Surviving mass suicide: How Heaven’s Gate is still going strong
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Why do people believe in provably false ideas? They’re in a cult. Why do people give their lives to rich dickheads who hate their guts? They’ve found a cult leader. Why does the failure of these people and their causes only strengthen their followers’ belief in them? You guessed it, it’s because they’re in a cult. What’s more, they’re in this cult for a fairly understandable reason as well. It’s the same reason that there’s been such a massive resurgence in Astrology and witchcraft. The simple fact is that the world is basically impossible to understand at the moment.
Everything is fundamentally fucked. No one can understand anyone. Information is everywhere, yet impossible to verify. Everything that previous generations of humans have believed in has as many arguments proving its flawlessness as it has arguments completely eviscerating it, and one can never entirely trust whether either side of those arguments is acting in good faith. Confusing is underselling it, the world makes a Hieronymous Bosch painting look like a Mr Men book at the moment, and yet one day, we’ll look back at this very period where everything’s on fire as “a simpler time”.
Cult logic bypasses all of that. Cult logic is just “whatever the leader says, goes”. If it’s untrue? It’s not. If it’s unattainable, just try harder. If it directly contradicts itself, you’re just not believing hard enough. It’s like the “spa day for my brain” bit from Barbie, but with slightly more suicide. To an extent, I can’t blame people for seeking out something that makes the world easy to understand. God knows I would love some confirmation that I haven’t wasted my time by having a moral code that I’ve tried to stick to.
There are several cults I could pull from to illustrate this, but in terms of how much people will put up with in order to feel like they understand the world, few come close to Heaven’s Gate.
Read more https://dangerousminds.net/history/surviving-mass-suicide-heavens-gate/
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