On the anti-cult

In my last post, I mentioned that people in the thrall of the bizarre cult of Boris Johnson care only about who he is, not what he says or does. To the fascist cronies of such men, the person is above all : the law, convention, democracy, due process, all of it. There is no ideology at work in the conventional sense, no determination to enact some great social reform except as a side-effect of bringing them to power. For the fascist, the important point is who is in charge, not what they do when they get there. They may well cloak this in promises of what such despots will do to improve the lives of the common folk, but that's not what fundamentally matters to them, not really.

For such a person, there is little problem in believing in contradictory ideas. If their Dear Leader one day declares death to pigeons, they will loudly devote themselves to enacting feathery death at every opportunity. If the same leader declares the very next day that pigeons are now sacred, they will immediately set about constructing great temples and statues to honour their beloved birds. It's not that they aren't aware of the stark contradiction, it's that they don't care. Self-consistency isn't what matters to them. The only thing they respect is their precious master.

The leaders themselves provide excellent evidence of this. Johnson once wrote two letters, one in support of and one attacking Brexit. Trump frequently contradicts himself in the space of a single sentence. You only have to listen to the verbal effluence spilling forth from the bowels of Nadine Dorries and Jacob Rees-Mogg for a few minutes to realise that these people don't have any agenda of their own whatsoever.

Not every cult is necessarily an example of fascism, but every sort of fascism is a type of cult. It enthrones the leader and discards everything else as irrelevant. 

In an earlier post, I mentioned that people can define themselves by being against things as well as in support of them. You can be against abortion rather than trying to have as many babies as possible; against veganism rather than wanting to be being purely carnivorous.

Recently I was reminded of this by seeing some of the rather distasteful reaction on reddit to the missing submersible visiting the Titanic. None of the people on board have ever had much if any media presence before, but certain segments of the internet are reacting in a very personal way. It's not the (rather obscene) wealth of the people they have a problem with, it's the people themselves they object to simply because they're wealthy.

I suggest that this is an anti-cult. Not the opposite of a cult, but cult-like behaviour applied in the opposite way to usual. Just as you can idolise someone because of who they are rather than what they do, so you can demonise them by exactly the same token. It is, of course, a form of discrimination : this person is wealthy, so I must hate them now; regardless of all other considerations I must hate them and them personally. And this is manifestly different from being opposed to wealth inequality itself; hating the person who has the money (irrespective of how they got it or what they do with it) rather than hating the fact they have the money (or hating the system that allowed this) is quite a different state of affairs.

An anti-cult is personal in the same way a regular cult is. It's all personal, not ideological. It's just that it's against specific individuals in and of themselves, regardless of context and circumstance. A regular person might say, "huh, well I don't agree with Donald Trump on most things, but when he said the time was 1:30pm, he was basically right", whereas a Trump anti-cultist would say the time simply must be something else.

We can generalise this to broader issues as well, beyond the exclusively personal. A normal person might have concerns about nuclear power but admit that its low CO2 emissions are an advantage, whereas an anti-cultist will insist that either the low emissions are a lie or even somehow a problem. A reasonable person might not like the monarchy but concede that some of their charitable activities are okay, while an anti-cultist will maintain that these must be damaging or that all charity is therefore bad. To an anti-believer, anything associated with the target of the ire must also fall victim to their displeasure. Anti-cultists like these dedicate themselves to being against certain things not because of the consequences that such things cause, but because they are against those things by their very nature.

This way of thinking may be somewhat more common than it might appear. We are all of us tribal to some degree and we shift our opinions depending on what are tribal leaders determine. If our preferred party changes its stance, we do as well, at least a little bit. Of course, most of the time we're probably not too deep in the grips of true cultism or anti-cultism : we can bring ourselves to sometimes agree with those we overall despise, and disagree on specific points with those we generally find favourable. And if we're pushed too far, we switch allegiances - if we didn't, there'd be no point in having elections. But we're none of us wholly immune to bias, tribalism and anti-tribalism alike.

Acutely aware that "everyone" must necessarily include myself, I nevertheless wonder if I've misread my social media feeds. I've been thinking that they're rife with cynicism, seeing everything and everyone as having an ulterior, malevolent motive. Things that I find inspiring (space travel, virtual reality, new technology more generally) are viewed with a strange, perverted disdain, through a warped ideological lens in which only the complete overthrow of capitalism is ever the acceptable answer to any question no matter the relevance of the financial system to the issue at hand. Any manifestly promising development is at once rejected if it comes from a disapproved source. The technology itself must be bad, the thinking goes, because the developers are inherently bad people. Any level of wealth more than half a sigma above the median is bad, so anyone not having financial difficulties is clearly in need of a guillotine.

It's all a bit mad. Perhaps I just need better social media feeds.