TRANSCRIPT
I’m going to start with a difficult way to start a cult, and I’m going to spend very, very little time on it because I think actually most people don’t have what it takes to go the difficult route to start a cult. To start a cult for adults, to start a psychology cult, or to start a religion cult, or to start a philosophy cult, the hard way to start a cult is you have to be incredibly smart, incredibly charismatic. You have to be gifted and talented. You have to be very extroverted. You have to have the ability to convince people of things that are not true, and you have to find people who will come in and give you their power. They will make you the only self in their life. You will become the god in their life, and that is very, very hard for adults to do. That’s why there aren’t very many cults in the world. It actually takes people who are exceptional in terms of these talented, charismatic qualities—very sick people, very screwed up people, very confused and traumatized and split off and unconscious people, very angry, hostile people, also very violating people, very unethical people. But for people who are like that, who also are incredibly charismatic, confident, often good, smart, manipulative, most people don’t have those qualities. And I say exceptional qualities, I don’t mean exceptional in a good way, but they are the exceptions. And for those people who want to have power over lots of people, who want to control the minds of others, if they have those really exceptional qualities, exceptionally disturbed and talented qualities mixed together, they can start a cult.
So now I’d like to spend the rest of this video talking about the easy way to start a cult. The way to do it is to have children, to create children, to biologically procreate. So how does one start a cult by having children? Well, the main way to do it is to not be the most psychologically healthy parent, to be kind of traumatized and unconscious about it, or maybe even be kind of aware—aware how traumatized one is but not really dealing with it, not really bringing up the traumas and healing them, not really being massively engaged on the healing process, or being engaged on the healing process but not being very far along on it and still being kind of unconscious and traumatized. And then what happens is that when the person raises a child or children, almost by no will of their own, they start their own little cult. It’s called the family system.
And what happens is this child, because this child is so needy and has such passion to survive and has so many needs, that this child will bend himself and mold himself to be whatever that parent needs, to whatever his or her parent needs. And when people are unconscious, even a little bit unconscious, a little unconscious of their traumas, a little bit traumatized, even a little bit, they’re going to have unresolved needs from childhood that live on in their adult life. They’re still going to be hurt, needy children in some ways because that’s what happens when people get traumatized in their childhood and don’t resolve it. They get blocked from getting their needs met, and those needs carry over into their adulthood. And when people become parents, even if they try not to do this, what happens is they try and they succeed in getting a lot of their unconscious needs met from their children, from their babies. Even they feel loved by their babies. I’ve heard people say this so much: “Oh, if you’ve never had a child, if you’ve never had a baby, you don’t know what the meaning of love is. It’s the most love you’ll ever get in your whole life.” I’ve had people explain this to me with no irony whatsoever, with no self-consciousness whatsoever, with no awareness.
Children are not brought into this world to love their parents. In the healthiest of family systems, children don’t feel like they have to love their parents at all, and the parents don’t try to get love from the children. Instead, the parents give love to the children. They nurture their child. They don’t turn it around and make the child love them. And people say, “Oh no, no, I’m not making my child love me. My child just loves me,” while the parents just aren’t conscious of how they are making the child love them. There’s a million ways that parents can subtly reject and abandon the child emotionally, totally within the law, within the ethics of conventional society. Everybody says it’s okay what they’re doing, but they emotionally reject and abandon this child, and the child picks it up and adjusts and warps and has to worship this parent, has to make this parent feel good, feel important, feel loved, feel valuable in order for the parent to love the child back. This is the nature of conditional love.
And people who are even partially traumatized, or better yet, I’ll say to the degree that people are traumatized, adults are traumatized, they can only offer conditional love. When people are not traumatized, when people are healed, when they’re connected to their true self within, they can give unconditional love from the surplus of love that they already have for themselves. But when people are traumatized to the degree that they are traumatized, they cannot love their true self on the inside. They’re split off from it. They’re blocked. That’s what the trauma does. They’re stunted, and so they’re always looking unconsciously in all sorts of different ways to get loved from the outside, from whoever it is that they can have that kind of power over.
A lot of times, people live in the fantasy of romance. “Oh, romance is going to save me.” But it is a lot harder to control a romantic partner than it is to control a child, especially a young child, especially one’s own young child, because that child cannot leave. They cannot escape. They have to love their parent. They are required to by their very biology because when they have parents that are even partially traumatized, that is the only way that little child will get their needs met. They will not survive emotionally, even physiologically, if they cannot figure out how to get that love, nurturance, and attention from their parents. And the best way to do it is to worship the parents.
So why is this a cult? What’s my proof that this is a cult? Well, when the child loses himself, is not allowed to connect with his true self on the inside, her true self on the inside, cannot be a conscious being, an evolving conscious being, has to put the parent in the position of the one who is the arbiter of truth. When the true self within the child—every child has a true self, by the way—and they’re not allowed to connect with it, instead have to look at the parent as the arbiter of truth, right away it begins to be a cult system where the child has to look to the parent to decide what truth is. When the child worships the parent, and then you look at these children out there all over the world, children who believe the most screwed up things and hold it to be true just because that’s what the family system says is true. Children growing up in the most screwed up, confused religions, religious ideas because their parents told them that’s what’s true. Children growing up believing very weird, obviously unrealistic ideas to anyone who is objective, but they believe it because that’s how they’re raised. And they know that if they don’t go along with this weird religion or this philosophy or these odd ideas that are sometimes unique to that individual family, they will be rejected.
And then that child will grow up to believe my parents are the most important people in the world. “Honor thy parents.” So many different religions say that. That is a commandment from God. God says that the child is supposed to honor his parents, sacrifice him or herself for the parents. And I’m going to take a step back and share one last idea that I’ve seen. I remember when I was in school as a kid, there were people who were not charismatic, not particularly intelligent, sometimes not intelligent at all, not sophisticated, not talented, not confident. And I’ve watched them over the decades. I’ve seen them. I’ve observed them. And what I’ve seen is many of them had children, and I realized these adults, they became the cult leaders of their family system. They raised their children to believe in them.
To honor them, to sacrifice their child’s own self for this parent, to worship the parent, to be screwed up just like the parent, and to accept that as good. To accept their traumas as something that they needed to say that this was healthy, this was for their own good. And yet, these parents were people who could never in a million years start a cult for adults. And yet, with children having children of their own, it was so easy for them to start.