Clearly, there is a very complex set of social-psychological, evolutionary, historical, and cultural reasons for the prevalence of large cults like Islam, Christianity, Hinduism, and Buddhism and all of their various sects and sub-cults.
However, when doing cultural studies, cult studies, and social science one must put a coherent peg in the ground somewhere, and use the best data available. Happily, DARPA and CERN laboratories have provided us all with the Internet for exactly this purpose.
Some of the best data is historical, and historical sources are very important for establishing what the key causal pathways were to establishing current social and cultural prevailing situations.
However, it is not always easy to identify which historical sources provide the answers — even using powerful Internet search tools. The answers and sources are often obscured by misinformation, disinformation, filter bubbles, echo chambers, and the illusion of consensus. That’s quite apart from politicised narratives, marketing propaganda, marketing psychology, and group delusion.
The illusion of consensus is what happens when a seemingly diverse set of upstream information sources are in fact not diverse, and are all fed by one source of misinformation further ‘upstream’.
Filter bubbles happen due to social-psychological and other psychological dynamics which lead people to gravitate to groups and information that confirm their existing opinions and beliefs, thus protecting their self-esteem, self-image, and egos.
There is a reliable technique for fighting misinformation, overcoming the illusion of consensus, and defeating filter bubbles in social media and off line. That technique is to identify and critically analyse memetic narratives of exactly the kind that refer to cults (religions) and to the relationships between cults, politics, and society, and thereby identify multiple diverse sources of those memetic narratives.
The good news about memetic narratives is that they’re — well — memetic. They have common core ideas. Those are the memetic contents — the memes — that are transmitted in the first place. If you can identify the conceptual content of a meme, you can trace the origin of the memetic narrative in which it is embedded.
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So one effective way of proceeding is research that identifies the source(s) of a given influential meme or memetic narrative. One starts with the influential memetic narrative and its memetic core concept(s), and works backwards in history:
Step 1: Identify the problem. If there is something bizarre and ridiculous happening in your community or society — identify it.
Step 2: Identify the core memetic beliefs and narratives that enable or cause that problem societal outcome. Identify their memetic content or memes.
Step 2: Having done step 1 and 2 — find the origin of the memetic narrative and who supported it and formulated it and who criticised it and attacked it. Usually influential cultural memetic narratives have identifiable sources and there is significant historical and critical-philosophical commentary related to them.
So for the task at hand step 1 is simple: Ridiculous infidelophobic cults like Christianity are free to cause chaos in our societies. Freedom of such cults (under the rubric of freedom of religion) is ridiculous and makes little sense to the reasonable, sane, and educated. Yet they not only persist, but are dominant. (One only needs to look at the current constitution of the Supreme Court of the United States.)
Step 2) leads us to explain the ridiculous freedom of insane, infidelophobic cults like Christianity and Islam in our society. We clearly need to ask ourselves why the idea of free-to-prosper nutty cults is so entrenched and assumed to be so important and indispensable. Immediately the doctrine and premise of freedom of religion (freedom of cults) is apparent as a major culprit.
Step 3) involves digging to find sources that identify the origin of the premises and memetic doctrine/narrative of freedom of religion.
A typical Google search will reveal such sources as debates about separation of church and state in the USA, lots of near-incomprehensible rantings by various cult groups like evangelical Christian cults, and endless flame wars and political debates about funding cults (religions), the US constitution, Christian cult schools, and the influx of Islamic cult immigrants into sovereign Western nations. That’s just to name a few.
A Google search will also turn up some critical memes, themes, and sources. It is likely to uncover quotations by Karl Marx about religion being the opiate of the masses. It will reveal more recent memetic critical themes like those surrounding Richard Dawkins’ ‘God Delusion’. Christopher Hitchens will almost certainly be prominent in search results:
Atheist activist and former neurosurgeon Sam Harris will likely appear:
At the end of the above interview excerpt Harris refrains a common concern about (specifically) the Islamic cult that is often voiced by atheist activists: Why is it given a pass for its obvious violent and vicious abuses of women, infidel, apostates, and freethinking critics like Salman Rushdie?
Why, indeed, are any of the atavistic, openly infidelophobic, Abrahamic cults given a pass in the 2020s?
Demographic, evolutionary, social psychological, and psycho-social reasons notwithstanding, let’s look for more immediately apparent narrative construction and its sources. Let’s continue follow our instructional three steps above and get to the bottom of why freedom of cults is so prevalent.
Clearly we need to identify the historical, ideological roots of the ‘freedom of religion’ memetic cultural doctrine/dogma.
To get started we need to deploy some lateral thinking. The simplest thing to do is start with opponents of the idea: critics of the big cults like Christianity and Islam.
Another sensible move is to identify where the ‘freedom of religion’ memetic doctrine has a foothold and is causing the most problems. Perhaps more importantly: why does it persist and survive where it is most perplexingly prevalent?
The answer to those queries is certainly the most scientifically advanced and powerful nation on Earth: The United States of America.
There’s no need to get bogged down in nationalistic culture wars here. Sure — Germany, France, The UK, and China are all immensely powerful, scientifically superior, nuclear capable nations. However, the US is the home to the inventors of the Internet, and Claude Shannon, Einstein, and Robert Oppenheimer were all Americans. The US has led the world in output of technology and scientific patents and Nobel prizes for a half century. (The US has a staggering 411 Nobel prizes — almost three times the count of nearest competitor the UK.)
(ChatGPT moment: The United States has the highest number of Nobel Prize laureates with 411 individuals earning this prestigious recognition. The United Kingdom ranks second in the list with 138 winners, followed by Germany with 111.)
I’ll skip a few other steps here, but if you triangulate on sources about the US constitution, the history of the US War of Independence and the founding fathers, commentators like De Tocqueville (the French scholar who coined the term ‘tyranny of the majority’) and some other large cultural icons from US history, you get these very important memetic narratives and memes that clearly contribute to the travesty of freedom of ridiculous large cults in the US:
Manifest destiny
Voltairean Multireligionism
Jamesian religious pragmatism
There are others to be sure (most significantly those around multiculturalism and the theme of “Bring me your unwashed masses.”).
However, these memetic narratives come up time and again in US history and culture — as every US middle school student knows — and they are identifiably and unambiguously memetically linked to the idea of freedom of religion.
Manifest Destiny
The ‘manifest destiny’ memetic narrative is the all-American liberal-individualist ideal. The term was first used by John L. O’Sullivan, a newspaper editor, in the July-August issue of The United States Magazine and Democratic Review in 1845.
Manifest Destiny was a belief in the 19th-century United States that White American settlers were destined to expand across North America. It was an early expression of American imperialism. The concept had three basic tenets: the inherent superiority of white Americans and their institutions, the mission of the United States to redeem and remake the world in this image, and an irresistible destiny to accomplish this essential duty.
The idea of Manifest Destiny was used to validate continental acquisitions in the Oregon Country, Texas, New Mexico, and California. It was a driving force for 19th-century U.S. territorial expansion, which led to war with Mexico, the Civil War, and the removal of Native Americans.
Manifest destiny encompassed all of the white culture that was vaunted as entitled and superior: including the dominionist grand narratives of the European Christian and Puritan cultists that invaded native American tribal lands and committed genocide.
Manifest destiny is perhaps the most interesting and ironic of the three memetic narrative pillars that contribute to the freedom of religion memetic cultural narrative, because it clearly diminishes any pagan (Indigenous American) religion as inferior.
Voltairean Multireligionism
This memetic narrative is much harder to trace even though it is probably more critical and important than manifest destiny when it comes to the memetic narrative of freedom of religion.
One cannot avoid engaging with the history of Freemasonry and the founding fathers in investigating and researching the memetic content of this key theme. It is the primary ideo-political memetic narrative that delivered the grand narrative of freedom of religion in the US. It has a decidedly pragmatic basis, which can be traced to the philosophy and work of French liberal philosopher and Freemason, Voltaire:
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Voltaire, “On the Church of England” Dilworth, Ernest, PHILOSOPHICAL LETTERS: Voltaire, copyright 1961. Electronically reproduced by permission of Prentice-Hall, Upper Saddle River, New Jersey, 22–26. via revolution
The excerpt in grey is the most salient and the most directly pragmatic. You can see how Voltaire thought that multireligionism was the only way — in pragmatic terms — to handle the large cults.
François-Marie Arouet (Voltaire) was initiated into the Masonic brotherhood in Paris in 1778 by Benjamin Franklin, a high-ranking Mason himself.
Interestingly and critically, this is the same Voltaire that clearly thought as little of religious enthusiasm as his enlightenment contemporary David Hume:
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The full (Google) translation of the above quoted passage is:
Divinations, auguries, were a species of oracles, and are, I believe, of greater antiquity; for it took many ceremonies, much time to attend to a divine oracle which could not do without a temple and priests; and nothing was easier than telling fortunes at crossroads. This art was subdivided in a thousand ways; we predict by the flight of birds, by the livers of sheep, by the folds formed in the palm of the hand, by circles traced on the earth, by water, by fire, by small stones, by chopsticks , by everything we imagined, and often even by pure enthusiasm which took the place of all the rules. But who was the one who invented this art? he was the first rascal who met an imbecile.
It was Voltaire’s style to be eloquently, aggressively frank in his expression when writing about fools and foolish things that he could not abide. You can see from this excerpt how pragmatic Voltaire’s doctrine of multireligionism was. His view of religion was not much friendlier than that of Diderot.
(There is no evidence to suggest that either Diderot or Hume were Freemasons. Hume’s lack of career success and vulnerability to the maneuvering of Anglican clerics tends to support this.)
Jamesian (Pragmatic) Preferentialism
William James is perhaps the most famous of American pragmatists. A psychologist and philosopher, James was the colleague and intellectual sparring partner of the recognised father of American pragmatism — Charles Sanders Peirce. However the contrast between Peirce’s pragmaticism and James’ more psychologistic pragmatism is a good way to understand the nature of the influence of the latter on the concept of freedom of religion.
According to Peirce’s pragmaticism, one should use the best of scientific theory prudently in adducing facts about nature. To do this one must have a conception of meaning that is grounded in practical scientific utility. This concept of pragmatism is taken to foreshadow the verification principle of the later logical positivists.
James’ pragmatism, on the other hand, was not grounded in scientific utility in this way. It found its most common expression in psychological terms referring to subjective human experience and belief. People should find and construct meaning based more upon what they believe in and feel is true for them.
The subjectivist influence of James’ psychologism resulted in a quite different conception of pragmatism about meaning from that of Peirce. Famously, Peirce didn’t like it, and fell out with James as a result. As a social scientist and psychologist, James applied this conception of pragmatism to people’s religious beliefs and ideological commitments.
So James was a staunch advocate of Peircean pragmatism as a philosophical approach that measures the truth of an idea and its meaning by experimentation and by examining its practical outcome. However, according to the psychologistic pragmatism of James, truth and meaning should be evaluated based on its impact on human behavior. Therefore, one’s religious faith can be justified if it makes a positive difference in one’s life.
(Peirce was all but financially and reputationally destroyed clandestinely by undeclared arch nemesis Simon Newcomb, an accomplished scientist in his own right.)
One Reinforced Memetic Narrative, then Science
It should be apparent how the memetic concepts of manifest destiny, Voltairean (Masonic) pragmatic multireligionism, and Jamesian preferentialism combine to provide most of the memetic content of the freedom of religion meme that leads to nutty cults running amok all over a nation like The United States.
In the past I have openly declared that I doubt that cults will ever lose their influence in our societies for exactly the reasons that they have prevailed to date. This is based upon strong evidence from evolutionary psychology, history, and social psychology.
However, serious global change is at hand because of science. This is what I referred to in my recent article about Reza Pahlavi. I recommended that if he is to succeed Pahlavi must embrace transhumanism and the rise of 6–7th generation general purpose robots:
Does the US even want stability in Iran and Does Reza Pahlavi Have The Right Stuff?
Follow the behaviour (geostrategic), the money (playing dirty against economic competitors), and the memetic narratives…
LLMs, CRISPR, gene therapy, and quantum computers signify a completely unprecedented new era for human civilisation in which scientism will likely prevail by sheer force of functional performance.
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It is already the case that people who attack scientism look silly, if not nefarious. Usually both. Theist mental patients’ delusions about an omnipotent imaginary friend and paranoia about demons has nothing to offer new generations who will be able to use 7th generation general purpose robots and change their own IQs using transhumanist enhancement.
This is not just about progress. It is about scientific progress that is at last able to completely and irreversibly change the face of humanity.
And not before time.
Ironically — the enlightenment values that were important to Voltaire, Peirce, and James included the indefatigable advance of science and scientism.Themes presumably not at all foreign to large parts of the Freemasonic movement. It is hardly surprising that Peirce’s pragmaticism was a foreshadowing of the verificationist doctrines of the early 20th century’s logical positivists.
The most significant developments in terms of human nature, lifespans, and longevity are upon us in the form of gene therapies and transhumanist medicine and cybernetics.
To assert that nothing will ever be the same after this is all but a truism. People dramatically underestimate the impact general purpose robots and gene therapies will have. We are, for the most part, not awake to the unprecedented possibilities and the realities, which are almost upon us right now.
Curiously — except for our science fiction we don’t have memetic narratives that can help us grasp the kind of change that is afoot. Religious narratives with their apocalyptic group delusions are completely useless.
Add struggles for resources, climate change, and water shortages and it will become undeniable that religion has nothing to offer compared with science. That’s the crossroads we are standing at right now. It will happen in the next 10–20 years, if not sooner.
Nation states and global powers will stop breeding suffering low IQ people soon. They cannot afford to do otherwise, and the scientific means to control these outcomes painlessly is at hand. As is a transhumanist cognitive arms race that will affect everyone — but presumably for the better. It is hard to see how anyone should need to miss out on transhuman enhancements. One exception is probably personality type screening. It may be best if the smartest of us are not psychopaths in most cases. That being said — personality is probably in range of transhumanist tweaking too.
