How do you know if you’re in a cult?
That’s the question I turn to often. A clear-thinking mind is a terrible thing to waste and yet so many do. Why? They get distracted and led down intellectual cul de sacs.
Re-watching the Netflix series Wild, Wild Country (2018) I was struck by how smart so many of the cult adherents seemed. Or, at least very nerdy. Sure, some of them were loopy but there were engineers and build they sure did. 1
Before that weird Indian lady started conducting bioterrorism (before fleeing to Switzerland) or they started mass importing the homeless to sway the vote in their rural Oregon county, why it seemed like the cult compound might have been a nice place to spend a weekend or a month or even a year or two in your misspent twenties. You might even start a tech company à la Steve Jobs and Robert Friedland’s apple farm.
There were no children and therefore no future — that’s always how they get you — so I suppose it had to end. You can’t have free love for forever. Eventually you’ve got to pay for it. If you’re lucky you get to pick the currency.
Few cults come at you with the claim that they’re actually going to make your life worse off and drain you of your time and money and energy. If you knew that all your toil was going to lead to Osho — the guru behind the Rajneeshi movement — owning 93 Rolls Royces, well, who would join?
Instead, they offer you what they say is the Truth. Enlightenment now! Transcendence!
But in the end, they ultimately always deliver what you really want — permission to engage in your vices. Naturally the Eli Cohens or Jeffrey Epsteins of the world are there to record everything you’re up to. Your vice becomes the means by which you are controlled. And make no mistake: every cult has some sort of tie in to a rival intelligence service and every cult promises liberation while delivering control.
A friend notes that dear old Hugh Hefner might have been an op and points me to this tidbit in Newsweek about the show.
"The Playboy Mansion was known for being a debaucherous environment where people visited to indulge in a number of vices. So the fact that there were cameras and microphones everywhere in the mansion, even on the bodies of the staff, put many in compromising situations.
It's alleged that Hefner would invite members of the media to parties at the mansion, catch them in the act, and blackmail them later to better shape Playboy's image in the public eye." [Emphasis mine.]
Epstein had an island where he’d take you and you could be free to behave badly. He took it literally but the metaphor is real and designed to separate you from everyone else and give you a safe space to act out.
Epstein’s island recalls the old Pinocchio story about the Land of Toys. (In the Disney version it’s called Pleasure Island but I prefer the original.)
At first glance the Land of Toys appears as a fantastic haven for naughty children to do as they wish without fear of recrimination. You can do anything and say anything. You’re free to be whatever you want to be.
Alas, soon the real purpose of the Land of Toys is revealed. By inducing your vices you are turned into a beast. The children are turned physically into donkeys, or literally asses, and sold off into bestial, backbreaking labor by the Coachman.
I’ve come to believe that the Land of Toys as depicted in The Adventures of Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi is real. And let’s be honest it’s probably in Miami.
After all haven’t you been told that that’s where all the cool people wind up? No, the decision to move to Florida — no income taxes thanks to its constitution — has absolutely nothing to do with the decision. These tech magnates are just concerned about the governance issues in California. That’s why they only move to zero tax states.
And so it was with the nerd party thrown this past month in Miami called Hereticon. It promised to get weird and weird it did. For all the critiques about Peter Thiel, let it be said that he throws a party.
Grimes — Elon Musk’s baby mama — was there! So too was Liv Boree, the strange girlfriend of Igor Kurganov, the Russian-Jewish poker who inexplicably runs the richest man in the world’s charity.
Why there was even a surprise wedding there.
How do you know if you’re in a cult?
At least there weren’t mass weddings. Maybe next year…
Gotta pace yourself before you go full Moonie.
The calendar for Hereticon was posted by Mike Solana, who serves as a kind of online emissary of Founders Fund.
Let’s review the participants at Hereticon and ask the obvious questions.
Is it really revolutionary to talk about the oldest profession? Reading about Aella’s past I can’t help but feel sort of sad for her.
Is it wise to change the Earth by terraforming it? See the plot of the new sci fi book by Neal Stephenson.
On what basis is Bret Weinstein, whose brother Eric is a likely Israeli agent, even remotely qualified to assess America’s covid response? He’s a failed biologist from Evergreen State.
Why have the longevity companies surrounding failed so spectacularly?
Why is there no discussion of the role genetics play in longevity?
What was the deal with Aubrey de Grey’s weird connections with the Russians? To what extent was the campaign against him a cynical play to get more money?
Why did Christian Angermayer, who is clearly the Russian money conduit into Europe, cut a deal with Wirecard and SoftBank? Wirecard is now under investigation as a money laundering front.
Is it wise to be pushing LSD in the United States when we have an explosion of homelessness? Why do the Russians seem to push it?
What’s the relationship between Christian Angermayer and Ambassador Ric Grenell? Is it normal to throw events for foreigners at the American Embassy in Berlin?
Is tattooing and piercing even a vice when a little under half of people under 40 have done it? Sure, I’m sure it’ll annoy your Jewish grandma but you’ll be alright if you get a little ink though would you really put a bumper sticker on a Ferrari?
Is it a good idea to be encouraging people to own guns that are 3D printed? Why do the Russians encourage gun ownership in the US but not in Russia?
Isn’t this natalism stuff old hat? Genomic Prediction was started in 2016 and well underway. Sure, it’s nice to pretend that a lot of women will have kids through IVF — corporate America increasingly offers services to freeze their female employees’ eggs — but the best way is still the old fashioned way. But I don’t exactly recommend marrying a woman you meet in Miami.
Is Geoffrey Miller simply looking for an excuse for leaving his older wife? There’s not a lot of evidence for that polygamous or polyamorous lifestyle leads to stability. In fact there’s quite a bit it leads to warfare.
Isn't it pretty well established that hypnosis is real? How is this even controversial? There’s a genetics literature establishing a link to hypothesis.
All of these questions are really about the underlying questions: How does any of this help really advance scientific inquiry? How does any of it make America strong?
This is deviancy masquerading as sophistication. The apotheosis of this sort of degeneracy is called “Burning Man” where the Man is burned in effigy. Could you get anymore obvious?
It’s a dead end if taken seriously so you’re supposed to take it ironically. Or so they say. It’s hard to keep up and if you don’t get it, well, you weren’t cool enough to get it. Even the nerds have hierarchy.
We wanted flying cars but we got Miami Vice.
Why?
Was it all fake?
“Cool By Association” as explained in 10 Things I Hate About You (1999).
Among the many things I learned in high school was this — nerds are tolerated only to the extent that they are useful. You get to be cool by association when you do the jock’s homework but the homework must always get done. As in high school, so too in real life. Many of us build a career of it. Who do you think writes all those executive orders anyway? You think The Donald dusts off that gold Sharpie and gets to composing?
Now I’m somewhat seditious here. As personality usually sets around age 13 or so, I’m generally of the view that high school never ends.
Bowling for Soup had it right back when I was in high school several millennia ago.
…And the only thing that matters
Is climbing up that social ladder
Still care about your hair and the car you drive
Doesn't matter if you're 16 or 35Reese Witherspoon, she's the prom queen
Bill Gates, captain of the chess team
Jack Black, the clown,
Brad Pitt, the quarterback
Seen it all before,
I want my money back!
It’s when we try to be other than what we were in high school that disaster often strikes. This is a natural order to the world and I don’t rebel against it.
The technological economy has preferred the autistic mind to all others. Machines are simply autism applied. The pattern seekers, to borrow a phrase. For nerds abstract things are a useful way of viewing the world. The stereotype of the autistic, rule following nerd has something to it.
We’ve discussed the seduction of spiritual opium a.k.a. video games already and how they take over a certain mind.
Religion is the opiates of the masses, we’re told falsely by the Marxists, but consistency and dogmatism is the drug of choice of the self-stylized libertarians (and for the Marxists, for that matter). How comforting it must be to believe their nostrums!
Real life is contradictory and confusing. There are no hard and fast rules and we’re all playing tennis without a net. There is no country club, no secret room where all the decisions are made.
A life dedicated to thought and action develops prudence and self mastery, and maybe, at scale, a statesman or two.
It’s nice to believe in a libertarian order but it’s a childish world view, an oxymoron.
So often our libertarian friends sell us license rather than liberty but we all know this is sociopathy masquerading us ideology. It’s a cover for a personality flaw, an excuse to do the depraved. Even Reason Magazine knows it.
Here’s Ronald Bailey talking about it:
So what did the study find to be the basis of libertarian moral thinking? It will not surprise Reason readers that the study found that libertarians show (1) stronger endorsement of individual liberty as their foremost guiding principle and correspondingly weaker endorsement of other moral principles, (2) a relatively cerebral as opposed to emotional intellectual style, and (3) lower interdependence and social relatedness.
These poor libertarian souls! It makes it easy for them to fall prey to their vices and for them to get compromised and ultimately played.
Is libertarianism a weapon?
Consider that Russian spy Marina Butina penetrated the National Rifle Association and Russia had banned most guns. Consider that Russia and China ban cryptocurrency but push its use to de-dollarize the world. Consider that a world of no taxes and no government is a defenseless one. To borrow from Abraham Lincoln "government should do for people only what they cannot do better by themselves, and no more.” Well, the people can’t invade by themselves can they?
I attended a Cato Institute fundraiser in 2011 at this swanky establishment in Oregon. What surprised me was just how many foreigners there were who wanted to donate to Cato. In addition to the true believers there were Russians, Venezuelans, and “overseas Chinese.”
Perhaps I ought not to have been so surprised.
Consider the Koch brothers, whose patriarch Fred Koch, supposedly started out as a hater of the Old Soviet Union notwithstanding his willingness to take their money for his business.
Daniel Schulman, author of Sons of Wichita: How the Koch Brothers Became America's Most Powerful and Private Dynasty (2014), discusses how Fred Koch got his start. It’s worth reproducing these pages for you to read. I’ve added a few of my thoughts in between the pages.
Around this time the Soviet Union became a petrostate and it never stopped being one. When Ronald Reagan and Gorbachev met they discussed the efforts by the Reagan-Bush team to convince Third World countries and the Middle East to keep pumping to drive down those high prices. The Kochs helped build the infrastructure that had made the Soviet Union strong.
I have become more or less convinced that this supposed anti-communism is the coverup for the oil technology transfer crime.
You could always just not do the deal with the country that hates us, couldn’t you? Apparently not. We see this today with all the tech transfer that took place with China or with other countries.
What’s interesting is that there is seemingly very little evidence for the views of Jerome Livschitz beyond Fred Koch’s description, starting in 1960. He was allegedly shot in 1936 in the Trotskyite purges.
Was Livschitz a creation of Fred Koch altogether? A sort of stand in for all the horrors that communism presented? We don’t know. He was shot and killed (supposedly or conveniently) so we can’t ask him and there doesn’t seem to be much online (or really anywhere) on him.
No matter: The elder Koch went on to give a series of anti-Communism lectures and wrote a book— all of which called for the US to withdraw from the world and, of course, net benefitting the Soviet Union who could come to dominate these institutions.
Was Koch bribed by the Soviet Union into his libertarianism and into developing the John Birch Society, where he served as a founding member from 1958 until his death in 1967?
After the crime, the cover up. Behind every great fortune is a great crime. The Koch crime is their willingness to work with the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. I wonder: should the Kochs be forced to pay reparations for this involvement?
Whilst the FBI and CIA had penetrated the American communist movement the Russians penetrated the anti-Communist movement. And now the Chinese penetrate the anti-Chinese efforts in America. (America did plenty of this sort of thing, too, to be sure.)
History is suggestive. The through line from the very compromised Senator Joe McCarthy who palled around with Roy Cohn to Donald Trump could not be clearer. Anti-communism begat libertarianism begat mobocracy — all of which favored the Russian state. The net end of all three is a weaker American state. As there are only really three countries — AUKUS (America, UK, and Australia), China, and Greater Russia— such a weakening can only wind up benefitting the Chinese or Russian polities.
The Kochs aren’t alone in cozying up to the Soviet Union. Whether it’s the Lauder family ties to the Russians, or the Hammer family ties to the Russians, or the Mercer ties to the Russians, or the Musk family ties to the Russians, or the Mellon ties to the Russians, or the Rockefeller ties to the Russians (which apparently persist), it’s all more or less the same. To be permitted to do business in Russia you become a creature of the Russians. This is how it has been and will be forever thus. Even the Nobel family was tied in with the Russians. (Really makes you think about what the Nobel Prize was all about, doesn’t it?)
What then should we make of Donald Trump’s early visits to the Soviet Union?
“When you say you are a libertarian you’re revealing that you’re a loser,” says Peter Thiel.
Or perhaps a traitor.
How shall we think of Sebastian Kurz, the disgraced Austrian chancellor who travels on the jets of sanctioned oligarchs, going to work for Peter Thiel?
Did the Soviet occupation of Austria ever really end if they are so dependent on Russian gas?
Could this chart reveal an answer?
Wikipedia makes it clear. The Rajneeshies were a strange and not very diverse bunch.
Half of them came from California, 97 percent were white, 25 percent were Jewish and 85 percent belonged to the middle and upper-middle classes. Almost two-thirds had university degrees and viewed themselves as "successful in worldly terms." Three-quarters had previously been involved in some therapy and more than half had previously experimented with another spiritual group. In 1984 the average age of members of the Rajneesh movement was 34; 64 percent of the followers had a four-year college degree.