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Every society eventually meets a moment where the assumptions they’ve held about themselves and the world are shattered by a confluence of crises caused by competing contradictions. The shared meaning theretofore projected onto that society’s experiences slips, refusing to adhere. The language that has carried their shared context from the past into the present fails to construct a legible future. In absence of a previously reliable certainty, new myths emerge hoping to fill the newly revealed blanks with assumptions that satisfy the itch of contradiction.
Contradictions
Contradictions emerge when there are inconsistencies in ideas, events, and other phenomena. A contradiction is not only an intellectual quandary, but also a state of emotional distress that spurs us into action. Contradictions catalyze the human need for things to make sense. To make sense is to assign meaning to phenomena. It is to impose or discern a pattern, to connect the dots to reveal shapes, images, and stories. It is to recognize and reconcile the inevitable contradictions of life.
Due to our limited contexts when we are children—which consist mostly of our imaginations—we rely on simple binaries, literalism, and fantasy to make sense of the world. We outsource the heavier labor of reconciling contradictions to the adults in our lives. It is in that outsourcing that we begin to build our own contexts. Those contexts, at the start, are unquestioningly inherited from our families; our national, gender, racial/ethnic, and class identities; and the various communities we belong to.
- At what point do we build upon or even rebuild these foundational aspects of our shared context in order to meet the existential threats these crises present?
Even as adults, we outsource the reconciling of contradictions. Tasked in our stead are subject matter experts and those who have been legitimized as trustworthy by government, religious, and academic institutions, as well as those who have accumulated adequate social, political, or financial capital.
- How does a society reconcile contradictions when these people and institutions fail?
Culture coheres a group of people via the consensus of meaning they’ve made of their collective experiences. Culture can also be understood as the complex hierarchies of trust that determine who has the power or authority to reconcile contradictions in a society. A people’s language is a living and breathing repository of their culture. It is the evolution of symbols and repetition of syntax that determine their relationship with the environment, other living beings, their own body-minds, and each other. When humans communicate with language, they participate in ritual incantation that reinforces the coherence of their culture.
Cults
The word culture includes the word cult which comes from the Latin cultus. It has to do with care and cultivation, particularly of animals and land. In French, cult is derived from culte, a form or system of worship. The term cult has historically been used to describe groups of people who are bound by their devotion to a particular deity. In the cult of Dionysus, for example, intoxicants and other means of inducing trance were used to liberate devotees from their inhibitions. Those trance and trance like states were a form of worship.
In modern society, cult (often used interchangeably with high control group or new religious movement) is a pejorative term used to describe groups of people who alienate themselves from mainstream culture through their devotion to a person or a set of beliefs. On the surface, cults reject the dominant culture’s hierarchies of trust and seek to establish their own. Modern cults are often a product of a society’s failure to adequately reconcile the social and material contradictions inherent to capitalism. However, rather than creating new material and social formations, cults often replicate the dominant culture’s hierarchies of trust, reifying the constructs of race, gender, and class.
Most people think they’d immediately recognize any attempt to recruit them into a cult. They think only a certain type of person is vulnerable to cults, only people who are gullible or naïve. Yet, because cults can be understood as subcultures that form around the rejection of the dominant culture’s reconciliation of contradictions, everyone is vulnerable. Everyone, at one time or another, can find themselves at the center of one of society’s inadequately reconciled contradictions. Everyone, at some point, inhabits a body that tells a truth contradictory to the truth of the dominant culture. Cults exploits those contradictions and the disenfranchisement that they produce while offering a “unique” solution to reconciling them.
- Are cults and cultures really that different?
Both cults and cultures function as forms of group thinking. They are vehicles of efficiency for making meaning. The labor of reconciling contradictions would take up all our time if we had to start from scratch every time we encountered one. Modern Western culture coddles us to the point that we struggle to know when to fall back on our own faculties and experiences. Group thinking, shared contexts, and collective sentiment overrides our otherwise critical judgement.
Crises
Between adults and children, religions and the state, the state and its citizens—at every level of society, the struggle for power is ultimately the fight over the authority to make meaning.
- At this moment of competing crises and overwhelming contradictions, how do we reclaim the territory of our bodies as a site of meaning making and an authority on reconciling those contradictions?
Words are an approximation for the subjective experience of embodiment. They are a vehicle to simulate the real, the material. However, our bodies tell a story that cannot be articulated with words. We cannot decipher our bodies in isolation with dictionaries and search engines; we must be felt by others in order to feel ourselves. This makes our bodies the beginning place of revolution. Revolution begins when reverberations of affect echo from body to body and back to our own; we feel in the language our bodies speak.
- What has stood in the way of this exchange of affect? What dissolves this barrier?
In this season, we meet the contradictions between this new feeling and the social reality we find ourselves in with the radical possibilities of embodiment. Revolution begins in the body. We’ve conformed our way through, dissociated, and pressed forth with brute force. This next leg of the journey can only be traversed by feeling.
