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Humans need fantasy to be human, to be the place where the falling angel meets the rising ape. Isn't that a marvelous quote from novelist Terry Pratchett? I'll come back around to it in a little while. It's been a tough time in our household because my mother in law recently died and it reminded me that death is coming for us all. Now, don't be alarmed. I'm not announcing the apocalypse, I'm just stating a fact. Though it is interesting how many cult leaders and religious prophets have claimed special knowledge about both the afterlife and the end of the world. It's not just the Heaven's Gate leaders, tea and dough, saying that the world was about to be recycled and your only salvation would be to abandon your earth suit and ascend to the alien mothership. It's also the myriad preachers who thought they knew when Jesus was coming back. Like William Miller, whose prediction that the Savior would appear in October of 1845 right before the world would be cleansed by fire, turned what was called the Great Awakening into what would later jokingly be referred to as the Great Disappointment. That's right, as many as 100,000 true believers across the American Northeast were disappointed that the world didn't end when Pastor Miller said it would. Or how about Juhayman al Otaibi, the Saudi Arabian Salafi leader who believed his brother in law was the Mahdi. That's a Muslim savior figure prophesied to come to earth right before the Day of judgment. Together with 600 militants, he laid siege to the Grand Mosque in Mecca, the holiest site in Islam, for two weeks in 1979, right at the time when 50,000 people were gathered there for religious ceremonies. Figures like this are both obsessed with and exploiting in their followers. Something I want to suggest to you is at the heart of our humanity, and that's what I'll be talking about today. They key up our fear of death and then present themselves as having the secret knowledge, practice, sacred text or divine personal identity that will soothe that fear. In this strategy, a time clock of impending doom is one tried and true method combined with the promise of salvation and liberation for the faithful. Do these rituals unquestioningly, Believe these things, follow me obediently, and you'll be okay. In some formulations, you will even be granted the ultimate reward of eternal life. I've been fascinated with how this works for at least the last 35 years. And even though my thought process is informed by strands from neuroscience and cognitive psychology and cultural anthropology, it is still, of course inevitably speculative and more philosophical than research based. So that caveat aside, the image I get is of a turning point, a conversion experience, a threshold crossing, if you will, into accepting a crucial metaphysical assertion. It seems like really buying into this powerful, highly abstract belief, whether it is that Jesus is the son of God who died for your sins, or that we've been sent here to tell you that the alien mothership is going to beam up the chosen ones, or it turns out my brother in law is the prophesied Mahdi. This has to be tied to the viscerally instinctual stakes of life and death, so that this sticky and highly charged claim radically reorganizes the person's operating system and therefore their priorities. Like an axiomatic equation, everything now gets rerouted through. And if that's too hopelessly abstract, I apologize. How about this? The guru, the cult leader, the prophet. They figured out how to hack in and install their closed loop software so that everything in the convert's life now becomes arranged around the sacred object of faith, be it what God wants, or when the Savior will come, when the world will end, how to save humanity. Or of course, that the teacher themselves is either divine or divinely chosen. And sometimes this software update requires fasting or isolation from the outside world, sleep deprivation via long hours of prayer or meditation, or memorizing of scripture. We don't call that process brainwashing anymore. But notice how closing certain neurobiological doors while overstimulating other pathways has great utility in getting members of a group to believe and act as if singing from the same proverbial hymnbook. With new religious movements, and I still call those cults, that process is often fast and intensely urgent, while with already culturally normalized religions it's more like a marinade that you're bathing in your entire life. And that marination makes a metaphysical construct feel essential to meaning, purpose, community, blissful states of emotional reassurance and to moral guidance. Without it, therefore, surely we'd be lost, empty, perhaps shunned by our community, plunged into a void of meaninglessness. In a way, the apocalyptic emphasis just raises those kinds of stakes immensely, to put humanity all in on the cosmic importance of the group and its leader. Whatever the intensity level, this kind of metaphysics may be so universal and familiar because it plugs into a set of anxieties and needs that we human beings uniquely have. I recently found myself up close and personal with those needs via the entirely normal but nonetheless surreal encounter with death represented by my wife's mother dying just about six weeks ago the grief of this for me is mostly secondhand, but what I am observing and and supporting in my wife is profound and at times overwhelming for her. We also have an almost 8 year old child and so sensitively communicating the loss of her grandma to her has required some thoughtfulness and it has led some close to us to wonder out loud, might this be the moment when we see the wisdom of leaning into religious solace? Julian I'm Julian Walker and you're listening to a Conspirituality Podcast Monday Bonus Episode. If you're not a subscriber via Apple Podcasts or a Patreon supporter, where, by the way, you can also browse all of our archive and listen to all of our episodes ad free and also chat in the comments with a dedicated community. If you're not involved in either of those options, you'll just hear the first five minutes or so before being prompted to spend as little as $5 for the month to keep listening. Today I'll be sharing some reflections on death as it relates to our topic area here of cults, pseudoscience, conspiracy theories and authoritarian extremism. I'll also lean on one of my favorite theorists in this area, Ernest Becker, and share more about the personal journey of the last six weeks since my
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mother in law died, you've been listening to a Conspirituality Bonus Episode sample. To continue listening, please head over to patreon.com conspirituality where you can access all of our main feed episodes ad free, as well as four years of bonus content that we've been producing. You can also subscribe to our bonus episodes via Apple Subscriptions. As independent media creators, we really appreciate your support.
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