Cult Classic Quotes

This was before I knew that the timing of a cruel thing does not make it more or less cruel, before I knew that only good way to hurt someone is never.

Love is agreeing to live in someone else's narrative.

The reality of an image both expands and narrows the imagination. It breathes, inhaling the new understanding and exhaling the old one.

Just because something ends prematurely doesn't mean it won't end eventually. Usually that's exactly what it means.

You'll find there are certain fragile truths every couple has.

You know who gets to drink coffee at fuck-you hours, I thought? The French.

Men, who can be so oblivious in most arenas, are very good a knowing when a woman’s heart has left the building.

The cult of self dominates our cultural landscape. This cult has within it the classic traits of psychopaths: superficial charm, grandiosity, and self-importance; a need for constant stimulation, a penchant for lying, deception, and manipulation, and the inability to feel remorse or guilt. This is, of course, the ethic promoted by corporations. It is the ethic of unfettered capitalism. It is the misguided belief that personal style and personal advancement, mistaken for individualism, are the same as democratic equality. In fact, personal style, defined by the commodities we buy or consume, has become a compensation for our loss of democratic equality. We have a right, in the cult of the self, to get whatever we desire. We can do anything, even belittle and destroy those around us, including our friends, to make money, to be happy, and to become famous. Once fame and wealth are achieved, they become their own justification, their own morality. How one gets there is irrelevant. Once you get there, those questions are no longer asked.

Romance may be the world’s oldest cult. It hooks you when you’re vulnerable, scares the shit out of you, hold your deepest fears as collateral, renames you something like ‘baby,’ brainwashes you, then makes you think that your soul will wither and die if you let go of a person who loved you. So you better have a good goddamn reason for saying ‘nah, not enough.’ The love lobby is worse than the fun lobby. More misery, more addiction, more heads on spikes. And for what?

I think you’ll like it. It’s a fucking cult classic. I figured you’d find some enjoyment out of it, considering it’s about eating people.” I frown. “You think just because I feed my pigs humans, I’m into cannibalism?

I fell for the projection and forgot the person.

Even if I was only ever borrowing someone else’s certainty, it would become mine eventually.

In youth he had felt the hidden beauty and ecstasy of things, and had been a poet; but poverty and sorrow and exile had turned his gaze in darker directions, and he had thrilled at the imputations of evil in the world around. Daily life had for him come to be a phantasmagoria of macabre shadow-studies; now glittering and leering with concealed rottenness as in Beardsley's best manner, now hinting terrors behind the commonest shapes and objects as in the subtler and less obvious work of Gustave Dore. He would often regard it as merciful that most persons of high Intelligence jeer at the inmost mysteries; for, he argued, if superior minds were ever placed in fullest contact with the secrets preserved by ancient and lowly cults, the resultant abnormalities would soon not only wreck the world, but threaten the very integrity of the universe. All this reflection was no doubt morbid, but keen logic and a deep sense of humour ably offset it. Malone was satisfied to let his notions remain as half-spied and forbidden visions to be lightly played with; and hysteria came only when duty flung him into a hell of revelation too sudden and insidious to escape.

The city was a parade of places shut down, left early from, arrived late to, sat in front of, met to say goodbye at. This is how it was for everyone. If you wait long enough, anyplace will become a barracks of the romantic undead, a sprawling museum of personal bombs.

It’s unfortunate, I thought, how some of the world’s most productive conversations are breakup conversations. People think, “If only we could have talked like this the whole time, things would’ve been different.” But you couldn’t have. That level of honesty requires a resoluteness achievable only by being within spitting distance of the exit.

Too often New Yorkers treated experiences as vaccinations. They went to the Whitney every two years, Coney Island every five, the ballet every twenty.

Even though it was a tiny role, I was very proud to be a part of the comedy, which became a cult classic.

Conscience is strong in women. Children are very violently taught that they owe all to their parents, and the parents are not slow in foreclosing the mortgage. But the home is not a debtor's prison - to girls any more than to boys. This enormous claim of parents calls for extermination. Do they in truth do all for their children; do their children owe all to them? Is nothing furnished in the way of safety, sanitation, education, by that larger home, the state? What could these parents do, alone, in never so pleasant a home, without the allied forces of society to maintain that home in peace and prosperity. These lingering vestiges of a patriarchal cult must be left behind. Ancestor-worship has had victims enough. Girls are human creatures as well as boys, and both have duties, imperative duties, quite outside the home.

everything actually was all-meaningful, that every symbol and combination of symbols led not hither and yon, not to single examples, experiments, and proofs, but into the center, the mystery and innermost heart of the world, into primal knowledge. Every transition from major to minor in a sonata, every transformation of a myth or a religious cult, every classical or artistic formulation was, I realized in that flashing moment, if seen with a truly meditative mind, nothing but a direct route into the interior of the cosmic mystery, where in the alternation between inhaling and exhaling, between heaven and earth, between Yin and Yang, holiness is forever being created.

In books such as Isis Unveiled (1877) or The Secret Doctrine (1888), Blavatsky covers everything from archaic mystery cults to modern paranormal research, giving one the sort of global perspective found in anthropology classics such as James Frazer’s The Golden Bough (1890).

Some of us get smaller denominations from the romance ATM than others. In addition to the flings, I’d had about fifteen five-month relationships, not to mention the six- and nine-month relationships, not to mention the on-and-off ones that came to life in the night like haunted toaster ovens: You up?

It’s difficult to comfort oneself by shrinking one’s emotions without conceding that one has allowed those emotions to expand, unchecked, in the first place.

Either the present part of the story slowed down a bit and waited for the past part to catch up, or the past part speeded up and overtook the present part. (We

A hero without a damsel is a mere man.

How badly can you be hurt by someone whose handwriting you’ve never seen?

Men,” I said, plunking my chair to the floor. “I can never decide if I forgive them too easily or punish them too easily. My whole life, I’ve never known.

This is New York,' I explained. 'Everything is outside everyone’s comfort zone.

I don’t think I meant a word of it. But this is how you speak when you’re in a bathroom stall in your twenties, high on cocaine, and testing the depths of your friendships.

I still believe monogamy is a construct, and I don't necessarily think that humans are biologically cut out for it. Someday I might decide again that I'm not either.

And all at once I felt repelled by this whole genre, by this cult of mythologies, by this jigsaw puzzle of handed-down forms of faith.

Like all good cult followers, we will gloss over the imperfections of The Quiet Man … Like little blemishes on the faces of those we love, they serve only to increase our affection.

Among [Applewhite's] other teachings was the classic cult specialty of developing disdain for anyone outside of the Heaven's Gate commune. Applewhite flattered his would-be alien flock that they were an elite elect far superior to the non-initiated humans whom he considered to be deluded zombies.[...]Applewhite effectively fed his paranoid persecution complex to his followers to ensure blind loyalty to the group and himself while fostering alienation from the mundane world. This paradoxical superior/fearful attitude towards “Them” (i.e., anyone who is not one of “Us”) is one of the simplest means of hooking even the most skeptical curiosity seeker into the solipsistic netherworld of a [mentally unbalanced] leader's insecure and threatened worldview.

But what the hell, I thought as I lay there in the dark. It could be souls rot away with the body, too. What did anything matter in the long run anyway, except memories? And they only lived on in corpses that couldn't talk.

It is a cherished dream of most Bullet owners to do the classic Manali to Leh ride. A sort of pilgrimage or initiation into the cult that is ‘Bulleting’. So there are plenty of Bullets in Manali during these months, some with number plates from as far away as Maharashtra, Karnataka, Goa and Kerala. The local mechanics are experts in servicing Bullets and preparing them for the arduous road ahead, and I got my bike serviced here. The rear brakes had taken a fair share of wear and tear, and the setting of the clutch had to be readjusted.

I am tired of this city. I am tired of its pagan pretensions and false histories. Hyperion is a poet’s world devoid of poetry. Keats itself is a mixture of tawdry, false classicism and mindless, boomtown energy. There are three Zen Gnostic assemblies and four High Muslim mosques in the town, but the real houses of worship are the countless saloons and brothels, the huge marketplaces handling the fiberplastic shipments from the south, and the Shrike Cult temples where lost souls hide their suicidal hopelessness behind a shield of shallow mysticism. The whole planet reeks of mysticism without revelation.

As Jack Trimpey, founder of Rational Recovery, has pointed out, steps 2 and 3 are a con—a classic “bait and switch.” Specifically, step 3 poses obvious problems for atheist and agnostic newcomers who have chosen, for example, a doorknob as their “Power greater than [themselves].” How does one turn one’s life over to a doorknob?

Had Cupid’s bastard cherubs snuck into my bedroom and whispered in my ear, “My child, never commit.” I’d begun to suspect that my search an inciting incident was the inciting incident. But before I could get to the bottom of it, I met Boots, who made it all stop, who could not unbreak me by who could protect me from the narrative of the broken.

The same event could happen to four different people and one would deem it a coup, another kismet, another ironic, another auspicious. A coup signified chaos, kismet signified fate, irony signified order, auspicious signified faith. Meanwhile, odds were quantifiable but chances were not. Chances were abstract and “for” whereas odds were concrete and “against.

The older a woman got, the more diligent she had to become about not burdening men with the gory details of her past, lest she scare them off. That was the name of the game: Don’t Scare the Men. Those who encouraged you to indulge in your impulse to share, largely did so to expedite a decision. They knew they were on trial too, but our courtrooms had more lenient judges.

Everyone has had that inkling, right? Like for some reason you are just not meant to pair. And on your good days, you think, hey, it’s because my heart is too big to get through anyone’s tunnel. And on your bad days, you think it’s because my heart is this tiny petrified piece of shit and it passes through other people like a kidney stone. Like it’s either nothing or it causes excruciating pain.” “Zach,

Every transition from major to minor in a sonata, every transformation of a myth or a religious cult, every classical or artistic formulation was, I realized in that flashing moment, if seen with a truly meditative mind, nothing but a direct route into the interior of the cosmic mystery, where in the alternation between inhaling and exhaling, between heaven and earth, between Yin and Yang, holiness is forever being created.

Stories with Vasalisa as a central character are told in Russia, Romania, Yugoslavia, Poland, and throughout all the Baltic countries. In some instances, the tale is commonly called “Wassilissa the Wise.” I find evidence of its archetypal roots dating back at least to the old horse-Goddess cults which predate classical Greek culture. This tale carries ages-old psychic mapping about induction into the underworld of the wild female God. It is about infusing human women with Wild Woman’s primary instinctual power, intuition.

In Classical times, music, poetry, philosophy, astronomy, mathematics, medicine, and science came under Apollo’s control. As the enemy of barbarism, he stood for moderation in all things, and the seven things of his lute were connected with the seven vowels of the later Greek alphabet, given mystical significance, and used forr therapeutic music. Finally, because of his identification with the Child Horus, a solar concept, he was worshipped as the sun, whose Corinthian cult had been taken over by Solar Zeus; and his sister Artemis was, rightly, identified with the moon.

Walking into a bookshop is a depressing thing. It’s not the pretentious twats, browsing books as part of their desirable lifestyle. It’s not the scrubby members of staff serving at the counter: the pseudo-hippies and fucking misfits. It’s not the stink of coffee wafting out from somewhere in the building, a concession to the cult of the coffee bean. No, it’s the books. I could ignore the other shit, decide that maybe it didn’t matter too much, that when consumerism meets culture, the result is always going to attract wankers and everything that goes with them. But the books, no, they’re what make your stomach sink and that feeling of dark syrup on the brain descend. Look around you, look at the shelves upon shelves of books – for years, the vessels of all knowledge. We’re part of the new world now, but books persist. Cheap biographies, pulp fiction; glossy covers hiding inadequate sentiments. Walk in and you’re surrounded by this shit – to every side a reminder that we don’t want stimulation anymore, we want sedation. Fight your way through the celebrity memoirs, pornographic cook books, and cheap thrills that satisfy most and you get to the second wave of vomit-inducing product: offerings for the inspired and arty. Matte poetry books, classics, the finest culture can provide packaged and wedged into trendy coverings, kidding you that you’re buying a fashion accessory, not a book. But hey, if you can stomach a trip further into the shop, you hit on the meatier stuff – history, science, economics – provided they can stick ‘pop.’ in front of it, they’ll stock it. Pop. psychology, pop. art, pop. life. It’s the new world – we don’t want serious anymore, we want nuggets of almost-useful information. Books are the past, they’re on the out. Information is digital now; bookshops, they’re somewhere between gallery and museum.

Nobody will be tougher on ISIS than me. Nobody,” he said during his campaign announcement speech on June 16, 2015. “There’s nobody bigger or better at the military than I am,” he stated a few days later. The following month came this memorably hypnotic line, one that echoes Moon’s language: “I know more about offense and defense than [the generals] will ever understand, believe me. Believe me. Than they will ever understand. Than they will ever understand.” It’s a classic example of Trump’s tried-and-true habit of lulling his audience through repetition. A few months later came another infamous claim: “I know more about ISIS [the Islamic State militant group] than the generals do. Believe me.

L'affaire du couvent des Pères Blancs ne fut pas mauvaise. J'aurais pu faire main basse sur bien des choses précieuses mais, pour être un indévot, je ne suis pas un incroyant et l'idée seule de m'emparer d'objets du culte, même s'ils sont d'or et d'argent massifs, m'emplit d'horreur. Les bons moins pleureront leurs palimpsestes, incunables et antiphonaires disparus, mais ils loueront le Seigneur d'avoir détourné une main impie de leurs ciboires et de leurs ostensoirs. [...] La vente du buste du dieu Terme m'a rapporté une fortune...oui, une fortune. Le quart m'a suffit pour racheter les parchemins, incunables et antiphonaires dérobés aux bons Pères Blancs. Demain, je leur enverrai leur bien en leur demandant des prières...et non pour moi seul. Mais j'ai gardé le mémoire. Ils me doivent bien cela.

The older a woman got, the more diligent she had to become about not burdening men with the gory details of her past, lest she scare them off. That was the name of the game: Don’t Scare the Men. Those who encouraged you to indulge in your impulse to share, largely did so to expedite a bus. Like I felt the wind of the bus. I could even see a couple of the passengers, all shaken by a potential suicide. And out of nowhere, the guy rushes over, yanks me toward him, and escorts me out of the street.” “The birthday boy?” “No, different guy. You all start to look the same after a while, you know that? Anyway, we were both so high on adrenaline, we couldn’t stop laughing the whole night. Then he asked me out. Now one of our jokes is about that time I flung myself into traffic to avoid him.” “You were in shock.” “No, I wasn’t.” “Why isn’t the joke that he saved your life?” “I don’t know, Amos,” I said, folding my fingers together. “Maybe we’re both waiting for the day I turn around and say, ‘That’s right, asshole, I did fling myself into traffic to avoid you.’ I’m joking.” “Are you?” “Am I?” I mimicked him. “Should the day come when you manage to face-plant yourself into a relationship, you’ll find there are certain fragile truths every couple has. Sometimes I’m uncomfortable with the power, knowing I could break us up if I wanted. Other times, I want to blow it up just because it’s there. But then the feeling passes.” “That’s bleak.” “To you, it is. But I’m not like you. I don’t need to escape every room I’m in.” “But you are like me. You think you want monogamy, but you probably don’t if you dated me.” “You’re faulting me for liking you now?” “All I’m saying is you can’t just will yourself into being satisfied with this guy.” “Watch me,” I said, trying to burn a hole in his face. “If it were me, the party would have been our first date and it never would have ended.” “Oh, yes it would have,” I said, laughing. “The date would have lasted one week, but the whole relationship would have lasted one month.” “Yeah,” he said, “you’re right.” “I know I’m right.” “It wouldn’t have lasted.” “This is what I’m saying.” “Because if I were this dude, I would have left you by now.” Before I could say anything, Amos excused himself to pee. On the bathroom door was a black and gold sticker in the shape of a man. I felt a rage rise up all the way to my eyeballs, thinking of how naturally Amos associated himself with that sticker, thinking of him aligning himself with every powerful, brilliant, thoughtful man who has gone through that door as well as every stupid, entitled, and cruel one, effortlessly merging with a class of people for whom the world was built. I took my phone out, opening the virtual cuckoo clocks, trying to be somewhere else. I was confronted with a slideshow of a female friend’s dead houseplants, meant to symbolize inadequacy within reason. Amos didn’t have a clue what it was like to be a woman in New York, unsure if she’s with the right person. Even if I did want to up and leave Boots, dating was not a taste I’d acquired. The older a woman got, the more diligent she had to become about not burdening men with the gory details of her past, lest she scare them off. That was the name of the game: Don’t Scare the Men. Those who encouraged you to indulge in your impulse to share, largely did so to expedite a decision. They knew they were on trial too, but our courtrooms had more lenient judges.

Fritz Lang's 1927 film Metropolis is commonly regarded as one of the classics of cinema, and at the time it was probably the most expensive film ever made. Only in light of recent restoration work, though, can we see how explicitly it draws on apocalyptic themes in its prophetic depiction of modern society. Partly, Metropolis reflects the ideas of Oswald Spengler, whose sensationally popular book The Decline of the West appeared in 1918. Spengler presented nightmare forecasts of the vast megalopolis, ruled by the superrich, with politics reduced to demagoguery and Caesarism, and religion marked by strange oriental cults. Lang borrowed that model but added explicit references to the Bible, and particularly Revelation. In the future world of Metropolis, the ruling classes dwell in their own Tower of Babel, while the industrial working class is literally enslaved to Moloch.

When the victor, in a fight of the cities, according to the law of warfare, executes the whole male population and sells all the women and children into slavery, we see, in the sanction of such a law, that the Greek deemed it a positive necessity to allow his hatred to break forth unimpeded; in such moments the compressed and swollen feeling relieved itself; the tiger bounded forth, a voluptuous cruelty shone out of his fearful eye. Why had the Greek sculptor to represent again and again war and fights in innumerable repetitions, extended human bodies whose sinews are tightened through hatred or through the recklessness of triumph, fighters wounded and writhing with pain, or the dying with the last rattle in their throat? Why did the whole Greek world exult in the fighting scenes of the "Iliad"? I am afraid, we do not understand them enough in "Greek fashion," and that we should even shudder, if for once we did understand them thus. But what lies, as the mother-womb of the Hellenic, behind the Homeric world? In the latter, by the extremely artistic definiteness, and the calm and purity of the lines we are already lifted far above the purely material amalgamation: its colours, by an artistic deception, appear lighter, milder, warmer; its men, in this coloured, warm illumination, appear better and more sympathetic — but where do we look, if, no longer guided and protected by Homer's hand, we step backwards into the pre-Homeric world? Only into night and horror, into the products of a fancy accustomed to the horrible. What earthly existence is reflected in the loathsome-awful theogonian lore: a life swayed only by the children of the night, strife, amorous desires, deception, age and death. Let us imagine the suffocating atmosphere of Hesiod's poem, still thickened and darkened and without all the mitigations and purifications, which poured over Hellas from Delphi and the numerous seats of the gods! If we mix this thickened Boeotian air with the grim voluptuousness of the Etruscans, then such a reality would extort from us a world of myths within which Uranos, Kronos and Zeus and the struggles of the Titans would appear as a relief. Combat in this brooding atmosphere is salvation and safety; the cruelty of victory is the summit of life's glories. And just as in truth the idea of Greek law has developed from murder and expiation of murder, so also nobler Civilisation takes her first wreath of victory from the altar of the expiation of murder. Behind that bloody age stretches a wave-furrow deep into Hellenic history. The names of Orpheus, of Musaeus, and their cults indicate to what consequences the uninterrupted sight of a world of warfare and cruelty led — to the loathing of existence, to the conception of this existence as a punishment to be borne to the end, to the belief in the identity of existence and indebtedness. But these particular conclusions are not specifically Hellenic; through them Greece comes into contact with India and the Orient generally. The Hellenic genius had ready yet another answer to the question: what does a life of fighting and of victory mean? and gives this answer in the whole breadth of Greek history.

This is a classic example of the type of literary blind that Crowley loved to utilize when he wished to publish, in a public medium, sensitive or secret information that had heretofore been reserved for high initiates while, at the same time, shocking and outraging the public at large. Today the sexual connotations are obvious to all but the most mentally or emotionally disadvantaged. For such unfortunates we advise they read the last sentence of this chapter first: "You are likely to get into trouble over this chapter unless you truly comprehend its meaning. " OF THE BLOODY SACRIFICE: AND MATTERS COGNATE by The Master Therion Aleister Crowley It is necessary for us to consider carefully the problems connected with the bloody sacrifice, for this question is indeed traditionally important in Magick. Nigh all ancient Magick revolves around this matter. In particular all the Osirian religions-the rites of the Dying God-refer to this. The slaying of Osiris and Adonis the mutilation of Attis; the cults of Mexico and Peru; the story of Hercules or Melcarth; the legends of Dionysus and of Mithra, are all connected with this one idea. In the Hebrew religion we find the same thing inculcated. The first ethical lesson in the Bible is that the only sacrifice pleasing to the Lord is the sacrifice of blood; Abel, who made this, finding favour with the Lord, while Cain, who offered cabbages, was

Treating someone with love and kindness after abuse is a classic cult tactic. I felt myself being manipulated, but refused to allow that to happen.

But, above all, the way we understand a message also depends on how we want to understand it. An example is the cult 1960s TV series Star Trek. Many fans interpreted the series as a classic science fiction adventure in space. But the gay community saw the close-knit relationships between the men and the rainbow crew (black African, Asian, Russian, Vulcan) as an allusion to the fact that some of the characters were gay. It is irrelevant that Star Trek's creator, Gene Roddenberry, denied this, because, according to Stuart hall, the message can be changed once it has been received.

Charles Manson was a run-of-the-mill cult leader who used old-fashioned misogyny and racism to indoctrinate his followers. Far from being a hippie himself, Manson posed as a spiritual father figure to lure flower children into his cult and kept them there by using classic abuse techniques of isolation, manipulation, punishment, and reward. A notorious celebrity, instantly recognizable by his wild eyes and the swastika carved into his forehead, Manson holds a place in the cultural consciousness as the leader of all the cult leaders. Yet there was nothing at all extraordinary about Charles Manson.

This is a classic response predicted by cognitive dissonance: we tend to become more entrenched in our beliefs (like those in the capital punishment experiment, whose views became more extreme after reading evidence that challenged their views and the members of the cult who became more convinced of the truth of their beliefs after the apocalyptic prophecy failed). “I have no doubt that they will find the clearest possible evidence of Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction [my italics],” Blair said.

It is my argument that American liberalism is a totalitarian political religion, but not necessarily an Orwellian one. It is nice, not brutal. Nannying, not bullying. But it is definitely totalitarian--or "holistic", if you prefer--in that liberalism today sees no realm of human life that is beyond political significance, from what you eat to what you smoke to what you say. Sex is political. Food is political. Sports, entertainment, your inner motives and outer appearance, all have political salience for liberal fascists. Liberals place their faith in priestly experts who know better, who plan, exhort, badger, and scold. They try to use science to discredit traditional notions of religion and faith, but they speak the language of pluralism and spirituality to defend "nontraditional" beliefs. Just as with classical fascism, liberal fascists speak of a "Third Way" between right and left where all good things go together and all hard choices are "false choices". The idea that there are no hard choices--that is, choices between competing goods--is religious and totalitarian because it assumes that all good things are fundamentally compatible. The conservatives or classical liberal vision understands that life is unfair, that man is flawed, and that the only perfect society, the only real utopia, waits for us in the next life. Liberal fascism differs from classical fascism in many ways. I don't deny this. Indeed, it is central to my point. Fascisms differ from each other because they grow out of different soil. What unites them are their emotional or instinctual impulses, such as the quest for community, the urge to "get beyond" politics, a faith in the perfectibility of man and the authority of experts, and an obsession with the aesthetics of youth, the cult of action, and the need for an all powerful state to coordinate society at the national or global level. Most of all, they share the belief--what I call the totalitarian temptation--that with the right amount of tinkering we can realize the utopian dream of "creating a better world".

your statues, your busts, the instruments of your cult have all been overturned—they lie on the ground and everyone laughs at your deceptions.”36

All this cool I wanted to avoid. All this cool made me tired.

Men do not like to entertain the idea that they have destroyed someone, so they behave as if they haven't.

Mysticism (...) is as rational as math for those living inside it

To him, the definition of a compliment was “to set apart.” (...) he’d enumerate the ways in which I was not like other women, listing traits such as intelligence and sanity—leaving me with the choice of rejecting the compliment or betraying my entire gender.

We were flaunting our former selves to our current ones.

I often felt my prime years to figure out if I subscribed to the concept of marriage were when I was a child, back when all of life was hypothetical. As an adult, it's hard to come down on a common institution to which you have no anecdotal access.

I could feel Death stringing cobwebs along the walls of my uterus like Christmas garlands

The fact is, happily, that human society could not be made to correspond exactly to the theoretic structure that the cult of kingship had erected. Too much of common everyday life escapes effective supervision and control, to say nothing of coercive discipline. From the earliest times on there are indications of resentment, defiance, withdrawal, escape: all celebrated in the classic story of the Jewish exodus from Egypt. Even when no collective retreat proved possible, the daily practices of the farm, the workshop, the marketplace, the hold of family ties and regional loyalties, the cults of minor gods, tended to weaken the system of total control.

I think, if closure exists, it’s being okay with a lack of it.

Dad held up his hand. “So Love International is a cult?” “She shows all the classic signs of someone who’s been indoctrinated and brainwashed by a cult,” Camille announced, like she was giving us a diagnosis.

1984 cult classic Repo Man

Human history is in large part nonsense, and I think it is appropriate to pay tribute to the percentage of the nonsense that is not tragic, that is harmless, even benign. Looking back at the challenges flung to us by the Soviets in our long struggle for hearts and minds, it is striking to realize how elegant, how courtly they tended to be. Their dancers and their skaters carried themselves like Romanovs, grave and unapproachable, aesthetically chaste and severe. It is striking as well how effectively their classicism governed the competition. Ballet was suddenly urgently important in America. Our orchestras were heroes of democracy for doing well just what they had always done. The Russians rejected modernism, and we looked a little askance at it ourselves, or flaunted it to the point of self-parody. Behind it all was an unspoken assumption carried on from the nineteenth century, that a great culture proved the health, worth, and integrity of a civilization. This was a sensitive issue for both countries, Russia having entered late into the Europe its arts so passionately emulated, America having entered late into existence as a nation. There are respects in which Russia was a good adversary. When they launched their first satellite, my little public school became more serious about my education. They helped to sensitize us to the hypocrisy of our position on civil rights, doing us a great service. This is not to minimize all that was regrettable, the doomsday stockpiles and that entrenched habit of ideological thinking, which lives on today among us, often in oddly inverted form, for example in the cult of Ayn Rand and the return of social Darwinism. The use of culture as proxy, its appropriation for political purposes, yielded a fair amount of self-consciousness and artificiality. Perhaps it compromised the authenticity of culture in ways that have contributed to the marginalization we see now. Still, given certain inevitabilities that beset the postwar world, the Russians were interesting and demanding of us, until our obsessions drifted elsewhere.

Christianity may have seen itself as the only truth but to most people then it was little more than an eccentric and often irritating eastern cult. Why waste time rebutting it? Then, about fifty years later, everything changed. Suddenly, in around AD 170, a Greek intellectual named Celsus launched a monumental and vitriolic attack against the religion.

Rome’s ancient cults were collapsing. And yet though Symmachus lost – perhaps because he lost – his words still have a terrible power. ‘We request peace for the gods of our forefathers,’ he had begged. ‘Whatever each person worships, it is reasonable to think of them as one. We see the same stars, the sky is shared by all, the same world surrounds us. What does it matter what wisdom a person uses to seek for the truth?

Chances are, if you’ve learned something, there’s probably a good portion of your community that would find value in learning that same thing from you, even if you aren’t the world’s leading authority on the subject. And if you’re regularly learning, then you’ll always have regular content to contribute to the community. This can become a nice flywheel over time, as teaching often becomes the best way to drive your own curiosity and inspiration to learn more yourself. And when you learn publicly, your students will have questions that force you to learn even more stuff to teach them. You don’t have to teach everything you learn. In fact, a narrower core focus can be better. For example, Patrick McKenzie, a writer, entrepreneur, and software business expert who is best known for a 2012 post on salary negotiation that has since become a cult classic in the software engineering space, believes that the best personal brands exist at the intersection of two topics. He now works for Stripe, where he continues to write and advise software engineers and software entrepreneurs about how to start and scale their businesses, speaking from real experience as a creator and business owner himself. If you’re learning every day, which you probably are, you’ll have something to share every day. Meanwhile, you’ll build your skills and experience, learn to speak the language, and grow your community, all essential ingredients when you eventually have a product you are ready to sell. Unfortunately, as you probably already know, there are no shortcuts. As you think about what you’re creating now and how that might lead to a business in the future, look to the communities you’re already a part of. You’ve invested time and energy there, so perhaps you already have an idea of how to proceed. If you don’t, keep going, and continue using your time to get strong, to learn how to paint, to learn how to code, to learn how to write, or to learn whatever else you are into, teaching what you’re learning along the way.

That pattern can be defined in a number of ways, but most fundamentally it is a conflict between those forces that Freud called the superego and the id. The superego – the self’s “harsh master,” Freud called it – is the angel guarding the door to Eden with a flaming sword; its archetypal religious expression is Christianity, that most social of all religions, which asks each individual to consider all others before himself. The id – the primordial raw power of instinct itself – is the force that sends us around to the back of Eden, looking for another entrance; its archetypal religious expression is Dionysianism, the cult of deliriant drugs that burst into Athens from somewhere in the East during Greece’s prehistoric period, approximately between 1000-900 BC. The German philosopher Nietzsche said that history is coming, in our time, to take the form of a final conflict between Christ and Dionysus, and that certainly seems to be the case in America today. The Reverend Billy Graham, the classic “pale Christian,” sits as an adviser to Presidents, while Dr. Timothy Leary, the Dionysian spirit of dope and ecstasy is sentenced to 40 years and flees into exile, only to be recaptured.

They sent me sweet texts so I’d have sweet texts to wake up to. None of it meant that I was obliged to love them back. But it did mean I was obliged not to torture them with indecision.

Lola. To not know you is to love you.” “That sounds like an insult.” “I think you know it’s not,” he said, turning scarlet.

Romance may be the world’s oldest cult. It hooks you when you’re vulnerable, holds your deepest fears as collateral, renames you something like ‘baby,’ brainwashes you, then makes you think that your soul will wither and die if you let go of a person who loved you.

He reached his hand behind him and patted my hip, a gesture that meant both “good night” and “making sure you’re there.

Then where’s my thank-you for training him out of jackhammering her pussy? He used to jam all his fingers up there like it’s ‘To Build a Fire’ and he’s using me for warmth, like he wanted to use my fallopian tubes for mittens. Like there’s a fucking game show buzzer up there. Like you know what I want to know? Who are the bitches before me who just let it happen?” Boots

In the early aughts, most of the women I knew still had more business with the twentieth century than the twenty-first, and so much of mainstream sex was defined as “to go along with.” It was hard enough, climbing out of this hole of internalized people-pleasing.

So these guys, they’ll just be going about their lives and feel compelled to visit Chinatown?” “It’s happening,” I said. “It’s already happened. According to Clive, I have one more.” “It’s like Field of Dreams except instead of baseball, it’s your vagina.” “People will come, Ray.” “People will motherfucking come,” he agreed, shaking his head.

We discovered that we shared a birthday, though she was two years behind me. She was enchanted by the coincidence, but I had just been told to expect them and thus had no reaction. The DJ probably had our birthday too. She confessed that meeting people with her birthday was jarring if they were younger, because she imagined them coming out of their mothers’ vaginas at the same moment she was eating her cake. She tried to will herself to stop imagining it but all she saw was icing and blood. “Cake, placenta, cake, placenta, cake, placenta.” I was exempt from this imagery because I was older. “Though,” she mused, “if you want to imagine me coming out of my mother’s vagina, I can’t stop you.” “Well, I wouldn’t want to ruin cake for myself.” “I wouldn’t want to ruin vaginas for myself.

He deserved better than to be with a woman who made lists.

For the first time in a long time, I looked at him as you’re supposed to look at someone you adore, like at any minute you will be asked to sketch that person’s face.

I’d done nothing wrong except, perhaps, to lay the groundwork for wrongdoing.

I decided right there and then that if there was ever anything so terribly wrong with me, it was only that I was a woman who’d spend her youth in New York and never left.

Know used to say that falling in love was like trying to remember something you never knew. The first time I heard him say it, I told him it was beautiful. But when he said it again, a pat piece poetry thrown into the evaporating pool of our love. I told him that it wounded too sad. It meant that love was always out of reach. It made it sound like a curse, to have happiness forever floating around on the tip of one’s tongue.

I realized, floating beneath the surface, that after years of being so intimately connected to one other human being, and after having that connection severed, I no longer had the desire to interact with anyone other than myself.

What I want is irreplaceable. What I want comes from a feeling so intimate, and so increasingly elusive, that to obtain it is like a kind of nirvana.

Civilization is fragile. And when shit falls apart, I want to protect my family.

Got it. You cast a spell. What happened?" "I-I blew up the building." "Whole thing?" I say. She looks at me like she's expecting me to be shocked or horrified or something. Around these parts we call that Tuesday.

Androgyny, which some feminists promote as a pacifist blueprint for sexual utopia, belongs to the contemplative rather than active life. It is the ancient prerogative of priests, shamans, and artists. Feminists have politicized it as a weapon against the masculine principle. Redefined, it now means men must be like women and women can be whatever they like. Androgyny is a cancellation of male concentration and projection. Prescriptions for the future by bourgeois academics and writers carry their own bias. The reform of a college English department cuts no ice down at the corner garage. Male concentration and projection are visible everywhere in the aggressive energy of the streets. Fortunately, male homosexuals of every social class have preserved the cult of the masculine, which will therefore never lose its aesthetic legitimacy. Major peaks of western culture have been accompanied by a high incidence of male homosexuality—in classical Athens and Renaissance Florence and London. Male concentration and projection are self-enhancing, leading to supreme achievements of Apollonian conceptualization.

In connection with this, it seems appropriate to apply Eliade's (1957, 1987) differentiation between shamanism in general and shamanism in the strict sense, i.e., characteristic of Siberia and Central Asia. This means that in these places the religious life of the society was organized around the shaman, or the institution of shamanism. This is in contrast to Europe where, with respect to Germanic or Slavic shamanism, the function was not central, or at least this is not apparent from the data at our disposal. Consequently, using Lewis's (1971) definition of cults of possession, shamanism can be viewed as peripheral, in comparison to the phenomenon of "classical shamanism," which was central.

Being a kid is like this. Your parents pack you a suitcase full of pedagogical messaging and by the time you're grown, it turns out most of the items were perishable anyway.

When we started Nalanda in 2007, there was a lot of buzz around a company called Eicher Motors led by a young, dynamic guy called Siddhartha Lal. Lal had inherited a hodgepodge of poor-quality businesses from his father in 2004. They manufactured motorcycles, footwear, garments, tractors, trucks, auto components, and a few other products, and none was an industry leader. In a remarkably bold strategic move, Lal decided to divest thirteen of the fifteen businesses to focus on just two products: trucks and motorcycles.30 Almost every analyst was gung ho about the future of Eicher; they were all taken in by its dynamic leader who was aggressively culling businesses, something that Indian firms rarely did. However, in 2007, this was a turnaround story with no empirical evidence of success. The company’s biggest hit, the Enfield Classic motorcycle, was launched only in 2010. We decided not to invest in the business. By the 2010s, the company’s motorcycles had taken on cult status in the Indian consumer’s mind. Sales exploded from just 52,000 units in 2009 to 822,000 units in 2019: a sixteen-fold growth. If you had listened to what we had to say about the business, you would not have invested. Your opportunity loss? Seventy times your money from 2007 until 2021. Tesla and Eicher Motors are the kinds of type II error we will inevitably commit because we reject highly indebted businesses, rapidly evolving industry landscapes, and turnarounds.

That was the name of the game: Don’t Scare the Men. Those who encouraged you to indulge in your impulse to share, largely did so to expedite a decision. They knew they were on trial too, but our courtrooms had more lenient judges. These men quizzed you about every hurt and humiliation until you were so flattered by the inquiry, you forgot that quizzes are made to be failed. This process was made worse by the garb of flirtation.

There were men whose dating profiles had read like rules at a public pool: No tattoos. No couch potatoes. No heavy drinkers. No picky eaters. No taking oneself too seriously. NO DRAMA! Men who demanded a woman have a sense of humor but showed no signs of being funny. Men who posted photos alongside striking female acquaintances, as if to say, “just so you have a sense.” Men whose insecurities ran so deep, they came out as accusations: “How do you not have a boyfriend? What’s wrong with you?” I went out with them anyway,

I had the urge to walk down the road, to keep walking until I came to a bus stop, take the bus as far as it went, transfer to another bus, and just circle the globe like that until I died.

Not only is the Universe stranger than we think — it is stranger than we can think. — Werner Heisenberg

Legs showed up soon after target practice, slithered his way up the M-16 and wrapped himself around the barrel for his afternoon siesta.

Oh no, there goes Tokyo, Go Go Godzilla!

MGM’s 1956 science fiction film, Forbidden Planet. This cult classic movie centers on a rather eccentric but brilliant scientist named Dr. Edward Morbius (played by Walter Pidgeon) and his innocent teenage