There are a lot of folks who do their best to use any and all tools to keep
the sheep in the pen - in the CorpRat world the worst are the ones who keep
insisting on 'this is a family' and other buzzwords all designed to try to
keep that warm fuzzy "wooly blinkers" feeling while extracting as much work
from the underlings as possible. Naturally the head CorpRat likes to think
of his/herself as the daddy or the mommy and the senior execs believe
themselves to be the elder sibs who can of course demand their due from the
younger ones - like forcing them to do the onerous chores and hogging the
credit and the goodies. I'm not sure this is quite a cult in the usual
sense of one though, despite the very real similarities.
Could we say a cult is a religion in its earliest stages? I'm not sure.
I've met fans, SciFi and Fantasy and SCA who were unhinged in a way I'd
actually call cultish despite the fact that I too have a lot of fannish
interests. I am profoundly nervous around someone whose entire life
revolves around only one or two things - whatever they are. I almost wrote
"one or two things that aren't real" but then I realized that while unreal
interests - fantasy, SF, religion (if it takes over a very significant
portion of your mental and physical resources) are indeed dangerous but so
is investing a great deal of one's self in only one or two 'real' pursuits
too - work, children, spouse/lover, hobbies, volunteering... if they are the
only thing a person ever does and all resources are focused only on that one
thing, there's something wrong.
Are cults part of some sort of obsessive/compulsive streak in some people?
Maybe. We all want to belong, we all want simple answers, to feel
absolutely right and at ease. Ok, I like it for a while, but then I start
to wonder what I'm forgetting or leaving out. But I know I'm peculiar and I
know very few people actually cannot be sheep or shepherd. I wish I could
remember the title of a really good book about Fuzzy Logic which really
helped me see how much of our thought patterns are binary, thanks not just
to Judeo Christianity but the old Greeks. Yes/no, black/white, with
me/against me... Binary is a useful tool, we couldn't have invented
computers without that logic pattern. At the same time, almost this/not
quite that is also valid and true - the world is not really, after all,
black and white. It isn't shades of grey either, it's in color; it's
analog. But if you spend a great deal of time staring at the marvels of
color and form in a single rose you won't notice the other flowers.
Meanwhile, I gotta clean up the kitchen - the contractor has found he needs
access to a wall which is, of course, above the ONE counter I did not clear
yesterday. Sigh.
Elena
Received on 2004-07-26 20:00:46
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