Tag: desire

Religious Lies, Conmen And Coercive Control: How Cults Corrupt Our Desire For Love And Connection
CULTURE, Journalism

Religious Lies, Conmen And Coercive Control: How Cults Corrupt Our Desire For Love And Connection

Project Mayhem is an all-male cult – but unlike the real cults that Sarah Steel writes about in Do As I Say, Project Mayhem is fictitious. It comes from the mind of Chuck Palahniuk in his masterpiece novel Fight Club, a dark exploration of contemporary masculinity that describes how a group of men come together to form a fringe group with fringe ideas – and how this can go wrong. Project Mayhem exhibits many key elements of what we see in cults. In Do As I Say, Steel (creator of the podcast Let’s Talk About Sects) explores how cults usually exhibit some of the following attributes: they have unique in-group language, they require intense work schedules of members, their leaders will often deliver endless sermons, and they will restrict access to media. Members are directed not to ask que...
How Mass Shooters Pervert A Universal Desire To Make A Difference In The World – A Quest For Significance Gone Horribly Wrong
Journalism

How Mass Shooters Pervert A Universal Desire To Make A Difference In The World – A Quest For Significance Gone Horribly Wrong

Agonizing questions are being raised by the recent tragic mass shootings at a school in Texas and a supermarket in Buffalo, New York. As in the recent years’ similar acts of horror at a synagogue in Pittsburgh, a Walmart in El Paso, and a mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand, people want to know how such senseless acts of violence can even happen, why they happen so often, and whether anything can be done to stem their dreadful tide. An easy answer has been to shunt the discourse over to mental illness as the cause and in this way marginalize the problem and identify a ready, if superficial, solution to it: improving mental health. It also absolves the rest of society of responsibility to address a pernicious trend of mass shootings that between 2009 and 2020 claimed 1,363 lives in the U.S...