S2 E1: Let’s Start a Cult

Posted on by Jeremy

S2 E1: Let’s Start a Cult

 
 
00:00 / 51:55
 
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We’re going fully off the deep end for season 2. Lots of changes to come. Get ready for all sorts of nonsense.

Big thanks to my guests this episode: Glenn, Talon, Eric, and Kristine, and to the beautiful folks at Free Music Archive and freesound.

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Transcript

Last season on It’s Now or Never

[00:00:01] I had quit my full time office job and I was trying to figure out what made sense for me to do now. I was getting kind of existential with it, but I kind of had been picking up on maybe the climate situation was… urgent. And it kind of hit me that this was sort of a problem that I needed to look into if I really wanted to get my existential bearings.

[00:00:24] You’re listening to Now or Never, a podcast just for funsies in the face of probable doom.

[00:00:29] It’s two minutes to midnight on the doomsday clock. ****’s all ****ed up and we gotta un**** all this ****.

[00:00:34] Manatees are dying from a toxic algae bloom. Oceans have absorbed 60% more heat per year. 200,000 acres of oxygen producing rainforest are burned down every day.

[00:00:44] Talon: The second I even remotely suspect this long downward spiral is about to bottom out, I’m going to rocket to the nearest store and buy every single box of Q-tips they have.

[00:00:55] Michael: I think it gets more ominous if you try to think about it more.

[00:00:57] Jeremy: There was a big forest fire not that long ago.

[00:01:01] Michael: I guess it’s wildfires up in BC and the smoke blows south.

[00:01:05] Jon: And every day it just kept getting worse until it was like three to four times worse than Beijing.

[00:01:09]Jeremy:  To get to star Trek. They did have to go through some kind of nuclear Holocaust.

[00:01:13] Jon: I’ve seen Max Max a thousand times. I’m ready.

[00:01:15] Jeremy: I really don’t know what to prepare for.

[00:01:18] Jon: Wanna build an Earthship? 

[00:01:20] Jeremy: I do.

[00:01:21] Kristine: Well, when you were talking about trying to figure out what to do in life, you know, that resonated with me.

[00:01:26] Jeremy: Most of the creatives that I know, their career has always been in like a constant state of reevaluation.

[00:01:32] Kristine: Maybe everyone should have that, being like, dejected from society just so that they know what it’s like

[00:01:38] Michael: In those moments when you’re on that barrier between being asleep and being awake, what is even real about the moment?

[00:01:44] Jeremy: What is the difference between feeling the derealization and believing in reality at face value?

[00:01:51] Michael: A more fulfilling form of spirituality for me would involve actually taking stock as how I’m living my life and how I’m interacting with other people and the world.

[00:01:59] Caleb: Every once in a while, I get really frustrated at work and I’ll find myself going like, “Why am I even doing this?” Like “This is the best humanity could do?”

[00:02:05] Jeremy: This prevailing myth that it’s important to keep building the society, that society is inherently good. We’re starting to question if it really is good to keep giving it your juice.

[00:02:19] Matt: Do you want to live like a Thoreauian separatist?

[00:02:24] Jeremy: Absolutely. 

[00:02:26] Matt: Like, why would I belong to this type of system? I’m going to go and do something else.

[00:02:30] Jeremy: Let’s get as clear and just go straight to the truth of it. And sometimes you have to stare into like void and go through grieving processes or whatever.

[00:02:39] It was sort of beyond just confronting my own mortality. I guess confronting the mortality of the species.

[00:02:46] Biodiversity continues to plummet and human beings continue their, in the words of New York Magazine’s Eric Levitz, globe-spanning murder suicide. Greta Thunberg said it best, “unless we recognize the overall failures of or current systems, we most probably don’t stand a chance. I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic.”

[00:03:12] So while I’m kind of going through this, I’m also feeling increasingly isolated. And the only way I could think of to talk about it was to turn it into a joke.

[00:03:27] Matt: I wonder if there is an aspect of laughter where you’re like, “Oh yeah, this is really life threatening, danger for me and future generations.” And then you just sit there and you go “HAHA” because that’s the only way you can close the door.

[00:03:39] Jeremy: I think so, yeah. If you’re not going to kill yourself, you have to find a way to move on anyway.

[00:03:47] Matt: That’s such an extreme, but it’s so true.

[00:03:50] Jeremy: I mean, like suicide jokes are extremely common now, and this is weird. 

[00:03:55] Caleb: Yeah. Suicide jokes are extremely common. And then the other one is the constant meme of “millennials are killing X industry,” “millennials are killing retail or malls.” So I’m like, yeah… because we don’t want to buy as much shit.

[00:04:05] Jeremy: “Fuck you guys, you killed Applebee’s!” Which like, yeah, to all the baby boomers out there, FUCK APPLEBEE’S, I’ll DO IT AGAIN.

[00:04:14] Matt: Yes. I love that we have this whole, like, hating on chain food stores and everything like that.

[00:04:19] Jeremy: Yeah. Sometimes there’s a lot of invisible effects of choices that seem efficient that wind up having repercussions that are just several steps removed.

[00:04:27] Glenn: Making things as profitable as possible is efficient for you and your bottom line, but then it’s like the end result is like extremely wasteful and stupid.

[00:04:34] Jeremy: It’s not utopian to be like, well, maybe we could be less sucky

[00:04:36] Glenn: “It’s easier to imagine the end of the world and than the end of capitalism.” So a lot of our imaginings look like Mad Max because we can’t envision a world that isn’t ruthlessly exploitative.

[00:04:46] Jeremy: There have been so many different shapes that society has taken. So many different ways of human beings interacting with each other and making meaning in the world. I’m not willing to believe this is what society has to look like.

[00:04:59] So if it’s now or never, I’m going to do a podcast just for fun. So I asked some of my friends, “Hey, do you want to come on? We’ll just have a conversation.

[00:05:07] Talon: Garfield definitely has thought bubbles, not speech bubbles.

[00:05:12] Caleb: Maybe we’re living in a simulation and no one’s paying attention.

[00:05:14] Jeremy: Space magic?

[00:05:15] Michael: Space magic. Do you a list of cool topics?

[00:05:19] Jeremy: But also to imagine, with me, another possibility.

[00:05:23] Sonja: I want to pick berries 

[00:05:24] Jeremy: Right. I want to be able to see the stars at night. I think it’s important to see these things that are, like, vast, that make you feel small, like you’re this tiny thing in the face of the enormity of the cosmos.

[00:05:37] Michael: And I don’t want to be like a Luddite and say like, “technology is bad.”

[00:05:41] Glenn: There’s a lot of aesthetics of like a back-to-the-land anarcho-primitivist, and then like on the other end of that spectrum is luxury space communism.

[00:05:49] Jeremy: I want to invite people to come on the show, talk about what they’re feeling, wherever they’re at in the grieving process.

[00:05:55] Ryan: We’re at a place right now where nothing that we can do will really stop catastrophe without a paradigm shift.

[00:06:02] Sonja: When it looked like it wasn’t going to get better, it was the kick I needed to find something that did work.

[00:06:09] Jeremy: So we’ll get heavy and we’ll talk about TV and we’ll talk about what kind of world we hope to build after this one falls apart.

[00:06:17] Eric: Maybe the only way you can really build societies that are like that is, just, you have to build a small society where you get a bunch of people that can just let that stuff go.

[00:06:25] Jeremy: I think there’s some value in experimenting with other ways of being. And then just the more intentionally we can transition, the better an outcome we’ll have.

And now…

[00:06:35] Have you ever had an idea that seemed completely absurd at first, but then it kept bouncing around in your head until eventually it started to seem kind of inevitable?

[00:07:17] I decided to reconnect with four guests from season one, run the idea past them. I figured they’d talk me out of it.

[00:07:25] And this is the part that either sounds like inevitable and obvious or just sounds totally fucking insane.

[00:07:33] So I was trying to explain what I wanted to talk about, what I wanted to get at, where I wanted to go. Like “What’s like the biggest picture vision? Where could you possibly go with this?”

[00:07:46] Glenn: The project should have a goal–

[00:07:48] Jeremy: That’s Glenn from 11, “A Universe of Chad memes.”

[00:07:51] Glenn: –you know, even if it’s like a big one or a wild one or one that, like, people call you insane for.

[00:07:56] Jeremy: Well, ultimately I think it would be to have a little chunk of land and be, like, growing shit and start forming a community, but then, like, share that from start to finish: this how we found land, this is how we had to fix this thing, these are like problems we ran into. Which is, given my extremely limited economic means, an incredibly ambitious goal. But that’s kind of what I’m interested in putting as like an organizing principle.

[00:08:26] Every time I try to explain to people, “Oh, so I want to get some land and form community, and then we can learn how to reconnect with this more like authentic, rooted form of culture, the response is like, “Oh, so you want to start cult?”

[00:08:41] The more I think about it, it’s like, maybe I do want to start a cult.

[00:08:44] Glenn: Totally.

[00:08:45] Jeremy: We just embrace the aesthetic. Okay, yeah. We’re starting a cult. We’re going to live off the land. It’s a doomsday cult because there’s an actual doomsday situation. And then, just like, start from that point.

[00:08:55] It’s like, okay, now’s the perfect time to start a doomsday cult. It’ll be the first doomsday cult in history that is correct. Because usually you start the cults and then you’re like, “Oh shit, we need to like have something we’re ramping up for.” And you come up with a doomsday prediction and then when that inevitably fails, you come up with another one and you just milk that for as long as you can.

[00:09:21] But this one, we’re starting with the doomsday. I don’t know if we’re going to go extinct. I don’t think certainty one way or another is really helpful, but there’s a non zero possibility that we’re going to totally destroy ourselves. And then there’s, like, aside from that, even if we do survive, various levels of more inevitable calamity.

[00:09:44] I obviously don’t think there’s any particular day that we can count down to when suddenly everything changes. It’s going to be like a gradually unfolding process. But this is the closest we’re ever going to get, I think, short of, like, being able to accurately predict an asteroid striking the earth. We can at least be the most accurate doomsday cult  thus far.

[00:10:09] Alright. I understand being a little skeptical at this point. I’d like to believe that if you’re listening to this in the first place, you’re already questioning the dominant cultural myths of limitless growth and boundless resource consumption. Hopefully you’re already aware of the real damage this is doing and the threat of what’s yet to come.

[00:10:27] Maybe you’re even on board with the idea of building resilient, intentional communities, regenerative farming and cultural experimentation. But “cult?” Isn’t that kind of a loaded term.

[00:10:41] Well. Yeah.

[00:10:42] Talon: It’s very easy to hear those words and go, “Yeah! I’m so into it.” —

[00:10:47] Jeremy: You remember Talon from all the way back in episode one?

[00:10:49] Talon: But the word “cult” connotes a lot of really negative stuff that I don’t think we just get to pretend doesn’t exist. And how do we put a friendly face on this?

[00:10:59] Jeremy: I want to use those negative connotations. If you say, like, “I’m in this cult,” you hear that, like, record scratch sound effect. It just, like invites a lot of “What the fuck are you talking about?” If you say, “Oh, well climate change is going to cause crop shortages and there’s going to be struggles and famines and there’ll be climate refugees…” people have stopped listening at the very beginning of that sentence. But if you say, “I’m starting a cult,” you at least probably have their attention because they’re going to require you to explain that shit you just said.

[00:11:29] Talon: [laughter]

[00:11:29] Jeremy: You could talk about all that stuff now.

[00:11:31] But the other thing is, like, there’s two different definitions for the term cult. There’s the, like, academic use of “cult,” which is just like a small movement with a particular ideology that does stuff. It doesn’t require a sociopathic narcissistic leader to be a cult. You know, it’s like a very broad term. So, really, I’m aiming for that but we’re in drag as this other thing.

[00:11:55] Talon: Yeah.

[00:11:56] Jeremy: We can still wear robes though. Ropes are just fun.

[00:11:59] Talon: Yeah.

[00:11:59] Jeremy: Ropes are an elegant–

[00:12:00] Talon: No, robes are comfy.

[00:12:02] Jeremy: The problem with a lot of new religious movements is that if there’s a new thing that people are doing and it’s kind of private — this happens all the time, like every new religious movement — people are going to be like, “they’re doing weird sex stuff and they’re eating babies.” Early Christianity, the Romans said “weird sex stuff, eating babies.” All the new shit, it’s “weird sex stuff, eating babies.” And sometimes it was weird sex stuff. I don’t know who’s actually out there eating babies. That just, that seems like a bit much if you ask this old timer but they’re not controlling the message.

[00:12:35] Because, inevitably, you’re going to get accused of eating babies, I think we should have a baby-eating night where, like, I’m going to eat some baby bok choy. Get some baby back ribs. You know? It’s up to you. “Yeah, we fucking eat babies. They’re delicious! Come to our baby-eating night.”

[00:12:52] Part of me feels like doing it and this kind of, like, joke way gives people something a little more meaty to respond to, even if the response is like, “that’s stupid.” But now like let’s lean into the stupidity of it.

[00:13:05] Glenn: It’s also like, how do you put your money where your mouth is. It’s like these conversations will pretty much not really go anywhere if there’s no application of it. You can be like, “what practically can I do? How would I want to live if I could choose how I want it to live,” even if it isn’t a game that you’re going to win. And I think that like any kind of documentary process makes it more real. I mean, it’s a lot like… There was a place called The Farm, and it was like San Francisco Bay area hippies who got on the bus and kept driving East until they found a spot and they made a farm to live on communally. They were really good at being like “I don’t know what I’m doing. I’m a Bay-area hippie. I’ve no idea. I’m going to have to ask all these old timers how to farm.” They were very, very upfront about their level of ignorance. Actually, like, they got pretty good at farming. And their documenting it, owning a printing press and making stuff about it, was like the real output because, it’s like, if they didn’t do that, you know, their effect would be really limited.

[00:13:58] The impact they had was beyond growing soybeans or whatever. Like it’s something that like I look at, I think about 40 years later, whatever, 50 years later.

[00:14:07] Jeremy: Being vulnerable and being like “I don’t know what I’m doing” gets more people, more voices in the conversation. It’s like, this super conservative guy who’s been a farmer, you know, his whole life, but he knows a lot of shit that you don’t know, so even if you’re not going to talk politics with that dude, his voice is still useful for the conversation. Like, where do we build it? How do we do that? But how do we govern ourselves? How do we relate to other farms? Like, let’s talk to people who are doing that now. It’s so fucking complicated, so there’s like a lot to talk through and a lot of information to parse.

[00:14:38] Glenn: Totally.

[00:14:39] Jeremy: Trying to figure out how to have conversations in that zone is kind of what’s leading me into this ridiculous kind of conjectural area.

[00:14:47] Glenn: It is, in one way, ridiculous, but in another, you know, your wild idea, like, it gives it something to kind of latch onto or orbit around.

[00:14:54] Jeremy: Yeah.

[00:14:55] Glenn: You could still talk about all the same shit. It’s just like, you have something to kind of, like, tie it to. It becomes a lot easier to understand. 

[00:15:00] Jeremy: And I think even people who haven’t spent a ton of time thinking about collapse, if you say like, “Hey, we’re going to start a cult, what should we do?” I feel like everyone has something to say about that. I think it like opens this, like, imaginative space in a way that is more playful. Like, you know, it injects humor more into the conversation. Even if it means every single guest is going to have their different idea about like what kind of cult they would want to form, you’ve now invited X number of contributions to this ideological playground. Like maybe the way to reverse gears from global capitalism is to get more specific and hyperlocal and differentiated and nuanced and embrace those differences. And maybe it turns into like, oh, there’s like 20 different tribes and they’re all kind of like things we can joke about or talk about on the show and you can decide which one you like or, like, roll your own, and it can all be kind of, like, open sourced. Maybe we’ll throw a wiki up or something like that. Brainstorm rituals or mythologies or something. Like, “What kind of rituals can we experiment with or practice with? How can we bootstrap a little ritual for mourning the loss of this specific species?” or something like that. So it’s like a communal form of like setting an intention and creating a space.

[00:16:16] Kristine: Well people like rituals.

[00:16:18] Jeremy: This is Kristine from the toast one. You know, the one about toast… Among other things.

[00:16:24] Kristine: It’s very comforting to have rituals. And it makes me think of like yoga or something. It’s pretty much, like, ritualistic, to get you in the mind frame of a certain thing, an intentional thing. It would be fun to, like, explore rituals. I mean, you know, we have some certain rituals from our culture. Like, would we, like, totally change it up? Would we look back in the old ways, traditions, bring some of those back? Create something entirely different?

[00:17:00] Jeremy: Like, Halloween used to mean a lot more than it does now. It used to be part of this collective recognition that the seasons are changing and the life around us that we depend on is dying and detailing and kind of a way of symbolically recognizing that it’s going to happen to us too. So this idea that there are like the spirits or energies of the dead that we can also have a relationship with, because in a way, that’s how we can have a relationship with our own death.

[00:17:34] But instead, it’s like everything autumnal about it is just reduced to a commercial color palette and a set of symbols that people can sell decorations and greeting cards and stuff around. Any yeah, candy. Literally consumer goods. I want to push back against that. I want to grow things so that I can give a shit about when things grow.

[00:18:11] I heard somewhere that lentils are low water usage.

[00:18:13] Glenn: Oh really?

[00:18:14] Jeremy: Yeah. 

[00:18:14] Glenn: Maybe we should get into that. Lentils are good.

[00:18:16] Jeremy: Yeah, man. You can do a lot with lentils.

[00:18:18] Glenn: Really good for you. There’s a bunch of varieties. I’m really into preserving rare genetic varieties of shit. Do you think of like… Get rare lentils… Would be awesome. That’s also like kind of a market differentiator if you’re like, well, there’s this weird cult down the road. They sell lentils. But they have, like, really good lentils. They have extremely rare lentils.

[00:18:38] Jeremy: It also really lends itself to the symbolism of monoculture being inherently unsustainable. Like the way that a lot of crops have been. Bread and manipulated toward just being more resilient to like being bombarded with poisons, but then that also being like not sustainable because they’re just shitting poison everywhere.

[00:19:01] But that’s also kind of what we’re doing as a human monoculture that’s spreading, is just learning to be somehow more and more resilient against all the poisons that we’re just shitting all over ourselves until eventually we just can’t do that anymore and some disease or ideological disease or something just like wipes it out and then it’s going to be all the little weirdos that have managed to survive that are going to be what can keep us going. Little pockets of diversity that have somehow been like maintained.

[00:19:31] Glenn: Totally. That’s a really good way to explain what you’re doing. It’s very tangible too, because you can eat the proof. You. You’re not just like, here’s my lecture that I want you to come to. It’s like you can actually offer that. You’re not just offering like a something that’s pessimistic or whatever. You’re able to do something better. It’s not just a fallout shelter.

[00:19:47] Jeremy: Yeah. Moving away from the fallout shelter mentality. Like maybe that needs to be part of it. Like let’s talk about like what to put in your bug out bag or whatever if you can’t farm or some shit, but–

[00:19:58]Glenn:  All that shit’s real. It’s just like, it sucks to think about it.

[00:20:14] Jeremy: Look, if you haven’t seriously grappled with the existential threat we’re facing, not just as a species, but as the collective biomass of the planet…

[00:20:23] If you think the next 50 years are looking bright except for just one or two speed bumps we can innovate our way over with market friendly, sustainable solutions…

[00:20:32] If you roll your eyes at Gretta Thunberg’s anger, and you’re annoyed by all the protestors…

[00:20:38] If neoliberalism still seems like a pretty good deal… this episode isn’t going to convince you otherwise.

[00:20:44] If you know something’s wrong, but you think it’s just about mitigating climate change or resource extraction, overshoot peak oil consumption, putting out the Amazon fires, solving the food crisis, avoiding another recession, halting the rise of fascism and far right, nationalism or just ending nuclear proliferation… this episode isn’t going to connect the dots for you.

[00:21:08] If you’ve done the research, disrupted your own personal status quo, and you find yourself in the middle of a grieving process that promises to end in the acceptance of a completely unacceptable reality — but right now, you just have pain or anger or depression or some combination thereof…

[00:21:26] If you know, not just as a factoid in your head but you know, in your heart that half of all plants and animals have already been lost… that fossil fuel extraction has increased rather than decreased… that we really needed to act 50 years ago… that some climate change feedbacks have already been activated… that this is really, really not okay…

[00:21:51] …I feel you. And in a lot of ways, the past 13 episodes stand as a record of my own grieving process. But what this is really about is the next step, the next phase: what comes after the grieving.

[00:22:06] There’s only so much you can say about collapse. And then what? Like, we can either like sit around pointing fingers — and that’s helpful to like identify who is at fault for getting us all here, but there’s only so much you can do with it and it’s not exactly empowering if you don’t have something to offer instead.

[00:22:26] Glenn: Which is good, but my brain is a maximum saturation point for depressing shit.

[00:22:31] Jeremy: That’s all important but you also need humor and lightness and gratitude, and… something. Some kind of like savoring what we have. Like there has to be a positive edge to it’s now or never like that also has to give us the freedom to start choosing how we’re going to live or how we’re going to respond to that.

[00:22:51] Yeah. It feels like the way forward with this is really to somehow, like, rectify these apparent opposites, like the pessimism of preparing for the worst, but then the optimism of like trying to live your best anyway, or the darkness of helping people connect and process their grief and also talking about lentil farming and shit like that. The material and the theoretical. But then also somehow doing it in a way where you can have a smile on your face at least some of the time, and you can joke about it at least some of the time.

[00:23:28] As long as we just don’t turn into Jonestown and–

[00:23:30] Glenn: And the odds of that are pretty low.

[00:23:32] Jeremy: I mean, how many Jonestowns have there been, really?

[00:23:34] Glenn: It’s not that many, dude. Like a couple, I guess.

[00:23:54] Jeremy: Hey, still listening? Great. Just checking in. Is this making any sense yet?

[00:24:05] You know how used to talk about we should start a cult?

[00:24:09] Eric: Oh yeah. I still think that we should start a cult.

[00:24:12] Jeremy: Okay, that’s great, because my pitch for season two is: we start a cult.

[00:24:17] Eric: Okay, I’m in. I was thinking about that the other day.

[00:24:20] Jeremy: New listeners, Eric. Eric, new listeners. Eric was on episode eight. The one about UFOs and stuff.

[00:24:27] Eric: If you really wanted to start a cult, how would you start a cult? Well, first you have to start in India and then write a book and then move everybody to America, and then you have to sell so many books that you can buy a lot of Rolls-Royces and then you have a place for your commune. That is what I learned from Wild Wild Country.

[00:24:44] Jeremy: That seems like unnecessary steps if you’re not super interested in Rolls-Royces.

[00:24:49] Eric: Yeah, that was kind of a weird gotcha with them.

[00:24:52] I really love the first episode of that documentary. You just get this whole vision of their dream and how they’re building all this stuff and it’s really happening and then like towards the end of the episode and you get the hint it’s all gonna go to hell.

[00:25:04] Jeremy: Yeah. I’ve always been sort of fascinated by cults because it’s always been really amazing to me how much Jim Jones was able to accomplish. But they’re, like, you know, shitty. The problem is there’s like one person that gets to define truth for a group of people and everyone has to follow that person and then they abuse that power to do something for selfish aims. But like if everyone wasn’t just following a narcissistic, sociopathic leader and was just sort of all committed to some sort of democratic, like yeah, we can actually do something kind of amazing.

[00:25:39] Eric: I’m not sure how effective it would be. ‘Cause the thing that all cults share in common is that they have one person saying exactly how they think it is. And the appeal of that is that you can join and then you have this world view that you can just pick up and no effort required. You just have to buy in. If you have a lot of independent people thinking about a lot of independent things, I think that’s why intentional communities disband, right? Because there’s just too much conflicting ideas about how it should happen. So there is something to the thing with cults about everybody’s being a little bit brainwashed, right? Because that’s how you build the cohesion and you maintain it.

[00:26:13] Jeremy: But then there’s like the Burning Man approach, right? Where you’re just creating a space, you’re creating like a temporary autonomous zone and everyone just brings whatever the fuck they want. Or like the Quakers where they’re, like, you speak when the spirit moves you to speak. And yeah, you don’t see a lot of like Quaker megachurches, but like, you know, there are Quaker gatherings. Burning Man happens every year. Local burns happen every year. Like, maybe not everyone is going to do that. But I don’t think we need everyone to do that. Just, like, how do we make a space for the people who do want to do that? 

[00:26:46] Eric: Yeah, I think it’s possible. It just, it needs to be non-regressive.

[00:26:50] Jeremy: Yeah, we can’t be hyper-focused on recreating some kind of Golden Age. Like, primitivism isn’t quite right, but like how do we bring intention to our way of being and the structure of our society?

[00:27:04] Eric: I don’t know. When I imagine having a cult, I think of it having really nice architecture. Kind of like Star Trek: The Next Generation. They visit all these planets where there’s like 10 people living on them, but they have these huge, beautiful compounds and gardens and all this shit. That’s what I want in a cult.

[00:27:21] Jeremy: That does imply like the employment of skills artists. You’re just like, come up with a cult that appeals to artists, and in that case you can be more creative, anti-hierarchical anarchists about it. It’s like it’s not just one person’s vision but people who have vision, whose vision is compatible. Like a cult without followers, only creators.

[00:27:44] Eric: I think that’s something interesting. And especially if you can just ask them a little bit from the culture, you can produce work that’s innovative in all the right ways.

[00:27:54] Kristine: I mean, what is a cult? Like, you know, there’s somebody who has a vision, you know? Why not be going after something you want to realize.

[00:28:06] Jeremy: Like you said, you have a vision. I think everyone has a vision of something better if they give themselves even a little bit of space, to think about it. Part of the whole It’s Now or Never thing is like, we don’t have time to postpone trying to realize any of these visions. So is your vision compatible with what I want? Then let’s work together. Now is the time to be implementing our visions in whatever little steps we can, because there may not be any other time.

[00:28:36] Well, I don’t want to put myself up as like an individual except that I’m the one making a podcast and, like, [laughs] I’m doing work around this, and I have this particular thing that I’m trying to do. Well, like we have to actually organize. We actually have to determine policies. I don’t want to suggest another like Anonymous mask that anyone gets to wear. I want to retain some control over the brand, you know what I mean? We do kind of need to agree on some things. One of which is, and I was thinking about this, because some rules are just kind of arbitrary. Like where it’s just like, well, you do this because this is the way we do it. And that’s how you build a group identity is just by having these policies or rules or rituals that we just do and we define ourselves because we’re doing it this way. 

[00:29:23] So here’s my suggestion: it’s always “rock, paper, scissors, shoot.” You don’t go on scissors ever. That’s anathema. Similarly, it’s “one, two, three, go“, not “one, two, three.” Yeah. Because the three becomes the go. You say the number differently and that’s just sloppy.

[00:29:42] Talon: So I think the real thing you hit upon here is the clear and concise explanation for why we do things, even if that explanation is “just because.” So like anytime there is a rule, it has to immediately be followed with “here is why,” even if there’s like no reason. It kind of future-proofs it a little bit because there’s value in being able to look back at things that have come before and go, “Oh, the reason they had was literally no reason” so I guess we can chuck that one. I think we just need to say “we thought it would be fun,” like as long as we specifically say that.

[00:30:16] Jeremy: And I’m also okay with like creative mythologizing as long as it’s like–

[00:30:20] Talon: I want an in-universe Terry Pratchett-style disclaimer to any mythology. So like anything we say, we undercut it immediately.

[00:30:28] Jeremy: No, I like that. Well, like look at the history of Buddhism. Buddha didn’t want to talk about afterlifes or metaphysics or cosmologies, really. People wanted to know, so they would like ask him a bunch of stuff and– I’m talking about like the earliest documents, it’s mostly him being just, like, “that shit doesn’t matter bro.” Like, “don’t worry about that,” but like inevitably takes on this like rich mythology and this like dense cosmology and all these stories, ’cause people fucking want that shit! They want to get off on that shit. But I’m saying you could find a way in the middle where you can throw all that ridiculous mythology together, but then also undercut it and do it in a joking way so it clearly doesn’t matter and also isn’t set in stone.

[00:31:11] Talon: People need stories, but I want a story that inherently insists that the story itself doesn’t matter. And here’s a refrain that could be just injected after almost every line, anytime, like you have like a “the world was created on so-and-so day|, and then you immediately follow up with: “but that might be wrong and it doesn’t matter.”

[00:31:29] Jeremy: If you’re giving a sermon, you should conclude this sermon with “but enough of that shit.” Like, I like the whole Discordian approach where it’s all sort of tongue-in-cheek, but they are saying something of value. Like there is something sort of Zen about Discordianism, but it’s also just kind of playful, like an early post-irony. It’s like that Discordian maxim, “Any statement is true in some sense, false in some sense, true and false in some sense, meaningless in some sense, true and meaningless in some sense,” so on and so forth. I actually think that’s an extremely important thing to enshrine somehow. It’s also a really important thing to keep a cult from going sour, is like somehow enshrining the principle that you don’t need certainty, that maybe there’s something taboo about certainty and embracing the fact that any truth claim can be read myriad ways and half of those ways are bullshit, even for your, like, most favoritest truth claims.

[00:32:30] Talon: Yeah. Certainty is the devil.

[00:32:34] Jeremy: Should we make certainty a literal devil?

[00:32:36] Talon: I was just thinking, as soon as it came out of my mouth!

[00:32:39] Jeremy: Like there’s like a bumbling… ‘Cause like Satan used to be kind of a bumbling figure, like for awhile he was just like… Also a servant of God, but he was just like the prosecuting attorney. But then for a while he was just sort of like a bumbling, you know, it never worked out for him. He was like a cartoon villain of like a kid’s cartoon. Like it doesn’t work out for them because they’re the bad guy. Like, so we make it like,  certainty’s the dude who’s just the most sure of everything all the time, and he’s like, mansplaining everything to everyone.

[00:33:15] Talon: From a parable point of view, it’s actually a really useful figure to have because in order to make counterpoints, you need someone to make the point. And you know what? Let’s not be super certain about him being a straw man. Let’s like give him some moral sympathy because why should we be certain about certainty?

[00:33:29] Jeremy: That’s a good point. We have to at least concede that. Well, there’s another like, I don’t know what to call it. Well, I guess it’s a parable, but there’s this Buddhist parable of, um, the Buddha going to have tea with Mara, the like demon of illusion that, basically the devil figure — and Buddhism generally doesn’t take him nearly as seriously as Christianity takes Satan — but is like, keeps you like trapped in the illusion. But Buddha will still like go and have tea with him every now and then. And then I think it was like a monk is like, “Buddha, why are you having tea with Mara? That guy’s a dick.” And Buddha is just like, “Hey man, if you don’t take him seriously, like Mara just wants someone to hang out sometimes.”  This is not verbatim any accounts of it. But that’s like my little takeaway. So I think that’s an important point too.

[00:34:18] Talon: I actually really like that because it allows us to say that certainty is, there is a lot of danger to it, but we can still come to reasonable conclusions about what we think is going to happen based off of established evidence and I think having tea with certainty is a perfect way to encapsulate that.

[00:34:37] Jeremy: You could say you’re “entertaining,” like, “I’m entertaining tonight,” “I’m entertaining this person.” So literally “entertaining certainty” might be important. Being able to think “If I was totally sure about this, how would I behave and is it worth behaving in that way or not?”

[00:34:52] Eric: I’m thinking more like, you need to have something that, that you can build on Instagram, which sounds stupid, but you know. Like how Rajneeshpuram, they all wore their maroon clothes and that was like their own hip little style. You know? That is why you have to have your cult in the desert because it’s just extremely photogenic.

[00:35:12] Jeremy: Hey, forests are nice too.

[00:35:14] Eric: It’s true, but the best cults are in the desert. I don’t know, it’s just true.

[00:35:19] Jeremy: Uh, yeah, there’s a lot of cults that started in the desert, actually. Christianity, Judaism, Islam…

[00:35:25] Eric: Yeah! See? It’s true. And I think like Eastern Oregon is kind of deserty.

[00:35:31] Jeremy: Southern California–

[00:35:32] Eric: Well yeah, California–

[00:35:34] Jeremy: –there’s a lot of, like, So-Cal cult scene.

[00:35:36] Eric: Eric Davis wrote tons about  California cults and spirituality. There’s something about California that attracts that.

[00:35:43] Jeremy: I was just wondering why deserts are so conducive to cult activity. Is it just the photogenic qualities or…?

[00:35:50] Eric: I think there’s like a spiritual aspect to it. Remoteness probably detaches you from the other shit and you have a gap in your psyche to allow something else in maybe.

[00:36:03] Jeremy: Yeah. There was like a very… sense of spaciousness in the desert.

[00:36:07] Eric: Yeah. And it’s also like a hostile environment. And I think that plays into the Hero’s Journey or, you know, sort of shamanic stuff where you’re just, like, you have to go out and put yourself in danger to experience your true self or something, you know, get outside of the shell of modern society’s protections.

[00:36:29] Jeremy: It helps if there’s like a spice or a toad you lick or a particular cactus. 

[00:36:34] Eric: Yeah, I mean, if you want to get on the fast track for brainwashing people, by all means start using drugs.

[00:36:41] Jeremy: Sure. A tried and true method. It’s almost cheating.

[00:36:45] Eric: I mean, I think the start always begins with money. I think that’s why it always starts with a charismatic leader because they can sell it and then the money starts flowing because they’ve convinced everybody to like give up all their assets and then you can buy the land.

[00:36:57] I guess you could do it on the internet.

[00:36:59] Jeremy: Is there to like micro-finance a cult?

[00:37:01] Eric: Yeah, it was weird. I knew this guy that bought some land and he was trying to start a sort of intentional community with it and he like put up a Kickstarter or something like that.

[00:37:11] Jeremy: The thing with Kickstarter is usually like people want to get something out of it. I’ll kickstart a video game or something because I’m going to get that thing. So what can we give back?

[00:37:24] Eric: Well, I mean, it could be something like, you kind of, you’re buying a share. It’s like a timeshare for the cult.

[00:37:30] Jeremy: Cult-share.

[00:37:32] Eric: And you’d have like places people can stay and relax, and that’s kind of like your retreat, I guess. But…

[00:37:38] Honestly, man, every good cold starts with a manifesto, right?

Manifesto Montage

[00:37:55] (Sound effects. Clock winding up, ticking, speeding up.) 

[00:37:55] Manifesto Montage: The prestigious Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists published in Chicago has maintained a symbolic clock showing how close they think the world is to nuclear war. They call it the doomsday clock.

[00:38:10] And now, two minutes to midnight.

[00:38:16] (Bell rings. Cuckoo clock chimes. Sound of crying. Music builds.) 

[00:38:16] It’s a little late for tears now, isn’t it Barbara?

[00:38:19] We’re going, Mom. Goodbye!

[00:38:20] Let us face, without panic, the reality of our time. And let us prepare for survival by understanding the weapon that threatens us.

[00:38:23] All of you have heard of capitalism. But just what is capitalism? Fundamental to capitalism is the profit motive. There’s the basis of the capitalistic system. That’s the incentive that makes capitalism work. 

[00:38:33] Well, look around.

[00:38:35] For the first time in human history, there is enough productive capacity in the world to meet the needs of every living human. This does not take into account the human misery and suffering that cannot be measured in dollars and cents. Every day we are tragically wasting our human resources by failure to provide for a helpful and effective living. Because the capitalist demands a profit, these needs will go unmet.

[00:38:52] Our world condemns imperialism and its bloody deeds.

[00:38:56] That’s how the capitalistic system operates. You didn’t seem at all appreciative. Can’t we agree that capitalism is an economic system for the production and distribution of things we need and want?

[00:39:05] I won’t agree to that.

[00:39:05] Well it’s easy to see that you have different ideas of what capitalism is.

[00:39:08] There are primarily two opposing forces in our society. On the one hand, the capitalists, who are the ruling class, and on the other hand, the majority of the people.

[00:39:15] For the past 15 years, I have totally discounted myself and felt off the fucking wall because I was living with people who felt, acted, and thought differently than I did. And I thought they were the way everybody in the world was supposed to be and I thought I was absolute total shit because I obviously wasn’t that way.

[00:39:27] I found out that I’m not absolute total shit and I was giving up any credible amount of power.

[00:39:31] (Music swells.) 

[00:39:31] A kind of traditional repressive asceticism… The law in our society, basically, is based upon this particular point of view. All our frustrations we learn to hold in and to repress. I’m getting fed up with it.

[00:39:41] Even if you’re not really well mannered, or you could make a habit of being civil.

[00:39:44] And our anger like just builds up year after year at work and our personal relationships and all these feelings we have inside us that we just can’t get out. We can’t say ’em. And we end up screaming at people and we end up drinking and we end up doing this countless things that are real self-destructive. When I discovered what was going on, I freaked out. I felt totally alienated and I was seething with anger. The absurdity of it… the total absurdity of it is incredible. But what can you do when you’re powerless out there, alone, faced with this kind of thing every single day? You internalize that and you start to believe it. And act on it. And that’s what the capitalist wants you to do: act on it so you can buy stuff so he can make a fucking profit.

[00:40:26] What?

[00:40:30] Mario Savio: Sometimes the grievances of people extend to more than just the law — extend to our whole mode of arbitrary power. And that’s what we have here.

[00:40:36] Manifesto Montage: This is a nation of laws. And you and I have a guarantee to police protection. The law is our weapon.

[00:40:36] Noam Chomsky: Wherever you find a structure of domination and hierarchy, somebody giving orders, somebody taking them, whatever they may be, you have to ask “Is that legitimate?” You shouldn’t assume it is legitimate because it’s been like that. That’s not a justification. When you do, you generally find that it can’t be justified.

[00:40:43] Manifesto Montage: Now, what can you do to solve the problem? You’ve seen the nature of the problem, but what can you as an individual in your own community do?

[00:40:49] Mario Savio: There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart that you can’t take part, you can’t even passively take part, and you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the leavers, upon all the apparatus and you’ve got to make it stop. And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you’re free the machine will be prevented from working at all.

[00:41:11] Manifesto Montage: Fires and other catastrophes are dramatic events which attract wide attention.

[00:41:14] The trouble with me is getting started. I always have to force myself to do new things.

[00:41:23] I’m the same way!

[00:41:30] Noone likes to sit and wait for a party to start. A party can’t really get going until everyone arrives. A party calls for teamwork! Why, nobody will have any fun unless everyone joins in. So join in wholeheartedly and you’ll all have a lot more fun. An invitation even is extended to the reader. So come join the fun!

[00:41:34] A party’s more fun when all your friends are there.

[00:41:35] I just thought you might want to go to that party.

[00:41:43] Oh, I do, I do!

[00:41:44] Then we’ve got some work to do.

[00:41:45] A rich harvest of forgotten truths, which may influence our present thought, seems to be at hand from the wilderness.

[00:41:47] There’s a whole ‘nother Millennial vision that actually can go back to roots in the Aquarian Age of the Hippies in the 60s which sees the new world, the new age, the new order, the new light coming down. So it’s a fascinating thing.

[00:41:57] That a revolution often brings into provenance a type that is always with us: the eternal witness to the fact that things are not what they should be.

[00:42:03] This wilderness has been, on one hand, the haunt of bandits and outlaws, but on the other, it has been an aslyum for political and religious refugees.

[00:42:11] Don’t let the alarmists alarm you. Non-conformist screwballs in a society, far from being a sign of its susceptibility to possible overturn, are signs of its stability — in their odd way.

[00:42:22] Little lies are such a firm foundation for big ones. And you couldn’t help stretching truth like a rubber-band.

[00:42:28] Man has been given an escape from the biological determination of a satisfier of his drives, but he hasn’t yet found an answer. He’s escaped from, but he hasn’t escaped to anything yet. But one must pioneer first in one’s imagination until one can do it in any other manner. The human imagination is indeed something to be admired. And since we are inquiring into a future world, one might conceive of the boundaries of this world as being quite different from those are the old one, and not simply the physical ones you see on that map, which is no longer one of limitation but a point of departure.

[00:42:58] Understanding cult as innovative, in my own mind, it becomes more of a positive kind of word. Indeed, a revolutionary necessity.

[00:43:04] We were all very excited by the energy of the gathering and by the new unity we were finding in a class analysis of the world around us.

[00:43:21] (Music ends. Cuckoo clock sounds again. A mechanical clock beings to play La Internationale, then winds down as it finishes.) 

Back to the Guests…

[00:43:21] Eric: I think it’s not a bad idea to like throw it out there as an idea and try to like get feedback from people that you don’t know.

[00:43:40] Jeremy: Well, that’s the plan, right? That’s where I’m at right now, is like, just throwing out this crazy idea and then seeing like what that sparks in other people and what kind of ideas and even pushback other people have. And I just think that would make for interesting conversation. And then I’ll try to get some people who know more than me.

[00:43:59] Kristine: Yeah. Like right now, we’re not even living on land. We’re living, like, above somebody else, like, in a second storey apartment.

[00:44:08] Jeremy: We don’t even have dirt. Not only do we not own the teeny box that we live in but we don’t even we don’t even own the dirt below it. Or we don’t even have dirt below it, we have another box.

[00:44:18] Kristine: No dirt.

[00:44:19] All right, signing off now. Hit the “like” button and subscribe to this podcast.

[00:44:23] Jeremy: Yeah. Subscribe. I’m gonna set up a Patreon. [Laughs]

[00:44:26] Kristine: Yeah, buy Jeremy a cup of coffee.

[00:44:35] Jeremy: Buy me a coffee. I run on coffee.

[00:44:56] (Jeremy and Kristine simultaneously say “yum.” Music fades in, out.)

Closing

[00:44:56] So. What do we have to look forward to? What’s next? Hm. Okay.

[00:45:03] Let’s take a quick peek at the future. Picture the problem.

[00:45:08] (Cards shuffle.) 

[00:45:08] Now clear your mind. Please cut the deck. Thank you.

[00:45:15] The name of the game is three card spread. Ante up.

[00:45:19] Card number one. This is where we’re standing right now. Each moment a mystery revealed. The card overturned, exposed. Your mind grasping these images and symbols, trying to find a rational meaning.

[00:45:33] And what a card to start with. The tower. An imposing figure looming over all those below. Babel. The spine of the beast. The needle stuck in the last good vein of a junky, black oil coursing through the global techno-industrial empire. The pinnacle of the grandiosity of humankind. The point where all roads and supply chains converge. Civilization as we know it. Babylon.

[00:46:03] The tower wobbles. All things are impermanent. One stone will not remain a top another. Not forever. And not every stone even needs to be removed for a tower to fall. It only takes one Jenga block. The question is not whether the tower will topple but when. You see, the tower has already been struck. A bolt of white hot lightening awareness, a burst of potential energy suddenly materialized and released, rigid order dissolving into the chaos of possibility. The tower’s supposedly solid foundations have become unstable.

[00:46:48] Second card. The midway point. The moment met, but yet to be revealed, touched but not truly known.

[00:46:57] Death.

[00:46:59] Death stands in the road ahead. But, of course, the death card doesn’t necessarily foretell doom. The question is death of what. Of you? Who are you? What are you. What is a “you?” Where is the you? The ego? A cartoonishly simplistic image. The inner crayon drawing of an omni-definitional reality. The flaking scab, the shallow point of contact between living hot blood and everything else.

[00:47:29] Death of that? Maybe. Maybe the death of something holding us back, keeping us from where we need to go.

[00:47:35] Now, these cards point to energies. But with intention, energy can be directed. Where does the path lead? Where are these energies headed? Where will the reaping plate of death fall? The very denial of death, the idea that death can be overcome or evaded even as a civilization, a society, a species?

[00:48:04] Final card. The outcome. The still unrealized potential. The Green Sun’s Zenith. Search your library for a green creature card with converted mana cost.

[00:48:19] Wait,  this is a Magic: The Gathering card. Who put this in here? Whatever.

[00:48:24] All right, look. I’m no fortune teller. There’s no reading the future with any certainty. Sure, you can track patterns, plot curves, build models, and Intuit trends. You can tell stories, but in times of turmoil, when the stories that shape our societies and cultures are no longer sufficient to the reality, there’s often innovation, new stories emerged to fill the need.

[00:48:50] Our old stories have failed us where we are now, wherever we are, we’re off the fucking map. Our constants have lost their consistency. Collapse is like a grand koan. We’re confronted, forcibly, with a sudden knowledge of impermanence, the arising and passing away of all things, of suffering — the suffering of clinging — and the burning away of the foundational delusions of our way of living: the denial of death itself.

[00:49:27] For me, it’s not about saving the world anymore. Not this world. Not this way of doing things.

[00:49:36] Embrace the end.

[00:49:38] This world could use a good eulogy though. What wonders were created. What horrors. What a wild ride. What a time for lovers of human and cosmic drama. What an age to choose to be born in, if any of us ever got a choice, and if not, what a wonderful coincidence that we could be here together to see all of this. An end. A beginning. Change, which is as always inevitable and necessary. So let’s celebrate that… And the new world to come, whatever that looks like.

[00:50:31] This podcast, like any living thing will continue to change and evolve. Things might look pretty different this season. We’ve got some new stuff planned…iIf anything ever goes according to plan anyway. I hope you’ll join us. I think it’ll be a lot of fun. See you next time.

[00:51:55] (“My Body’s a Question” by Telepathic Teddy Bear plays, then fades out.)