Cult Books: One Good, One Terrible

 

I’ve finished writing a new novel (stay tuned for details) in which the massacre at Jonestown in November 1978 plays a pivotal role. Both to research it and because the phenomenon interests me, I’ve read more than a few books on cults and cultic ideology over the last year.

Some of these I’ve already written about, either to praise them (Tim Reiterman’s Raven) or pan them (Jeff Guinn’s The Road to Jonestown), but there are a lot more of them that I haven’t addressed yet. I thought I’d take a moment out of my busy schedule (eating locusts and wild honey while I mutter to desert ghosts, mainly) to highlight two that I consider particularly noteworthy. One of them is quite good, and the other is a perfect example of a terrible author and thinker at their very worst. 

First up is Emma Cline’s striking novel The Girls, which is based on a fictionalized version of the Manson Family and the Tate-LaBianca killings that rotted out the summer of 1969 and cast a shadow that continues to blanket North America to this day. Cline’s novel is aptly named. It focuses on the girls (and a few young women) who surrounded a middle-aged pimp/guru, and the dynamics that bound them to their grim destiny.

 The action in The Girls takes place from the perspective of Evie Boyd, an ex-member of the Family, now living in obscurity and looking back on the events that led her to the very brink of an irreversible course of action. Primarily, we learn of Evie’s upbringing in a family of former Hollywood royalty in decline and the alienation and isolation her dysfunctional family fosters in her. Evie’s attraction to “the ranch” and the Family is almost entirely based on her sexual awakening by way of an infatuation with Suzanne, a character based on Susan “Sexy Sadie” Atkins, arguably the most infamous and flamboyantly damaged of the “Manson girls.”

 What I love most about The Girls is that it sets up cultic initiation in the most realistic manner of any novel I’ve read recently. There’s no “mind control,” no hypnotism, and no dark, incomprehensible forces at play. Simply people; people living in a California struggling under the weight of youthful unrest and idealism, and in a country tottering atop the rotten foundations of American power. It’s a story of young people; primarily young women struggling with predatory men, and with a patriarchal and militaristic society that has rejected them as much as they’ve rejected it. As a character study, it is exquisite. As a look into malignant cults and the anything-but-malignant motives that draw in most of their adherents, it is impeccable.

 Emma Cline’s The Girls won the Shirley Jackson Award for Best Novel in 2016, and you should read it for yourself!

 Now, regrettably, we turn to Steven Hassan’s 2020 nonfiction work The Cult of Trump.

 

Steven Hassan is a curious fellow, and one for whom I feel a commensurately curious loathing. His “claim to fame” is that he was a member of the Reverend Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church; the Family Federation for World Peace and Unification, if you’re nasty. The Unification Church is one of the world’s better-known and longer-lived religious cults. Hassan was a Moonie (as followers of Moon are popularly known) for “more than two years” according to him, and even acted as a recruiter. Once he was “deprogrammed,” he became a “deprogrammer” himself, although he has distanced himself from that movement’s more crazed, barbaric methods since 1980. Those methods, by the way, have included kidnapping, assault, criminal conspiracy, and other criminal acts, and prominent “deprogrammers” like the so-called father of deprogramming, Ted Patrick, have done time for it.

 The problems don’t stop there. Steven Hassan claims to be a hypnotist, believes in the debunked pseudoscience of neurolinguistic programming (or NLP), and, furthermore, believes in the outdated and thoroughly unscientific concept of mind control. This thumbnail sketch should amply illustrate why I detest Hassan as much as I detest other media staple public pseudointellectuals like Doctor Phil or Glenn Beck’s pet not-a-historian David Barton.

 The Cult of Trump is the type of “explainer” book that became a boom industry after the election of Donald Trump in 2016. For a good chunk of Americans, the election of a game-show host and proudly ignorant fascist was inexplicable instead of the inevitable culmination of forces that have been gathering in American politics and social mores for a century. How could so many people vote for Trump? Was it misguided anti-elite sentiment? Racism? The product of epistemic closure? (Hint: probably all of these factors and more.) Not to Steve Hassan! To him, Trump’s repetition and mid-sentence self-contradictions aren’t signs of a poor vocabulary and cognitive decline, but brilliant hypnotic techniques (to back up this claim he cites - I shit you not - Dilbert creator and widely-mocked dim bulb Scott Adams). The Trump fervor of outlets like Fox News and Breitbart aren’t just items in the long history of party newspapers, they’re “mind control.” And, just as the title of his book states so matter-of-factly, Trump supporters aren’t people with different values from Hassan and other Boomer libs; they’re cult members.

 It’s difficult to pick where to begin with this loosely-packed gunny sack of total and complete bullshit. There’s the fact that it minimizes individual choices by voters, not to mention different conceptions of morality and value hierarchies. It simplifies a complicated interplay of political, economic, and social forces into something scary-sounding that pathologizes, minimizes, and belittles, all while pretending to a scientific rigor that is utterly lacking in anything Hassan has ever written (this is a guy who thinks that Great Britain’s royal family is a cult, by the way). He cites fraudulent and debunked sources. He thinks that the CIA’s grotesque MKULTRA clusterfuck was a masterpiece of secret government at its most devious, instead of a total failure perpetuated by an agency that was better at convincing people it was scary than at actually succeeding in any of its missions (other than two; a coup in Guatemala and the installation of the Shah in Iran). He exhibits the paranoia, lack of skepticism, and starry-eyed belief in the world as a better place than it is that characterize the worst tendencies of Baby Boomer liberalism. 

Here's a tip based on my own experience that you may find helpful. If someone starts to talk about “CIA mind control” and “hypnotic programming,” I suggest you do two things. 1. Listen intently, because what they are about to say is probably going to be a wild fucking ride. But while you do this: 2. Feel free to discount the speaker’s opinions in their entirety. The saddest thing about The Cult of Trump is that it isn’t a wild ride; no adrenochrome, ala QAnon, or even weather control machines. Just the same tired fucking “false consciousness” narrative that drives 99% of the books in the highly-profitable Trump-explainer subgenre of bad pop-politics.