One of the shows we’ve been streaming during lockdown is HBO’s The Vow. It follows a group of people, some famous, others not, as they join and then attempt to escape a cult called NXIVM (“nexium”). A fascinating thing about this one-season documentary series is that it is not filled with re-enactments. The cult leader engaged a documentarian to tell the story of his life — and the subsequent creation and expansion of his “self-help” organization — and this documentarian is one of the cult escapees. Who kept all the footage. It’s very engaging.
And it raises some interesting questions.
What could possibly cause an otherwise intelligent and accomplished person to give up huge amounts of self-determination and control to a cult like NXIVM (or Scientology)?
In 2020, it raises another interesting question.
What could possibly cause an otherwise intelligent and accomplished elected official to give up huge amounts of self-determination and control to slavishly follow a would-be dictator like Donald Trump? Similarly, what could possibly cause 72 million American citizens to vote against their self-interest, ignoring the evidence of their own eyes?
While they heard Donald Trump promise middle-class prosperity and job growth, they saw tax cuts that gutted the middle class and a trade war that sent tens of thousands of blue-collar jobs overseas. While they heard Donald Trump promise that Mexico would build that wall, they saw him divert billions of dollars from U.S. military programs and national security (U.S. taxpayer dollars) to fail to complete even half of the wall he had promised. While they heard that the novel coronavirus was a hoax not even half as deadly as the flu, they watched while a quarter million Americans died of COVID-19.
How could 72 million Americans possibly vote in favor of four more years of Donald Trump? How could thousands of people fall under the spell of Keith Raniere (NXIVM) or L. Ron Hubbard and David Miscavige (Scientology), or even Jim Jones, Charles Manson and David Koresh?
When (and why) do people stop understanding and believing in objective reality?
I contend that if every human could be forced at an early age to confront the truth of its own existence and the reality of its place in the universe, that human could never be taken in by a NXIVM or a Donald Trump. Which brings me to Frank Herbert’s Dune.
I consider myself lucky — I found a sun-bleached copy of Dune in my grandmother’s house when I was eight or nine years old. I read Dune every summer for about ten years, gradually adding the other books in the six-book series and reading them every summer as well. It’s fair to say that Frank Herbert’s ideas on ecology, philosophy, religion, education, and politics shaped my own thinking. I still consider the Dune series and Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series the greatest efforts ever in the field of speculative fiction.
There is a moment early in Dune when the main character, a boy of fifteen at the time, is forced to undergo a “test of humanity.” He is made to place his hand in a box while a poisoned needle is held to his neck. He feels an intense, burning pain in his hand, to the point that he imagines all the flesh has been burned off of that hand, yet he is ordered to keep his hand in the box. When the test ends and he removes his hand from the box, he is shocked to discover that the pain was all in his head, and his hand is perfectly normal. As the proctor of the test says, “We can’t go around maiming potential humans.”
The test is one of self-control: If you keep your hand in the box, you may lose your hand. But if you remove your hand from the box, you will die. The theory behind the test is equally simple: an animal that gets caught in a trap will chew its own leg off to get away. A human who falls into the same trap will have the self-control to lie in wait and try to kill the trapper, knowing that it is removing a threat to its own kind.
In other words, an animal cares only for its own survival. A human cares for all of humanity.
Do we live among 72 million animals disguised as humans?
That’s a harsh word. I think we can just as effectively call them emotionally immature. We have to accept that humanity as a whole is emotionally immature. Collectively, we seem unwilling to recognize the fact that we are causing such damage to our environment that we may cause our own extinction. (It’s worth noting that the planet will undoubtedly survive; I think environmental activists suffer from bad messaging here.) We seem unwilling to recognize that we could feed, clothe and shelter every human if we chose to, yet we choose not to. We seem unwilling to recognize that there really is enough to go around, and that one person’s success does not take away our ability to attain our own success.
And clearly, millions of our individual fellow citizens suffer from emotional immaturity as well. “I want mine, and I don’t care what happens to you!” Responsible (and well-resourced) parents try to correct such behavior. Other parents can’t or don’t. And we find ourselves here.
Let’s go back to Dune. What if we could develop an intervention that we performed on every child at the appropriate age? I would love to talk to developmental psychologists about this idea. Children are born selfish; it’s a survival mechanism. It’s completely appropriate for early human development. But at some point, in order to mature as an individual, you need to come to terms with the fact that you share this planet with 7 billion other souls. What if we could develop a technique that would rip the scales from a child’s eyes, force that child to realize that they are both a unique, special individual and an insignificant mote in the universe? Could we do that in a clinically structured, safe environment? Like a benevolent brainwashing? Could we do it without destroying that child’s sanity?
Would it be moral? Would it be effective? Would it save humanity? Would it be wrong to do this to a child without their permission or understanding?
Can we afford not to do it?