Do pseudo-religious cults reflect the times in which they develop? Or does popular culture make the various cults the symbols of the times?
I’m sure there’s an online sociologist or philosopher, somewhere, who has thought this before – feel free to point them out – but what the heck. It’s my blog, I’ll derive if I want to.
Think about the major cults that’ve made news over the past five or six decades:
The Manson Family formed in the Sixties – communal pseudo-hippies, living on LSD, intertwined with California popular culture – and in some ways marked the end of the Sixties.
The Peoples Temple – like an EST seminar run amok? All about the seventies.
Heavens Gate? Even though it ended with a mass suicide in ’97, it flourished (after a fashion) in the eighties, for reasons that seemed to match the decade.
The Branch Davidians? Synonymous with the ’90s – in a decade of groups that fought the law and the law won, they were the big kahuna of them all.
The 2000s? My theory breaks down a little here, unless you count militant Wahhabi Islam which, conveniently for my theory, dominated American culture more than any cult in history.
And with the war over and lost, we can go back to normal…
…well, not “normal”.
It’s all setup for my theory that this particular cult may be perfectly set to define the 2020s, or vice versa, so far.
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