New Discourses
Politics • Spirituality/Belief • Writing
Queer Theory is the Doctrine of a Sex-Based Cult
by James Lindsay
March 12, 2024
Guest contributors: ConceptualJames
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The following is derived from the preparatory notes I made for my February 20, 2024, remarks to the University of Pittsburgh TPUSA chapter, as pictured, which was protested but very well received.

I’m here to talk about Queer Theory. Some major points can be summarized very easily.

  • Queer Theory is the doctrine of a religious cult;
  • That religious cult is based on sex;
  • That sex-based religious cult primarily targets children; and
  • Almost none of it has anything to do with gay identity.

Let’s address the last point first because it’s the least obvious.

The term “queer” in “Queer Theory” gets its definition from David Halperin in a 1995 book called Saint Foucault. The first words of the relevant paragraph (on p. 62) are “Unlike gay identity.” There, Halperin explains that gay identities are grounded in a positive fact of homosexuality. That means homosexuality is in some way real. “Queer,” by contrast, he says, need not be based on any positive truth or in any stable reality. There’s nothing in particular to which it refers. It’s an identity without an essence. That means it’s not based in reality.

What is Queer Theory, then, if it’s not based in reality? It’s a radical political view. Halperin tells us “queer” means adopting a politics that is whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, and the dominant. Just to prove I’m not making it up, here’s the relevant quote.

Unlike gay identity, which, though deliberately proclaimed in an act of affirmation, is nonetheless rooted in the positive fact of homosexual object-choice, queer identity need not be grounded in any positive truth or in any stable reality. As the very word implies, “queer” does not name some natural kind or refer to some determinate object; it acquires its meaning from its oppositional relation to the norm. Queer is by definition whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant. There is nothing in particular to which it necessarily refers. It is an identity without an essence.

To underscore his point, he then continues with,

“Queer,” then, demarcates not a positivity but a positionality vis-à-vis the normative—a positionality that is not restricted to lesbians and gay men but is in fact available to anyone who is or who feels marginalized because of her or his sexual practices.

In other words, you cannot be queer. You can only do queerness. It’s an act. 

So nobody is “queer.” People feel “queer” against some standard, perhaps imagined, and people act queerly. By that, it means they act defiantly against normalcy and legitimacy while denying reality. You can only perform queerness—or, if you refuse, straightness. Performing straightness, to Queer Theory, isn’t being who you are if you’re straight; it’s just another kind of performance, one that upholds the allegedly oppressive “status quo” instead of opposing it.

Now let’s consider the Drag Queen Story Hour curriculum paper from a couple of years ago.

It explains in a section titled “from empathy to embodied kinship” that queer programs are presented as improving LGBT empathy, and that Drag Queen Story Hour makes use of such “tropes,” their word.

It then says that’s not really what Drag Queen Story Hour, queer education, or “queer worldmaking” are about, though. Instead, they use the “tropes” of empathy “strategically” as a “marketing” platform to justify getting it into schools, libraries, and in front of kids, but it’s actually about leading kids to see the world and themselves in a queer way. Here’s how they word it:

Finally, it is often assumed that the primary pedagogical goal of queer education should be to increase empathy towards LGBT people. While this premise has some merit – and underlies many sincere projects in educational and cultural work, including DQSH – the notion of empathy has also been critiqued by feminist scholars of colour and others for the ways in which empathy can enable an affective appropriation of an individual’s unique experiences and reinforce hierarchies of power. … Whether through literature or virtual reality, these tropes tend to reflect an overstated ability to understand difference, as well as empathy’s potential to preclude meaningful relationships of solidarity.
It is undeniable that DQSH participates in many of these tropes of empathy, from the marketing language the programme uses to its selection of books. Much of this is strategically done in order to justify its educational value. However, we suggest that drag supports scholars’ critiques of empathy, rather than reifying the concept…This approach can support students in finding the unique or queer aspects of themselves – rather than attempting to understand what it’s like to be LGBT.

That’s what Drag Queen Story Hour is actually about. It’s not about empathy—that’s a marketing strategy that is, in fact, a bit problematic. It’s about getting kids to discover any aspects of themselves that might be considered “queer” and developing those into a queer political stance that will be conflated with who they believe they are. More than that, they’ll be told they’re not truly allowed to be who that is, even though it’s who they really are. Society will object. Their parents will object. It has to be kept secret from their parents in case it isn’t affirmed by them.

Now, I’m not supposed to use the word “grooming” to describe this grotesque set of activities. It’s part of a major controversy—one the Pitt students showed up (potentially menacingly, but in fact as clowns) to protest outside. So I’ll ask a question instead. I’m going to show you something, and then I want to know what word am I supposed to use for this. This self-characterization for the program comes up shortly thereafter in the same paper.

Drag Queen Story Hour presents itself as “family friendly” in a way that it characterizes as a “preparatory introduction to alternate modes of kinship.” What does that mean? 

It then says that the “family” in “family friendly” refers to a “queer code” for the “other queers [they connect with] on the street.” So they’re not just lying about the empathy but also what they mean by “family”—which is a “queer code” for a “new family” that Drag Queen Story Hour is teaching kids to be “friendly” to. 

The paper repeatedly invokes the concept of a “drag family” for the kids too, and then the paper ends with “we’ll leave a trail of glitter that will never come out of the carpet.” What’s the carpet here?

Here’s the full quote of the “family friendly” part, so you don’t think I’m lying.

Queer worldmaking, including political organizing, has long been a project driven by desire. It is, in part, enacted through art forms like fashion, theatre, and drag. We believe that DQSH offers an invitation towards deeper public engagement with queer cultural production, particularly for young children and their families. It may be that DQSH is “family friendly,” in the sense that it is accessible and inviting to families with children, but it is less a sanitizing force than it is a preparatory introduction to alternate modes of kinship. Here, DQSH is “family friendly” in the sense of “family” as an old-school queer code to identify and connect with other queers on the street.

So, I’m asking. What word am I supposed to use for that? I know which one I can’t use, and that puts me at a complete loss.

So here’s how Queer Theory works. You can’t describe it unless you support it—just like a cult, one we now see targets kids. If you criticize it, that’s “hate.” The rumor widely printed about me is that my using that word, “groomer,” to describe that, above, implicates me in some social crime called “anti-LGBTQ hate,” which is very bad, very serious, and utterly toxic. It’s not just “harmful rhetoric” but a “conspiracy theory.” I am a very bad person, apparently, for naming the obvious, not as a result of inference or guesswork but from their own proudly printed writings.

The accusation and resulting social dynamic, which is always hostile, is straight out of Maoist China. I am alleged to be engaging in a crime called “anti-LGBTQ hate,” and “the right side of” society is to judge me and hold me to account for that crime by whatever means it can manage. This bullying is to continue until I learn to recognize from the “queer position” (that is, standpoint) how what I said was socially criminal and pledge to reform my thought, adopt Queer Theory, and not only do better but also become an activist on behalf of Queer Theory. This is identical to the thought reform of Maoist China with a slightly different ideology.

The accusation is obviously nonsense, but that’s not the point. The point is to initiate the social struggle session on me to “transform” my views. The accusation is of an old Marxist standard form, though. It’s a truth married to a lie.

Here’s the truth: Gays and lesbians fought for decades to break the public perception that they are predators and groomers of children. Here’s the lie: That’s who and what I’m talking about when I criticize their theory and activism, which is the very groomery thing I just described previously, in their own words.

As we saw from Halperin and from the “marketing” admission in the Drag Queen Story Hour curriculum paper, Queer Theory doesn’t represent gay identities. It hides behind them and uses them. 

The truth is that “queer” used to be a slur for gay people, one many activists took to describe themselves in defiance of prejudice and bigotry. The lie is that Queer Theory ever represented a civil rights movement for anyone. It’s a destructive form of radical activism that actually historically opposed gay civil rights and equality. Why would it do that? Because gay equality and acceptance would normalize being gay within society and legitimize gay people as fully equal members of society, and Queer Theory is, by definition, radically opposed on principle to anything normal and legitimate. They even have a word for it, homonormativity, which is also very bad.

Gay activists from the 1990s will readily attest that the Queer Activists were often strongly opposed to their ambitions: civil and legal equality, marriage, and social acceptance. Queer Theory needs radical activists, not stable citizens who can go about their lives in a society that doesn’t discriminate meaningfully against them. Those activists fought hard for decades to overcome stereotypes of predatory behavior and the idea that they’re intrinsically groomers. That’s why the Queer Activists can claim that calling out their blatant grooming is an “anti-LGBTQ” theme. Those were stereotypes that good people fought like hell to overcome.

The fact is that Queer Activism, exactly as described here, puts the appearance of glaring truth back into those stereotypes, and then the Queer Activists hide behind gay people and say, “see, they’re attacking you; see, everyone hates you.” Of course, everyday gay people who are good citizens lose the most from this little trick, and the Queer Activists gain the most. Queer activism is strictly parasitic behavior.

On the theme of grooming, specifically into a cult, I want to direct you to another scholar, Kevin Kumashiro, who wrote a paper in 2002 called “Against Repetition.” In that paper, he describes the purpose of queer education of children. Kumashiro explicitly says that teaching children about social justice, including about ideas from Queer Theory, induces emotional and identity-based crises in them.

He then says that’s why it’s important to have queer educators who can guide the vulnerable students who are experiencing their crises to resolve them in favor of social justice and Queer Theory beliefs and actions. The relevant quotes are these:

Repeating what is already learned can be comforting and therefore desirable; students’ learning things that question their knowledge and identities can be emotionally upsetting. For example, suppose students think society is meritocratic but learn that it is racist, or think that they themselves are not contributing to homophobia but learn that in fact they are. In such situations, students learn that the ways they think and act are not only limited but also oppressive. Learning about oppression and about the ways they often unknowingly comply with oppression can lead students to feel paralyzed with anger, sadness, anxiety, and guilt; it can lead to a form of emotional crisis. (p. 74)

Once in a crisis, a student can go in many directions, some that may lead to anti-oppressive change, others that may lead to more entrenched resistance. Therefore, educators have a responsibility not only to draw students into a possible crisis, but also to structure experiences that can help them work through their crises productively. (pp. 74–75)

This practice is indoctrination, and it is knowingly willful and deliberate. In a 2019 paper, Torres and Ferry say explicitly that what their model of education represents is indoctrination. Here’s how they said it.

For all the criticism teachers receive for ‘indoctrinating’ students, turning them into liberal-minded cry-babies, not much has been said in defense. At the very least, a shy denial is made. It is time for educators to own this criticism and admit that is exactly what we do. (“Not everyone gets a seat at the table!” p. 33)

What Kevin Kumashiro is describing, though, is worse than indoctrination. The cycle of inducing crisis and then resolving it toward a doctrine, though, isn’t indoctrination. It’s a technique called trauma bonding, which is a practice of cult grooming and ideological transformation—that is, thought reform or brainwashing.

It can be said plainly, then. Queer Theory practices thought reform because Queer Theory is the doctrine of a religious cult. That cult is based on sex and primarily targets children, and it has little or nothing to do with being gay.

Nobody joins a cult to join a cult. People join a cult because they are suffering in some way, and the cult offers them a resolution to their suffering. Virtually everyone who has escaped a cult tells the same story: they wanted to belong, they wanted a social circle, they wanted understanding, and they wanted purpose. The cult preys upon these people and slowly locks them in.

Trauma bonding is as harmful and manipulative as it sounds. It is a technique of cult initiation and abuse. It’s like a kind of hazing. The basic formula is simple. First you traumatize your targets until you’ve harmed them enough for the process to work, and then you celebrate them when they do what you want.

In Queer Theory, you tell them the world isn’t at all the way it seems. It isn’t the way they’ve been led to believe. If they’re different, it’s because they’re oppressed. If not, it’s because they’re hurting other people. If they’re interested in exploring, even though they’re young, they should. If they’re uncomfortable with their bodies for any reason, perhaps their body is wrong for who they really are. If their parents might disagree, they shouldn’t be included in the decisions. Queer Theory is then offered as the lens that resolves all of the confusion, shock, dissonance, and pain. 

Then you affirm and celebrate them when they show interest. You lead them to believe they’re making brave decisions that are worthy of interest and respect. You coerce their social groups to participate in this ritual and tacitly threaten anyone who doesn’t want to go along with it. You make them feel like they belong and that they—just for being who they are—are special and have a special purpose to fulfill. You teach them special words that describe the very small but growing number of people who identify just like them.

This cult programming—or grooming—takes predictable paths. First, it leads people into emotional vulnerability followed by resolution. This generates personal and social interest, then psychological and social commitment. This is then deepened into an increasingly deep social and emotional commitment achieved largely through trauma bonding techniques, among others, detailed below.

This process creates emotionally and socially bonded members who populate the wide majority of any cult’s membership: those who are socially and emotionally locked in even without necessarily understanding the doctrine. This is sometimes called the “outer school” of the cult. The social, psychological, and emotional cues are steadily deepened over time, particularly increasingly playing upon themes of guilt, shame, isolation, alienation, and confusion on the one hand and hope, excitement, inclusion, and belonging on the other. Shunning “haters” who don’t support and affirm them, even within their own families, is also increased to make sure the cult environment is the predominant influence in the victims’ lives.

When commitment is high enough, a process of “study” begins, where the more committed outer school members start learning the cult doctrine. Here, they’d be studying Queer Theory. They’re not just learning how to use pronouns, present themselves, denounce everything against Queer Theory, and shut people out of their lives for disagreeing with what the cult thinks is good. They’re learning to defend it with pseudo-intellectual arguments based in Queer Theory. They’re also doing a lot of Queer Activism, which in turn deepens commitment. Why would you do this stuff, which is unpopular and difficult, when you have other and better things to do unless you are really committed? These people, who are socially and emotionally dependent on the cult and intellectually committed to it form an “inner school.” They are the “adepts” of the cult, where the “outer school” are its initiates. Most of the scholars and community organizers in the Queer Theory cult are in this tier.

There’s another tier, of course. The so-called “inner circle.” The members of the inner circle of a cult direct it and profit from it. They might or might not believe its doctrine, depending on their motivations. With Queer Theory, undoubtedly some of the biggest organizers and financiers of the movement, which primarily targets our children, do not believe it in itself but fully believe in its destructive and disruptive potential. Others believe in the enormous amount of profit that’s available from destroying lives and turning them into permanent, complicated medical or psychiatric patients. Others see the political utility of a permanently disaffected group with partially legitimate demands against a system they hate. Others see getting millions of people participating in the cult and its affirmations as a way to affirm themselves in their own “journeys,” and they just so happen to have the money to finance a campaign for mass affirmation.

The most important thing to remember about these tiers is the basic structure and the guiding principle behind each. The “outer school” initiates are seeing psychological and social reward through the cult’s manipulative offering, and they’re the overwhelming majority of captured cultists. The “inner school” seeks the same with existential fervor and some degree of intellectual and moral superiority. The “inner circle” is very small in number and ultimately is using the whole cult to their own twisted purposes. In the case of Marxist cults, the inner circle always uses the revolutionary cult of the era and then disposes of it when it’s time to move on to the next “phase of the revolution.”

The environment in which cults transform their victims is worth understanding in greater depth. According to Robert Jay Lifton, who studied the Maoist cult in detail as it was happening, cults effectively take advantage of up to eight qualities. Queer Theory very obviously utilizes all of them in sophisticated ways. I’ll touch upon them briefly.

Milieu control: Cults control the environment and make sure it only reflects cult doctrine. This is why they cut people off from friends, family, and outside information and views. This is your inclusion policies to ensure institutions and people only present cult-agreeable views and affirmation and remove anything that might cause doubt in the cult. This is cancel culture. This is immersive media and messaging from all levels.

Mystical manipulation: Cults create an appearance of total agreement (silencing all disagreement), inevitability (“there’s a change coming and there’s nothing you can do about it but get on the right side of it”), planned spontaneity (organized protests that look organic), and a higher purpose (like being on “the right side of history”) in order to convince their victims of their power and influence. It makes the cult appear more “right” and righteous to those captured within its spells. Think of the film The Truman Show. Jim Carrey’s character, Truman, was at the center of a huge operation of mystical manipulation within a fully controlled milieu.

Demand for purity: Cults are almost always puritanical in their values systems. They present their victims with stark contrasts of good and evil, right and wrong, on virtually every issue, and they demand purity with being on the “right” side of every issue. These dynamics manifest in dichotomies like pure vs. impure, absolutely good vs. absolutely evil, sacred vs. profane, or, specifically in the “social justice” cults like Queer Theory, affirmation vs. existential denial and care vs. “hate.” They are also interested, if not obsessed, with the binary of innocence vs. initiation to various levels of standing within the cult, including inclusion in the cult itself. In the extreme, this demand for purity sets up a dichotomy as stark as “the people” versus “the enemies of the people,” who must be destroyed in the name of “the people.”

Cult of Confession: The demand for purity leads the cult’s victims to readily identify how they fall short of cult perfection, leading them to both fear and desire to confess their failures and evil ways. Cults often encourage this behavior to facilitate the trauma bonding process. The trauma bonding wheel-of-pain is turned through pressuring people to confess—say to homophobia or transphobia or being a made-up gender or sexuality, and then rewarding them when they do—only to later indicate the confession wasn’t sufficiently total or sincere enough, initiating another round.

The milieu control and demand for purity come together to create a uniquely exquisite psychological environment. In this environment, almost everyone believes everyone else is pure while they, themselves, are not. You are the one falling short, even though you see your “classmates” confess to their own failures. You alone have the deepest, darkest failures. The guilt and shame are overwhelming, and they fuel even more accusation (criticism) and confession (self-criticism). This is the part of the environment that does the bulk of the thought-reforming work.

A “Sacred Science”: At the heart of the cult is what Lifton refers to as a “sacred science” that is infallible—though people can and do fail it all the time—into which people are being brainwashed. The point of the cult of confession dynamic is to force people to confess their failure to understand, internalize, enact, and even embody the “sacred science,” while accusing others of their failings as much and often as possible. The point of the confession is to get people to willingly adopt the lens of the sacred science so they can “recognize their crimes” against it and pledge to “do better.” “Do better” means “ideological remolding.” Here, Queer Theory is the correct understanding of sex, gender, sexuality, and all “normal” features of society. 

Doctrine over person: Cults place doctrine over people (“History uses people and then discards them.” -Hegel) The person isn’t even a person if they don’t hold and enact the doctrine. “Not to have correct political opinions is like not having a soul.” -Mao)

Loading the language: This is painfully obvious at this point, isn’t it?

Dispensing of existence: At the deepest level, the cult decides whose existence counts and who doesn’t. The punchline is that those who accept the cult doctrine (the “sacred science”) and its application are people, and no one else is. Only the doctrinally legitimate are allowed to exist. Others are “haters,” effectively enemies and non-people, justifying their abuse, disenfranchisement, silencing, etc.

Under the standard Iron Law of Woke Projection, the dispensing of existence aspect of cult environments is why Woke activists say everything is “denying their existence” or a “genocide.” They’re projecting. You don’t have a right to exist if your beliefs “deny their right to exist.” In Queer Theory, this means if you don’t affirm their embodied political activism against the legitimate and the normal, you’re denying their existence. You are therefore beyond the pale of humanity and do not deserve to exist. All totalitarian genocides come from this darkest piece of cult logic.

Frankly, we could go a lot deeper into the cult nature of Queer Theory than this. We could talk about how it’s ultimately a Gnostic and Hermetic conception of the world with “normal society” acting as an evil spirit that imprisons everyone into performing a fake persona for the world so they can never be liberated to be who they truly are. I’ve done that at length elsewhere.

That would require us to talk in depth about one of Queer Theory’s progenitors, Judith Butler, and her belief that gender and sex aren’t actually real but are performances we learn and repeat to satisfy normal society. Her whole body of work could be summarized in six words and a little explanation: “Drag is life; life is drag.” Everyone, always is doing drag in everything they do, whether they realize it or not. Society writes the scripts for how their drag (usually “cishetero”) is to be performed, and that imprisons their souls, which they then have to script physically onto and through their bodies. Becoming aware of the “doingness” of gender and even sex and sexuality opens a door to a “queer horizon” of possibilities beyond the norm.

Judy got those ideas in turn from people like the postmodern philosopher, sadomasochist, and pedophile Michel Foucault, from whose work David Halperin derived his definition from Queer. Foucault was asking what it means to be a homosexual absent society’s definition of the term, absent the homosexual versus heterosexual binary and privileged status of being straight within it, and absent the patterns of discipline and punishment that enforce these definitions on people through society, most frequently through themselves. The idea that it is the soul that imprisons the body, exactly in this way, didn’t originate with Judith Butler. She got it from Foucault.

Interlaced into aspects of Queer Theory from the broader milieu of the sexuality studies and sex-positive radical feminism from which it was born are the ideas of people like John Money and Alfred Kinsey, among others, who sought to divorce sex and “gender identity” completely and to liberate sexuality to the greatest possible extent.

Most of the inspiration, outside of the sexual aspects of Queer Theory, however, derive from gender-critical feminism, as it evolved eventually into the sex-positive branch, which went to war with its prudish sisters primarily through the 1980s and eventually won. That, in turn, means to understand this cult deeply, we’d have to start with the first truly gender-critical feminist, Simone de Beauvoir, who initiated the pressing question of our day way back in 1949: What is a woman? Her point was the same as Foucault’s: what does it mean to be a woman when no one else—and particularly society and patriarchy—are defining it for the people who actually are women?

In short, we are imprisoned by the features of our social reality but can escape with the right hidden insights about who we really are and into what we have been thrown. The thinkers above derived this transformative Sociological Gnosticism from earlier mystics of greater fame. We don’t have time for that now, but it’s not a hard legacy to trace from characters such as Rousseau, Hegel, and Marx through Beauvoir, Foucault, and Butler to arrive at the conclusion that we’re dealing not with social science but social alchemy here. One of its primary laboratories is our children.

Why children? Four reasons, mainly. First, children in schools and even with their entertainment are a captive audience. Second, children have not achieved the necessary cortical development to distinguish reality from fantasy, so the mystifications of Queer Theory can be considered plausible to them where adults would be less interested. Third, children are going through the developmental process of identity formation, which needs to be hijacked for this ideology to take firm root. Finally, children become a gateway and a wedge to other targets, like their families, faiths, and other institutions in which they take part.

So that is Queer Theory. It’s the doctrine of a religious cult. That cult is primarily sex-based. It predominantly targets our children. And it has little to nothing to do with being gay. But what can we do? 

Normally, we would turn to our institutions and ask them to see the light and step in. That isn’t working. We face a problem of captured institutions. Our institutions accept and promote Queer Theory. We therefore cannot count on our institutions—educational, psychological, medical, or governmental—to help us here. They are all captured. They are all part of the controlled milieu, creating the mystical manipulation, and peddling the sacred science of Queer Theory.

We find ourselves in the position of a pilot who has lost all of his instrumentation on his aircraft and has to fly it safely to a runway and land. No navigation computer, no altimeter, nothing—just him and his wits and hopefully his ability to see what’s in front of him and do the right thing. Our institutions are like the instruments in the cockpit but for society. Right now, they’re putting out all the wrong information. They cannot help us find the runway or land the plane safely, upon which our lives and the lives of others depend. What would we do? We would use our senses directly to find the runway, line up and lower the plane, and land it. We wouldn’t look to the broken instruments at all. We’d look at reality and navigate without the intermediary. That’s what we need to start finding ways to do at the societal level now—one individual at a time.

What, individually, though? What we must do is start with the truth. Not the mediated “truth” peddled by the corrupt institutions. The plain, simple truth. There are two sexes. Most people are straight. Gay happens. Queer isn’t an identity; it’s a defiant political stance we don’t have to tolerate or accommodate. If someone claims to have an identity or sexuality that requires an explanation, it’s fake and doesn’t demand our respect. Predatory behavior of any kind in any place and perversion outside of the confines of consenting adults acting in private do not deserve our tolerance and shouldn’t be given it. Pornography doesn’t need to exist in children’s libraries, and children do not benefit from its presence there. Enough.

Regarding the truth, though, I want to make a point. It’s important to say the truth, but you actually have to do more. You have to love the truth. You have to love the truth with all your heart and all your mind and all your soul and all your strength, and then you have to love your neighbor enough as you would yourself to tell him the truth that you love. These are basic commandments.

But you have to love the truth. If you love the truth, you’ll say it. You’ll also seek it and defend it. You’ll defend other people saying it. You have to love the truth because if you don’t, when the pressure mounts, you’ll eventually buckle. You’ll be asked to care and affirm, but there’s no caring and no affirmation that isn’t built upon the truth first. So you must love the truth. Every time you tell a lie to be nice or to fit in, you’re selling a piece of your soul. You have to stop doing that. That takes loving the truth.

When you do this—which is what it means to be based—you break the milieu control. You break the mystical manipulation. You call doubt upon the sacred science. You break the cycles of abuse and confession. You tell people that it is okay to trust their eyes and ears and even their gut intuition that what they’re experiencing from Queer Theory is abusive and manipulative.

Queer Theory is the doctrine of a cult religion based on sex that primarily targets our children. It is our necessary responsibility to learn about it and to oppose it. If you are so inclined, I’m releasing a new book, primarily written by Logan Lancing with my contributions, called The Queering of the American Child. I recommend you pick it up and get in the fight.

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The American Idea

New Discourses Bullets, Ep. 125

Is America just an idea? No, it isn't, but America is based on an idea. That idea is simple: free men and women can govern themselves by taking personal responsibility, and organizing the political structure this way will produce both liberty and prosperity. No other nation in the history of the world has been explicitly based on an idea in this way, and the results have been tremendous. In this episode of New Discourses Bullets, host James Lindsay reminds every American of the idea his country was based on and calls them back to it. Join him to be inspired and have your faith in America restored!

The American Idea

I recently had a conversation with an old married couple (about 75 years old) who exclusively watch leftist establishment news - mostly CNN and MSNBC, in Canada. Without provocation, they started ranting about how RFK Jr. was a crazy kook and conspiracy theorist and was doing great harm to people because of his anti-science beliefs. I gave very gentle pushback through simple questions, like "What's crazy about that?" and "Why do you think that's true?"

They did not have the cognitive capacity to handle these simple questions.

Over many years, I've had many conversations with people that have broken minds, and most of the time they become aggressive and abusive. This is the first time that I've encountered in person the most simplistic and stereotypical response - the behavior that is extensively documented in the literature about cults, and brainwashing, and perpetual cognitive dissonance, and everything else that is intrinsic to Woke and Leftism - and it was without any ambiguity.

I could see the ...

Regarding FDR:

@NewDiscourses James, and everyone else for that matter, I suggest that you read/listen to the work of Matthew Ehret (Canadian Patriot, Rising Tide Foundation on substack and YouTube, etc.) and his wife, Cynthia Chung, for a different perspective on FDR.

Their research into the occult underpinnings of the would-be ruling class elite globalists might interest you, too. Ehret claims that FDR has been purposefully misrepresented by his enemies, then and now. Ehret also discusses the "coincidences" of those presidents who were assassinated and their opposition to and/or thwarting of the globalist bankers plans.

I would encourage you to connect with Ehret and Chung as they have many criticisms of both left and right. Ehret hosts a regular podcast on Badlands Media with Ghost-of-based-Patrick-Henry (Gordon McCormick).

Here are some links: https://matthewehret.substack.com/p/fdr-vs-keynes-and-the-city-of-london?utm_source=publication-search

...

September 03, 2025

All over in my various newsfeeds I've noticed that Woke Right has been adopted all over the place to describe what's happening with Tucker, Candace Owens, Carl Benjamin, et al. I think James won this one. Woke Right did catch on!

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Catharsis or Civilization: A Statement from Our Founder on the Life of Charlie Kirk
by James Lindsay

I've been trying to share a particular message for a couple of years now, and I can never quite find the words. I doubt I will tonight, but I have to try again because I watched my great friend get murdered over it today.

We have a choice: catharsis or civilization.

There's no other choice for us. We can have a civilization, where people are civilized enough to live, work, and trade with one another in a productive way, a safe way, a trustworthy enough way, or we can abandon it for the pursuit of letting the negative emotions of the past years, decade, or decades consume us.

There's no other choice.

If we choose catharsis, we let our emotions, our Pathos, get the better of us. We turn to our anger and look to give it more justifications. We turn to our frustration and seek an orgiastic release through whatever deeds vents it. We turn to our oppression, our rage, our despair, our fear, and we let it flow through us until the Pathos pours out and covers the land in what will eventually be fire and blood.

Catharsis is tempting, and stepping into it will be libidinous, orgiastic, elevating, and divine, until we realize that it's the feast of demons upon everything we could have built and everything we could have passed on to our children and our posterity.

Civilization is harder. It's bitter, in fact, in comparison to catharsis. It means swallowing hard and taking all those negative emotions and sublimating them into something productive, something that builds rather than makes us feel better. Civilization feels like injustice, in fact, even though it is the only basis for justice outside of Heaven and Hell, if they exist.

If we choose civilization, we're allowed to be mad, but we must temper our anger into right action that builds something to leave a better world, which will dissolve it, of course. We're also allowed to be frustrated, but we must sublimate our frustration into the dedicated search for real and lasting solutions to our problems in a civilization worth living in and passing to our children. We are not allowed to despair, though, and we cannot persist in fear. We must have faith that swallowing and metabolizing all of our negativity to turn it into a flourishing society is possible and worth it, and faith will drive out fear and is the mortal enemy of despair.

Civilization is not available on the wide path. It is the narrow path, at least so far as worldly life goes. Veer too far to one side or the other, or even for too long a moment forget your purpose or principles, and you lose the path, lose civilization, and lose everything worth having.

Without civilization, though, we will find ourselves in a terror beyond our comprehension. Maybe it will be like the philosopher Thomas Hobbes described it in the wake of the terrible English Civil War, when civilization was nearly thrown aside. Violent, solitary or tribal, nasty, brutish, short, a wicked and selfish war of all against all. It looks like the favelas of Brazil.

Maybe we'll end up conquered, fighting among ourselves while our enemies feast on our folly. Maybe we'll end up holding it together, for a little while anyway, under a tyrant who can, for a time, make it all stop and demand order. Maybe we all just end up learning Mandarin and get along mastering the ins and outs of social credit existence.

Civilization is worth fighting for, and catharsis is the kind of momentary pleasure followed by pain that every virtue stands in opposition to. In a civilization we, and each of our children after us, can live as individuals, free to pursue our dreams in sufficient safety and opportunity to generate abundance. Catharsis will be a groupish disaster with all the allure and hangover of a drunken mosh pit.

Again, I'm not expressing myself the way I see this issue in my mind. It's such an important message that I just can't get right, no matter how I try.

What I will say is that, for any differences in the particulars my great friend Charlie Kirk and I have had, Charlie Kirk stood for, lived for, and acted to his dying breath for civilization. He was far too temperate and wise, even at 31, for catharsis.

How can I be sure?

Under strange circumstances once, I found myself out on a skiing boat on a lake with Charlie Kirk. Music was playing, we were having a good time enjoying the morning. Charlie, with his standard grin, bare chest in the sun, laughed a little and explained himself, "I had fun once, guys, and I hated it."

Then he made our host change the music from something fun and hip to... classical. And we ran up and down the lake alongside all the other party boats listening to Bach, Vivaldi, and Stravinsky, not having fun even once and loving it. Charlie Kirk lived for civilization, and nothing remotely like catharsis would have been near his mind, heart, or soul, even in its darkest, most frustrated moments.

Charlie wanted to win, but he wanted to win so that we can move away from evil and move away from cathartic, orgiastic destruction and toward civilizational order, where his family and children could grow up as strong, proud Americans.

More than that, Charlie lived for Jesus, the Logos, as He is named in John 1. He knew the difference between the Logos and the Pathos, human though he was. He understood civilization is built on the rock of Logos, and that it can never be built on the churning sands of Pathos.

That's how I know that Charlie understood the choice I still cannot articulate. We have two options, and only two. They are catharsis and civilization. Charlie Kirk lived that we would have civilization.

May Charlie Kirk not have died such that we spiral into catharsis and evil.

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The Dark Heart of Woke: Manufactured Alienation
by James Lindsay

At the core of both Fascism and Communism as radical ideologies is a sense of alienation. In fact, it’s alienation with the injustice of the alienation turned up to eleven. This alienation breeds resentment, envy, hatred, self-pity, and radical politics itself. It is also, in these evil systems, deliberately manufactured specifically for this purpose.

About Radicalism

First, a word about radicalism. What does “radical” mean? It means “at the roots,” or more accurately, tearing out the roots of the existing system to replace them with a new system with totally different roots. Radicalism means wishing to dismantle the existing system and replace it with something the radicals prefer. It almost never works.

Resentment, envy, self-pity, and a certain kind of hatred—not to mention psychopathology—is therefore often at the roots of radical politics. Certainly it is possible that a political system is actually oppressive and needs a radical solution, but it is also very common that the radicals are in a perfectly functional system but don’t feel like they fit within it. When that feeling turns sour, we get radical politics of the sort under examination here.

About Resentment, Envy, Etc., and Their Agitation

Second, a word about the politics of envy and resentment. At the heart of radicalism is a suite of negative emotions that stem from a sense of alienation. These primarily include envy (of those who are not or do not feel alienated), resentment (of the same), hatred (of the same), and self-pity, which is the most destructive of all human emotions. These often tend to sour under the feeling of alienation into something nasty Nietzsche called ressentiment, using the French word to distinguish it from mere resentment. Ressentiment is like envy that has curdled; it’s resentment that has turned putrid and has been directed outward. It’s the feeling the prisoner has for the freeman when he hates him merely for his being free.

Radicalism is often the politics of resentment through alienation, and Woke is no exception. While it’s frequently the case that the person who feels alienated will go on to develop these other emotions at the roots of his radicalism, and thus become a radical himself, it is much more often the case that the sense of alienation is inculcated by others who are already afflicted and that these negative emotions are encouraged to develop to a far larger degree than they might have under organic individual circumstances. That is, I suppose, Woke is a mind virus, and its receptor sites are almost all located in the emotions attached to feelings around fairness and belonging.

Radicals spend much of their time agitating others to join them in their misery, a process they call “consciousness raising.” They are actively teaching people to see themselves as alienated and to feel resentful about it. This is one way Wokeness spreads.

About Alienation and the Alien

Third, a few words about alienation—and therefore also about the “Alien force” that alienates. Alienation here ultimately refers to the idea of being made an alien in or to your own circumstance. In the circumstance of radical politics, what this implies is feeling like there’s a circumstance that fits you, and you belong in that circumstance by some right, and you are or feel removed or estranged from it, likely unjustly.

The sense of political alienation is usually believed to be the result of having been (actively) alienated from your rightful inheritance or sense of belonging in society by some hostile force—the Alien who alienates. It is, of course, generally assumed people would not intentionally remove themselves from their own rightful context. Alienation in radical politics is something that has been wrongly done to you by some force outside of you that you cannot control.

The outside, interloping force that removes the alienated subject from his rightful context and circumstance is, from the perspective of the radical, an Alien power. It doesn’t recognize the legitimate circumstance of society or people’s rightful claim to it and its inheritance. Instead, it comes from outside and imposes itself into and over that circumstance to usurp it for itself. While there's a lot of depth that could be added to this (notably talking about Gnosticism in various stripes), now is not the time for that

Understanding this mechanism and belief structure, which is fundamentally dualistic (split), is absolutely necessary to understanding the underlying mythologies and ideologies of both Fascism and Marxism. Both depend upon it fundamentally and intimately

A Clarifying Example

A sadly familiar example will help us understand. The way the Woke Left sees race and racism is that we should have a fully egalitarian and thus “antiracist” society, but that’s simply not possible. Our “state of nature,” in their eyes, has no racism and no room for racism. So, where did it come from? The short answer is “white people,” but it requires understanding more deeply than just that.

The Woke Left racial mythology (and it is a mythology) is that white people at some point in the past decided upon their own racial superiority and imposed racial categories onto all people specifically to name, maintain, and enforce their own “white supremacy.” White supremacy is an ideology meant to convince all people in society that this outside, artificial imposition both of racial categories and of racialist superiority and inferiority is “real,” “natural,” “just,” or what have you. White supremacy therefore alienates people of color from their full participation in a society that is supposed to be intrinsically “antiracist.” White people, as an interloping Alien force, impose this racial framework and racism to their own benefit and thus alienate themselves from their full humanity, which is supposed to be “antiracist.” In so doing, they become the Alien who alienates by race.

As a brief aside, the Iron Law of Woke Projection is located here. The pathological modes of Fascism and Communism (Woke) do not actually represent true humanity, as they claim, but are themselves an interloping Alien power that alienates people from their societal inheritance in other forms of societal organization. This, though, is what they accuse the mainstream society outside of their cults of doing. The Iron Law of Woke Projection is an iron law, therefore, because the entire psychosocial apparatus of Woke political worldviews is Alien-projection. It couldn’t be otherwise.

Alienation and Fascism

Since I usually start with Marxism and lose people, I’ll start with Fascism, which is actually easier to understand. Fascists fundamentally believe that there’s a past state of their own society that was roughly a golden era that is now corrupted. It fell through the corruptions of some alien powers being allowed sway—that is, through tolerance

More specifically, they have a romantic fantasy about their past as a people and the society and fruits they should have inherited from it, but they are alienated from that society and its inheritance by the inclusion of an interloping power. That power is the Alien that has corrupted the system for its own gain and to their loss

So Fascists look back to some mythological, romantic point they come to believe is their past and feel aggrieved as a people (collective) from having inherited the fruits of that past. Notice that they are likely to write historicist accounts of their past to reinforce this belief and to spread it. They go on to blame outsiders (political, cultural, or ethnic) for having displaced them from a glorious life they’ve lost due to illegitimate impositions of the Alien politics, culture, or ethnicity

In response, they seek to band together (fasces, from which Fascism gets its name, refers to a tight bundle of thin faggots) to reclaim their lost inheritance through brutal political power and the imposition of the romanticized past state as it was, they believe, meant to progress to the glorious future they’ve failed to inherit. (Talk about an entitlement complex….) So the Fascist, ultimately, feels alienated from a glorious society (that never really existed) and the firstfruits of that glorious society. Alienation is at the core of his disposition

Fascists, then, see themselves as alienated or dispossessed political, cultural, or racial elites who have lost the opportunity for an idealized Received Society, which the Alien has prevented them from receiving. The Alien is his enemy, and he must destroy his enemy and reclaim his lost society. Identifying and destroying the Alien who has alienated him—along with its societal enablers—becomes his chief political project. All who do not join him are believed to be sympathizing with and part of the alienating force and are therefore as much Enemy as is the Alien

The Fascist Project of Counter-Alienation

The Fascist project is therefore to awaken people to a consciousness of their alienation—which most will not have detected—and its alleged causes to get them to band together in the effort to reclaim their “future past.” Notice here, then, that it isn’t just a sense of alienation but a manufactured sense of alienation, deliberately spread to others, that drives the process of “awakening” (Woke). Of course, the most awakened Fascists will have to lead the program, not mere recruits, and they will restore the conditions for the common good and a future Golden Era in exchange for everyone’s liberty

Obviously, the “renewal” process begins (and proceeds) through punishing the Alien and its representatives and sympathizers, resulting in tyranny and mass murder. That is, the project is actually one of counter-alienation. Seemingly ironically, in the name of deposing the Alien who alienates them, the Fascists themselves become the imposing Alien force who alienates. This is a crucial point to understand. Rather than seeking to end alienation, they seek to counter alienation with their own more powerful and compelling alienating force. In staring into the abyss, they become the enemy they wish to destroy. Given the suite of negative emotions driving Fascist radicalism, it couldn’t be otherwise.

Who Were the Fascists?

Obviously, since there are different ways Fascists can feel alienated from their idealized Received Society, it can manifest in different ways. Three historical examples make the case

In Italy, the Italian Fascists arose around the idea of displaced Italian Nationalist identity, which was partly based on rejecting the internationalist agitations of Communism. In Spain, the Francoists arose around the idea of a displaced Spanish National cultural identity rooted particularly in Catholicism—so long as it obeyed Franco. It too claimed the internationalist and cultural (especially anti-religious) agitations of Communism as part of the Alien problem, but it hardly limited itself to purging Commies. In Germany, Hitler and the Nazis proposed a hybrid alienation scheme of German Nationalist identity and a German racial identity (based in part in eugenics and in part in the occult ravings of the Theosophist Helena Blavatsky, who, in alignment with pre-existing currents of German antisemitism believed that Jews represented the lowest (spiritual) racial form

Thus, to simplify, the Italian Fascists under Mussolini believed they were alienated from being fully Italian and sought to restore Italian Nationalist identity and usher in progress under its banner. The Spanish Fascists under Franco felt alienated from being fully Spanish and sought to restore Spanish Nationalist and Cultural identity through a kind of Nationalist-Catholic reunification program and usher in progress under its banner. The German Fascists (National Socialists) under Hitler felt alienated from being fully German in both practical and a profound occultist racial senses and sought to restore German Nationalist and mystical-racial identity, from which Hitler believed “high culture” sprung, in order to literally complete history (that is, to usher in progress under its banner). All three were unmitigated catastrophes

A similar utterly failed experiment was conducted in various ways throughout South America under the banner of (Catholic) Integralismo in Brazil, or Brazilian Integralism (reintegration of Catholic Church, state, and economy). Its program was different because the Alien was ironically framed primarily as colonialist in nature (that Iron Law of Woke Projection never misses), particularly blaming Western liberalism and Communism as alienating both indigenous populations and the working classes. South America is mostly Communist today as a result, not least because Integralismo gave way to Marxist Liberation Theology in so many cases (e.g., Dom Helder Camara, the “Red Bishop” of Recife). [No, Pinochet wasn't an Integralist, to be clear, but another sort of Fascist

So, as indicated, we understand Fascism as an ideology of (Gnostic) alienation and resentment where there is some idealized group that is a contingency of history itself who has been displaced from its rightful inheritance by an Alien power that must be destroyed

Alienation in Marxism

I’ll be briefer with Marxism, but it is ultimately the same, differently (same energy, opposite direction).  First, note that if you don’t realize that alienation, “the Alien,” and estrangement are very explicitly at the very center of everything Marxism thinks and talks about, you don’t know anything about Marxism. Marx talked about these concerns all the time and characterized his entire philosophy around them.

Marxists believe that all of humanity is the alienated group, and the bourgeois class is the Alien. That is, certain human beings are alienating all human beings from their rightful inheritance and proper circumstance unjustly for their own benefit

Marxists do not look back to a past romanticized golden era for their inspiration, as Marx told us in 1852, as do the Fascists. They look, he claims, “to the future,” but this isn't quite right and requires understanding Marxism properly to comprehend

Marxists all believe they are alienated from an idealized future that recovers the idealized past. They believe they are oppressed through the Alien who is located in the “dominant” or “oppressing” classes in each society throughout history. Private property becomes the alienating force that estranges man from himself and prevents his realization of the idealized future that recovers the idealized (communal, “social”) past. Marx stated frequently that realizing this idealized future is therefore humanizing, which is a “complete return of man to himself as a social (i.e., human) being.”

This belief sounds confusing and crazy, so we should unpack it a little. Marxism actually adopts the dialectical nonsense of the wildly degenerate Frenchman Jean-Jacques Rousseau to outline its (Gnostic) theory of man, history, and thus the future from which we allegedly alienate ourselves. Rousseau believed man is imprisoned by the strictures of civilization and is only truly free in his proverbial State of Nature (“man is born free but everywhere he is in chains”). Rousseau also liked civilization and all its perks, so he dreamed of completing man by finding a way to live in our State of Nature (free and noble “savages”) while retaining all the fruits of society (“savages made to live in cities

Marx echoed this sentiment clearly in his definition of true Communism: “Communism [is] the positive transcendence of private property as human self-estrangement, and therefore as the real appropriation of the human essence by and for man; communism therefore [is] the complete return of man to himself as a social (i.e., human) being—a return accomplished consciously and embracing the entire wealth of previous development

Marxists believe that all human beings as one giant group alienate themselves from their true inheritance (Communism: a stateless, classless society of plenty for all) by alienating ourselves from who we really are (Communists). We allegedly do so through the acquisition of private property (fundamental right to exclude others from your property), which inherently defines each person as an individual who can hold and withhold property from others (which is the basis for all wealth

People who support the concept of private property are therefore the Alien who alienates all of man from his inheritance, which is his State of Nature while “embracing the entire wealth of previous development.” It is from this preposterous fantasy future Marx believes Communists take their inspiration instead of some stupid, romanticized past era partway along the track. Marxists still romanticize the State of Nature (origin point, Alpha Man) but want him completed (Omega Man) at the same time.

Marxism’s Remedy to Alienation: Sublation

Marx rejects the mere rejection of private property “as human self-estrangement,” though. That, he argues, defines a low, ugly, brutish, dirty “crude Communism” that doesn’t have any higher culture or “wealth of previous development” to grift off of. While Fascism seeks to throw off the alienating force in a kind of counter-alienation, Marxism seeks to transcend the alienation entirely.

The problem is how it’s supposed to get there. Marx’s solution to this problem was through two means: violent revolution followed by “inversion of praxis” by the “dictatorship of the proletariat.” First, there would be revolution, in which the masses would rise up under the direction of the Communists and “expropriate the expropriators.” Then, the Communists would establish a dictatorship in the name of the workers called the “dictatorship of the proletariat” that would effectively re-educate, re-train, and brainwash everyone through forced re-socialization (“inversion of praxis”) to become progressively more socialist. The Communists saw this as a kind of remembering of who people really are (socialists), but it’s quite obvious that it’s just another counter-alienation move.

Curiously, Marx saw this process beginning with class consciousness, which he explained begins through “supersession” of the self. How did he say you supersede yourself and come to a class identity? “Supersession as the retraction of alienation into the self,” he explained. That is, you radicalize yourself by coming to see yourself through the lens of your own alienation, which will then awaken that suite of negative emotions that leads to the revolutionary radicalism that drives his project.

Marx’s project, like that of the Fascists in another fashion, is ultimately transformative, though: man must transcend private property, not merely reject it. Only in that way can he retain “the entire wealth of previous development” and high culture while creating a stateless, classless society in which man is as free as he (always) was in his State of Nature, from which he is alienated

Marxist Agitation into Counter-Alienation

Marxism therefore mobilizes class conflict by trying to awaken the exploited classes to their alienation and also some of the exploiting classes to their participation in the total alienation of society (think: “feminism is good for men too”). That solidifies it as yet another destructive counter-alienation project in which a sense of alienation is encouraged and then exploited to their political ends

Those who cannot be awakened into militancy or allyship, the Marxists always believe, have effectively sided with the Alien and must be destroyed. Maybe two hundred million corpses testify to how destructive and impossible this program is in practice. The result we can see: resentful people who conclude their lack of success in life is due to alienation by the Alien power adopt a radical politics intentionally destructive to the existing order

Their objective is to claim as much of the infrastructure of that order as they can (“seize the means of production”) but also to destroy not only everything they cannot but the entire order upon which it is based so they can replace it with their own (which always conveniently place themselves in abusive power they use to alienate people from their own societies as an interloping Alien). It must be this way because the roots of the existing society are ultimately either the Alien itself or that which allows and enables the Alien to alienate

The politics will always be radical. The power claimed will always be abused. Destruction and mass death will always result

These Are the Politics of Resentment

The reason for these Marxist and Fascist catastrophes isn’t superficial. It’s as fundamental as a foundation can be. Their entire world-concept is based on a theory of illegitimate alienation, resentment, pride, entitlement, covetous desire, self-pity, and rank incompetence at anything except manipulation and usurpation

The (Gnostic) metaphysics of the Alien is the taproot of these programs, whatever their forms, scapegoats, and excuses. Since they cannot see beyond these metaphysics, their project is not one of eliminating alienation (or oppression, or injustice) but of counter-alienation. They are always becoming the monster they believe controls the world.

How Are Marxism and Fascism Different?

Marxism and Fascism manifest differently (same energy, opposite direction) because they locate the pre-alienated state in different places and thus bear a different vision for the completed utopian future, but they’re ultimately variations on the same theme. 

Marxists have a better but more fanciful sales pitch: a world of total freedom and no oppression or injustice based on our State of Nature while retaining the plenty we achieved through our Fall from that noble original state. The Fascists boast a more realistic and brutal one: a complete return to a fictionalized Golden Era and the glorious future it promises for our people by kicking out and destroying the interlopers who stole it from us. Marxists, in fancier words, reject historical contingency while Fascists embrace it and place it in different “received” features like politics, culture, or race. 

Why Is This Woke?

What being “Woke” means, ultimately, is having “woke up” to at least one of these dark fairytales of alienation and having committed yourself to “doing something about it.” 

Woke is a distorted consciousness born out of a sense of alienation and is therefore a way of seeing the world and acting in it

The Woke consciousness, necessarily, is critical too, in the sense of Critical Theory. That’s why you could say that being Woke means using Critical Theory. Why? Because as dispossessed outsiders, the alienated people aren’t in a position to challenge (or even fully imagine or articulate) the circumstance that should have been absent the Alien power. They’ve lost or lack the means. What they can do, however, is criticize the Alien power for not being the glorious vision in their dark fairytales, allowing them to pull at the loose threads of existing society and radicalize the people who can be led into feeling dispossessed and resentful of it. 

Woke is therefore a parasitic, toxic mentality that attacks the society it is attached to because it feels wrongly alienated from it. Alienation is at its core, and that alienation is often not so much real as it is profoundly manufactured for the political ambitions of tyrants, some of whom share in the resentment.

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Why Cult Beliefs Don’t Stop When Proved Wrong
by James Lindsay

In the 1950s, there was a UFO cult called the Seekers, and it was infiltrated by a psychologist named Leon Festinger who wanted to understand why they believed what they believed and how their beliefs worked. In particular, he wanted to see what happened when their very specific central prediction, around which the cult orbited, did not come true. 

The Seekers believed there was an impending catastrophe that would strike the world on December 21, 1954. On that date, there would be a gigantic global flood. As a cult they engaged in lots of rituals and “awareness raising” activities about the impending disaster. 

The Seekers also believed in aliens—it was a UFO cult. Specifically, they believed that aliens would save the faithful Seekers from the coming disaster. In particular, the aliens would rescue the faithful Seekers for trying to warn people about the coming catastrophe. They also believed the aliens had the power to intervene on Earth if necessary. As everyone might suspect, the aliens would only intervene, believed the Seekers, if there was sufficient faith in Seeker doctrine and its vision of living a moral life on Earth. 

Obviously, what the Seekers believed amounts to a 1950s UFO-based version of the biblical story of Noah recorded in Genesis 6–9. Also obviously, they were completely wrong. 

Leon Festinger understood this and wanted to understand not just the Seekers but the phenomenon of cults. To learn more, he infiltrated the cult, posing as a faithful Seeker, and observed it through the lead up to the fateful December 21, 1954. Additionally, from his position inside the cult, he was positioned to observe and interview subjects when it turned out after that date that nothing of the sort had happened.

Eventually, December 21, 1954, came and went, and… nothing happened. This failed prediction marked a crisis of faith for the Seekers.

What did the Seekers do? Did they abandon their beliefs? No! They did not abandon their beliefs, except in a few individual cases. Instead, most Seekers experienced some form of emotional crisis and emerged from it with a powerfully increased commitment to the Seekers’ cult beliefs. Festinger was intrigued.

Most of the Seekers emerged from the crisis of their failed prediction firm in a new belief. They believed that their faith and devotion had saved humanity because the aliens saw it and intervened to prevent the flood, thus saving not just the Seekers but also humanity at large. Yay, Seekers!

That’s obviously nonsense, but it served as the foundation for the psychology not just around cults but around conspiracy theories (not conspiracies, which are real, but the “theories,” which are borderline crazy crap).

What Festinger observed is that under certain conditions, people do not abandon their conspiracy theories or cult beliefs when presented with solid evidence those beliefs are wrong. Instead, they modify and repackage their beliefs in even more tenuous ways so they can keep believing them. With the Seekers, the aliens magically intervened thanks to their Seeker faith. Who could check this claim? Well, nobody, and that’s the point.

Festinger explained what happened with the Seekers by formulating what’s called the theory of cognitive dissonance, which many have heard of but may not fully understand. When our minds are occupied with two contradictory but strong beliefs (cult doctrine versus hard evidence, for example), a state of great psychological discomfort and unrest called “cognitive dissonance” arises and becomes an impulse for the subject to resolve that discomfort, which is psychological but can be profound and manifest with physical signs.

There are a few roads to resolving the state of cognitive dissonance, but two stand out. One is to double-down on the cult belief or conspiracy theory, which is called “rationalization,” and the other is to accept the hard facts of reality and repent of your error, which is also psychologically painful.

Under many conditions, the psychological pain of facing reality is far too high for most people to bear, and they will instead rationalize. Perhaps the moral implications of their beliefs and resulting behavior is too high, so they cannot face it. This is easily understood. Imagine you transitioned your child and have to cope with the fact that you've done them irreparable serious harm in the name of “inclusion” so you could feel virtuous. That’s hard to walk back from. This recommitment to the beliefs rather than facing the emotional pain of facing the consequences of your error has been called the “Backfire Effect.”

Festinger observed with the Seekers that their commitment to the cult beliefs was too deep, so they could not overcome it. Instead, they not only came up with a rationalization for what had happened that preserved their beliefs; they also specifically came up with a rationalization no one could check—an unfalsifiable rationalization. No one could know whether or not the immensely high-tech aliens and their UFO came close enough to Earth to stop the flood but without being seen. It had to be taken on the Seekers’ word.

It turns out this phenomenon is common. When a cult’s doctrine gets crushed by a collision with reality, the psychological and social importance of the cult or its beliefs can win out and cause the individuals involved to make their beliefs unfalsifiable instead of letting them go.

The question here is why that commitment is so deep. The answer, when factual embarrassment and moral culpability aren’t the only explanations, is almost always that one’s social milieux and sense of identity get wrapped up in the cult and its beliefs that it’s more important to keep seeing yourself in line with the cult than in line with reality. For many people, there’s simply no going back if being part of the cult is who you are and how you fit in.

So how does someone get so locked into a cult that they’ll deny reality, even at the point of catastrophic falsification of their beliefs?

Being socially locked into a cult is usually its primary hold over people, particularly at first. Eventually this social lock will creep into one’s sense of identity through the processes of psychosocial valuation on the self (answering: how do I fit in as a valued member of a community I esteem, thus who am I in relation to this community and in a more universal sense?). At the point when the cult defines your identity and sense of virtue and worth, you’re deep in, and there’s no easy escape.

This gets worse in ideological, political, and religious cult circumstances, especially rigid and militant ones—like Communism, Fascism, Woke Left, and Woke Right. Part of this is psychosocial, as before, though with a particularly vicious twist. You will be heavily punished both socially and psychologically for any defection both while inside the cult and while attempting to leave it—and you know it. In fact, you have probably participated in that punishment ritual against others by the point of being fully ensconced in such a cult.

In ideological cults, though, there’s an even deeper layer because there’s substantial doctrine that allows you to intellectualize your beliefs in terms that sound true and reasonable. This feature facilitates the rationalization process of deepening cult commitment against exposure or contrary evidence (the “Backfire Effect”). While rationalizing the UFOs through unfalsifiable claims seems risible (from outside the Seekers), the ideology of ideological cults is the cult’s rationalization schema turned into a totalizing worldview. There’s already no escape!

Because the conditions of an ideological, totalizing cult can be so vicious to defectors of any kind, rationalization is the easier road in the case of doubt or encountering contradictory evidence, and most (not some) take it. Millions of people died, property was destroyed, and everything fell apart in a horrible war last time we attempted a mass movement based on your “new” world-changing beliefs? That’s because the people back then did it wrong and didn’t believe it sincerely enough! Obviously. Of course, this belief cannot be falsified.

This is the essential feature Festinger noticed, too. The rationalizations of the Seekers were that the aliens came and, from a safe distance, saw the faith of the Seekers and their righteousness and so intervened to stop the flood. No one could see this happen because it was far out in space and very high tech, and the bad thing the Seekers predicted simply didn’t happen. “Nothing happened” became “evidence” that something happened.

The way it was possible is that the Seekers changed the fulfillment conditions of their beliefs without changing their beliefs. Their new belief structure reaffirmed the cult rather than evidence against the cult’s bogus doctrine.

What Festinger noticed, ultimately, is that when cult beliefs and conspiracy theories encounter hard evidence that they’re wrong, or other exposure, most of the cult’s victims will cling to the cult’s beliefs by rationalizing them in ways that render them unfalsifiable.

While the example of the Seekers is clearly instructive, take the example of the moon landing being “fake and gay,” as some people today phrase it. The equipment from that landing is still mostly on the moon, and it has been observed in multiple ways by orbiters and even from the ground (in the case of the mirror array for laser telemetry).

Confronted with this evidence, deniers will counter that the imagery is all faked, probably by NASA, which is also “fake and gay” and also Satanic, including because the acronym represents something nefarious and evil in secret Hebrew which is probably also in the Talmud but only the one Jews will never let you read without having to kill you if you do…or something. The conspiracy mindset only grows deeper, and the evidence in front of their own eyes gets denied. At every turn, new evidence is just more “evidence” of the alleged conspiracy, and the belief becomes unfalsifiable.

Not incidentally, this is in a way similar to the state called “demoralization” that Yuri Bezmenov warned about with regard to Communist subversion. The “demoralized” person, Bezmenov explains, cannot see or comprehend as real evidence that contradicts his demoralized and propagandized view of the world “until the boot comes crashing down on his balls,” at which point he might still rationalize it away.

This is the ideological equivalent of locked-in syndrome, where someone is fully locked into their minds because their bodies are in every way absolutely frozen and unusable, even though they are fully conscious. Another good way of putting it, especially when the cult belief is a political ideology, is that people in (ideological) cults are ideological prisoners of war. People still wearing their masks alone in cars are Covid ideological POWs, for example. So are most deep conspiracy theorists, though for different belief programs.

You might think this is a dumb-people problem. Not so. Notice that rationalization is an intellectualizing and abstracting process, so higher intelligence isn’t a guard against it but a liability for falling into it. Smarter people can rationalize better. If you find yourself wondering how smart people can fall for this stuff, it’s that they’re still human (thus social) and are in a literal sense too smart for their own good. They're expert rationalizers.

Festinger did not have a particularly optimistic prognosis for this circumstance, and I have to admit for myself that as the internet and social media in particular have exploded cult recruitment and expansion (including conspiracy theories), that it's hard to be optimistic about our psychosocial environment under the circumstances we've built for ourselves.

There’s genuinely only one antidote: exposure to reality until the victim of the cult begins to see it for themselves. Something has to become undeniably out of alignment with the cult’s views, and the cults failures and manipulations have to become visible. Only then can the process of escape begin.

This process can take months or years, though, and it will almost never be from a sudden change of mind. The process of leaving a cult is literally called “deprogramming” for a reason.

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