Fairly recently, a fellow disgruntled forwarded me a link to this New York Times article: The High Price of Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Life
It describes Footsteps, an organization that provides community, counseling, and support for young adults leaving strict Orthodox communities. It describes the struggle of leaving such cloistered sects — operating in comas of 19th century belief systems, think Fiddler on the Roof — without the 21st century survival skills. It reports the uptick in suicides in these communities by those who find they can’t fit into the prescriptions set forth and are thus rejected by friends, family and community because of it, but don’t have the education, skills or guidance to navigate in the world beyond.
Here’s a rhetorical question: what kind of a choice is you’ll be what I tell you to be, or you won’t exist to me? Answer: no choice at all. Cults do this. Cults attempt to flatten human beings into one-dimensional cogs. Cults strip individuals of person-hood & identity. Members exist for the “good of the group” – otherwise known as the top narcissist. It’s an odd phenomenon, but alive and well, as we can see by the orange narcissist occupying the White House, but that’s another post for another day.
It’s also damaging. Even as someone who only flirted with 5 years of cult-i-ness in my adult years (I always had a toe out the door and was never gonna make it into “school’s” elusive inner circle) — I am quite familiar with the feeling described in this quote:
“Even in my lucky circumstances I am left with flickers of superstition and magical thinking, no matter how long it has been since I’ve realized that most of what I was taught as a child is not something I agree with as an adult. And still, every night, I place my hand over my sleeping children’s eyes and I recite the Shema bedtime prayer on their behalf. Every year, I fast on Yom Kippur and apologize for the ways I can’t bring myself to be what I was told God wanted. I do it just in case, or because I’m a coward, or at least because I’m not as courageous as your garden-variety Footsteps member. All of which is to say that I don’t know if it will ever feel normal.”
I can’t imagine trying to grow up under the weight of such oppression.
I don’t know why humans are wired so strangely – control or be controlled. I do know that there are other and better ways to live.
Well, we’re social animals. We evolved to exist in cooperative groups. That is what appeals to us in the early feel-good stages – that sense of belonging to a group, particularly one with a higher purpose. One of the criteria that they use when choosing who to try and recruit is people who feel a lack of such belonging. We go in for our “Trial period” and everybody is so welcoming it’s like we finally found the community we were looking for. The secrecy gives everything a little frisson of intrigue. The idea that we are a select group, studying ideas that not just anybody can understand adds romance and drama. By the time we start to see the cracks in the wall our thinking has been changed.
I suspect that in the hunter-gatherer days, there was always a charismatic individual at the head of every band. Someone who could organize the group and keep people in line. When we started to form larger societies, these individuals became priest-kings and then just priests and kings. If you really look at it dispassionately, religion has always had at least a flavor of something that existed to exert influence on the mass of people. Sometimes the charismatic individual at the head of the group (of whatever scale the group is) is a narcissistic sociopath. We’ve all experienced what happens then.
I knew your treatment of this article would be far more intelligent and informative than my ranting and raving. Good job and Happy Pesach.
Thanks, Mr. S! Happy Pesach!
The group doesn’t even have honest exile or shunning. Notice that while stated as an absolute rule, it’s always a matter of convenience. Did people who left school and worked for Bobget new employment? No. There was at least one lawyer who kept doing work for him. I remember overhearing one person being sent off on his own for his own good for a while being told that he didn’t have to split up with his wife, who was still in at the time. (Both people I’m sure you’ve known or known of.)
The talk of rules is utter bullshit because the rules are as amorphous as the ideas. Those at the top change them for convenience and don’t have to obey them. Everyone else either does or doesn’t have to, depending on what works for the group’s elites.
When absolute rules are completely situational in their application and never seem to apply to someone in a favored position, you know you’re being gaslighted.