I wonder how many in the current FOF think Robert Burton is such a such that they would submit to a Jim Jones suicide pact?
Elena: I found the latter in the fofblog and put like that is not understanding the question of cults or the FOF cult in particular. For one, the gradual dismantling of people's personality has already taken place and there are hundreds of Fellowship members that no longer have enough will to leave the cult even if they ever realized it to be a good idea. They're I or self does not follow their intellectual or emotional centers. These have already been de-structured to the point that no matter how reasonable they thought or how much they needed human support, their I or self is unable to act on their pleas. This is important to observe if one is serious in trying to understand what actually happens in cults. The I of the members, their sense of themselves, their individuality, has been replaced by their place in the cult under the authority of the guru. The guru has replaced their free will and they have given up their free will in the conviction that giving it up will lead them to "heaven" or that at least, if they are obedient of the "master" who they believe a divinity, they will be protected from "hell" and suffering. Most cult members of our times are much more programed by the traditional christian mentality of heaven and hell and they are already very much prone to submission and obedience by the time they join the cult. The member must be convinced of the divinity of the guru but convincing him or her is not difficult at all. It just takes some people to be obeying the guru for others to imitate the obedience. This allows him or her to commit and comply unconditionally, that is, to sacrifice his and her own free will to the will of the guru and the subsequent acts of satisfying each and every one of his whims becomes the act of "adoration". Sacrifice and adoration to the false calf becomes the only meaning of their every day worthless lives.
To ask wether people in the fellowship cult would be willing to commit suicide like in Jonestown is not the right question if we wish to understand suicide in the Fellowship cult, because it is not taking into account the actual differences between the two cults. Evil learns its lessons and one should be able to realize that it learnt the mistakes it made in Jonestown to not make them as crudely in following cults. The Fellowship cult is much more "refined" than Jonestown. It completely abolished second line of work and jumped from self annihilation to divine surrender. It did not confront society or the social structure of capitalism like Jonestown did, it simply killed the "six billion dead people of the planet". It does not need to argue with "life" because it killed it. It is smart enough to stay so in line with it that it does not need to challenge it: it simply disappeared it and became invisible to it in complying with each and all its "laws" while at the same time, abolishing the human (s) and leaving only the divine guru.
The people in Jonestown committed suicide at a critical moment in which the confrontation with life was too blunt to keep it a secret and the guru knew it. He had to force people into a sublimation of the horrors they had lived so that the horrors they had gone through would not be looked at bare and square.
Robert Burton does not need all that. His sex life is widely accepted and supported. His abuses are too common in life to be questionable and every one inside likes the gold alchemy "glamour" convinced that trading the facts of life for an imaginary glitter is a deal worth paying for: it is the middle classes' opportunity to live out its frustrated dreams of belonging to an upper class.
So NO, the members of the Fellowship cult will probably not commit suicide en masse like the people in Jonestown. They have already sacrificed their will to the guru so they are already non existent. Some will commit suicide like Abraham Goldman when the pain is too severe to avoid it, others will dry away in their own absence. The body does not go too far without one's presence. It continues to do what it's told but withers away. It dies of "self" starvation.
It is interesting how the System turned around against the people and was used to enslave them. Now that I am working with it again it is easy to find how exactly it was used to manipulate people. I'll write about it in later posts. For now, the idea of "giving up one's will" to the teacher is one of the ideas that was manipulated and used against the members. In a real School, a teacher would assume authority for only some time, while the pupil strengthens and coordinates his or her own self based on trust. To put the pupil in contact with his and her own self is the aim of a true teacher, not to replace the will of the pupil for ever. Replacing the "life" within every individual, the "guru" of the cult puts the members in a retrograde disintegrating process. Keeping the reigns of the pupil's will is the most pervasive act any teacher can do and the consequences are as damaging for him as for the pupil. He might abuse and profit from it for some time but in the long run, the weight of those souls hanging on to his will keep them all entrenched.
Mass Suicide is not necessary in a cult like the Fellowship of Friends. The members are already in an accelerated form of self annihilation: They are disappearing en masse without needing to spill blood. It is the perfection of slavery: people voluntarily self sacrificing themselves for the eccentricities of a sociopath. Nothing noble or humane about it: simply rampant decadence.
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