Category: Society

Turing never benefited from the revolution that he started. In 1952, he was convicted of having a sexual relationship with another man, to which he made no defence other than to say he saw nothing wrong in his actions. The conviction robbed him of his security clearance for GCHQ, for which he still worked, and made him the target for surveillance at the height of the cold war. He died after eating an apple laced with cyanide. The symbol of the half-eaten apple lives on to this day.  

You can now load software in your kids’ BlackBerry and/or cell phone that will be your watchdog (to prevent them from being approached by someone potentially trying to molest them) How it works — the program will send the parents a text message when a foreign IM, text message or e-mail comes into their child’s phone or PDA (anyone not on an approved phone contact list).  

[Quotes from] the very first chapter of the New Testament … actually gives clear evidence of the authors’ human fallibility.

And for this we’ve had to endure Crusades, Inquisitions and Cliff Richard. Bastards.  

aims to prove that we can all make a difference to the future of our planet. On Thursday June 21 – Midsummer’s Night – we are inviting the whole of London to turn off all lights and non-essential appliances between 9 and 10pm.

Look upwards – the more lights go out he better view we’ll all get of the stars.

Spot the bats – it will be dusk during the event, exactly when the bats come out to play!  

the hyped-up PR gibbons have forgotten one very important fact about next Thursday – the longest day of the year. It won’t actually be dark at 9pm. Brilliant.

Is it just me, or are there more stupid people than usual working for London-based PR projects at the moment? 

What do all cults have in common, to varying degrees?

1. A strong central leader or founder.
2. Belief that the leader has access to special and exclusive information or has special authority. (In the case of financial cults, it’s the illusion the leader provides of freedom from the laws of economics. The “mark” is vulnerable because of their desire for a quick buck.)
3. A demand for loyalty oaths and obedience.
4. High initiation fee or other renunciative action geared toward making withdrawal difficult, such as a requirement to cut off contact from one’s family.
5. Rings and rising levels of membership, which reward strong commitment.
6. Intensive, often confrontational–yet uncommonly intimate social relationships.
7. Reinforcement of in-group and out-group differences. External threats actually benefit the cult by amplifying and solidifying interior control.
8. Make people feel special, loved, and accepted.
9. Often attract lonely or confused people who need direction and may have trouble fitting into typical career paths.

But the most important characteristic of cults, without which they could not exist is:

 

THEY NEED MEMBERS

 

Members provide the power. They are the cult’s life blood.

 

Without members, a cult leader would be just another delusional nutjob or con man. Without followers, the leaders’ loyalty demands or financial claims would sound downright creepy or fraudulent. Their wacky extremist philosophies would be seen in the same category as a homeless person shouting on the street corner. Early members provide the opportunity to hone and polish a more skilled presentation, develop wider legitimacy, and an illusion of popular support to budding sociopaths.

The first thing a burgeoning cult leader has to do is:

1. Create a mythology or backstory. In the financial cult, it’s fake case histories and success stories.
2. Create a mission to give the work a sense of exclusivity and desirability (the way Tom Sawyer got the other boys to paint the fence). Establish an inner circle willing to reinforce their authority (at least until the membership grows).
3. Acquire the skills to fend off challengers (as soon as members of the inner circle see the power or money start to flow, they will begin vying for it).

Most people don’t have the skills to manage a relationship with even one other person. We only have to look to the high divorce rate to verify this fact. Imagine what it’s like for a leader to meet daily challenges to his authority (without the normal reward/punishment system of money/loss of job). This is why a cult leader has to get used to saying “because I said so” with a straight face. He has to get used to doling out stern summary justice in the form of ostracism and outright dismissal. He has to learn to use member peer pressure to humiliate and corral troublemakers. It also helps to appeal to supernatural beings and endless divine missions. But it’s not absolutely necessary. The most important skill is an uncommon ability to connect with people (on whatever terms), and to attract and control members.  

Atheism is pretentious in the sense of claiming to know more than it does. It claims to know what belief in God entails, and what religion, in all its infinite variety, essentially is. And atheism is muddled because it cannot decide on what grounds it ultimately objects to religion. Does it oppose it on the grounds of its alleged falsity? Or does it oppose it on the grounds of its alleged harmfulness? Both, the atheists will doubtless reply: religion is false and therefore it is harmful. But this is to make an assumption about the relationship between rationality and moral progress that does not stand up. Atheism is the belief that the demise of religion, and the rise of "rationality", will make the world a better place. Atheism therefore entails an account of history – a story of liberation from a harmful error called "religion".

Some will quibble with the above definition. Atheism is just the rejection of God, of any supernatural power, they will say, it entails no necessary belief in historical progress. This is disingenuous. The militant atheists have a moral mission: to improve the world by working towards the eradication of religion.

Douglas’s theoretical apparatus allowed her to think in original ways about almost any topic. In a lecture earlier this year at the Young Foundation, she discussed "enclaves," the small groups which at their most extreme become terrorist cells. Where others emphasise their strengths, she emphasised their weaknesses: how prone they are to splits and sectarianism, and how hard it is for their founders to enforce rules. To survive, enclaves create around themselves what Douglas called a "wall of virtue"—the sense that they alone uphold justice, while all around them are suspect—yet the very thing that bonds them together encourages individuals within them to compete to demonstrate their own virtue and the failings of their peers. The only thing that can override this fragility is fear of the outside world—and so sects, whether political or religious, peaceful or violent, feed off the hostility of outsiders, using it to reinforce their own solidarity. The implication is clear for western governments: in the long term, defeating terrorism depends on ratcheting fear down, not up, dismantling the "walls of virtue" rather than attacking them head on with declarations of war.

So petty tyrannical spiteful controlling interfering clerics get their way and yet another woman is prevented from working, living her life, having ordinary grown-up interactions, having fun, expressing joy and exuberance. The world is made just a little safer for narrowness and deprivation and general nothingness. 

These days, as a middle-aged and respectable author, I still feel a sense of indeterminate but infinite possibility on entering a lift, particularly a small one with white walls. That to date the doors that have opened have always done so in the same time, and world, and even the same building in which I started out seems merely fortuitous – evidence only of a lack of imagination on the part of the rest of the universe.