cultic

I started to see cultic thinking in America everywhere in pop culture, entertainment and politics, and I just started pulling on the thread.

"It’s absolutely textbook. In fact, they have to do that for this machine that is cultic brainwashing to work," she says.

As an expert on the history of Western thinking about human extinction, I have long been worried about the ever-ballooning sphere of technophile elites—including megalomaniacs like Musk and Peter Thiel, cultic con artists like Sam Bankman-Fried, and influential “existential risk” researchers and “longtermist” philosophers—who believe that decisions about how to keep humanity safe from extinction are best made by themselves and their entourages.

Among them are five people with PhDs, two winners of the Margaret Singer Award for cultic studies and three accredited therapists with extensive experience working with ex-cult members.

Yet, by accepting at face value the purported rationalism of the New Misanthropy, Kirsch fails to fully appreciate its essentially theological, even cultic character.