Today a huge step has been taken in the understanding of the cult phenomenon and it is in realizing the deepness of the human tragedy that involves them. I do not know if other authors have seen this side of the picture but I haven’t seen it elsewhere and it is a beautiful side that merits the deepest look. I am talking about the self-sacrifice capacity of cult members that has immediately connected me to each and every soul that has committed suicide under cult conditions. They need to be heard. These were not just lunatics that killed themselves because the guru said so, they were human beings that deeply believed in what they were doing and they were sincerely protesting and renouncing to the alternatives that the world of today offered them. Mass suicide is all the more tragic than individual suicide and like in the individual, what these people are telling us is that the world left them no other alternative and that they are its willing victims.
With so many mass suicides and homicides today, we will inevitably come to understand the differences between individuals that kill others and those who kill themselves. Both are equally hurt by the world they live in but while one opts to escape it without hurting others, the other resolves it by trying to destroy those who hurt him. They are both telling us there is something substantially unbearable about their life conditions. The fact that they are so young, confirms that they are victims. These are not the mature suicide the hara-kiri demanded or Hitler escaped with, these are effects of social realities and not personal failures.
13 year old Megan Meier who committed suicide in her closet is no different to the 914 members of Jonestown that committed suicide with cyanide kool-aid one sunny morning. They were all, like the 100 suicides daily in Japan and that many more in Russia and other parts of the world, telling us that they can’t bear it. That they don’t have the inner resources to process and transform within themselves what they’ve received: That they needed help and couldn’t find it and weren’t strong enough to look too hard.
There is something pathetically tragic about cults and it is that they are like those poor girls whose mummy never allows them to go out and makes them obey everything she says until after they are forty and then dies leaving an orphan who never married or knew how to do anything but obey and struggles the rest of her life trying to live a life without having the life to live it. Cult members likewise, seem to be people that were willing to do everything they were asked to avoid the conflict that confronting the world implied and sacrifice themselves convinced that they are doing it for the well being of mankind. Their tragedy needs to be heard. They are screaming from beyond begging us to hear them and render them justice but more than that, desperately hoping that we do not follow their steps. I honor each and every one of these deaths. That is, I am present to their suffering and willingly embrace them with compassion. People in cults are not lunatic revolutionaries who act blindly against society, on the contrary, they have everything society asks for: self-renunciation, self-sacrifice, unconditional effort, work, work, work, submission to the authority, no matter which, no matter why. That is the problem.
We have lived under such authoritarian regimes for so many centuries, that we no longer know how to live, just like the little girl who at forty no longer has enough of a life to live it. What cult members tried to do when they joined a cult at thirty or earlier, is not show that they are not willing to commit themselves to mankind and work hard, on the contrary, they are ONLY willing to commit themselves to mankind and everything they do inside is justified by the “humanitarian” ideal. That is why they all act out the tragedy of the end of the world and when it doesn’t come, kill themselves or the people around them to make sure! Unless they are fortunate enough to be in feeble little cults like the Fellowship of Friends in which instead they become unconditional slaves to a psychopathic queen who is yet to prove how much further into self-destruction he can take them.
How many more people will have to commit suicide in cults before we the people resolve our conflict between our “self” and our “selves”? Our religion and our laws? Our humanity and our multiple nationalities? The sphere of religion is not and cannot be separate from the sphere of law. The sphere of humanity has to include the sphere of our multiple nationalities. What is right for our own people is right for all people in no matter what nation. Globalization cannot come without such consciousness without proving its destructiveness as it already has. We are One and there is enough for all of us if we share in illness as in health. The multiplicity of our nations speaks only of the grandiosity of the human spirit that we all carry inside. Just as we do not act against our brothers and sisters who are seldom like us, we cannot act against each other’s cultures and nationalities because they are different to us. Those differences between us are what make life glorious! What matters is not what religion or nationality we belong to but how human can we be with that religion and that nationality.
Nationalism in developed nations that have to suffer the presence of the people they previously invaded is as absurd as fundamentalism from those who continue to resist the reality of globalization. We are One and just like an adult has to bear with the consequences of his and her mistakes as a teenager, developed nations cannot avoid assuming their role in history. If they are to survive, they must be able to embrace their own acts and violence. People in the third world must bring forth their own humanity and embrace those in the first world after taking care of their own governments and their ability to rule their own lives coherently. Destruction is destruction and what we can and want to do is, live.
No comments:
Post a Comment