I am disappointed in my university — do better » « The Great Red Spot controversy

Watch out for the abuse of language

Whoa, this video invokes a lot of familiar tropes that I see in cults and other religions, and things like Amazon and Qanon.

Watch it to learn the dangerous tactics conspiracy theorists and religions use to recruit members. These include long-windedness, loaded language (us vs them dichotomies), thought-terminating cliches (that’s why I hate “agree to disagree”) and lots and lots of jargon. I’ve noticed that creationists are masters of the latter — so much of what they do is invoke words and phrases like “irreducible complexity” and “no transitional fossils” and it’s empty, meaningless noise, but it triggers automatic affirmations from the devotees.

I am disappointed in my university — do better » « The Great Red Spot controversy

Comments

  2. Hemidactylus says

    I’m always a bit put off by superficial treatments of cultish groups like the People’s Temple because the focus is upon the contingent end-result, like the Jonestown massacre rather than the roots or early stages. Why did Jim Jones emulate MLK or Gandhi, who he named his own son after, because he was a manipulative charlatan? Or maybe he was a sincere believer in racial justice and equality who became warped by societal reactionary backlash. He started off in Indiana, which was a hotbed of eugenics and sundown towns. He did leftist stuff that kinda forced him to move away to California, into a lily white area also apparently not happy with his race mixin’ ways or diversity of his congregation.

    An interesting essay (The Civil Rights Movement in Mendocino County, California? Jim Jones, Peoples Temple and the Civil Rights Movement Reconsidered by Logan Silva):
    https://jonestown.sdsu.edu/?page_id=33222

    With a bit of a bold conjecture:

    It is my argument that Peoples Temple was a civil rights organization, born of the struggle to achieve gains for African-Americans, and belongs in the pantheon of groups such as SNCC and CORE. Although the group ventured into perplexing territory, the identity of the congregation was predicated on economic and racial equality. The early history of the church, both in Indiana and the Ukiah/Redwood Valley area is lost amongst the lurid details of the later years. The residents of Mendocino County experienced the Civil Rights Movement through Peoples Temple and the conflict that ensued.

    Yet on the inevitable (???) final downslide in Guyana, Jones was not above co-opting and repurposing Huey P Newton’s phrase “revolutionary suicide” for grisly results. Another interesting essay (The Many Meanings of “Revolutionary Suicide” by Bonnie Yates)
    https://jonestown.sdsu.edu/?page_id=31465

    Jim Jones was, it is fair to say, an innovator of a form of wokeness that didn’t end well. He as a leader might be comparable to Koresh, Manson or the Heaven’s Gate leaders, but his group wasn’t quite the same as the others. And Jones’ idealistic notion of racial harmony could not have diverged more from Manson’s Helter Skelter.

  3. gnokgnoh says

    @Hemidactylus, your ideas are not mutually exclusive from Erica Brozovsky’s thesis about the use of language in cults. She is not asserting that the use of language by cult leaders is the sole source of their ideas or even their authority. It’s a tool, a tool we see in social media (followers) and politics. My favorite expressions that reflect one of these techniques (lots of words or shifting assertions) in debate or discussions are Gish gallop and firehose. Other favorites are gaslighting and deflection. These have also become defenses intended to end conversation.

  4. cheerfulcharlie says

    Nice video. I am going to start my own cult tomorrow. This gives me some good blueprints.

  5. seachange says

    I am reading another book by Amanda Montell, who wrote the book on cult language we see cited twice in the video. This one is about feminist speech, and it is called Wordslut. It is very good, and worth a read.