The Era of Cults.

These posts explore the themes developed in my monograph, Narcisso-Fascism, which is itself a real-world test of the central concepts of the Biocognitive Model of Mind for psychiatry.

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In a truly bizarre incident in Queensland a few years ago, an 8yo diabetic child died after her parents withheld her insulin. They were members of a small religious group who believed in divine intervention, that she didn’t need the drug as she would be healed by faith and prayer. For days as the child sickened and finally died, they sang and prayed around her, even refusing to call police or ambulance when she had been dead for 24hrs as she wasn’t dead, just sleeping. All 14 adults have since been convicted of manslaughter. The leader of the group, whom the judge described as “a dangerous, highly manipulative individual” was sentenced to 13 yrs in prison while her parents, who made the decision to stop the insulin, got 14yrs. All the other members who were accomplices to her death were given between six and nine years to think about it.

Fortunately, this sort of thing is fairly rare in this country but not so in the US. Given its long history as a refuge for European heretics, it has a rich tradition of spawning cults of various sorts. Indeed, what’s a cult? There are various definitions but mostly they focus on the idea of a small group of people, usually following a charismatic leader who demands absolute loyalty to his ideas (most are men), be they original or his interpretations of standard texts. Members of the group are tightly bound to the leader and to each other and are mostly required to make considerable sacrifices, such as withdrawing from the larger society and from their families, giving up wordly pleasures and handing over large sums of money or property to the leader. Often, they wear distinctive clothes or have unusual haircuts or beards and use a jargon or cant that outsiders struggle to follow. People can join cults themselves or be born into them but typically, leaving is made as difficult as possible.

Given all this, why would anybody bother joining? Why give up the comforts of suburbia, such as a beer while watching the footy on TV or a day at the beach ogling the bikini-clad belles, just to stand around with a group of weird-looking people singing hymns and yelling “Praise be with you, brother”? The answer is that people only do anything because they expect a pay-off. It may be that they expect a reward of some sort in their crappy lives or they fear punishment but hoping for a benefit of some form keeps them on the hook.

Typically, cult-like religious revivals and radical political movements are the product of unhappy people in unstable times; people are dissatisfied and are inclined to follow anybody who confidently spouts that he has the answer to all their questions and the solution to their discontents. The 20^th Century saw several of the biggest political cults of all time, Stalinism in the USSR, fascism in Italy, Germany and Japan, and Maoism in China. They were totalitarian, meaning total control over every aspect of life for the whole population at all times. They had the power of the state behind them: anybody who questioned The Party or The Leader was likely to get the chop.

These days, religious cults can’t quite match that although ISIS tried. In the main, they rely on people choosing to join and stay so they have to keep the excitement flowing in order to keep the punters but a big part of their spiel is fear of leaving, fear of the ever-alert enemy waiting to pounce. For mainstream religions, cultish offshoots are heresies that need to be opposed. In the old days, that led to bitter wars that dragged on and on. Where possible, heretics were crushed and burned although if they took control, they did the same to the remnants of the old orthodoxy. Fortunately, in the West, we have moved beyond internecine religious wars although we’re still quite partial to fighting other religions when the chance presents.

As everybody will know, the West is experiencing a resurgence of religiosity which, depending on where you stand, is either a return to the True Religion or a slide into heresy. As usual, the epicentre is the US, spreading rapidly around the world but this illustrates an important point: religious revivals start with a panicky populace but they spread and develop according to the money. In the US, the conventional or mainstream churches are loaded but this is mainly property that they picked up 100 years ago or comes via deceased estates. The new, megachurches rely much more on donations, and that is a large part of their appeal.

Firstly, they are mostly based on an electrifying personality rather than a novel interpretation of the scriptures, and second, they are in the business of marketing prosperity. The message is: “Come to hear Pastor X, you’ll feel better, and stay to get rich.” Instead of the old Christian notion of helping the poor, the modern version is prosperity gospel, as in the old “God ’elps them wot ’elps ’emselves.” If you’re rich, it’s a sign that God favours you; if you want to get rich, donate to the pastor and you’ll get your money back seven times” (seven is the magic number). Behind it all looms the ever-present temptor, Satan himself; if the promise of riches isn’t enough to keep them in line, the fear of the devil will. As a result, the pastors become exceedingly wealthy and use that as a drawcard: “I believe and look how rich I’ve become. You can do it too, just drop your money in this pot.” This idea isn’t restricted to the fringes of Christianity, it’s actually quite common in a lot of religions, especially among poor people. And the priests and pastors take advantage of it, and the more narcissistic and psychopathic they are, the worse it gets. This means there are some very wealthy churches in the US which send money overseas to poor countries to build their empires. It also means there are lots of preachers who believe they’re above the law and take advantage of it.

The same thing happens in Islam, where the fundamentalist Saudi sect, the Wahabists, have access to rivers of money which they use to build religious schools or madrassahs in poor countries such as Pakistan and Indonesia. Very often, parents don’t know what they’re agreeing to when they let their sons (only boys) enter them, they think they’re normal schools but they definitely aren’t. Once the boys are in, they’re indoctrinated in an intolerant and socially-regressive form of Islam, but they get very little actual education so it is extremely difficult for them to leave. Practically the only job available to them is as an imam in a dirt poor community where they spread the harsh gospel they’ve been taught, because they don’t know any better. They are definitely not taught to question their teachers (sounds a bit like psychiatry, doesn’t it).

Anyway, more or less since 1945, there has been a widespread religious revival in the US, coupled with a growing secularisation of the mainstream. However, nobody who wants to get ahead in any field dares question the often twisted religiosity as that would invite a massive pile-on from the hard core fanatics. Even Herr Drumpf, who doesn’t have a religious bone in his body, pretends to be on their side. None of this is encouraging as the religious hard right and the crackpot hard right are very much in bed together. We saw this at the January 6^th debacle in Washington when QAnon flags were mixed with signs proclaiming “Jesus is my saviour.” How can this be? Simple: they are united in their hatred of the same enemies. But, you protest, Christians aren’t supposed to hate anybody, turn the other cheek, love your enemies and all that, isn’t that the message? Perhaps it is, in the mainstream, but we’re not talking mainstream. We’re talking of what happened when Hollywood met Madison Avenue in a disused church and got a brilliant idea for making money: new christianity (note it loses its capital). Instead of having little old ladies quavering through monotonous hymns in draughty churches, they realised that the market for hip churches was wide open. Crank it up, get rid of the candles and bring in the strobes, out with the organ and in with electric guitars, make Sunday Funday and the money will come.

In the process, the message morphed. The idea of Christianity as a religion of peace and care was quietly led out the back and strangled, to be replaced by the bloodthirsty and vengeful god of the old testament, the hellfire and brimstone, tear-your-enemies’-heads-off and enslave their children version. The Sermon on the Mount was dumped and the Book of Revelation pushed to centre-stage, complete with its hallucinated monsters and lambs with seven horns and seven eyes (the magic seven again), its battles with demons and plagues and damnation. What is called evangelical, pentecostal or charismatic christianity is a heresy from beginning to end, but the good news is that it has probably peaked. The figures don’t show this: worldwide, charismatic churches are growing rapidly but this is by recruiting people in poor countries, especially by luring them away from the mainstream. In the West, the average age of congregations is rising rapidly as young people refuse to enter, or those born into it leave, sorely aware that the hyped up promise behind the spectacle was hollow.

Meantime, another revival has gone off the rails. The political doctrine of zionism was developed in the 1880s and 90s as a solution to the problem of Jewish people living in Europe being exposed to violence from their neighbours. Note that this was Europe: Jews living in North Africa and West Asia didn’t have an antisemitic problem (even today, there are 15,000 Jews living in Iran, with their own seat in the Majlis). It was decided that the only way they could be safe was to have their own country, subject to their own laws and protected by their own police.

To begin with, they looked at different countries including Argentina and Uganda and apparently also Tasmania, then decided that the Ottoman province of Palestine would be best as that would bring in the religious crowd (with all their money). Orthodox Jews were well-organised and disciplined; without them, the zionist project probably wouldn’t get off the ground. Aided by wealthy Jews like Baron Edmond de Rothschild in France, they started buying land in Palestine but soon ran into difficulties as the locals resented groups of white people who had no intention of assimilating (e.g. learning Arabic) moving in and trying to take over. That soon led to fighting, the uprising in 1936, World War II intervened and, in 1948, the Jewish population, by then 32% of the region, were awarded 56% of the land by the UN and declared their own state. Then the serious ethnic cleansing started, during which hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were forced off their land, thousands were murdered, and hundreds of villages demolished without trace. As we see, this process of grabbing more and more land has never stopped.

It has to be remembered that, like most groups, the world’s Jewish community represents a wide range of opinions. There is a significant Orthodox movement that says Israel’s existence is a heresy and they will never go there. There are large numbers of secular Jews who are horrified by the actions of the Jewish State and will never set foot there, let alone give them money to buy more weapons. These and others have very little influence as the great bulk of Israeli Jews and probably most in the diaspora have embraced a hybrid religious, political and racist movement called zionism. This has the form of a cult. As it stands today, zionism is a project directed at expanding the borders of the Jewish state to the limits described in their mythology:

Deut. 28:1. Now it shall come to pass, if thou shalt hearken diligently unto the voice of the Lord thy God, to observe and to do all His commandments which I command thee this day, that the Lord thy God will set thee high above all nations of the earth. 2 And all these blessings shall come upon thee and overtake thee, if thou shalt hearken unto the voice of the Lord thy God.

That’s all pretty clear, except for two points. First, there’s no written or reliable record of this, it’s just what they believe. Modern zionists resolutely believe that they are on a mission from God to recover the lands from the Nile to the Euphrates and to clear it of all defilement, meaning unbelievers. The corollary is that they can’t stop trying to expand and drive the indigenous people off their ancient lands. They also believe that withdrawing from any conquered land or handing it back represents the most grievous of all sins, rejecting God. So they will not hand it back. This matches perfectly with the inherent human drive to dominate others at any cost. But here comes the second point: yes, their mythology says they had a contract with God which would give them all this land but a contract is a contract, it goes both ways:

Deut. 28: 15 But it shall come to pass, if thou wilt not hearken unto the voice of the Lord thy God, to observe to do all his commandments and his statutes which I command thee this day; that all these curses shall come upon thee, and overtake thee: 16 Cursed shalt thou be in the city, and cursed shalt thou be in the field ... (rest of the curses here)

That is what is called the consideration in the contract: I will do this for you but, in consideration, you will do this for me; if you don’t, here’s the penalty. This particular contract, known as a covenant but it’s the same thing, therefore becomes: “All this I will give to you if you obey my law.” That is the consideration the Jews must pay. Now obviously the modern zionists have jumped for joy at this but then some party pooper looked at the laws and found there are 613 of them, including the well-known Ten Commandments (of which Henry Mencken said: “Say what you like about the Ten Commandments, you can’t beat the fact that there were only ten of them”). That’s a lot to remember, and they’re pretty onerous. In fact, they’re so onerous that it’s quite possible that no living Jew today keeps to all of them. Certainly, zionists don’t because one of the rules says “Thou shalt not kill.” Another says adulterers should be stoned to death but Messrs Weinstein and Epstein somehow escaped that fate, perhaps because they were rich.

So it has happened that the zionists pick the bits from their Bible that suit them, ignore lots of others (“Thou shalt not destroy fruit trees,” a favourite hobby of settlers on their cowardly pogroms), and have work-arounds for the rest. How do they slip out of killing a quarter of a million Palestinians in Gaza? Simple: Palestinians are not actually human. They’re animals in human form so they can be killed as easily as we kill a rat. Jewish souls come from heaven, goyim (unbelievers) come from the satanic sphere so they’re fair game for Hellfire missiles. How do they account for the Hannibal doctrine, that killed hundreds of Jews on October 7^th? I haven’t seen a justification for this but I’m sure a rabbi could be found who would devise one. By this means, the original religion of Judaism has been dumped in favour of a heretical version of it.

Another rule says “No idols” but the land has assumed the role of an idol. Similarly, the general thrust of many of the rules is against anything that would constitute criminal behaviour, e.g. theft. However, driving people off their land and annexing it, as in Gaza, the Golan Heights and the West Bank, is theft, as is looting by Israeli troops in Lebanon. Because the goal of zionism is to take other people’s land, zionism is a criminal enterprise. It is an heretical, idolatrous, criminal cult but the trouble is, it has found common cause with the christian heresies spreading and financed from the US. There are now millions of people who call themselves “christian zionists,” a contradiction of terms, who actively support genocide and other crimes against humanity. As Blaise Pascal said, “Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.” Even though they don’t pull the triggers or drop the bombs that incinerate children, zoinist gpyim support it and pay for it, so they’re as guilty as though they were doing it themselves. In the process, they have forgotten that Christianity started as a revulsion against Judaism, which had become degenerate. So has Christianity. Granted, there is a lot of argument about just what happened 2000 years ago [1] but there’s no argument over the central message of the Nazarene:

Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God (Matt.5:9).

The good news is that all cults eventually either die out or moderate. The bad news is that they kill a lot of people in the process.

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1. Zuesse Eric (2012). Christ’s Ventriloquists: the event that created Christianity. Hancock, MI: Hyacinth Books.

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My critical works are best approached in this order:

The case against mainstream psychiatry:

McLaren N (2024). Theories in Psychiatry: building a post-positivist psychiatry. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. Amazon (this also covers a range of modern philosophers, showing that their work cannot be extended to account for mental disorder).

Development and justification of the biocognitive model:

McLaren N (2021): Natural Dualism and Mental Disorder: The biocognitive model for psychiatry. London, Routledge. At Amazon.

Clinical application of the biocognitive model:

McLaren N (2018). Anxiety: The Inside Story. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. At Amazon.

Testing the biocognitive model in an unrelated field:

McLaren N (2023): Narcisso-Fascism: The psychopathology of right wing extremism. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. At Amazon.

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