How easy it is to control and manipulate people

[vlyons]

I've been watching "Wild Wild Country" on Netflix. I encourage everyone to do the same. It is about the Rajneesh cult in Oregon in the 1980s, and how it tried to take over a town and a county. In the 1970s, I had my own experience of cults in Calif. I lived in San Francisco, during the Jim Jones cult, although I was never a part of it. There were many cults tho'- one behind every tree it seems. And they aren't any different than the cult of Trump, or the cult of Nazi Hitler.

It seems we humans like to be a member of a tribe. I guess that it's in our ape DNA. The rallys to confirm that our choice to be in this tribe, rather than that tribe, are the right choice, and that we are special and better and right. Whereas those people in that tribe over there are inferior, and wrong, and detestable. The line between a tribe and a mob is tissue thin. Play on ignorant people's emotions just a little bit. Make them prove that they are more dedicated to the cult than anyone else. And it becomes very easy to get them to believe lies, close their eyes and ears to facts, vent their anger in violent acts. Our egos get all entwined with identifying with the cult. So any crack or tarnish in the perfection and righteousness of the cult is a personal ego reduction. And the death of a fabricated imaginary ego cannot be tolerated.

We don't get much education about our emotions, how they arise and fall, how they exist, how to manage and deal with them. So we have an emotionally how-of-control president pulling the emotional strings of his followers. And they are so easy to manipulate, because accepting facts means their dear leader is an ignorant evil asshole. And then what would that make them? Accepting that a fabricated ego entwined and enmeshed with a cult is a big fat delusion cannot be tolerated.

When the Rajneeshies in Oregon fell apart, and it came out that their leader had poisoned a town of 700 people with salmonella and tried to murder a US attorney and the Attorney General of OR and god knows who else, the cult followers got a big fat taste of the disillusionment and sorrow that they had been ignorant of the delusion that they had been living.

And that is exactly what it will take to begin to crack and tarnish the cult of Trump. We must shove all the Trump crimes that Mueller discloses into the faces of the Trump followers.

[no_hypocrisy]

1. It all begins with misplaced trust.

And the abandonment of independent thinking.

[Solly Mack]

2. How easy is it?

Scary easy.

[realmirage]

3. Humans have built in impulses to shut down their own brains

A quick look at history shows humans are dangerously easy to convince to do all sorts of atrocities. We have impulses toward greed and being accepted by a group, even an evil one. The Neanderthals did themselves in somehow, I wonder how many years humans have left.

[kentuck]

4. Is DU a cult?

[uponit7771]

6. No, there are too many views on the spectrum accepted here and too many people who know

... how to type and read from a computer screen.

I even view FAUX News with the purpose of wanting an opposite view but they lie so much about the simpliest shit

[realmirage]

7. The majority decides which groups are cults

200 years from now Christianity could be considered a cult. Some offshoots of it already are. But since it's still a major religion it doesn't get the label. Political groups could be considered cults. Capitalists, communists... I know that the usual definition includes religion, but many people follow non-deity related ideas even more rabidly than they do gods. This is evident among "christians" who care more about border security than they do about what Jesus said about children.

Any and all groups can be considered cults, so long as the majority agrees that it is.

[uponit7771]

5. Nearly 50% of Trump voters believed Pizza Gate was true in part or whole

[vlyons]

8. What wisdom will we gather from the Trump era

I would like to think that after Mueller reveals Trump's crimes, and the consequences of that revelation begins to unfold, that there will be a renaissance of ethical decency and a public yearning for honesty and truth.

[Ron Green]

9. Tribalism is easy because it's fear-based, lower brain stem response.

Community, on the other hand, requires higher brain activity and yes, even love.