[FRIAM] cults

[Steve Smith]

Glen -

A fascinating question as usual and I appreciate the extra background 
you offer below.  I've contemplated your central conundrum ("the 
apparent contradiction between fascism and individuality") for most of 
my life, both from the inside and the outside.

I was raised among the ?natural? individualism which comes from 
rural/frontier culture where the value of autonomous agency and 
independence had obvious value while at the same time, the ability to 
engage in short and long-term cooperative/collective endeavors could  
magnify and leverage those advantages.  There was a dynamic tension...

As I moved into more and more urbanized and collectivized contexts 
(cities, regional industrial contexts, university, professional 
organizations, scientific institutions, etc.) I felt there was an 
illusion of advantage given to participation in the shared 
identity/values implied but it was somewhat enforced by 
in-group/out-group logic which (dis)advantaged (non) participation.

With a little perspective of age/hindsight, I realize now that it was 
not nearly so simple, and that there were in fact plenty of *advantages* 
(carrots) to subsuming my identity, my will, my agency, my ideations to 
"the collective", not just alienation and punishment (sticks) for 
failing to participate or at least "pass"...

I now live somewhat by the assumption/belief that my "self" is something 
of a contrived illusion, but an autopoetic one. Somehow, it seems that 
the emergence of self-awareness on top of basic consciousness promotes a 
strong identity boundary with an acute self-other response at many 
levels (from the immune system to systemic racism to rabid 
nationalism).  My main way of resolving this is through the pop-Buddhist 
alone/all-one duality reflection and a sense of soft, multi-scale 
scoping of "self".

I know you have expressed an allergy to poetry but for others (or my own 
virtue-signal satisfaction) here is one I literally was writing for 
entirely different purposes which I think is perhaps relevant:

    The Autopoetic Self

        /Crafting the self's essence,//
        //a mental festival, an inner dance,//
        //clouds of consciousness,
        fossilized memories//revisited and refreshed.
        //
        The self, a story shaped, constantly askew.
        For the self to survive,
        it must paradoxically,
             dance the /danse macabre/' *

        *(pronounced Mac-Abrey for the purposes of this poem)
        /

    Steve Smith, October 2023

On 10/1/23 7:36 AM, glen wrote:
> It's been awhile since I've run across a new-to-me cult. But 09A 
> certainly qualifies as a meaty one:
>
> https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/sep/28/new-york-satanic-cult-764-fbi 
>
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_of_Nine_Angles
> https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1057610X.2023.2195065
>
> I can't reconcile the apparent contradiction between fascism and 
> individuality. I guess the closest some analysts come is to suggest 
> that they're only aligning with the fascists, for now, to bring about 
> the end of the current aeon and the colonization of the galaxy.

>
> I guess it reminds me of the "no enemies to the [right|left]" 
> rhetoric: 
> https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/sep/30/conservative-christopher-rufo-florida-twitter-debate
>
> But otherwise, O9A's ... "beliefs and structure" seem incoherent 
> enough to write them off as just too stupid to care about. However one 
> author nailed it in saying that there are plenty of both 
> impressionable and antisocial people using the internet, susceptible 
> to the "sinister" allure, to cause real damage.
>
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