Re-posted from the Canada Free Press By Mark Gray —— Bio and Archives—June 3, 2020

Cults are often described as a religious sect considered to be extremist or false, typically under the thrall of a charismatic leader. However, even religious cults meet the general description “Obsessive, especially faddish, devotion to or veneration for a person, principle, or thing.”  In a broad secular sense, it could be said that cultists are devotees of false, reality-challenged, principles.

Is it possible that “conventional society” itself could become a cult? At first glance that would seem impossible because not everyone believes the same things. The point is, in a democracy, you don’t need everyone to believe the same thing, you just need enough believing voters to gain political power. Boom, the cult rules over everyone.

Psychological And Emotional Manipulation

Cults have to pick and choose their targets carefully, typically seeking those who are stressed or emotionally vulnerable with tenuous family connections. The grooming begins with “Love-bombing” whereby targets are showered with praise and affection.The feelings of validation and acceptance provide a sense of belonging and help build loyalty towards the group.

Isolation follows. People are physically and intellectually separated from outside influences of friends and family that could provide a reality check and contradictory information is censored. This allows the cult to gain control.

Maintaining control requires keeping the members ignorant and off balance, typically with a mixture of terror and love. Dissent is punished and obedience is lauded. Fear isn’t enough as people will break down and become a problem, so the cult provides a safe space to run to. The combination of fear and safety guides their path.

The brainwashing makes it exceedingly difficult for people to escape. Control of information stagnates intellectual development and prevents growth and understanding and without outside allies, it is hard to break the emotional bonds that have been developed.

It’s easy to look down at people who’ve been taken advantage of by a cult, to mock their emotional weakness and insult their intelligence but are we as a nation guilty of swallowing barrels full of kool-aid ourselves?

Psychological manipulation through emotional control and intellectual ignorance are the keys to a cult’s success and both can be managed if one controls the message. For the most part, our media and educations systems speak with a monolithic voice on all important matters.

While cults have to be careful in their target selection, a country sized cult has no restrictions because every citizen is targeted. The goal is simply to convince enough citizens to gain political control. Unfortunately, success forces everyone to live with the cult’s rules.

Censorship is evil, as are those who engage in it. It doesn’t protect us from “bad” information, it ensures conformity by restricting the information available for consumption and contemplation. It boxes us into an intellectual corner thereby setting limits on societal understanding. In other words, censorship keeps us ignorant and ignorance is an exploitable condition.
Emotional control tactics come in all shapes and sizes, from subtle persuasion to vile coercion.

Virtue signalling is a type of love-bomb that says, “look at how good we are, and how bad you are”. It has a dual personality that reflects both submission and superiority. By submitting, one is warmly welcomed by acceptable society where they can show superiority by shaming and excluding from the group those who refuse.

Reusable shopping bags and COVID masks are great examples

Reusable shopping bags and COVID masks are great examples. Unless kept meticulously clean, reusable bags are unsafe when they turn into bacteria and virus farms. COVID masks don’t prevent catching the virus because they aren’t sealed, and some have pores larger than the virus. They virtue signal concern but virtue signalling is not an act of virtue because virtuous behaviour is that which honors and respects truth and reality.

The phrases “willful ignorance” and “lack of nuance” are more aggressive forms of emotional manipulation that insinuate the target lacks the intellectual capacity to properly understand the situation. They are used to emotionally bully opponents into accepting one’s own beliefs about the subject. For instance, one is willfully ignorant if they don’t accept the scientific consensus on “climate change” that the sun has little to do with it. Nuance can be viewed as the weighing and measuring of information at the appropriate time and place in the thinking process. Some information is irrelevant or overwhelmed by other factors. Dismissing such data isn’t a sign one “lacks nuance”, it’s an indicator of intelligence. Using the phrases as slurs, however, is an obvious attempt to coerce, not teach.

The vilest manipulation tactics are direct attacks on a person’ character and can induce a mob mentality within the cult. Indiscriminately labelling people who disagree as some form of racist, xenophobic, bigot can cause people to lose their livelihoods and sometimes their lives when the mob starts braying for blood. They are typically used against those whose understanding and expertise threaten the state of ignorance that has been carefully and deliberately crafted in the cult.
The underlying theme of Cult Canada is government is good, big government is better, and totalitarian government is best.  Climate and COVID alarm are media manufactured fears where more government is the solution.

An Admission Of Ignorance

Norway’s health chief admitted that they could have controlled COVID-19 without the lockdown and avoided some of the unfortunate impacts of the lockdown.  It’s an admittance they acted hastily in ignorance, a refreshing dose of honesty sadly missing in the Canadian landscape.

Some of us warned back in March that we were making an incredible mistake. It wasn’t a guess. It was the knowledge that the media does manipulate emotions in service to an agenda and that the data challenged models could only be guessing. They, and the experts, were absolutely ignorant. That, and logic rule number one, bad information leads to bad consequences.

We’re willingly destroying ourselves so tell me, how are we not a cult?