Another book that provide a wealth of information on this topic is "Fantasyland - How America Went Haywire - a 500-Year History." This is a highly researched 2017 book from Kurt Anderson. The susceptibility of Americans to believing in obvious nonsense is breathtaking, and the durability of such delusions in the hard-core believers, long after the claims are thoroughly debunked and fallen out of favor, is astounding. The book is full of great nuggets - a study in the British Medical Journal sought for supportive scientific evidence of 80 randomly selected pieces of advice Dr. Oz offered on-air in 2013. More than half the time, there was none. So, the crackpot Oprah Winfrey called "America's doctor" is "a dispenser of make-believe." (I'm not sure why it took a scientific study to show this - he had psychics on his show who claimed to communicate with the dead. Any physician who referred a patient to one of these psychics would be guilty of medical malpractice.) Bizarrely, Oz is now likely to get confirmed to run Medicare and Medicaid, which, as an internal medicine physician, I find not just ludicrous, and offensive, but dangerous.
From early on I learned not to trust Oprah and the things she thrust on women in particular. She's another charlatan cult leader who has always been after money and fame. Dr. Phil and Dr. Oz are just two of her ways to suck in more people, there have been many others along the way. Look how she lives, all of her homes, etc., her school in Africa was begun to give her legitimacy (hopefully some have benefited beyond her motives), I've never read a book she recommends for the same reason. She is just a manipulative self-promoting cult leader who really doesn't care about anyone else. Americans can be duped so easily no wonder we're where we are now.
I see a connection between this piece of writing, and Josh Levs' piece, ‘Red’ America needs the truth on Trump’s fentanyl failures. The author makes the point that cults exploit people's vulnerabilities.
We need empathy to understand community vulnerabilities, such as those created by pervasive drug addiction. We must respond better than we have and empathy is one of the pathways by which to do this.
It seems empathy is in short supply. Good luck to us trying to connect with the vulnerable people we need for our Democracy to work.
The use of PILGRIM as synonym for PURITAN early in this interview makes me cautious about the book's scholarship.
Although the two groups stemmed from the same source - dissent from Church of England - there were significant differences in their practices including how they interacted with native people.
I grew up in New England; none of my grade school teachers 60+ years ago would have allowed students to make such an equivalence.
As a descendant of those early New England people, I find the idea of them being a cult an interesting insight. A generation or two after their arrival in Massachusetts, three of my ancestors were hanged for witchcraft in Salem, two of them were victims of that property grab that Arthur Miller describes in 'The Crucible' the other was just an outspoken twice widowed woman with her own money (a condition that can still get a woman in trouble). Yup, there was a cult there, one that lasted a long time.
And despite the various branches of the family pulling up stakes and moving west into Michigan and Ohio, that mindset persisted. My grandmother (born in 1902) still had most of those cult-like beliefs. I don't know how my mother (born in 1927) turned out to be a progressive liberal who requested that 'in lieu of flowers, please send a donation to Planned Parenthood,' just before she passed on 4 years ago. She is proof that cults can be overcome, but a couple of her grandchildren are MAGA-types. I guess that shows how easy it is to slip back in to those mindsets.
I think The Contrarian would benefit from someone who has left the far right Christian movement (is this part of the MAGA cult or another segment of it, or it's own cult?). Benjamin Cremer https://www.facebook.com/ben.cremer - writes some pretty amazing posts about how far the Christian right has gotten from the Bible's teachings. His posts also celebrate how the Bible teaches us to take care of all people, especially those in need.
Sounds like a fascinating read. I know the puritans had their issues, and they certainly have had a lingering effect on US culture norms. One of the core tenets of Puritanism was the importance of education. Other influences rejected Puritanism successfully, and seem to have a larger hand in our current issues. I’m thinking of the Tidewater and Deep South cultures that ruled by keeping people uneducated, poor and afraid of “others”, especially the “educated elite” of the NE. Also, who was the “charismatic leader” of the puritans? John Winthrop was the leader I most remember from history class, but he was in and out of leadership for over 20 years.
Thank you for heads up on this! I've done deep study of cults, as an amateur, since I came back from a retreat in 2010 and realized the group had turned into a cult since I last had contact with them. This book is a must read for me and should be a valuable contribution to American History.
I would see the shape of the dominant religious system, Christianity, as perpetuating the problem. There's the strong 'man' figure - god, who demanded the death of a son in order to spare people from eternal suffering. It would be important for this dynamic to be exposed and explored, so that people can begin to develop systems of the meaning of life and death from a psychologically healthy perspective. Learning how to deal with our fear is a challenge that needs to be understood.
Most of my family are MAGA cultists. We usually do not speak to one another. My parents are ancient. They only watch Fox nudes. Mother is demented, she would jump off a cliff if her husband told her. Yikes!
The British America Company were bringing people into what is now Virginia and Maryland for quiet some time before the May Flower but that is rarely understood. I had an ancestor arrive by that route in May of 1620. Six months before the Mayflower.
The first Virginia English settlement was in 1607. In the area now known as Maine, the French settled in 1604 and a short-lived English colony was established in 1607. But, yes, Plymouth gets all the press.
As much as I'd like to think of MAGA as a cult, I feel that it is instead a mass movement as defined by Eric Hoffer in 1951 in his book "The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements"
“The True Believer” and William Shirer’s “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich” are the most important books I ever read. They functioned as vaccines protecting me from the dangerous and manipulative nonsenses that now have manifested into the downward spiral of our civilization. Love and hope are all we have; will they be adequate to the task?
This is a different take on the succession of cults or groups affecting society. I still have a difficult time understanding how people can be so (dare I say it?) stupid to believe in Trump's lies and Fox News.
When everyone else appears to have abandoned you, you turn to whoever promises what you want to hear. I myself have a hard time wrapping my brain around that, but also think about how many people who are abused stick with their abuser, because the unknown is so much scarier. Or because they don’t have the resources to pursue another avenue. Our country and our government has let people down by refusing to acknowledge the problems created by wealth disparity, among other things. Now we are at a point where people aren’t educated enough to understand they are being led to slaughter.
In a world consumed by the voracious hunger of capitalism pushed to its absolute extreme, "The Owl and The Sword" novel unveils a dystopian landscape where wealth is the ultimate currency, and power is wielded by those who control it. Set in the near-future United States suffocating under the weight of corporate greed, the novel follows the harrowing journey of a group of unlikely heroes as they confront the insidious consequences of a society driven to the brink of collapse.
See “The Owl and the Sword” – a novel now available at Barnes & Noble only, not Amazon.
Another book that provide a wealth of information on this topic is "Fantasyland - How America Went Haywire - a 500-Year History." This is a highly researched 2017 book from Kurt Anderson. The susceptibility of Americans to believing in obvious nonsense is breathtaking, and the durability of such delusions in the hard-core believers, long after the claims are thoroughly debunked and fallen out of favor, is astounding. The book is full of great nuggets - a study in the British Medical Journal sought for supportive scientific evidence of 80 randomly selected pieces of advice Dr. Oz offered on-air in 2013. More than half the time, there was none. So, the crackpot Oprah Winfrey called "America's doctor" is "a dispenser of make-believe." (I'm not sure why it took a scientific study to show this - he had psychics on his show who claimed to communicate with the dead. Any physician who referred a patient to one of these psychics would be guilty of medical malpractice.) Bizarrely, Oz is now likely to get confirmed to run Medicare and Medicaid, which, as an internal medicine physician, I find not just ludicrous, and offensive, but dangerous.
From early on I learned not to trust Oprah and the things she thrust on women in particular. She's another charlatan cult leader who has always been after money and fame. Dr. Phil and Dr. Oz are just two of her ways to suck in more people, there have been many others along the way. Look how she lives, all of her homes, etc., her school in Africa was begun to give her legitimacy (hopefully some have benefited beyond her motives), I've never read a book she recommends for the same reason. She is just a manipulative self-promoting cult leader who really doesn't care about anyone else. Americans can be duped so easily no wonder we're where we are now.
I see a connection between this piece of writing, and Josh Levs' piece, ‘Red’ America needs the truth on Trump’s fentanyl failures. The author makes the point that cults exploit people's vulnerabilities.
We need empathy to understand community vulnerabilities, such as those created by pervasive drug addiction. We must respond better than we have and empathy is one of the pathways by which to do this.
It seems empathy is in short supply. Good luck to us trying to connect with the vulnerable people we need for our Democracy to work.
The use of PILGRIM as synonym for PURITAN early in this interview makes me cautious about the book's scholarship.
Although the two groups stemmed from the same source - dissent from Church of England - there were significant differences in their practices including how they interacted with native people.
I grew up in New England; none of my grade school teachers 60+ years ago would have allowed students to make such an equivalence.
The book delves more into this distinction.
As a descendant of those early New England people, I find the idea of them being a cult an interesting insight. A generation or two after their arrival in Massachusetts, three of my ancestors were hanged for witchcraft in Salem, two of them were victims of that property grab that Arthur Miller describes in 'The Crucible' the other was just an outspoken twice widowed woman with her own money (a condition that can still get a woman in trouble). Yup, there was a cult there, one that lasted a long time.
And despite the various branches of the family pulling up stakes and moving west into Michigan and Ohio, that mindset persisted. My grandmother (born in 1902) still had most of those cult-like beliefs. I don't know how my mother (born in 1927) turned out to be a progressive liberal who requested that 'in lieu of flowers, please send a donation to Planned Parenthood,' just before she passed on 4 years ago. She is proof that cults can be overcome, but a couple of her grandchildren are MAGA-types. I guess that shows how easy it is to slip back in to those mindsets.
I think The Contrarian would benefit from someone who has left the far right Christian movement (is this part of the MAGA cult or another segment of it, or it's own cult?). Benjamin Cremer https://www.facebook.com/ben.cremer - writes some pretty amazing posts about how far the Christian right has gotten from the Bible's teachings. His posts also celebrate how the Bible teaches us to take care of all people, especially those in need.
Sounds like a fascinating read. I know the puritans had their issues, and they certainly have had a lingering effect on US culture norms. One of the core tenets of Puritanism was the importance of education. Other influences rejected Puritanism successfully, and seem to have a larger hand in our current issues. I’m thinking of the Tidewater and Deep South cultures that ruled by keeping people uneducated, poor and afraid of “others”, especially the “educated elite” of the NE. Also, who was the “charismatic leader” of the puritans? John Winthrop was the leader I most remember from history class, but he was in and out of leadership for over 20 years.
Thank you for heads up on this! I've done deep study of cults, as an amateur, since I came back from a retreat in 2010 and realized the group had turned into a cult since I last had contact with them. This book is a must read for me and should be a valuable contribution to American History.
I would see the shape of the dominant religious system, Christianity, as perpetuating the problem. There's the strong 'man' figure - god, who demanded the death of a son in order to spare people from eternal suffering. It would be important for this dynamic to be exposed and explored, so that people can begin to develop systems of the meaning of life and death from a psychologically healthy perspective. Learning how to deal with our fear is a challenge that needs to be understood.
Most of my family are MAGA cultists. We usually do not speak to one another. My parents are ancient. They only watch Fox nudes. Mother is demented, she would jump off a cliff if her husband told her. Yikes!
The British America Company were bringing people into what is now Virginia and Maryland for quiet some time before the May Flower but that is rarely understood. I had an ancestor arrive by that route in May of 1620. Six months before the Mayflower.
The first Virginia English settlement was in 1607. In the area now known as Maine, the French settled in 1604 and a short-lived English colony was established in 1607. But, yes, Plymouth gets all the press.
As much as I'd like to think of MAGA as a cult, I feel that it is instead a mass movement as defined by Eric Hoffer in 1951 in his book "The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_True_Believer
“The True Believer” and William Shirer’s “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich” are the most important books I ever read. They functioned as vaccines protecting me from the dangerous and manipulative nonsenses that now have manifested into the downward spiral of our civilization. Love and hope are all we have; will they be adequate to the task?
This is a different take on the succession of cults or groups affecting society. I still have a difficult time understanding how people can be so (dare I say it?) stupid to believe in Trump's lies and Fox News.
When everyone else appears to have abandoned you, you turn to whoever promises what you want to hear. I myself have a hard time wrapping my brain around that, but also think about how many people who are abused stick with their abuser, because the unknown is so much scarier. Or because they don’t have the resources to pursue another avenue. Our country and our government has let people down by refusing to acknowledge the problems created by wealth disparity, among other things. Now we are at a point where people aren’t educated enough to understand they are being led to slaughter.
OT –
In a world consumed by the voracious hunger of capitalism pushed to its absolute extreme, "The Owl and The Sword" novel unveils a dystopian landscape where wealth is the ultimate currency, and power is wielded by those who control it. Set in the near-future United States suffocating under the weight of corporate greed, the novel follows the harrowing journey of a group of unlikely heroes as they confront the insidious consequences of a society driven to the brink of collapse.
See “The Owl and the Sword” – a novel now available at Barnes & Noble only, not Amazon.
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-owl-and-the-sword-i-craig-adler/1147181986?ean=9798317627249
Fascinating! bought the book.