They got me. For years, I liked their posts. I skimmed their articles. I learned their talking points. I retold their stories. I mastered their language, though its acid argot ate away at the foundations of the voice, my own, that I had worked so hard to build from nothing. I went to their protests. I followed their races. I became 95 percent certain that I knew who the heroes were, and 100 percent that I could accurately name the villains.
You see? They got me.
But who were "they," exactly?
I imagined that they were the people who knew what I didn’t. I wanted to make the world a better place—doesn’t everyone?—and they seemed to know how to do it. If not for their enemies, entrenched and maniacal, they would’ve done it already.
“Get involved,” they told me. “Do you want to change the world? Get involved. Here’s how you get involved.”
Everyone seemed to take for granted that I was qualified to get involved—everyone but me, that is, but since they seemed so certain, and I felt so un-, I deferred to their ad hoc authority.
Following their social media pages, attending their gatherings, and watching others respond to their rhetoric with seemingly sincere emotion, I learned, in good Pavlovian fashion, to respond to it as well. The tinny quality of their incantations did periodically plant small question marks around their words, but the more involved I got, the more deftly I wrote off my failures to perceive precisely how their flourishes might ameliorate human suffering (or plant or animal suffering, for that matter) as flowing not from a flaw in their stratagems, but rather from my faulty powers of perception.
Getting involved means different things for different people. For me, it mostly meant listening to the appropriate news, reading the appropriate articles, alluding to the appropriate books, and following the appropriate influencers. On one occasion, it even meant joining a roving band of volunteers with clipboards and accosting strangers in their homes, sometimes in person, sometimes over the telephone, in a effort to verbally bully them into voting for the appropriate candidates.
I did that only once. Failing to perceive how your actions might be productive is one thing. Failing to perceive how they could possibly be anything other than counterproductive is quite another. Even so, in every other respect—every intangible, and therefore not demonstrably antisocial, respect—I stayed "involved."
At no point did anyone encourage me to innovate, create, or build. At no point was broader, deeper knowledge of a discipline, any discipline, posited as a useful tool. No one ever suggested learn a skill, skills being largely irrelevant to the task of improving the world. Certainly, critical thinking skills were off the table, for these require giving due consideration to counterarguments, alternatives, and criticisms. My kneejerk impulse to give such due consideration anyway did me no favors. On the contrary, such suspicious ways of thinking, and sometimes even speaking, only called into question my integrity and further enhancing the urgency with which I sought to stay involved, for only by staying involved could I prove that while I might not be the purest of believers, I was at least on the right team. I wasn’t, in other words, as bad as I could’ve been.
With time, in good Pavlovian fashion, my critical thinking skills grew duller, though thankfully, they didn’t altogether wither away.
So far, I’ve declined to name the coalition with which I was involved. I will not name them—not to shield them, but because naming them would send the wrong signal, suggesting, quite spuriously, that they’re somehow different from all the other cults just because they go by different names.
They are not different.
Cults are cults. Some cults are nested within others. Some are locked in existential battles with their rivals. Some preach total disengagement from the world and all cults except for one, themselves. In the end, it makes no difference. Cults are cults, and cults are everywhere. Disavow one, and you’ll meet a rep from another on your way out the door. Good luck not getting entangled. Good luck getting involved with this or that apparently noble enterprise. I’m not just saying “Good luck” for effect here. I mean it. You’ll need it.
Some cults are easy to spot from a distance. Others are more savvily disguised. Many look perfectly harmless until you end up inside them, and often, they keep looking perfectly harmless, at least to you, until you end up on the outside again. That’s the nature of cults: to look harmless to most people, most of the time, so that they can go on passing for organizations that are not cults—which, we are assured, exist.
For lack of any more reliable heuristic, I propose this one: either it’s a cult, or it’s a public library. If you’re one of those people who simply must become a card-carrying member of something, go with the library. They won’t tell you who to love or hate. They won’t reprimand you for thinking the wrong thoughts. They won’t insist on your loyalty. They won’t insist on much of anything, for that matter, except that you shut up and mind your own business so that other people can enjoy the library. They won’t tell you that shutting up and minding your own business will change the world, at least not in so many words, but it’s implied.
If you still feel compelled to change the world in a more quantifiable sense, you can always find books on how to do that in the public library. If you want to end homelessness, for example, you can find books about how to build houses. Better yet, you can find and talk to actual homeless people, who are known to hang around public libraries because most of the cults where they might otherwise kill time charge membership fees.
Next time you need to scratch that itch, instead of setting out to save the homeless, or get the homeless off the streets, or rehabilitate the homeless, or romanticize the homeless, or rename the homeless, or eliminate the homeless, or subject the homeless to any extravagantly transitive verbs of your own devising, go to your local library, find that rough-looking dude in the trench coat who always seems to smell like urine—you know the one I’m talking about: the guy who goes there to email his KGB handlers from the public computers—and sit down next to him, and listen to him.
Just that. Just listen to him.
He might say some things that make you cry, or that give you the heebie-jeebies, or that ought to be bleeped out or R-rated. He might even say some things that sound just like the things they used to say—the ones who wanted you to get involved, I mean. That’s fine. Just listen to him.
Look him in the eye, as you would with any other human being, and hear him out. If he’s taking questions, ask him some. Have your pepper spray at the ready, but don’t reach for it unless it’s absolutely necessary.
Assuming that it isn’t absolutely necessary, stick around. Give the guy a chance to speak his mind. Let him tell his story. Maybe even tell him yours. He might shake his head and rub his red-rimmed eyes and mumble that he hasn’t got any idea what you’re on about, but then again, he might listen—and after all the years you’ve spent liking their posts, and skimming their articles, and learning their talking points, and retelling their stories until you half-believe that they’re your own, even though they’re not your own and never were, any more than that strangely stilted, tinny language of theirs is your own, you might discover, with an uncanny little thrill of recognition, that the whole world changes—or at least your whole world changes—in that moment. That moment when finally, you’re heard.
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