I’ve started listening and it’s very interesting … I highly recommend it!

http://cultish.org/

Michael C, is this what you were searching for on Saturday?

Everyone else can ignore this post.

When I created this blog, I was unburdening myself of cult secrets. Now, I’ve released my cult days out of the cult closet. Friends know. Family knows. Colleagues and co-workers know. Laying down those burdens benefited me in endless ways; for starters, when you have no secrets, secret groups have nothing to hold over you. In a future post, I will outline the benefits further.

This post is about the liabilities of secret-keeping. “School” secrets damaged my mind, my psychology and my relationships — collateral damage, to be dismissed as “only life things”. Keeping “school” secrets benefits the mysterious Queen Sharon at the expense of everyone else. Ironically, many Boston-branch “students” aren’t told of Queen Sharon. They have no idea that their every thought and breathe is meant to be serve her, everything else be damned.

When it comes to cults, this is standard fare. Cults foster circles within circles, or as “school” likes to call it, “worlds within worlds” …  The outer circles — in “school’s” case, the “younger classes” — don’t know about the mysterious “inner circles”. Many in the Boston branch don’t know about New York. Many in New York don’t know about Boston. The “classes” within these two cities, don’t know about each other. The word is that this cult has a branch in Germany. Who knows how many branches full of “students” that don’t know about each other exist in other “invisible locations”.

This intentional lack of transparency keeps all in the dark about the cult life to come. “Students” are unwittingly participating in a bizarre system of deception, beginning with this requirement:  “it’s very important that you don’t tell any one about this … it’s private — just for you”.  Membership seeds in secrecy.

That secrecy grows like a weed. That first little lie (or, cough, clever insincerity) snakes out and spreads through your life, in concert with the length of your tenure, leaving a wake of damaged relationships behind. Collateral Damage includes Friends. Family. Marriages. Relationships with children. Jobs. Colleagues. Co-workers. After all they are “only life things” …  you know.

All cults require secrecy to greater & lesser degrees. Recently a friend with whom I’d shared my illustrious cult days said: “Secrets are a cancer to our souls and the collateral damage is extraordinary.” 

That’s why I plan to keep spreading the word; this is not just about my little mom & pop cult. The collateral damage extends far beyond. In October, I met a group of mothers whose 20-something children had been sucked into various destructive groups. These mothers were desperately seeking real help (as  opposed to “help”) and finding that resources were few & far between; some of them faced legal threats, efforts to intimidate them into silence, also standard cult fare.

I know some about cults abusing the court system; “school” tried to drag me into some b.s. lawsuit in 2014. When cults employ the legal system to intimidate, the damage ripples out, impacting communities, societies, and tearing away at the fabric of democracy and free speech … paid for, of course, by our tax dollars.

These endless ironies could fill the pages of a very lengthy book. Example after example illustrate how destructive groups, such as “school”, cults, are, essentially, psychological cancer — emotional, psychological, physical malignancies that multiply and spread, leaving a wake of destruction behind. ISIS, of course, is the most extreme example at present.

My daliance with a little cult called “school” (or “the study”, or whatever the latest name) is just one example of a bigger force of destruction: destructive groups that institutionalize and justify lying by placing themselves above civilized societal norms and referring to anything external “only life things”, inferior, therefore expendable. Just collateral damage, sacrificed for the higher cause. Cults. Extremist groups. Human traffickers. Sex Traffickers. The list goes on and on. They all use the same tactics that are seeded in lies cloaked in secrecy and justified by the claim of “sacred knowledge”, “enlightenment” or some such bullshit.

For the ultimate, smelly, irony is that, inevitably, the enlightened “cause” is to make some narcissist rich. Collateral damage is simply to be expected and accepted.

Or not.