Posted by bwb 9 hours ago
Another great one: The Confidence Game by Maria Konnikova.
Of course now it's used on everyone who uses smartphones and social media.
It's a Brave New World, and you're carrying the main tool to mind control you in your pocket. Bonus, you probably pay for it too!
But it's not informative about cults in the slightest. It's just a caricature of what "satanic panic" [1] people thought a cult was.
Real cults are much more normal, which is why they are so easy to accidentally fall into. The worst cults have pretty mainstream acceptance. Often, they are simply break-offs of already well accepted religions.
One side is the technology of artful misleading, which is usually much stupider than it sounds.
And another side is a forbidden taboo to speak of. An occult secret that lives like a cancer within us.
Through a sustained art of Power human minds may entangle and manipulate each other at any distance. Counter intuitively, this “esp” is merely consciousness entangled. And some have great skill and others delusional cargo cult “gifts.” Those “gifted” rather than rigorously formed are played in games by their handlers who they themselves cannot perceive perched in their own minds (big spacious brains and all.)
This is how the CIA Stargate programs and those since have largely worked. Overt participants are gamed by handlers who can see in everyone’s minds. It is for those who can “mind trip” to a degree, that functional awareness gradually forms. The basic neurological feedback of being messed with by such “Power” is what causes its development.
It is not that some are “psychic”, it is that all minds may be entangled and some have decades of development “screwing around” in the backs of minds. Their own and others.
The modern occult mindfuck is that consciousness has been hacked.