I wasn’t the first person in my family to run off to San Francisco to join a movement of fringe countercultural weirdos that later somehow found itself at the vanguard of American elite culture. San Francisco today is known for a mishmash of movements that overlap with and support each other, for social scenes and group houses that are incredibly insular and sometimes verge on outright cults, for great teachers and their devoted followings, for free love and libertinism justified with a veneer of revolutionary radicalism, for thinkers and authors who lack the formal markers of prestige but nevertheless end up writing the thoughts that everyone else repeats five years later, and generally being the petri dish where new cultural mutations grow and spread from. And that’s all true. But it’s not
Excellent questions to ask when joining any group.
"Cults Inside Out: How People Get In and Can Get Out" by Rick Alan Ross gives a pretty good overview of how cults work. It more or less aligns with what you say.
Excellent questions to ask when joining any group.
"Cults Inside Out: How People Get In and Can Get Out" by Rick Alan Ross gives a pretty good overview of how cults work. It more or less aligns with what you say.
https://www.amazon.com/Cults-Inside-Out-How-People/dp/149731660X/
I assume you've read Eric Hoffer..?