For once the acolyte is imbued with the view that approval of, and communication with, the guru are important to his life, then the implicit and express threat of excommunication of removing from the direct or oblique presence of the guru creates a robust psychological sanction for the “enforcement” of loyalty and obedience. The lives of the members are dominated by the gurus affect and presence. It’s not that I would forbid the likenesses which are wrought in marble or in bronze; but because the faces of men, so all similitudes of the face are weak and perishable things, whereas the trend of the soul is eternal, such as could also be expressed not in some overseas substance, or by the assistance of artwork, however in our own lives. Yoga is another practice that promotes mindfulness while additionally offering bodily advantages akin to improved flexibility which may enhance sexual experiences. If the glaring internal contradictions of the Leninist cults make them intriguing objects of research, still more so is the Ayn Rand cult, which, while in some sense remains to be faintly alive, flourished for just ten years in the 1960s; more particularly, from the founding of the Nathaniel Branden lecture series in early 1958 to the Rand-Branden cut up ten years later.
In a development eerily harking back to the organized hatred directed towards the arch-heretic Emanuel Goldstein in Orwells 1984, Rand cultists were required to signal a loyalty oath to Rand; important to the loyalty oath was a declaration that the signer would henceforth by no means learn any future works of the apostate and arch-heretic Branden. Ayn Rand mentioned it, and it couldn’t be more true. Women are far more more likely to be nearly at all times or at all times orgasmic when alone than with a accomplice. 12) Who’s the best sexual companion you’ve got ever had? Doubtless, better of fathers, with that most loving spouse at thy aspect, all the dues of affection have been abundantly paid thee, but with too few tears thou wast laid to thy rest, and in the light of thy last day there was something for which thine eyes longed in vain. Thou submittedst to thy fate, so they tell us who were present to hear thy final words, with courage and cheerfulness, seeming to be doing all thou couldst to present thine Emperor full acquittal.
Within the America of the 1970s we are all too aware of the religious cult, which has been proliferating in the last decade. That the cults of Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Trotsky, and Mao are religious in nature, regardless of the specific atheism of the latter, is by now frequent data. It should be clear at this point in historical past that an ideological cult can adopt the identical features because the extra overtly religious cult, even when the ideology is explicitly atheistic and anti-religious. From his account, it is obvious that the rank-and-file member joins the get together from being interested in the official or exoteric creed; but, as he continues in the Party and rises via its hierarchical constructions, he is confronted with a sequence of crises that take a look at his mettle, that both drive him out of the celebration or convert him increasingly right into a steel-hardened cadre man. Frank Meyer writes, in his The Moulding of Communists,2 of the sequence of crises that Communists repeatedly go through of their profession within the Party. A series of crises and growing interior contradictions was then obligatory to achieve energy over the minds and lives of the membership, and to inculcate absolute loyalty to Rand, each in ideological issues and in private lives.
On the ceremony, the couple pledged their joint devotion and fealty to Ayn Rand, and then supplemented it by opening Atlas perhaps at random to read aloud a passage from the sacred textual content. Carus Metius had as yet the distinction of however one victory, and the noisy counsels of Messalinus were not heard beyond the partitions of Alba, and Massa Baebius was then answering for his life. One technique, as we have seen, was to keep the members in ignorance. Since each cult is grounded on a religion within the infallibility of the guru, it turns into needed to maintain its disciples in ignorance of contradictory infidel writings which may wean cult members away from the fold. The philosophical rationale for keeping Rand cultists in blissful ignorance was the Randian idea of “not giving your sanction to the Enemy.” Reading the Enemy (which, with just a few rigorously selected exceptions, meant all non- or anti-Randians) meant “giving him your ethical sanction,” which was strictly forbidden as irrational.