Narrative Warfare: Pop Cults Are Intended By Design

This video expands upon the Network Effect concept I posted about a few days ago. Hit up that video before watching this to get what I'm going to discuss below.

Mr. Hayes is, to my knowledge, no culture warrior. He's just a man with experience and expertise making useful commentary on a gaming market he's familiar with. That doesn't mean that he didn't hit on a key element of the culture wars: the creation of the Pop Cult. He did, and the deliberate and intentional creation and maintenance of such cults is older and far more pervasive than he says.

If one were to point to the origins of the contemporary Pop Cults, it would be the rise of mass media in the late 19th century with the rapid industrialization of the West and it spreading East to Japan, China, and other parts therein. With that came a rapidly centralizing and urbanizing population with rapidly rising income levels, more or less, and those people were seen as unruly sorts that needed to be simultaneously fleeced and coralled.

Enter the contemporary mass media machine.

Both conspicious consumption, and its deleterious consequences, as well as mass media propaganda came into being at this time; they would be formalized by World War One and that formalized acumen re-privatized afterwords in the form of the Public Relations discipline, applied as Marketing and Advertising, and PR is nothing more than weaponized psychology- a fact not lost on the ties between Sigmund Freud and Edward Bernays, as the former is uncle to the latter.

Psychology, in turn, is nothing more than the secularization of the cult control playbook with some novel applications. It's no surprise that Intelligence networks have roots in the world of cults of all sorts; the original Intelligence networks were the cults themselves and all the dirty tricks we see folks that glow in the dark today pull to exert power were used anciently also for the same reasons.

This includes cultural control, and in lieu of worshipping golden calfs as idols we're tricked into making idols of our entertainments and cults of our pasttimes instead of putting that devotional power to its lawful uses maintaining healthy societies and worshiping our Father in Heaven.

In more practical terms, it's also why cultural dissidents face such an uphill battle; it's one thing to become a player within a niche, and quite another to become the dominant player in that niche such that you can break out into the greater culture. That's where the Network Effect plays into this discussion.

The use of cult psychology and methodology is how the Network Effect is applied in realspace. You're not supplanting Football so easily because of the massive emotional, social, and cultural infrastructure built up around the core of the cult- it's idol of worship. Each fan gets immense value out of being devoted to the game, even as a spectator, due to the size of the network. Your new sport can't compete without somehow subverting that network or having a superior one to leverage against it; this is the case with Soccer (i.e. Football) in the U.S. vs. American Football, and there are other examples like it.

It's also why telling people to disengage is difficult at best; there is real value to being a cult devotee, real and tangible value, that cannot be dismissed. It's what makes Pop Cults dangerous in the long run, because idols are notoriously vulnerable to subversion by a more devious cult, and when that happens you get the undermining cult eating the targeted cult and assimilating any former adherants that don't resist or flee.

Such as what the Death Cult does to all the Pop Cults we have now, be it entertainment or politics or whatever.

And when a cult collapse, the believers are left vulnerable to being themselves subverted into whatever promises and delivers relief from the pain of a destroyed devotion- and that is how the Death Cult gets new zealots.

It's a nasty business, and it's all by design- just not necessary to the ends the designers intended.