Inside Hugh Jackman’s Weird Cult
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Recently, the actor Hugh Jackman made the gossip rag headlines for performing a song and dance routine at the 95th birthday party of Logan Roy…sorry, I mean Rupert Murdoch. I must have been confused by the “Logan” part. Anyway, a lot of people were shocked and appalled at this: after all, Rupert Murdoch is, well, evil! Legitimately evil. He’s the reason we no longer have a functional free press in the United States, and the United Kingdom, and Australia. Possibly Canada? I’m honestly not sure and it’s too depressing to check for a video where he is only a side character.
Because the real story here is Hugh Jackman, who for the past several decades has managed to build up a reputation as a very good looking, very talented actor as well as a fun, easygoing guy. He sings and dances! He does pranks with his best friend Ryan Reynolds! He was married to the same lady for twenty years! Um, almost. And did I mention that he is very good looking? He is! So why is he debasing himself at a party in honor of this soulless melting lump of silly putty?
It’s simple: because Hugh Jackman sucks shit. I know, I’m sorry. I’m not happy about it either but it’s best I just rip that bandaid off as soon as possible.
I’m not even kidding, this was pretty tough for me to accept, too. Okay, so I do tend to have zero inclination towards celebrity worship and I’m never all that surprised when famous rich people turn out to be giant turds, but I did grow up as a MEGA FAN of Wolverine. I read every X-Men, Uncanny X-Men, Wolverine, and yes, even fucking Alpha Flight, “Marvel’s premier Canadian superhero team akin to America’s Avengers,” according to their Wikipedia page. They had their own Sasquatch! He was named Sasquatch.
So even though I knew that Wolverine should have been a smelly five-foot-three walking mohair sweater with claws, I was very pleased to have someone who looked and acted like Hugh Jackman take on the iconic role, and I thought he did a great job in pretty much every movie, but especially Logan and its criminally underrated precursor, The Wolverine.
But! We cannot let such artistic triumphs stand in the way of a cold, rational take on a person’s integrity. And so, yeah, I’m sorry but literally singing and dancing for Rupert fucking Murdoch permanently removes you from the “Good Person” list. I mean, if you’re a millionaire, that is. I won’t hold it against the homeless orphans that Murdoch steals off the streets who are forced to perform numbers from “Annie” in between sessions where they have their blood siphoned for Peter Thiel’s patented Immortality Machine. Those kids can still go to heaven. Once they’re ground into a paste to be fed to the Bengal tigers chained up in Murdoch’s basement.
While reading about this news story, I happened across a comment stating that Jackman attended and performed at Murdoch’s birthday party not JUST because they are both extremely wealthy Australians with less moral fiber than one of those killer robot dogs from Boston Dynamics, but also because they’re in a CULT together. Interesting! So I looked into that allegation and while I could not find any evidence that Rupert Murdoch is in a cult–rarely does the guy who makes a cult end up in a different one–but I DID find evidence that Hugh Jackman is in one. So I figure, hey, let’s talk about that.
In 2006, Jackman was interviewed by Oprah Winfrey for her magazine. “I read that you’ve been studying at the School of Practical Philosophy since 1991,” Oprah said.
“Yes,” Jackman replied. “The school began in London in 1938 with a group of men and women who saw the world heading for disaster—World War II. They were asking, “How do we share this planet? What is natural law for humans?” Capitalism is a wonderful idea, but it isn’t a cure-all. So this nondenominational group of people wanted to get together, find the truth, then apply it. Now the school is all over the world.”
Now, there are a few problems with Jackman’s answer. For a start, no, capitalism is not in fact “a wonderful idea.” I think at this point it’s pretty clear that it is a terrible idea that has led to unimaginable misery and death and the destruction of our entire planet!
You might think that his praise of capitalism is just a weird non sequitur in the midst of discussing his school of philosophy, but in fact it is actually quite on point. Because the “School of Practical Philosophy” was not, as Jackman claims, founded by “a group of men and women” who “wanted to get together, find the truth, then apply it” to save the world from disaster. For a start, no women were involved at all. I know, you’re shocked. It was actually founded by this handsome devil, a British politician named Andrew MacLaren, and his son Leon, and they called it “The Henry George School of Economics.” Henry George was an American economist who was, in fact, a pretty cool dude: he saw that rich people were buying up all the land and continuing to get wealthier off this finite resource while poor people led shittier and shittier lives, so he argued that people should own the value they produce but money made off the land and natural resources belongs to everyone, and thus taxing landowners more heavily could entirely fund the government and maybe even pay us all a nice little basic income. He also argued that we can scientifically deduce the most ideal economic policies by comparing and contrasting different societies, making hypotheses and testing them in different conditions.
So far so good, right? Some economists wanted to get together and discuss this one guy’s ideas for combating poverty. Zero red flags. Well, a few years later, Leon took over the organization from his dad, and he changed the focus to “the study of natural laws governing the relations between men in society,” dropping Henry George from the title and going with simply the “School of Economic Science,” which it remained until 2019.
So why did Oprah and Jackman call it the “School of Practical Philosophy” in 2006? Simple: because by that point, it had grown into an international organization that went under different names in different locations in order to hide what it actually was. Oh, there’s the red flag! I found it! To be less confusing, for the most part I’m going to refer to this cult as “the School” or “SES” for “School of Economic Sciences.”
Content retrieved from: https://skepchick.org/2026/03/inside-hugh-jackmans-weird-cult/.
