight psychological themes, the greater its resemblance to ideological totalism; and the more it utilizes such totalist devices to change people, the greater its resemblance to thought reform (or “brainwashing”).

I seem to remember cult-expert Rick Ross arguing that at least 6 of Lifton’s 8 themes need to be present for a coercive persuasion effort to be considered thought reform or “brainwashing”. If so, I think there’s a strong case to be made that gender ideology qualifies. I strongly suspect that theme 2 (Mystical Manipulation) is applicable to some degree, although it is hard to conclusively demonstrate for reasons I have already mentioned. As far as the other themes are concerned, I say TRAs have earned a perfect score.

* Not all cult experts see this as a necessary criterion being a cult, however. E.g. Steven Hassan seems to argue that any group that engages in coercive persuasion qualifies as a cult.

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