A misguided description of cults that promotes cult thinking

This article is about a youtube video that attempts to explain cults. Below is the video:

DEFINITION

This was a bad video because the speaker never provided or started with a complete factual definition of what a cult was. By doing so, he was practicing cult-like propaganda behavior. For more complete definitions of “cult”, see:

1. Wikipedia
2. Websters Dictionary

If you roll up the above, you find that religion is just the worship, meaning OBEDIENCE, to the dictates of beings or leaders with superior or supernatural powers above your own. Thus, INEQUALITY is always involved. See:

Sovereignty Forms and Instructions Online, Form #10.004, Cites by Topic: “religion”

Those dictates are called “rules”, and that obedience produces economic benefit usually. That obedience wouldn’t happen unless the underlings were made to feel inferior or ignorant or inadequate, so what they are allowed to learn and know must be limited so they can be controlled. Thus, they must constantly be disparaged, abused, gas lighted, and even hazed as part of their “mental programming”. That is how military boot camp works, by the way.

Some of you might respond to our comments by saying such things as:

I felt like he did define it through describing the attributes of the leaders and how people are marked and lured in. No explicit definition but it was all there in context. I thought he did a decent job and didn’t see a propaganda angle but I am still inexperienced and naive.

We respond by saying: That’s your problem: You are relying on feelings instead of actionable facts. The characteristics of cults that he didn’t identify are important:

1. Authoritarian leader who likes to control and use people.
2. Leader is the origin of rules of conduct that implement the control. By asserting the right to make such rules, the cult leader is in effect asserting ownership and control over the members of the group as cattle or chattel or slaves.
3. Unequal relationship between the leader and the followers.
4. Comparmentalization of information between the leader and the followers to keep the followers ignorant and subserviant.
5. Familiar but undefined terms are used to control the emotions and feelings of the members to manipulate them into compliance. These terms often have multiple definitions based on the context but the context is never identified in order to promote “equivocation” that deceives the members into believing that all contexts are equivalent. See, for instance:
   Legal Deception, Propaganda, and Fraud, Form #05.014
6. Financial or commercial exploitation of the followers by the leader for the benefit of the leader. Followers are “cattle” on the leaders “farm” or plantation often.
7. Followers who ask questions to dispel the ignorance, challenge the inequality, or challenge the definition of terms used in equivocation are “excommunicated” or censured because they threaten the control or revenues of the leader.

Thus, there is idolatry towards the leader because the leader is playing or emulating God. There is no equality between the governed and the governor, which is the foundation of freedom itself according to the Supreme Court of the United States. See:

Foundations of Freedom, Form #12.021, Video 1
SLIDES: https://sedm.org/LibertyU/FoundOfFreedom-Slides.pdf
VIDEO: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ikf7CcT2I8I

APPLICATION OF THE DEFINITION

The above tactics are what Larken Rose, the creator of “The Jones Plantation” video describes as “slave think” on his Youtube channel. He did a whole series of videos on “slave think” on his channel, in fact, as practice before he filmed the Hollywood release of his animated “The Jones Plantation”:

https://www.youtube.com/@LarkenRose/videos

Everything the government does, by the way, is cult behavior that exactly replicates the above. When slavery was prevalent in this country, the above techniques were also used to control slaves.

The speaker in the video probably didn’t start with an actionable factual definition at the beginning like we always do because he felt unqualified to discuss all the characteristics of a cult and didn’t want to look like an idiot. This tendency to avoid all the details, ironically, is how cults are started! Cult leaders only tell their audience as much as they need to expose to get them to do what they want their followers to do.

PREVENTING CULTS

None of what makes a cult is possible if you start with the legal definition, cover all aspects, leave no room for compartmentalization or equivocation, and insist on equality at all times.

At least you’re humble enough to admit that there might be things you don’t know. That means you are teachable and can still grow instead of becoming a fossilized relic of the past. It also means that you won’t be victimized by Dunning-Kruger and literally become a prisoner of your own pride, presumption, and ignorance.

HOW TO DETERMINE IF AN ORGANIZATION IS NOT A CULT

Based on the previous discussion, any leader or organization which promotes any or all of the following literally CANNOT be a “cult” as defined:

1. Mission is to promote equality of treatment of ALL.
2. Mission to promote personal education and empowerment.
3. No censorship of Third rail issues or proponents of exposing them.
4. Revenue or commercial benefit is not the main goal of the organization.
5. Rules of the organization are designed to protect or benefit everyone equally, instead of only the leader or the members only.

SEDM, by the way, satisfies ALL of the above. It is therefore completely impossible for us to fit within the definition of “cult” as defined in this article. SEDM was created to eliminate ALL cults, whether religious or secular, not to create yet ANOTHER one.