Managing the Free-Range Cult
The most basic cult technique is an assault on humanity itself.
NOTE: Within this text, wherever gender is not key to the explanation, I am using the Elverson ey/em construction of the Spivak Pronouns.
In my first essay on Medium, Use Your Words, I wrote about words and phrases that I referred to as signals. These were terms that merely identified how those in the receptive audience were to feel, and had nothing to do with conveying ideas or concepts. In the same way that a great ape may rise before the troupe, bellow out a guttural “Ooh-Ooh-Ooh” while pounding its chest and displaying its impressive scrotal sac, the Republican may cry out “communist” or “welfare queen” or “immigrant”. All of these are simply signals. When the audience hears them, they experience an intimate association: they are bound to the speaker’s “cause” (because they understand the same signals); they revere the speaker (because he is calling out a “self-evident truth” in an apparently threatening environment); and they feel the emotion appropriate to the signal (in the case of the ape, awe at the massive testicles identifying the speaker as head of the troupe).
A signal is manufactured by repeatedly associating a phrase with evocative imagery. Eventually the signal alone will yield the correct response. For example “CRT” is…
