Pick something you think will benefit others. Your first question if you're forming a cult should be: would the world be a better or worse place if everyone was as enthusiastic about this thing, as we are, or as I am? If the answer is that the world would be better, objectively, that people would indeed lead better lives if they also worshipped Tom Brady's throwing glove from the Super Bowl, then you're on a positive and harmless track.
Often, cults are manipulative psychological enterprises organized by a single charismatic individual. They're organized to seem as if the good of the group is the goal of the cult, when in actuality all activities are designed to benefit the leader of that cult. Jonestown, the Heaven's Gate, and the Manson Family are perhaps all tragic examples of this. Learn as much as possible about your obsession. If you're going to throw the word "cult" around, you better make sure you're informed about the subject you're going to hype to a group, so you don't come off as a make-believe guru, or some kind of snake-oil seller.
If you're going to form the Cult of Star Trek, you need to know a lot more than what color Spock bleeds. You need to know which episode he first bleeds in, what the significance of that color is in the greater context of the color-schema in the series, and how that affects your interpretation of Star Trek's utopian worldview.
Get reading those fan blogs. Part 2. Choose a leader. Most cults have single leaders, or they're typically called collectives. If you're the one forming the cult, it's likely that you're the leader, but you need to make sure that your cult is organized for good purposes, not for your own material gain, or purposes of power grabbing.
Cult leaders are typically charismatic and manipulative, but if you're going to form yours collectively, it's a good idea to pick someone who has the good of the group at heart. The person who wants to be the leader is the last person you should pick. Establish the rules of the cult. By what rules, concepts, and moral code will your cult organize itself? What is the ultimate goal of the cult?
How will you use Star Trek to change all your lives, and perhaps the lives of many others, for the better? What's your big message for the world? Focus especially on the issue of how you'll use this to transform your lives for the better.
The difference between a Star Trek Cult and a Star Trek Fan Club isn't necessarily the fervency of your adoration for Star Trek, but how you use that fervency to change your life. It's helpful to write up these documents, but probably leave the word "cult" off of things. You don't want to give people the wrong idea. Write up a body text. All cults have governing texts which have the virtue of being both mysteriously vague, pseudo-profound, and easy to read by a wide variety of people.
Find a place to practice or worship. Fair warning: people will probably find the idea of a cult about anything pretty strange, and you may face a lot of hostility and backlash if you're really public with your cult. It's good to have a quiet, private place where you can do the things you want to do, the way you want to do them.
If you've got a Star Trek Cult forming, it's likely you won't be doing anything much more significant at first than watching episodes, having in-depth conversations, and maybe re-enacting a scene or two, which it's perfectly possible to do from someone's living room.
If you're brave, you could try meeting in in public parks, or other places where you might attract some attention, but it might not be the kind of attention you want. Come up with a slogan. All clubs, organizations, and groups need good slogans, cults included.
It's an easy way to sum up what you do, organize around a singular idea, and keep everyone focused around the topic. Slogans should be memorable, simple, and multipartite, so they've be mysterious and vague in equal measure.
Or maybe quotes from the show: "I was born in Iowa, I only work in outer space. Bring other people in, slowly. When you meet people in public, start gradually bringing in the concepts and the obsession that you've decided to shape your life around, to start growing the group. Become an evangelist for whatever it is you've decided to adulate.
Again, you may experience hostility and a lot of resistance at first, so you should try to market the less extreme aspects of your ideas. The utopian fun of Star Trek? Good selling point. Your plans of building a galaxy class star-cruiser in a warehouse in Queens?
Maybe save that for later. Part 3. Make sure all behavior lines up with the party platform. Cults are singular. If you're going to be a full-fledged member, or even a leader, in a cult of Star Trek, you can't be messing around watching other sci-fi, or doing things that aren't in line with the noble tenants of Trek.
Make sure that you and everyone else in the group realigns your priorities to fall in line with the singular-minded concepts of the cult. Often, cults live together, communally. Consider moving into a place and giving it a name, something like, "The Enterprise. Refer to your concept as the only true idea. One way to really get people to fall into your cult head-first is to make your idea seem like the only way of answering the problems of the world.
You're not requiring simple excitement about Star Trek here, you're talking about total devotion to the transcendent power of James Kirk and Co. That means you've got to present it as the one true way. Often, this is where cults get a little manipulative. Try to have healthy discussions and debates, just be good at presenting your ideas to the group.
If other people think Star Wars has equally good merits, you need to be well-versed on the anarchy associated with a Star Wars influenced worldview. Preach it and believe it. Practice your obsession. Keep doing what you do. How you choose to let your idea change your life and the lives of others for the better will largely depend on your concept. At what point does the cult become more serious than watching re-runs of Trek and eating Cheetos? When does positive change start to occur?
Maybe you start writing all your congressmen to take the tenants of Star Trek more seriously, devoting resources and time to science and exploration, taking the equality of gender, race, species, and class more seriously, and even abandoning the ancient Earth concept of "greed. Do community outreach. Most interesting, perhaps, are the psychological components of cult life, questions such as: Who in the world would fall for that?
Humans desire comfort, and in a fearful and uncertain world many turn to cults because they tend to promote exactly that. Jon-Patrik Pedersen, a psychologist at CalTech, has pointed out that cult leaders often make promises that are totally unattainable, but also offered by no other group in society. Such things might include financial security, total health, constant peace of mind, and eternal life — the things every human desires at the deepest level.
As Dr. Adrian Furnham describes in Psychology Today , humans crave clarity. People are often surprised to learn that those who join cults are, for the most part, average people. They come from all backgrounds, all zip codes, and all tax brackets. But research done in the past two decades has found an interesting pattern: many people successfully recruited by cults are said to have low self-esteem. Cults generally do not look to recruit those with certain handicaps or clinical depression.
Psychologists have different ideas about why more women than men join cults. David Bromley of Virginia Commonwealth University points out that women simply attend more social gatherings, either religious or otherwise. This makes women statistically more likely to join groups that will ultimately victimize them.
Others suggest it has to do with the fact that women have been oppressed for much of human history. Still others write this off as total crock. Stanley H. Cath, a psychoanalyst and psychology professor at Tufts University, has treated more than 60 former cult members over the course of his career. From this unique firsthand experience, Cath has noticed an interesting trend: many people who join cults have experienced religion at some point in their lives, and rejected it.
Perhaps this is surprising, considering many cults tend to be religious — or at least claim to be. But Dr. When the aliens did not appear, some members of the group became disillusioned and immediately departed, but others dealt with their discomfiture by doubling down on their conviction.
They not only stuck with Martin but began, for the first time, to actively proselytize about the imminent arrival of the saucers. Auroville was the inspiration of Blanche Alfassa, a Frenchwoman known to her spiritual followers as the Mother.
The Mother does not appear to have had the totalitarian impulses of a true cult leader, but her teachings inspired a cultlike zealotry in her followers. When John contracted a severe parasitic illness, he refused medical treatment, too, and eventually died. Shortly afterward, Diane committed suicide, hoping to join him and the Mother in eternal life.
And, while he is appalled by the fanaticism that gripped Auroville, he is grateful for the sacrifices of the pioneers. Auroville ultimately survived its cultural revolution.
The militant frenzy of the Collective subsided, and the community was placed under the administration of the Indian government. Kapur and his wife, after nearly twenty years away, returned there to live. Kapur gives too sketchy a portrait of present-day Auroville for us to confidently judge how much of a triumph the town—population thirty-three hundred—really represents, or whether integral yoga was integral to its success. The silos of political groupthink created by social media have turned out to be ideal settings for the germination and dissemination of extremist ideas and alternative realities.
To date, the most significant and frightening cultic phenomenon to arise from social media is QAnon. According to some observers, the QAnon movement does not qualify as a proper cult, because it lacks a single charismatic leader.
Donald Trump is a hero of the movement, but not its controller. Q has not posted anything since December, but the prophecies and conspiracies have continued to proliferate.
Liberals have good reason to worry about the political reach of QAnon. We harbor a general sense of superiority to those who are taken in by cults. Some cults, including Aum Shinrikyo, have attracted disproportionate numbers of highly educated, accomplished recruits. Yet our sense that joining a cult requires some unusual degree of credulousness or gullibility persists.
Few of us believe in our heart of hearts that Amy Carlson, the recently deceased leader of the Colorado-based Love Has Won cult, who claimed to have birthed the whole of creation and to have been, in a previous life, a daughter of Donald Trump , could put us under her spell.
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