Yes, you are all wrong
Yes, you are all wrong
You really should read Schulz's *Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error*
The most interesting questions about this cartoon have nothing to do with whether the guy is right or wrong, nor whether it's possible for one person to be right when everyone around them is wrong.
The really interesting questions are:
Why do people instantaneously react to a person who does this—even to the very idea of someone doing this—with such contempt, both scorning and mocking anyone who would ever dare to take the position that they are right and their entire group (whatever its size) is wrong?
Why the contempt, scorn, and mocking? Are those what result from intelligent, thorough familiarity with the facts?
People don't scorn, mock, and hold someone in contempt because known facts make it painfully obvious that the person is wrong. No, no, no. If they had facts, they’d use them. Contempt, scorn, and mocking always prove complete ignorant of the facts because, being ignorant, moronic shit liked that is all that fools have left to use.
Think about it. You looked at the depiction of this guy, you don't have a fucking clue what he's talking about, and you (if you’re like most people) were immediately inclined to think that the chances of the truth siding with him are next to zero.
Besides, the gall of him to say so!
And most likely, you're completely oblivious to the fact that doing what this guy is doing and being right about it is not at all a rare occurrence. It happens all the time. It happens every time someone makes a discovery or realizes a truth that contradicts what their upbringing, their education, their religion, their government, or even science itself has said all their life or even for hundreds of years.
It happens every single time there’s progress.
We celebrate them, too, don’t we? Sure we do: once they’re long ago dead and gone.
It is always just one person who initially discovers the truth of what everybody else is wrong about, or maybe a group so small that they might as well be just one in light of the numbers imbalance—or the power imbalance—that they face by being honest and speaking the truth as they know it.
"You're all wrong," doesn't just apply to the people standing around us at the time, but also to everyone who ever believed what all of them are wrong about.
A friend recently shared this clip with me, an excellent example, because this man—a hero no matter what your politics are—stood up to goons who were just a tip of a huge and powerful spear and who, without their arsenals and backing, are not a fraction of the man he is. I hope he’s still living.
What I’m telling you is that this herd mentality, this propensity to act like sheeple, this cult mind has shitall to do with concern for the truth. It revolves around the terror of standing alone in fidelity, in loyalty, in devotion to the truth we know against when confronting antagonistic forces.
"Tell me lies, tell me lies… but don't ever leave me."
But why are they antagonistic at all, especially when all we’re doing is stating something that contradicts whatever sacred cow they identify with and have huddled around, and especially when they haven’t even heard yet what we found out? It’s just like they do not want to find out. But, if it could be true, why wouldn’t they want to find out?
The obvious answer is that they hate the truth. They don’t just hate the truths that contradict them. They don’t love the truth except for the truths they don’t want to hear. That would be like loving the part of a person that bolsters your ego while hating the part of them that exposes who you really are. Meaning: you’re not loving any of the person at all. You’re not at all dealing with the real person in the first place, because those “parts” don’t make up the person. Those are nothing but narcissistically perceived parts of the compartmentalized object to which you’ve reduced them, whose sole reason for being is to serve your purposes.
The truth is no more your servant than a person is.
The proof of what I’ve said lies in the expression "dare to tell the truth".
Why must we “dare”? Why is truth something it takes daring to tell? Why isn't truth, instead, so loved and in such high demand that people will hoist the truth-teller up on their shoulders and parade them around town in celebration? Why, when a longtime consensus has been dead wrong, did uttering truths which no more than hinted at undermining it so often wind up killing the reputation or taking the life of the poor sap who dared (supposedly) to “deny, hate, and rebel” against the judgment and wisdom of fools who were actually clinging to lies?
Wouldn’t you chuck their shit, too?
Well, history has proven as roundly as anything ever gets proven that NO, you most likely would not.
And why, over and over and over, did such brutal and evil things have to happen, and only after they’ve “killed the body but not the soul” of the truth-teller (or a long string of truth-tellers) did anyone else dare so little as merely to question what later revealed itself to be a fool's "truth", or even a malicious, destructive lie?
In other words, why is persecution even a thing?
If you haven’t seen oodles of examples of demonic levels of persecution, from the very outset of the CONVID hoax and throughout it, in every circle and sphere of life and against anyone who dared question or criticize or reject that pathetically thin, smarmy, weak narrative that carried most of the world away, then wake the fuck up and start looking at what’s been going on all around you.
One of the most succinct and useful definitions of “cult” I know of is: a group of people who refuse to look.
One of the most distinctive cult behaviors I know of is to use the excuse of being offended—at cursing, for example—in order to terminate further thinking and conversation by derailing focus and shifting it off the issue and onto the feelings and (quite frail, obviously) “integrity” of the “offended” person.
How do you know when a person has genuinely been offended? They shut the fuck down. They retreat. They hide. They run away.
How do you know when a hypocrite gets offended? They rail. They lose their shit. They treat you like your only intent was to damage them. They create a huge scene. They make you the bad guy. They paint you evil.
In other words, they stop people from looking at what offended them by bringing their gorilla of outrage, shifting all the attention away and onto them.
This is always a disingenuous ploy, a gimmick, a trick (except when children and juveniles are involved,) and today’s discourses are infested with it. It’s also not what this guy is doing. There is no “offense” in warding danger off from your loved ones.
This is what protection looks like:
Silverback. Directed by Miles Blayden-Ryall, performances by Vianet Djenguet, John Kahekwa, and Lambert Muhangi, 2024.
The hypocritical kind of “offense” is also easy to spot. Notice what hypocrites do in contrast and dead opposition to what they say. It’s all words. Their words are not true, as is the case when people are protecting their loved ones.
A hypocrite’s words seek to engender support and action on the part of those that the hypocrite depends on and would feel powerless without.
What indication of offense and powerlessness and dependence did you see in Mpungwe’s behavior?
There is nothing powerless or dependent about a true protector.
But back to cultism…
Everyone tends to think that cultism is an aberration, a craziness confined to the “fringe”, a break from reality which the wider society claims to know.
That would be true in a healthy society.
In authoritarian societies, cultism is the core. It's an aberration of healthy humanity. It's an aberration of healthy human development and maturity. It's an aberration of sanity and the ability to reason soundly. It’s an aberration of genuine community, because the communality of a cult is the result of confinement, not freedom. You must stay “inside”, because everyone “outside” is an antagonist who hates the cult. The cult is truth itself—so your relationship to the truth is wholly and solely defined by your relationship to the cult.
Are you beginning to get a glimmer of the nature of the reactions that most people have to the prospect shown in the comic, even if just from a detached perspective? How about from the vantage of actually standing there, surrounded by everyone you know, telling them they’re wrong? Do you truly have huevos like that?
If not, you’re some shade of cultist. There are shades of grey here, to a point, but the cultist themself draws the line in the sand—except that this is sticky sand that gets hard as concrete the instant you disturb it. They draw it at the exact point where they turn against someone relationally for nothing more than taking exception to them with mere words. This is why cultists, aside from the fact that they’re hypocrites, always become far more upset about what you say than about what you do. It’s why they care so much about what you “believe”.
In my early Christian days (mid-70s) I met a fellow “believer” who seemed nice enough, but as soon as he'd shaken my hand, he started quizzing me about my beliefs. And he went on and on. I satisfied him with my answers, but I was left with and upsetting and dizzying realization. This was 50 years ago and it still sends a shudder down my spine. At the time, it shook me to my bones. I could have been a serial killer or a rapist or child-fucker for all he knew. Not only would he have remained completely clueless, even after his little pop quiz, the experience made me realize that beliefs served a particular, abhorrent function: they put him in a severely oblivious position where not only did he not know anything about my life, and not only was he just as likely to walk away deluded about me as he would understanding me—he’d walk away never needing to know, nor even aware that something else could be known.
Beliefs were his proxy for understanding.
He didn't care even a little bit about how I lived my life. He never asked about what I did or what I wanted. All he cared about was whether my beliefs passed muster with the orthodoxy he preferred. Since I got an “A” though, (I could tell by his hug,) he welcomed me heartily as his “brother”. I couldn’t believe I’d met someone so shallow. It was a pivotal experience for me and left a deep impression.
Cultism isn't just a problem of dearths of honesty and integrity and intelligence. If it were, we’d only be talking mental health here (and believe me, we are); but cultism is far more insidious and destructive than that.
Cultism is the only soil in which authoritarianism can take root.
Cultism is the destruction of the preciousness of the individual, the reduction and transformation of precious people into optional appendages of a group body.
In a cult, the sole purpose and value of an individual lie in their contribution to the strength, respectability, and expansion of the group. They might as well have put a radioactive golden tumor on an altar and bowed down to it. For them, the group is all, and it must be over all, above all, in all, consuming and subsuming all, forever, Any particular member, though, is just a temporary, optional, disposable appendage. Prunable. Cullable. Purgable. Forgettable.
(Except they in no way actually forget you. It’s plain as day whenever you, the “reject”, approach them. You’ll see it written all over their faces and their bodies. They remember, alright—with dismay that broaches on terror.)
So, how does this relate to the cartoon?
We all know that it can take daring to speak the truth, but this isn’t because it’s the nature of truth-telling. We must dare to tell the truth because we live in the midst of cults of every size: relationships, families, neighborhoods, communities, clubs, cities, counties, states, entire nations, entire “schools of thought”, religions, philosophies, ideologies, entire cultures and traditions. I’m not saying that every example of all those things is a cult. Of course, all of them that actively promote cultism are cults. But before a cult can form, there must be a demand for its wares—just like any market. “You can’t con an honest person,” so they say. Con artists are opportunists who exploit the connability of dishonest people. Which came first? Eliminate dishonesty and con artistry will wither in the sand. So, in that sense, “marks” are more culpable for their own victimization than their victimizers are, because the marks present the opportunity (even the desire) to get conned before a con can happen.
The same is true for cults, because a cult is just a grand, systematized, perpetual con. To the degree that we are codependent in our minds and our relationships, we're either filth-encrusted flies in search of a new turd or firmly embedded in one already. What is a nation if not a grand cult of "we're better then all y'all" delusionals screaming, "AMERICA -- LOVE IT OR LEAVE IT!" ?? What is a religion if not a grand cult of, “We, and we only, far more than any of the rest, have the ultimate truth?”
A lot of people object to that last characterization because they refuse to look at what happens if you propose that another grand, systematized, perpetually indoctrinating and behavioral-conditioning institution (in the broadest sense) has an even better, truer truth that should assimilate, rectify, and subsum yours. You’d think that truth-lovers would rejoice, ecstatic that they’d might be getting introduced to an even fuller, deeper, more beneficial truth than what they’d been evangelizing.
Of course they would, if in fact they were truth-lovers, not cultists.
Think about it. We all know what would happen, and it would not be a celebration.
Apart from their infantilism, which is the very air that cultists breathe and the only “light” they seek, they as cultists would suffocate, stumble blind, and perish; and authoritarianism—the one and only thing that poses the threat against which telling the truth demands daring—would die with them.
So, then, how can you tell if a pair or a clique or a group is a cult? It's really easy:
If you know that you must accept, conform, and subordinate yourself to what they all “know is true" or face being marginalized, erased, expelled, or even exterminated (yeah—just like a disease-ridden rodent)—it’s a cult for Chrissake! Especially if merely raising the possibility that what they claim to be right might in fact be wrong, or that it might be good to at least ask the question instead of refuse to look… If no more than that will get you blackwashed, blackballed, and “cast into outer darkness”, it’s a cult, full stop. I don't care how widespread, how powerful, how highly respected or revered it might be.
And, yeah, I'll say it: the Vatican is the capital of the biggest, richest, most obscenely opulent, insanely brutal, utterly horrendous and murderous global cults the world has ever seen. Protestants, despite their protestations in word only, whose very identity would be incoherent without the target of their protestantism, follow directly but feebly in the footsteps of their supposedly repugnant mother.
It does not matter how fervidly or fervently or furiously or frantically or crazily you need your special, chosen group to not be a cult. Of course it's not, right? It's the answer, the hero, the truth, the savior in which you trust, without which you'd face chaos and death. Sad to say and sorry I have to say it, but truth isn’t a function of your needs. If staying in a group’s good graces is, for you:
· a desperate, existential condition for your survival;
· an unflinching demand from the group you depend on as your ultimate source of sanity and sense of safety;
· and if, on failing to satisfy that demand, the group will disavow you and throw you under the bus…
Then it's a fucking cult, dude! There's no doubt about it.
If a group demands subordination and compliance on pain of the punishment of ostracization, expulsion, or eradication, THEN IT’S A CULT.
No amount of whitewashing euphemism or explaining away its cultism will change a goddam thing.
If you submit to this kind of treatment, you’ve become a cultist.
If you demand this kind of treatment and will fight tooth and nail to get it and protect it, even to the point of murder (whether literal or reputational or relational—and I’m not exaggerating or kidding: they demand it and do it), then you’re a flaming cultist.
And yeah, all you so-called “patriots”: I’m talking about your infantile, “My country is better than your country!”
And yeah, parents, I'm talking about your families, too.