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I’ve run into this “Everybody worships” BS before. This is only true by redefining the word broadly to make your point. He may not be wrong about the history of cults, but he lost before he started by spouting that nonsense.
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For a glide in my stride…
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I think that Humans are just unsuspecting little children that roam this beautiful planet in search of, oh wait, that’s the same thing…
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Whereas of course we are all enlightened freethinkers!
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I am extremely intelligent because i know im dumb
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If it weren’t for my own pesky set of morals and ethics, being a hard-grifting narcissistic cult leader would be a great gig. It’s clearly not difficult, and way easier than “honest” work.
/s, in case that weren’t obvs.
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I think that is dead on in a lot of situations. People want to belong - to family, friends, like minded people (i.e. BoingBoing as @Atlas indicated). But when you are alone / scared / hurt you are more susceptible to the freaking @*!$ predators.
And the promise of something better beyond this life or that we are really in the know can be very intoxicating.
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Ok, let me put this another way… do you think of me as a “damaged lonely and isolated” then? Because I had a dysfunctional family. I think it’s perilously close to putting the onus for victimization on hard-to-quantify intrinsic characteristics in the victims, which are often assumptions and particularly prone to bias.
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He was expecting you (everyone) to raise your hand on that one. And his history is, if not wrong, not completely right either, This struck me as a culty take on cults.
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As Sir Terry put it at the end of Hogfather…
@Death: Then take the universe and grind it down the to the finest powder, and sieve it through the finest sieve, and then show me one atom of justice, one molecule of mercy… and yet, you try to act like there is some ideal order in the world, as if there is some rightness in the universe, by which it may be judged…
Susan: But people have to got to believe that or what’s the point…?
DEATH: You need to believe in things that aren’t true… or else how can they become.
it’s the exact same BS that people say about women (and never about men) who do various forms of sex work… Fuck that.
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This is what happens when TPTB actively endeavor to make a society as ignorant and complacent as possible, as a means of control.
Eventually that society loses its ability to reason and its sense of self preservation.
In one way or another, that describes a vast majority of all humanity… and yet most of us still don’t end up as part of a cult.
O_o
Sadly, it’s not nearly so simple a problem as ‘people are fools and even more people are opportunists.’
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“Sex work is dangerous!”
And why is that, guys?
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Sounds like a cult . . .
Oh…
Anyway, I don’t have time to watch yet another video, but I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that those of us laboring delusionally in a capitalist system that purports to be an egalitarian democracy, nor under the delusion of say, this or that form of nationalist exceptionalism, should spend much time declaring that we know why “damaged” others end up in “real” cults. 
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Indeed; it’s the infrastructure of the society we live in which is ‘broken’, and most people just adapt to it as best they can and muddle through.
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Yeah, I don’t think it’s that people are too gullible, too stupid, or too willing to follow a charismatic leader and believe in whatever they say. I think that too many people get off on being the leader or being high up in a charasmatic leader’s organization, and on the abuse of that power to deliberately deceive, brainwash, and indoctrinate people into becoming their unwilling followers.
I had a friend in high school whose older brother, on inheriting a six figure sum for the workplace death of his father, was sucked into $cientology, and was broke inside of 6 months, then assigned to a scut job in one of their compounds to earn them even more money. He escaped by walking away, literally as he couldn’t afford transport, then begging his mom to send a cab via collect call, living in her basement while he recovered and got his life back. I can’t blame him for that – that’s entirely on the predators and conmen who set up that system.
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Right? We live in a culture that prizes brutality and hierarchy, while proclaiming itself highly egalitarian and a meritocracy, in part to make the white dudes feel entirely justified at their unearned positions in this world. There is plenty of worship of the capitalist system that people believe is just a form of rational thinking. But in reality, a belief in the markets as a levelling force for good is just as much a cult as a belief in a guru. It’s all built on “faith” that if we just release the market forces and stop trying to regulate it, all would work out as intended… But as Leonard Cohen said…
Everybody knows the fight was fixed
The poor stay poor, the rich get rich
That’s how it goes
Everybody knows
The Concrete Blonde version…
Jinx!
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Truer were words were still never spoken.
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I say we worship LC like a god! 
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