it’sJimHow to Become a Cult Leader ★★★★★☆☆☆☆☆ https://trakt.tv/shows/how-to-become-a-cult-leader #HowToBecomeACultLeader #trakt
🇺🇦 Sean Prophet ⚛The Netflix series "How to Become a Cult Leader," narrated by Peter Dinklage, is scary accurate. It uses the format of a "playbook" for cult leaders with specific principles and tactics. It's a companion to the earlier series "How to Become a Tyrant," that explored large-scale dictatorships.
It's six half-hour episodes. And well worth your time.
The series takes an irreverent and sarcastic tone, using examples of famous cult leaders and how they either followed or didn't follow the playbook. And how they suppressed dissent, and doubt, and solved "challenges" to their leadership. Dinklage's narration is pitch perfect, with just the right mix of dry reveling in the dastardly behavior, and euphemisms to describe when things go wrong.
Stylistically, the show mixes archival clips of cult leaders in action with animated recreations, and comedic stock footage. The score alternates between ominous electronic tones and comedic orchestral.
But the topic couldn't be more serious.
Abusive relationships, small and large cults, religions, and political dictatorships are the same phenomenon, only differing in scale.
I've said a lot over the years about my own cult experiences. And I could say a lot more. But the most important thing you learn from watching a show like this, is that no one sees any of it coming. The biggest danger we all face is our own propensity to want to be flattered, and told what we want to hear about ourselves. That's really the whole secret to cult leadership.
The enforced purity and behavioral restrictions and exclusivity and sense of mission are common to all cults. But what's also common is the complicity of membership, and the denial that anyone is acting against their own free will.
Cults cannot operate without collusion in delusion, between members and leaders. At some point, every cult pushes members to engage in horrible, antisocial, damaging behavior.
And they go along with it.
The concluding statement of the series is a sort of tongue in cheek challenge from Peter Dinklage, "Which do you want to be, predator or prey?"
And this is all wrong.
Members empower leaders, just as certainly as leaders abuse members. The whole thing is a group effort. Sure, it takes a skilled and conniving narcissistic sociopath to take advantage of the flaws in human nature to build a cult.
But the seeker mentality is also center stage. This is the idea that someone aside from yourself has the answers to life, the universe, and everything, and if you follow them, you will become enlightened and superior to your fellow human beings.
Folks, cults are driven by greed. The "spiritual hunger" of seekers is its own form of narcissism. It's really a hunger to avoid the uncertainties and vicissitudes of life. A hunger to take a shortcut to happiness. A hunger for community and belonging. A hunger to avoid the hard work of attaining real knowledge through rigorous study. A hunger for some sort of boilerplate meaning. And a hunger for eternal life.
That's how they get you.
Cult leaders would be nobodies without their followers. Every single one of them is propped up by a gaggle of wounded sycophants.
And this is the lesson that I have yet to see presented effectively in any of the numerous cult documentaries and series. It's the mass production of distilled human vulnerability that provides the nightmare fuel for every cult. And THAT is what no one wants to hear.
Instead, they want someone to blame, when it all goes wrong. And it's the leader who becomes the sick and twisted poster child for cult atrocities.
But just try imagining a general without an army, and you'll understand the absurdity of focusing on cult leaders, rather than the sordid dynamic between these sociopaths and their greedy followers.
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