Boring Ourselves to Death
A brief foray into the weird world of optimisation...
The last time I joined a cult led to thorough disappointment. After overhearing the excitable chatter between cult members—on the Tube, between bar stools, within WhatsApp groups—my interest swelled. Evidently, the first rule of this particular cult was to never stop talking about the cult.
Of course, devotees don’t call it a cult. They prefer community. A community of like-minded individuals coming together as one to share the burdens of existence. Or perhaps to whack a golf ball over acres of manicured grass, only to whack it again. To each, his own. But the word community derives from commune. I have seen those steamy 1970s films. I thought I knew unfailingly what community members do when they commune.
Cults follow a tried and trusted rubric. For starters, a cult needs a leader. Secondly, cults need an all-encompassing vision through which they neatly explain all of existence and man’s redemption from its grubbier aspects, in a tidy little paragraph. Thirdly, a cult needs members. A cult without members is just a lunatic masturbating on the Piccadilly Line.
To attract members, a cult needs an overarching philosophy, a promise of truth, enlightenment and ultimate redemption from man’s earthly woes. A cult also needs your money, not to mention your lobotomised devotion to its cause.
A cult encourages feet through its temple doors and bums onto its foldable chairs by promising its flock something devotees cannot get by joining a book club or a local pub darts team. Nothing else will do. To siphon those £20 notes from your wallet and the equity from your mortgage, cults must dangle a carrot unobtainable elsewhere. Call it a unique sales proposition.
And what is that USP? Eternal truth? Perhaps. Enlightenment? Maybe. Free coffee? Sure. Comradeship, camaraderie, community? There’s an alliterative slogan. Yes, yes, yes!
But that which a cult offers its flock is implicit. It’s unwritten in the small print. Sure, you show up for the free garibaldi and the chinwag, but you keep coming through the doors for one thing only.
It’s a thing one cannot get anywhere else—at least not without a heap of unpaid labour, and needless psychological, social, and financial risk. That’s right. Cults promise, at least to its more virile members, access to the common stock. By common stock, I don’t mean ladles of mung bean soup languishing in a grubby Yeti box. Nor the passing around of bum-sucked joints. In Plain English, men join cults in order to shag the wives and girlfriends of their fellow cult members. Every active cult on this earth operates on this implicit assumption. It’s like swinging but with compulsory choral music, undiagnosed personality disorders, and complimentary coq au vin.
