We Need (Much) Better Cult Leaders

Where have all the "Mad, Bad and Dangerous to Gnow" gurus gone?

If you’ve been bored and near a screen in the last couple of years, you’ve likely stumbled across one or more of those cult documentary series.

You know the ones–they kicked off with a review of the classics, Wild Country about Bhagwan/Osho, another about Heaven’s Gate. But after those look-backs, the stories we’ve been getting lately are pretty dull.

NXIVM and that mulleted wanker Keith Raniere. Basically running a retread EST/Landmark Forum multi-level marketing scam with some pervy harem business at the end.

Gwen Shamblin–the Diet for Jesus crazy lady with the Big Hair convinced that she’s the skinny Christ. (and why does their hair and makeup always get wilder the crazier they get?)

Amy Carlson–the MotherGod, a former McDonald’s burger queen who convinced her followers she was Jesus, Mary and ten thousand year old deities and died of booze and silver poisoning that turned her blue as Smurfette.

Twin Flames–two decidedly unsexy scammers who latched onto the idea of SoulMates TM and then spun up an online Lonely Hearts Club. They blithely encouraged their marks to become stalkers tracking down their twin flame. Then, when they ended up with too many sad spinster cat ladies with restraining orders, decided they needed to encourage sex changes for better Soul Mating. And oh yeah, the dude decided he was also the second coming of Christ cuz he kinda looked the same with long hair and a beard.

Throw in the QAnon Queen up in Canada ordering executions of public officials and channeling divine master plans from her janky RV and we’ve got a veritable rogues gallery of wannabe gurus.

None of them are remotely interesting, or display any signs of higher consciousness, however bent.

They all present as two-bit carnies on the hustle, who get increasingly swept up in their own megalomania.

But they’re not that structurally different than most other hustlers in the spiritual marketplace of Instagram and TikTok. It’s a matter of degree, not of kind.

They’re knock offs of knock offs.

But seriously. If we really are at the End of Days, anxiously scanning the horizons for Anti-christs, Maitreyas (the Buddhist World Teacher) and Messiahs, shouldn’t there be some stronger candidates for those leading roles?

***

We seem to be backsliding down a slippery slope. And we’re falling for less and less interesting versions of the same old story.

There are a host of reasons for this race to the bottom. But here are four that seem to be reinforcing each other these days:

Generational Amnesia: We always forget. If we didn’t we’d likely go mad with grief. Whether the pains of childbirth or the horrors of war, sometimes it’s better not to remember. “Fluidity of memory and a capacity to forget,” anthropologist Wade Davis notes, “is perhaps the most haunting trait of our species.” But this current rise of culty-cults all around us seems so much a chapter-and-verse repeat of the cautionary tales of the ‘60s and ‘70s, it’s hard to understand why we can’t seem to recognize what’s staring us in the face.

Part of that might be exacerbated by the fact that the generation rising to power and prominence right now—the Millennials—are the children of the baby boomers. And like all children individuating from their parents, they tend to assume two things—the first, that nothing their parents did could be cool, relevant, or revelatory, and the second, that anything the kids have discovered is new and has never been done before.

That’s leaving us with a wisdom gap, and we have an entire generation of echo-boomers putting it right in the same ditch, on the same hairpin turns that their parents did. Never mind the skid marks.

Instagrammers at Burning Man might not even know about Ken Kesey, the Merry Pranksters, and their original 1962 art car and Acid Tests. Ayahuasceros who first heard about the potion on a podcast might not even recognize the names of Harvard ethnobotanist Richard Evans Schultes or the Beat writer William Burroughs.

Advocates of polyamory might never have heard of Stranger in a Strange Land or the Church of All Worlds that it spawned. “He who knows only his own generation,” Churchill lamented, “remains forever a child.” As we head into uncertain times, it’s feeling increasingly like a Children’s Crusade.

Techniques of Ecstasy: Never at any time in human history anywhere have so many had access to so much, with so few guidelines. The Age of Aquarius gets all the hype for being the era of Sex, Drugs, and Rock ’n’ Roll experimentation, but really, that was a relatively small fringe population. It only looms so large in our collective imagination because the media loved to cover it.

Today, industrial-strength marijuana is legally available in most states, tens of millions of users are participating in the psychedelic “renaissance” (an order of magnitude more than dabbled in the ‘60s), polyamory and other forms of nontraditional sexual relationships are at an all-time high, breath work, sensory deprivation, ice and sauna bathing, intensive yoga, EDM concerts, immersive digital worlds—are available on demand. And there’s quite a bit of demand. These are potent and destabilizing tools, especially when yanked out of context. Addiction is as likely an outcome as illumination.

Digital Influencer Culture: In the past, if you wanted to become an authority in a given field, you had to apprentice to a lineage. If you were a scholar you had to devote yourself to earning a PhD. If you were a writer, you had to work your way up to the journals of record.

True also for martial arts, yoga, or meditation. Pick your tradition, find your teacher, submit to the practice, and maybe, just maybe, if you proved yourself out, year after year, at some point you’d get the nod and be given permission to assume the mantle of teacher yourself.

All that changed with the advent of the internet. The gatekeepers got dis-intermediated. Content got democratized. If you had the will, now there were a thousand ways. While there was a flourishing of creativity and greater inclusion of voices, quality control went out the window.

That kicked off a race to the bottom. The spiritual marketplace got thoroughly commoditized and its incentives flipped. In the past, traditions served an imperfect but vital function of boosting the signal of wise teachers and suppressing the signal of charlatans.

Today, pretenders to the throne can spin up a slick website, push out some digital ads, and start grooming their very own fleeceable flock. The naive seekers they target cannot tell the difference between the diamond sutra and a rhinestone knockoff. The money changers have sneaked back in the temple, only now they take Venmo.

\Rapture Ideologies: On top of all that—things have been getting super weird lately. The collapse in authority, global systemic crises, and tangled mythologies—it’s increasingly difficult to tell what’s around the bend.

The seductive pull of Rapture ideologies beckons.

The more uncomfortable and the less certain we are, the more tempting it becomes to find comfort in community. And the most tempting community to latch on to? The one that confidently proclaims to know exactly what’s going on and is certain it’s going to be standing on the right side of history (just as soon as whatever BigTimeCrazyThing that’s gonna happen happens).

Rapture ideologies are like a giant ontological vacuum, devouring everything in their path. That slow sucking sound as you watch friends and family slip down the conspiratorial rabbit hole? It’s not a rabbit hole. It’s the black hole of the Intertwingularity as all of our End Times End Games blend together. And no one, except the chosen few, gets out alive.

We should expect conditions to worsen on the road ahead. The 2020s have seen an exponential uptick in all four of these dynamics—Generational Amnesia, Ecstatic Technologies, Digital Influencers, and Rapture Ideologies—overlapping and amplifying each other.

As plagues, fires, famine, and floods (to say nothing of global cabals secretly running the world, or imminent alien disclosure) ricochet around us, it’s hard not to read into things. Signs and portents abound. Omens of Millennium are everywhere.

Meanwhile the echo chamber of social media is taking our shadows and turning them into monsters. By the clicking of our thumbs, something wicked this way comes . . .

***

If you take just two of the most interesting examples of the past century, Aleister Crowley and Adi Da, you can see how much we’ve lowered our standards lately.

Crowley, most commonly known for his cameo in the back row of the Beatle’s Sergeant Pepper’s album, and Led Zeppelin III (plus guitarist Jimmy Page’s purchase of Crowley’s Scottish castle) was far more interesting than his “666 Mark of the Beast” reputation.

Educated at Cambridge, a chess grand master, a poet, a boundary pushing mountaineer with climbs throughout the Alps, Mexican volcanoes and the Himalayas, Crowley blew through the mystery schools of Europe and then created his own. He fought with William Butler Yeats, crossed paths with British intelligence agents Roald Dahl (Charlie and Chocolate Factory) Ian Fleming (007), and philosopher Aldous Huxley.

He directly influenced Jet Propulsion Lab founder Jack Parson’s and Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard, as well as Tim Leary and Robert Anton Wilson. All of modern Wicca via Gerald Gardner was modeled on Crowleyean ritual magick.

One British historian said "In native talent, penetrating intelligence and determination, Aleister Crowley was the best-equipped magician to emerge since the seventeenth century."

In short, while his personal life was an utter trainwreck of dysfunctional relationships, addiction (both heroin and cocaine) and endless scandal, his influence ripples through the East-West spiritual scene, the neo-Tantric sexuality movement, and psychedelic renaissance like few before or since.

His fingerprints are all over today’s counter-culture.

To a lesser reach, but similar impact, Adi Da set off atom bombs through the 70’s and 80’s.

He went to Columbia and then Stanford’s writing program under Wallace Stegner (at the same time as Ken Kesey and the infamous launch of the Merry Pranksters and the West Coast psychedelic scene).

After a series of psychotic breakdown/breakthroughs, Da (constantly changing his name to reflect each chapter of his initiations) hosted a wild and crazy sex, free love, non-dual awareness commune in the early 70s (immortalized in the book Garbage and the Goddess). Pushing his followers to increasingly intense acts of deconstructing social boundaries, partner swapping, and an insistence to simply dissolve into the mindfuck of God consciousness.

As with Crowley, Da created tons of collateral damage. Marriages destroyed. Careers derailed. Sanity tested. Boundaries breached. By the time he’d repaired to Fiji for his final era, his world changing mandate had shrunken considerably.

But spend any time with any of his former devotees, and you can’t help but notice a unique and particular vibe. They still have the embers of a burn-it-all-down fire of liberation in their eyes. A playful, irreverent mark of initiation. And it came from their exposure to the mutated consciousness of their guru.

And yet, despite all the moralizing and tut-tutting over both of these “Dangerous Magi” they are categorically different than the characters we surveyed from the Netflix/HBO documentary circuit.

These guys were as destructive as they were creative, but in fully committing to the bit, they generated more novelty than anything we’ve been seeing lately.

Crowley and Da mutated their consciousness and brought through insights and experiences that weren’t previously accessible. But because they had punched up through the clouds of consensus trance, only to find themselves more or less alone, they went rogue.

With no one to guide them, or challenge them, or keep them connected to their humanity, they got bent by the will to power.

(we can see parallels to some of our TechBros these days)

You can call it the Lucifer Effect. It happens when a person boots up into higher states of awareness and power, and becomes so brilliant that those around them are dazzled.

Like staring straight at the sun, followers can’t fully grok this new expansive, ungoverned awareness, so they deflect their gaze. They give up their own centers.

That’s when the Lucifer bit comes in, and the self-proclaimed guru challenges them “Dare thee to look upon me and spot my imperfections!”

And just like staring into the sun, the people around them grow dazzled, unable to see the shadows of their teachers.

Crowley claimed he was the prophet of the new age of the Aeon, Da proclaimed himself World Teacher. But no matter how incandescent they might have been at times, they still held massive pathologies.

They pranked and punked their followers just to see if anyone would call them out. And when they got away with it, they pushed further. And further still.

Instead of being a gifted person with flaws and foibles, suddenly all of their pathologies kicked into overdrive. And the intensive meditative, magickal, chemical, sexual practices they were playing around with, metastasized their dark elements.

Even as they’d nearly freed themselves from them altogether. Cancer of the soul on overdrive.

99% translucent Jedi can become 100% Sith Lord when the poles switch.

***

But it might be time to reconsider our morality plays.

After all, Icarus, the quintessential Lucifer fable, was tempted by Pride to fly too close to the sun.

His come-uppance is supposed to serve as a cautionary tale for all the other tall poppies out there, looking to do things differently. We cut the tallest poppies, because reaching for the light, rather than knowing our place (we tell ourselves and our children) is dangerous.

But what if we reconceived the Icarus tale?

Rather than the moral: “You shouldn’t fly too close to the Sun” we updated it to: “Better use glue instead of wax next time!”

So let’s celebrate the Mad, Bad and Dangerous to Gnow test pilots of Yesteryear (without excusing them for the damage they also inflicted). Let’s learn from their boundary pushing experiments. We should sift through the wreckage they left behind them to figure out what put the might in their dynamite.

Let’s not duck our own gaze from someone who starts slinging a bit of the ‘Rizz around

(that’s a technical term from Max Weber’s parsing of the three types of leadership ;)

While we’re at it, let’s not fall for every two-bit charlatan recycling cliches on Instagram!

Rather than giving away our own centers and discernment pining for the Second Coming, how ‘bout we all step up and help usher in the Umpteenth Coming?

Where so many folks step up to post-conventional ways of seeing and being, that it becomes almost unremarkable. Akin to being a really good pianist. Not common, still requiring natural talent and years of practice. But no longer magical/mystical.

We need breakthroughs from our leading psychonauts to show the rest of us what’s possible. But as soon as they share their trip reports, a bunch of fast followers can get to the summit more easily and safely.

Then we can fix ropes and anchors and help lift our communities and our culture to higher ground.

Everybody worships (or “cults”) as David Foster Wallace reminds us. The only question is what.

Isn’t it time to grow out of our current fascination with culty-cults, those that give up our sovereignty and common sense to fallible gurus, and start co-creating ethical cult(ure)?

Where traditional mystery cults demanded subjugation of the self to the lineage, and culty cults demanded subjugation of the self to the guru, an ethical cult does neither. Instead, it seeks to enhance the sovereignty of the individual while increasing the intelligence of the collective.

That’s a delicate balance, rarely achieved. Owning our own power while deferring to a higher power requires timing, humility, and skill. And to do that we need to pay more attention to the true (and troubled) trailblazers of the past, and less attention to the transparent attention-seekers of the present.

If traditional cults were like taking your seat in an orchestra, and culty cults were like being in a marching band, ethical cults feel more like playing jazz. No sheet music or drum major to guide off.

Just us, in the moment, listening for the pulse together.