Cult
My roommate has an addiction to buying DVDs and recently purchased “Undeclared,” a cancelled series about college from 2001. The series, which contains many of the same actors from “Knocked Up” and “Superbad,” reportedly achieved a cult following. After watching a few episodes, I see that the show has a unique type of humor and it is understandable that some would be enthusiastic about it, though I only think the show is okay.
Cults are a hotly disputed topic with no one completely agreeing on a definition. We all sort-of understand that cults are relatively small an involve worship, but issues of critical thinking, brainwashing, enthusiasm and “the norm” can vary from opinion to opinion.
In arts and entertainment, it is positive to have an item achieve a cult status. In fact, the mainstream is seen as simple and unable to comprehend the complexity of most art. Though classic art and literature can be good and famous, good contemporary art is almost always obscure and erudite. Only for the sake of making money do artists crave popular attention and a loss of the cult status.
With religion, though, cults strive to be more. Religion, lacking objective proof like science, relies on numbers for credibility. If a billion people believe that Jesus had superpowers, it’s not crazy. If ten people believe that David Blaine has superpowers, that’s crazy. With religious cults, people often highlight how the cults rely on brainwashing and abuse its members. Of course, nearly all religion attempts to indoctrinate impressionable children and tries to extract money from its followers. It all seems to be a matter of degree.
Cults of personality seem to break from the small size criterion and focuses on the worship without critical thinking that is reminiscent of religious zealots. Whether it’s Mao, a teen heartthrob or Obama, people worship a person and believe everything that person does is great without ever being critical of it.
Though there is great variance in the definition of the cult organization, there is one thing that present in all three- the desire for humans to worship something irrationally. Whether it’s a twelve-year-old schoolgirl, an eighteen-year-old rocker, an overly devoted boyfriend, a sports fanatic, a Bible thumper or campaigner, there seems to be a desire to worship a shiny golden calf.
The organization, whether it’s a person, a religion or a nation-state, feeds off of this desire to varying degrees. The organization can come in million forms, but the blindness of the worship is what makes a cult a cult.
Cults are a hotly disputed topic with no one completely agreeing on a definition. We all sort-of understand that cults are relatively small an involve worship, but issues of critical thinking, brainwashing, enthusiasm and “the norm” can vary from opinion to opinion.
In arts and entertainment, it is positive to have an item achieve a cult status. In fact, the mainstream is seen as simple and unable to comprehend the complexity of most art. Though classic art and literature can be good and famous, good contemporary art is almost always obscure and erudite. Only for the sake of making money do artists crave popular attention and a loss of the cult status.
With religion, though, cults strive to be more. Religion, lacking objective proof like science, relies on numbers for credibility. If a billion people believe that Jesus had superpowers, it’s not crazy. If ten people believe that David Blaine has superpowers, that’s crazy. With religious cults, people often highlight how the cults rely on brainwashing and abuse its members. Of course, nearly all religion attempts to indoctrinate impressionable children and tries to extract money from its followers. It all seems to be a matter of degree.
Cults of personality seem to break from the small size criterion and focuses on the worship without critical thinking that is reminiscent of religious zealots. Whether it’s Mao, a teen heartthrob or Obama, people worship a person and believe everything that person does is great without ever being critical of it.
Though there is great variance in the definition of the cult organization, there is one thing that present in all three- the desire for humans to worship something irrationally. Whether it’s a twelve-year-old schoolgirl, an eighteen-year-old rocker, an overly devoted boyfriend, a sports fanatic, a Bible thumper or campaigner, there seems to be a desire to worship a shiny golden calf.
The organization, whether it’s a person, a religion or a nation-state, feeds off of this desire to varying degrees. The organization can come in million forms, but the blindness of the worship is what makes a cult a cult.
posted by American Dilettante at
2:27 PM
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