There's no debating cult members

The first time I meet with a client in jail, I’m hit with a cavalcade of new information. Where they’re staying, who can post bail, which cameras I need to get the footage for, how I can prove the victim is full of shit right now, and can I please text their grandma to let them know they’re ok. I match the relentless pace and scribble it all down.

Then sometimes my pen will hit an emergency brake. It will be one errant statement that nevertheless serves as an information dense injection. A prototypical example could be something like “Also, my ex-boyfriend is a shape-shifting alligator and he paid Michael Jackson to have me arrested.”

Oh. That’s the epiphany moment. I may not know the specific mental health diagnosis, but that’s when I realize that my typical intake process is useless for the task at hand. There’s no point in meticulously documenting every one of my client’s delusions.

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Being part of a cult occupies the same general penumbra. We haven’t had a new blockbuster cult in several decades now but throw your mind back to the Heaven’s Gate group¹, where in 1997 all 39 active members were found dead in a large California mansion, dead from voluntarily ingesting phenobarbital.

If you’ve never been acquainted with this particular episode of human insanity, just read the Wikipedia entry or watch any of the dozens of documentaries about them. There’s nothing about it that makes any sense to an outsider. For one, their leader throughout the 23 years the group existed was this guy, Marshall Applewhite, who couldn’t stop talking about UFOs:

Imagine this guy convincing you to chop your balls off.

Yet he somehow convinced several dozen real life human beings to abandon their previous lives, wear identical clothing, and castrate themselves. The end goal was to get transformed into immortal extraterrestrial beings by committing suicide just as the Hale-Bopp comet passed by. Every member recorded a farewell message, and there’s not a hint of hesitancy from any of them:

I take solace in mankind’s rational faculties to wrench sense out of chaos, but there’s nothing I know of that can break this fever. For one, their belief system was immune to any counter-evidence. The group was originally led by two people, Applewhite and his partner Bonnie Nettles. But when Nettles died of cancer in 1985, the group stopped believing that you could ascend to heaven aboard a UFO while alive and recognized that you had to be dead for the process to take place.

Notice how they didn’t stop believing in UFOs.

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The essential epistemic pitfall with any fundamentalist ideology, cults included, is having specific articles of faith that can never be questioned or contradicted. For Heaven’s Gate, it was the inviolable fact that they’ll leave this mortal coil via UFOs; everything else gets explained and repurposed to accommodate that article. For my clients in the midst of psychosis, it was whatever errant thought became the foundation of their delusion. Everything is subservient to the articles.

I personally hold unconditional loyalty towards no person, so it’s trivial exercise for me to outline conditions whereby any person loses my support. It’s different for cults, because unconditional loyalty to the infallibility of one person is their distinguishing feature.

You might have already guessed this post is about Trump and his supporters. I expect the usual gnashing of teeth but even if I exhaustively laid out my case transparently, I wouldn’t expect any converts. Again, I have no ideations that I can debate cult members.

The articles of faith are readily identifiable, and you can observe for yourself the Herculean efforts devoted towards moving heaven and earth to maintain the articles. A few illustrative examples will suffice.

After the low-class debacle that was January 6th, I very naively thought that would serve Trump’s finale. I didn’t pull that prediction out of thin air, as the best that his die-hard sycophants could say at the time was yes, it was bad, but “everyone’s entitled to a mulligan once in a while.” Ben Shapiro remains a lying weather vane who caters to his audience for money, and even he got in front of the microphone on January 7th breathlessly asserting that J6 was an attempted insurrection, and that it was “the worst thing to happen to the United States of America since 9/11.”

Neither Mike Lee nor Shapiro nor apparently millions of Americans give a shit anymore. I know all the meme talking points, it’s a contradictory medley of it was actually Antifa, also it wasn’t that big of a deal, but also the people involved were Patriots, and also Hilary Clinton basically did the same thing by calling Trump illegitimate that one time. You can cycle through any of those slogans depending on the circumstances. Again, anything to preserve the faith. If you ask them about the fake electors scheme, chances are they don’t know anything about it, but if they do they might make a conclusory assertion that writing fraudulent certificates is actually one of the legal options Trump was entitled to avail himself of.

How about almost everyone who has ever worked for Trump end up hating him? Obviously the simple explanation is TDS! TDS! TDS! TDS! If you want something more recent, just watch the mental acrobatics from Trump supporters reacting to Puerto Rico being called a floating island of garbage.² Oh, didn’t you know that they were actually just commenting on their municipal waste infrastructure?

Anything to preserve the faith.

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I’ve been glued to the political discourse my whole life, perhaps it’s all been a time-wasting frivolity. In my idealistically grandiose moments, I assumed I was contributing something meaningful to the discourse, but I genuinely don’t see the point anymore. Something seriously broke among the right-wing within the last 5 years or so and I have no idea what the solution is. I’ve already gone on and on about the problems with the Great Awokening, but at least with that insanity you can point to verifiable signs of the fever breaking. Perhaps they’re both driven by a heretofore undiscovered identical dynamic, but the mindrot on the right has dwarfed the left in terms of pervasiveness and (crucially) indelibility.

There just is no comparison to the depths of conspiratorial thinking. When Nikole Hannah-Jones tweets something retarded about “government agents” purposefully setting off fireworks to disrupt the BLM movement, she gets ridiculed and eventually apologizes. I can’t even keep track of the hoaxes that right-wing talking heads continuously traffic and fall for on a daily basis, with no corrections or acknowledgements. The best you can hope for is some variant of “what they really meant” rehabilitative sanewashing.

We’ve always had crazy people, but the comforting anchor has always been that the crazies are too small of a minority to matter. When I noticed the lunacy spreading farther among those who credulously believed the 2020 election was stolen, I treated them like adults. I read the court filings, downloaded the spreadsheets, followed the Twitter threads, and kept an open mind as I examined their claims. Not only did not a single claim I examined turn out to have any merit, many of them were by any measure way too crazy to even entertain for longer than a second.

None of that matters though. It’s so trite to say that folks don’t care about reality, but it’s true. Cool, calm, collected, and nuanced debate are worthless against an army of NPCs that can regurgitate the same meme talking points. NPC is a perfectly apt descriptor too, because they’re either navigating a predictable dialogue tree, or just repeating canned lines. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard “What about the suitcase full of ballots they pulled out under the table?” from people whose curiosity goes only so far as to not look for the extensive investigations already done on that issue. Or people who are breathlessly outraged about “Grandmothers who got years in prison just for walking into the Capitol” from people who can’t name a single actual example.

I gave it my best shot. I tried debating their ideas in a measured manner, but nothing makes a difference to those who’ve already glommed onto the cult slogans. I took particular pride in my approach, and I recognize I have a particular knack for persuasion, but if you gave me a Heaven’s Gate cult members there’s absolutely nothing I could do to pierce their self-inflicted shroud.

We’re in an unprecedented epistemic ecosystem where people adopt ardent beliefs based on half-remembered tweets, ethereal wisps floating across their newsfeed pipeline, and I’ve lost faith in the utility of rational discourse. Even if I am being overly dramatic (being wrong should always be entertained as a possibility!), I don’t see this ecosystem changing anytime soon, nor can I envision the potential toolset required to interface with it.

I’ll likely significantly pare down political commentary writing, potentially to zero. I just don’t see the point anymore. I’ll keep writing, but will focus more on storytelling within localized purviews. Besides that, I’ll keep calling my mom, adoring my wife, feeding the squirrels, petting my cat, and playing my city-building games.

Wake me up when the inflicted have drunk all their Kool-Aid Flavor Aid.

1. Their website, in all its Geocities-like glory, is somehow still up to this day!

2. For the record I think the joke was really funny as a joke, but didn’t belong in a political rally. But given the election results, I’m very clearly unqualified to opine on its impropriety.