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It seems possible to me that there are just as many cults as they're used to be, but the novelty of them has worn off and our society simply doesn't care about them or write about them as much as we used to. Certainly a lot of what was written about cults in the 1980s looks like moral panic now.

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Jun 24, 2021Liked by Roger’s Bacon

I think "born again" Christianity raised it's game in the 1970s and took over the market. Although some of these groups are dangerous and coercive, the idea of "by grace alone" rules out anyone telling you that you are going to hell because you displeased them.

When I was in college in the early 1990s I was impressed with the the first edition of "Snapping" by Conway and Siegelman. Two decades later I was thinking... Boy that issue isn't salient any more, but the 2nd edition which came out soon after I read the 1st talked about the Heaven's Gate and Shinrikyo Aum which were on another level in terms of being deadly.

I wonder if today cult mind control technology is applied to coercive organizations that have a different appearance, such as Jeff Epstein's sex gang.

Last weekend I was doing Sidha development in town and was convinced that people who are "receptive" have a clear mark you can see if you cultivate the ability but made little progress towards the goal. I walked across the street and ran into somebody, I wound up talking all sorts of things, including my work. I said, "yeah, this is something a cult recruiter would find useful" and then I realized... he was a cult recruiter.

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Jan 19, 2022·edited Jan 19, 2022Liked by Roger’s Bacon

Would it be possible that this "cult deficit" corresponds to the popular wellbeing curve from Peter Turchin (where it started post 1930s and peaked at 1960s)? This would also imply that mass religion was caused by "elite overproduction" between the 1870s and 1930s? If this trends continues there is going to be a new mass religion between 1990s and 2050s, peaking at 2020s (now). The satire of "church of woke" and "fauci-ism" would have an inkling of merit. https://peterturchin.com/age-of-discord/

A secondary weird point is that it corresponded to a change in:

- the economic system from asset-backed to fiat, stagnation of wages, and increased inequality https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/

- change in sexual dynamics (no fault divorces, out-of-wedlock births, oral contraception, 2nd wave feminism)

- ideological polarization and abstraction, increase in discussion of "critical theory", educational decline coupled with inflation

- delayed births (which increases chances of children being gender nonconforming)

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Maybe cults got monopolized by only the biggest and most well-connected cults?

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As one who was present at ground zero in the year one of the stone age (i.e., the Haight-Ashbury in 1967, to which I cam as an anthropological observer) I can testify that lysergic acid more than anything else acts as a cultural solvent, dissolving the numerous ways that our perceptions of the world we grow up in have been conditioned by culture. Indeed, so widespread was the use of LSD among elite college students at the time, I hypothesize that it was probably the single biggest factor leading to the emergence of the phenomenon of wokeness throughout elite institutions today, half a century later, in which everything that Western culture and civilization has traditionally stood for is pitched overboard.

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Some smaller ideas on "Death of Axial Age Religions" and "Big Gods" being similar to reserve currency rotation: https://megatherion.substack.com/p/the-new-axial-age/comment/7056223

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