Cults: Religious, Political and Vegan.
27 October 2017 [link youtube]
This video includes reflections on how to speak to friends/relatives who may be (currently) cult-members or suffering from some sort of cult-like mentality (i.e., reflections on my own experience, and not only within Buddhism).
Youtube Automatic Transcription
I had a post that's on on Twitter where
I just said you know belief makes people perceive weakness as strength and faith makes people seek out the company of other faithful people other people who share their faith because they only want to be around people who are weak in the same way that they're weak they feel so threatened by anyone who actually does challenge their beliefs or anyone who potentially might challenge their beliefs and this is part of the self-selected obscurity of what cult groups do again even if we're talking about a political group a left-wing communist group or a vegan group what-have-you getting real real pragmatic for a second here when I talk to people who are members of cults who are in a cult-like relationship cult-like situation the answers you get are complex and meaningful because these people have to justify to you and they have to justify themselves why the group they're a member of rejects the authority of projects in a sense the surveillance of a larger you know church group now course very often the reality is we can't be members of a larger Church because they're gonna ring alarm bells about either what's going on financially or sexually or doctrinally they're gonna say look you guys are what you're doing here is madness or it's hurting people and of course their answers may be you know incoherent or magical they may say well the founder of this group had a dream and saw some demons or angels and have a vision and again don't stop the conference you can't just say to them doesn't that sound ridiculous to you because they're a cult member it's not gonna smell particulate for them I'm anise Yin [Music] how do you know if a friend of yours is a member of a cult how do you know if a friend of a friend of yours is a victim of a cult mentality can put it that way how do you define cults and cult-like thinking this is a practical problem for most of us in our lives even if you just know a lot of members of your extended family you probably know people who have at one time or another falling into or falling out of a cult cult-like beliefs I would say yes I would say yes but you know Scientology okay I've got a sneeze coming on how long has mr. I sneezed on camera you know Scientology is an example people who are sort of at the Oder rings of Scientology people who aren't you know closely connected to the central organization they may not be able to see the cult-like aspects of the organization but yes absolutely you know I would say Scientology's are called and most of the there are different academic disciplines that have a formal checklist rather define occult and normally included in the criteria are how easy it is to leave like whether not they try to keep you whether or not they cut you off from contact with family members who are hostile with the cult element resort size whether or not they have they train you in attitudes that demonize non cult members so that you'll insert insulate yourself against voices of reason that'll get you to question call tagua there's this there's this checklist and normally pretty high on the checklist also is so-called financial abuse meaning that the cult is extracting money from its followers but of course a lot of mainstream religions that are not consider cults you know extract money from their followers no you know for me in my life I've dealt with study you'd looked at and known people who are victims of cults within Buddhism within modern Buddhism Buddhism as it exists in the rule today and a lot of the rules and patterns for Western cults are kind of broken they're you know Buddhist cults are very very different from Christian Muslim and Jewish cults and most of the Western world when talking about religion that's what you're talking about Christianity Judaism Islam and then cult groups that more or less approximate these leaves that differ from them but are still derivative of them and Buddhism is is very very different and then beyond that also I've had to take an interest in purely political cults cults we have you know a cult-like mentality in a context that isn't ostensibly religious doesn't present itself as a religion and for sure I mean we've had discussion even on this channel I think up to what extent you know for some people you know the cult of freelee and durianrider the cult of ratha for really was a cult-like experience you know maybe it checks off some of the boxes for some people for the people who literally sold all the furniture in their apartment so they could sit on the floor and eat organic mangoes straight out of a wooden box straight out of the wooden packing crate the same way they saw freely doing you know on on YouTube it looks a little bit looks a little bit cult-like but if you've got that that long list of of check marks a lot of them are missing there too and for one thing for sure it's easy to leave it's easy to leave anytime maybe you're gonna get durianrider cussing you out on YouTube but you know it's uh you could leave you leave whatever you're ready to leave for sure you're not being trapped being trapped inside for me but dealing with this really really broad range of cults and cult-like attitudes that for me definitely included far left-wing political calls you know communist and crypto communist cult-like groups you know I really felt like the one the one crucial checkmark the one definition of what is a cult is when people lose the ability to make decisions for themselves you know and that's an interesting interesting criterion to put emphasis on because of course you can lose that just just across the internet you know when you're not physically moving into a commune or moving into a compound under you know the people from the cult aren't actually controlling your bank account or anything else in your life but you can have a cult-like mentality where you you really stop making your own decisions you start looking to the cult leader to make the decisions for you there was a there was a gay guy I had on my channel we did a interview discussion and I remember he talked about on YouTube he felt like he was in a cult-like group of durianrider supporters and the moment when it cracked for him was when durianrider made his announcement that his formal position was that being gay was a choice and that anyone could opt at any time and he went to these meetings with his cata group that he met with of and the attitude of the other people in the group was look like it or not this is now the party line you have to you have to support this or get out and he started really questioning what was going on but that's that's amazing because I mean again that's just it's just a group of people you know watching YouTube videos and again they start doing these imitative things me without question they start doing long-distance cycling they start going to the gym maybe they start sitting on the floor instead of sitting on furniture you know they're all these other kind of things rolled up in the package the anti anti medical science views the anti education views that's all this live for your own pleasure but then for this one guy and I did I did talk to him for a couple hours or something I forget you know we just had that one conversation but I remember was really interesting hearing from his perspective how he had to sort of come to a stop and question what was going on in his life when he realized he was part of a circle of people who weren't doing the thinking for themselves they weren't making that decision for themselves you know and apparently that kind of cult-like mentality can arise in a totally secular setting in a weight loss weight loss and ecology setting and it can arise in a in a you know ornate religious context and so on and so forth too so you know if though if someone asked me my girl was not my girlfriend is not gonna ask me this question if someone were to ask me why do people lose the ability to make their own decisions I think the really obvious answer is because they want to you know they're looking for that experience they're looking for someone to take that away for them you know they're looking for that to live in that breathless overwhelmed state where there's someone else they regard as omnipotent or transcendent or did better than themselves because immuno there were people who are like that with communism they didn't they didn't necessarily regard the leaders of communism as having supernatural powers but you know were they they wanted to give over that part of themselves to a movement to a church to a religious experience you know to whatever was I remember one of the theories of amnesia which interests me amid the whole the question of what is memory now doesn't work you know when you look into it amnesia at nisha it can be barely proven to exist you know okay so you've all right interesting sorry there's no that but you know one of the fundamental theories of amnesia is that it only happens people forget when they want to forget you know it's not what Hollywood movies would make you think it is put it that way it's not as real as sort of tell soap operas and Hollywood movies make it out to be but yet in most cases you're looking at someone who wants to forget who wants to part ways with this this side of their their character or their history they want to want to start again yeah so you know I mean in the case of my own father I regard my own father as someone who basically had a cult mentality that he brought to kind of a long series of things in his life he was I mean you know I think when my father was involved with Christianity which is long before I was born I mean I think he wanted Christianity to be that kind of cult for him he was seeking that out you know he signed up for he was always very left-wing he signed up for some of these Christian socialist groups he signed up he by his own account assuming he wasn't lying about this and he may have been but you know he signed up to become a citizen of Cuba he wanted to go join the revolution in Cuba and you can imagine how that cliques kind of the Christian socialism specifically you know that it wasn't it wasn't that his fantasy wasn't running away to Moscow was running away to Cuba you know joining that being a very Catholic very Christian form of form of communism and so on so you know but by his own account they didn't take him because he didn't have a respectable enough profession at the time he was an actor and they said with the revolution doesn't need actors become a dentist then come back looking freaking kick he says if you if you've recovered that if that is the story as he as he told it you know so yeah I mean he was looking for Christianity be it pardon me he was looking for Christianity to be more than what it was for him he was looking for communism left-wing politics to be more than what they possibly could be for him I would also say even the kind of mainstream European philosophy he studied in university you know whatever he was reading at the time if he was reading cabbar mass or Nietzsche or whatever it was reading some mainstream philosopher Hegel or Karl Marx whatever I think he was always looking for it to have that that quality for him this is very clean to me I mentioned you know ages ago I mean in some ways I recognize I'm I'm a little bit psychologically abnormal myself like I've mentioned this to you I don't feel jealousy I don't experience jealousy and I really have to use my imagination in a very artificial way you know to understand how co-workers are feelings cause even when they feel jealousy because that is something I have never felt you know and I and I'm not bragging I'm not saying this is a moral characteristic or sign it's just it's just an oddity you know one of the differences I really felt between me and my my blond ex-girlfriend I've only had one that was blondes that's what I refer to as such but you know I always felt like looking at her and looking at me we grew up in the same city in Toronto we had access to the same library system we watched exactly the same TV shows on television growing up same education went to the same schools approximately not actually the same yeah we went to same high school that's where I met her you know same University also you know there's a lot they are in common but it seemed to me like at every stage of her intellectual development one of the really deep differences in her and I was just that she was easily overwhelmed and I wasn't you know I'd sit down and read philosophy of Aristotle and kind of finish with sneering contempt like well you know and this is overrated and you know and I could go to an opera or you know see some supposedly great you know symbol of Western culture and civilization of philosophy and politics look at Co Marx call Mark das kapital sorry so the masterpiece by Omar's desk that was so built up for me because my own parents were left-wing extremists they regarded this as as really more sacred than the Bible as this you know book that changed history and when I read it I already had a very robust background in classical economics I knew many of the sources Marx was was quoting and you know again to say I was underwhelmed is is an understatement you know all these all these things that were built up for me whether it was from ancient Greece or the Bible or philosophy or politics or religion whatever it was and again even going seeing great works of architecture for me none of that was overwhelming I'm you know most of that it's like you know you'd see one of these great works of art that you can kind of sneer and be like well you know gee I guess we had to live through five hundred years of the Dark Ages so we could have this cathedral built by slaves you know yeah well good job you did a real good job painting those angels on the ceiling too bad there were people literally being tortured to death in the dungeons just around the corner so we could have this horrible 500 years of let's see things in this very cynical way and it wasn't phony cynicism it was cynicism that led to insight and to some extent came out of you know factual I was just not easily overwhelmed and again like so you know look another another thing we just came up in conversation but I was saying to you the other day or earlier today maybe you know a large part of our national identity in Canada the United States is actually based on World War two based on the start will do it's easy to be overwhelming that stuff I mean you're a child being taught about the Holocaust you're a child being taught about American soldiers liberating people from concentration camps it's easy to go home I gotta tell you I was not overwhelmed you know all of that I was sneering at it and I was looking at the hypocrisy and the inconsistencies and like well what is this stuff about the you know the pact between Joseph Stalin and Hitler and then all of a sudden Stalin is our number one ally you know they're all these weird questions if you're looking at it and if you're just not overwhelmed as a kid there's a lot and what about feign whose side was Spain on it will do but for me these were these were problems in the account of World War two why was it the Canada started combat in World War two like two years before the Americans if the Americans were such heroes why did they join so late all kinds of stuff you know and of course even much more recently though you know the role of Japan and Japan and Russia there's a lot of complexity there so you see my overall view of these things is one not being wrong this is in the context of discussion about cults I think a lot of people want to be overwhelmed they want it and I remember actually one-one cult-like group within and Catholicism so you know there are cults but they're not they're not quite part of mainstream Catholicism I remember reading an analysis of who joined and why and it just said total understand Allah said you know most people who are serious about autism there's not that much to do like once you you know kind of once you kind of graduated you know what see if once you've gone through the basic rituals these were people who were looking for something you know within Catholicism that would be overwhelming and give them a sense of meaning and direction and purpose and that the world was gonna end and you know a grand mission and some kind of overwhelming overwhelming set of set of sentiments yeah anyway look so again you at age 24 you were talking about your girlfriend you said that she's easily yeah just overwhelmed yeah yeah like oh she would hear this this history about World War two and things well America is great at Canada is great sure so so you know gee I remember we once went inside a church together her and I and the church yrden sign slightly clever with the architecture where they had moved forward there's this grill there's this set of bars that traditionally separated the the priestly caste from the commoners I totally forget that story all the oldies have technical terms in church architecture and they had built the church so that those bars were up at the front so you were being welcomed in to you know it was just an architectural shape so he's you know neoclassical this was fake historical architecture and I remember you know she looked at that she thought it was such a beautiful gesture there she broke down weeping you know look just looking at the looking at the church architecture you know hearing uh hearing a choir sing you know rousing church music or something she could break down weeping and she overwhelmed by that kind of thing but sure so I'm just doing but politically what you're saying is true too I think it was basically impossible for her to think in an incisive way about what the Prime Minister of Canada and certain partners to get it done in his career or it failed to do or to think about what happened in World War two and what didn't happen because elements of it were overwhelming because the the emotional narrative like blots out the kind of rational narratives you know I'm saying yeah and you know again maybe she's just wired that way but it maybe it's something she she wants yeah you know what I mean you you've seen me weeping watching Casablanca you know III don't I'm not trying to get rid of that side of my character I'm really happy that in my late 30s I'm able to wallow in sentiment that way you know in an appropriate time what's what's the point of watching Casablanca you know and for me that is really political it's because the movie Casablanca has this kind of weird political depth to it you know it's set as Europe is falling apart and the Holocaust is unfolding and so on sure sure so I've you know I'm not saying everyone should be a rational robot I'm not saying that at all no no I do what you mean that could lend itself to a cult-like mentality yeah right easily impressed by what somebody offers you well I think some people are seeking it out in direct action everywhere within veganism some people are seeking it out within you know well whether or not whether or not the place you seek it is really offering you a cult laying experience I think some people are I don't you know I don't think I'm as cynical is you know I'm sitting on a different way and that like I did see architecture like huge cathedrals when I was a very when I was a really young child when I was 10 you know I went to multiple different European countries and saw and saw things and so like hey there was on one trip anyway sorry you don't have to include this but like I was just thinking about it like I'm gonna include it I was just getting comments on YouTube saying you should talk more the video though god yeah so yeah and then again I went to Italy when I was 14 for a choir tour and we sang in the Vatican like we visited the Duomo in Florence we saw like just really beautiful things and you know I that is that is interesting you know I wasn't brought to tears by anything that I saw it's not like I I was cynical for historically you know but at the same time I wasn't like you know I just wasn't I don't have that that uh yeah issue that I'm like easily impressed and I think that also is reflected in like I'm very unimpressed with most of vegan YouTube like seeing seeing you your channel like you know I was like wow this is actually actually subsea you can dent yeah yeah but people are going to churches and looking to see and feel you know the kingdom of God they're going and hoping to feel you know there are people who are looking for an experience there that's something quite different from what bricks and mortar can ever give you and I think people are looking at you know even Aristotle and hoping for an experience that can't possibly be there yeah in a book that's not just that's not just ink and paper but a book that is first and foremost a relic of a dead society that's now very difficult for us to realize I remember being amazed by the architecture you know it had been built so many years ago and it is such a wonder at the time so in that sense just human ingenuity is impressive but like you know it wasn't it wasn't for religious reasons that I thought it was impressive it was just I I think I have shown you the photos on my hard drive when I was in Sri Lanka yeah see so again this kind of brings it back into this thing is related but I mean like so I went and visited historical sites from ancient Buddhism so architectural room dimension Buddhism I worked on manuscripts and ancient texts and philosophy formation Buddhism but all the time I was thinking about those things analytically you know what I mean I wasn't looking to be overwhelmed you know and it's really sad when you see the cult-like mentality active within Buddhism so like you know with with ancient sites like that and put ISM what you're looking at really is the history of the failure of Buddhism you know you're looking at well yeah look we reach this peak and then we got slaughtered by the Muslims we got conquered by the Hindus it was torn apart and it's all it's all gone now certain legs going to sleep but anyway you know like you know what what does this represent really you know what is the significance of seeing these ruins of what was once great architecture you know I'd be in those locations but other Buddhists would be wanting to see something very different you know from what I'm seeing you're looking at failure I mean a ruin is a ruin you know Rome is not in ruins this is a significant difference you know Mecca is not in ruins and the great cities of Buddhist antiquity are their ruins you know they got conquered they got decimated by Islam you know first and foremost also by certain forms of Hinduism also by the British Empire it's a long series of losing battles of the history of Buddhism so what you see there and how you relate to it and in terms of the texts I mean it's it's really sad because meaning should put his philosophy many of the texts not all many are actually written with real cynicism they're written in a very kind of cynical way so to see people you know modern people wanting to get swept up and then wanting them to be a kind of gospel there are kind of different layers of irony there I think I told you about this I got an email from someone who knew me as a scholar of Buddhism on the on the internet asking for my comments on a on a particular passage from Pelican I had never seen before but she sent me the original patli not just an English translation and the particular passage in Pali was you know obviously written by an ancient Buddhist monk and it was really saying that meditation leads to madness now it says more than just that but the word was madness meaning insanity you know and you could imagine still today if you spend time with people meditating you meet enough of them who were either crazy before they got there who are going crazy with the religious experience you know and it was just a really funny moment I said oh wow okay well thanks for saying with that that's a really interesting excerpt I say you know different passages of the pali canon reflect the perspectives of different authors already that was shocking to the person i was writing to like you know just like some christians want to imagine the whole bible is and i'll magically written by by god you know like as if the polly cat is written by one author it's not but so this is an especially kind of cynical or nihilistic author and this this is really warning you that you know meditation leads to madness interesting this was you know preserved within the the buddhist canon this is obviously an opinion or a perspective that's hostile to a lot of other scriptures you can read that are literally bound into the same book you don't mean terms of contrasting is and yeah the first time starting to you to them this this was just mind-blowing you know what is it they're wanting buddhism to be they're wanting it to be univocal and yoonah focal and you know by what you mean to speak with one voice to have one focus one direction one purpose and to provide them with a meaning in their life that's that's just not there in terms of why those texts were written and and so on see i was i was always in this position of saying like well look guys why can't we work with these ancient texts the same way we work with shakespeare or Aristotle or you know Socrates like you know this stuff is valuable it's worth studying in its own way but let's not pretend you know what it means something doesn't mean let's let's not pretend as evaluate it doesn't has it doesn't have but then you're you're really always crashing into the Coleman the cult mentality and again keeping it all the way real most the people I was dealing with in Buddhism they've been around long enough that they'd kind of outgrown the cult mentality like maybe 20 years earlier when they first started to become a scholar of bosom they were actually cult members I knew cases of that where they started off as members of a cult with a capital C notorious cults that had you know clandestine anal sex and financial abuse and the whole bit cuz there are buddhist monks who are closeted homosexuals and we're supposed to touch money well that's right they're not supposed to touch money they're not supposed to touch anyone's penis not even their own they're supposed to live in total celibacy and there were a lot of cults where sexual abuse is also a part of the the pattern with you know this notion of power what have you you know but a lot of people I knew they kind of grown out of that and we're still haunted by that when I knew them they'd grown up into being a scholar of another kind but then when you talk to them you saw they had never really dealt with they'd never really dealt with those skeletons in their closet with how they got involved Buddhism in the first place and they never dealt with the contrast in what they know and understand now and what they had believed or wanted to believe you know beforehand so getting real real pragmatic for a second here when I talk to people who are members of cults over in a cult-like relationship cult-like situation you know I asked a question which I've raised on this channel before or 200 videos going in a very different context one of the first questions I ask them is okay so your cult your your group your your member of why aren't you going to the local Anglican Church so if they're a member of a Christian college the cult I asked them why aren't you going to a mainstream Christian Church now if it was a Muslim cult it parallel will be asking about Islam I've raised this repeatedly in Buddhism when I'm talking to white people who don't have any answer for why they're part of a weird fringe group that I would either consider a cult or just to have absolutely no legitimacy well okay if this is what you believe and if this is what you preach within Buddhism why are you a member of a mainstream church like the CM nakiya from Sri Lanka why aren't you you know why aren't you a member of any of the mainstream Buddhist organizations that have a formal formal government status and millions of adherents and you know properties and procedures and bureaucracy why aren't you a member of the equivalent of the Catholic Church of the Anglican Church within Buddhism now I don't ask that as a simple shallow rebuke that's not the end of the conversation so I'm talking to a friend who's part of a weird Christian cult the answers you get are complex and meaningful because these people have to justify to you and they have to justify it to themselves why the group they're a member of rejects the authority of rejects in a sense the surveillance of a larger you know church group and of course very often the reality is we can't be members of a larger church group because they're gonna ring alarm bells about either what's going on financially you're sexually or doctrinally they're gonna say look you guys are what you're doing here is madness or it's hurting people they're gonna raise that and you you might think I'm putting a lot of faith in the Anglican Church but actually this is something I think the Anglo churches you know any of those mainstream groups are really accustomed to dealing with you know of course it's a judgment call for whoever whoever in that mainstream group is dealing with you getting someone who's in a cult or in a cult-like situation to recognize that they are insulating themselves in the larger society that they're insulating themselves against criticism even from members of the mainstream Church you know they're they may claim to be connected to you know so why is it you have to separate yourself from all other Christians and be in this self-selected obscurity of this group why is it you have to separate yourself from all sources all the mainstream Buddhist sources of authority and be in this group now it's possible they have a good answer like it's possible you could talk to someone in Buddhism and they'd say well look I'm really a scholar and what I do is really scholarly and the mainstream religion doesn't deal with that so therefore I'm part of this group of scholars and they may say but yeah I'd be delighted to have more of an open door to the mainstream religion and have more let's try to set that up let's try to have more cooperation with the mainstream Church but what we do is really so once in a while there may be there may be a positive answer but just if you can sit down face-to-face and get someone to talk through with you why are you a member of this self selected special group and not of the other group and of course their answers maybe you know incoherent or magical they may say well the founder of the screw had a dream and saw some demons or angels and had a vision and because of that he started his own church fine okay but why wouldn't he just join up with the Anglican Church or the Catholic Church or this mainstream but it's so what is the reason why isn't that he's pulling you away from your family and your job or any other Church it seems and you know they may have an answer that's magical within their group of saying well he says that the mainstream Church is corrupt and evil and what we're gonna do is pure and so on and again don't stop the conference you can't just say to them doesn't that sound ridiculous to you because they're a cult member it's not gonna stick you-let's to them you know another if there were other people in the room they might be standing there saying doesn't that sound ridiculous to you because okay but what what's your role don't you have compassion for the people who are the members of the mainstream Church or the mainstream Buddhist organization if they're so misled if their organization so is so corrupt why can't you reach out to them why can't you be involved why can't you be part of the same congregation and so on to keep challenging them on this issue of of isolation now the other criterion that I've alluded to is this question of losing your ability to make decisions I had a post that's on on Twitter where I just said you know belief makes people perceive weakness as strength and faith makes people seek out the company of other faithful people other people who share their faith because they only want to be around people who are weak in the same way that they're weak they feel so threatened by anyone who actually does challenge their beliefs or anyone who potentially might challenge their beliefs and this is part of the self-selected obscurity of what cult groups do again even if we're talking about a political group a left-wing communist group or a vegan group or what-have-you this can emerge in not so not so not so overtly religious circumstances I think what's what's really hard you've got to be face to face you can't do this by email but when you're when you're with someone who has that cult-like mentality and there's any issue like this like even the gay rights issue where they basically say to you oh I can't I can't make up my mind I have to ask leader I have to ask the person in charge of the in charge of the called what's really powerful you can do it is to sit down and ask them why whatever the decisions are because I mean you know people who are members of cults they may not make their own decisions but what kind of cool thing they wear you know they mean there may be seemingly trivial things that have taken on a sense of gravitas and transcendental importance those decisions now be made by the cult but what have you financial decisions decisions but their own future decisions about their love life who they're gonna marry whether they should break up with her boyfriend when they go and ask the cult leader they go and ask the Buddhist monk but you know whether or not that you break up with your boyfriend or not and it's not just guidance it's not you know it's not getting a second opinion where it really is that person you know making your decisions for you I think the hardest thing but the most crucial thing is try to challenge them on that issue of when and where did you lose the capacity to make your own decisions and I think most of the time people do that because they they wanted to they wanted that sense of abandoned they wanted to be part of a larger whole all those all those reasons that the people have for forgetting multikills yeah if I identify with this term nihilism and nihilist as a critique of a belief as a rejection of belief and you know I see wanting to believe as a real sickness in mankind you know I think if you got that in you whether we're talking about example like my father or what have you I think the people who want to believe the people who want to be overwhelmed will kind of shuffle from one one cult to another or they'll make a cult out of something where there maybe isn't even the raw material there to make a cult out of you know I see that as part of kind of the tragedy of the human condition but it's not universal I mean not everyone feels that way and not everyone feels that whether their whole lives I mean you know I I think I think a lot of the scholars I knew in Buddhism that were in that tragic position where it was like well they wanted to believe I mean for example reincarnation that's a real that's a religious belief in this you know if you actually believe in this maybe at some point they weren't the Buddhism they really did believe in reincarnation they really did believe in meditation and then after those beliefs had died after they outlived them and after also they maybe got more sophisticated in terms of actually reading the scripture and seeing the huge gulf between what the ancient scriptures say and what modern people want to say about them what's left in your life when now your whole profession and your identity is tied to this religion but you can't believe anymore you know your beliefs are dead and you're still walking around living without them you know and look I think those are the people I met in left-wing politics too I think most of the people I knew in left-wing politics including just mainstream you know NDP Canada's left-wing party the new Democrat Party I think they got involved with left-wing politics at an earlier time of the lives when they really believed in something about them that brought them there and then you know you learned that the party's corrupt and you learned that you're never going to comprehend any those goals you'll learn all kinds of things as you get older and then well maybe you're still involved in that party whether it's the Communist Party or the new democratic party or so I mean it's not necessarily an extreme party but then you know life life continues after belief you know as has ended that's it's not Universal this is because I don't live that way I don't think that way I don't feel that way my involvement in politics has never been like that but I think this is a mass phenomenon for millions and millions of human beings that they live their lives wanting to believe and then questioning what they're going to do once they once they run out of belief
I just said you know belief makes people perceive weakness as strength and faith makes people seek out the company of other faithful people other people who share their faith because they only want to be around people who are weak in the same way that they're weak they feel so threatened by anyone who actually does challenge their beliefs or anyone who potentially might challenge their beliefs and this is part of the self-selected obscurity of what cult groups do again even if we're talking about a political group a left-wing communist group or a vegan group what-have-you getting real real pragmatic for a second here when I talk to people who are members of cults who are in a cult-like relationship cult-like situation the answers you get are complex and meaningful because these people have to justify to you and they have to justify themselves why the group they're a member of rejects the authority of projects in a sense the surveillance of a larger you know church group now course very often the reality is we can't be members of a larger Church because they're gonna ring alarm bells about either what's going on financially or sexually or doctrinally they're gonna say look you guys are what you're doing here is madness or it's hurting people and of course their answers may be you know incoherent or magical they may say well the founder of this group had a dream and saw some demons or angels and have a vision and again don't stop the conference you can't just say to them doesn't that sound ridiculous to you because they're a cult member it's not gonna smell particulate for them I'm anise Yin [Music] how do you know if a friend of yours is a member of a cult how do you know if a friend of a friend of yours is a victim of a cult mentality can put it that way how do you define cults and cult-like thinking this is a practical problem for most of us in our lives even if you just know a lot of members of your extended family you probably know people who have at one time or another falling into or falling out of a cult cult-like beliefs I would say yes I would say yes but you know Scientology okay I've got a sneeze coming on how long has mr. I sneezed on camera you know Scientology is an example people who are sort of at the Oder rings of Scientology people who aren't you know closely connected to the central organization they may not be able to see the cult-like aspects of the organization but yes absolutely you know I would say Scientology's are called and most of the there are different academic disciplines that have a formal checklist rather define occult and normally included in the criteria are how easy it is to leave like whether not they try to keep you whether or not they cut you off from contact with family members who are hostile with the cult element resort size whether or not they have they train you in attitudes that demonize non cult members so that you'll insert insulate yourself against voices of reason that'll get you to question call tagua there's this there's this checklist and normally pretty high on the checklist also is so-called financial abuse meaning that the cult is extracting money from its followers but of course a lot of mainstream religions that are not consider cults you know extract money from their followers no you know for me in my life I've dealt with study you'd looked at and known people who are victims of cults within Buddhism within modern Buddhism Buddhism as it exists in the rule today and a lot of the rules and patterns for Western cults are kind of broken they're you know Buddhist cults are very very different from Christian Muslim and Jewish cults and most of the Western world when talking about religion that's what you're talking about Christianity Judaism Islam and then cult groups that more or less approximate these leaves that differ from them but are still derivative of them and Buddhism is is very very different and then beyond that also I've had to take an interest in purely political cults cults we have you know a cult-like mentality in a context that isn't ostensibly religious doesn't present itself as a religion and for sure I mean we've had discussion even on this channel I think up to what extent you know for some people you know the cult of freelee and durianrider the cult of ratha for really was a cult-like experience you know maybe it checks off some of the boxes for some people for the people who literally sold all the furniture in their apartment so they could sit on the floor and eat organic mangoes straight out of a wooden box straight out of the wooden packing crate the same way they saw freely doing you know on on YouTube it looks a little bit looks a little bit cult-like but if you've got that that long list of of check marks a lot of them are missing there too and for one thing for sure it's easy to leave it's easy to leave anytime maybe you're gonna get durianrider cussing you out on YouTube but you know it's uh you could leave you leave whatever you're ready to leave for sure you're not being trapped being trapped inside for me but dealing with this really really broad range of cults and cult-like attitudes that for me definitely included far left-wing political calls you know communist and crypto communist cult-like groups you know I really felt like the one the one crucial checkmark the one definition of what is a cult is when people lose the ability to make decisions for themselves you know and that's an interesting interesting criterion to put emphasis on because of course you can lose that just just across the internet you know when you're not physically moving into a commune or moving into a compound under you know the people from the cult aren't actually controlling your bank account or anything else in your life but you can have a cult-like mentality where you you really stop making your own decisions you start looking to the cult leader to make the decisions for you there was a there was a gay guy I had on my channel we did a interview discussion and I remember he talked about on YouTube he felt like he was in a cult-like group of durianrider supporters and the moment when it cracked for him was when durianrider made his announcement that his formal position was that being gay was a choice and that anyone could opt at any time and he went to these meetings with his cata group that he met with of and the attitude of the other people in the group was look like it or not this is now the party line you have to you have to support this or get out and he started really questioning what was going on but that's that's amazing because I mean again that's just it's just a group of people you know watching YouTube videos and again they start doing these imitative things me without question they start doing long-distance cycling they start going to the gym maybe they start sitting on the floor instead of sitting on furniture you know they're all these other kind of things rolled up in the package the anti anti medical science views the anti education views that's all this live for your own pleasure but then for this one guy and I did I did talk to him for a couple hours or something I forget you know we just had that one conversation but I remember was really interesting hearing from his perspective how he had to sort of come to a stop and question what was going on in his life when he realized he was part of a circle of people who weren't doing the thinking for themselves they weren't making that decision for themselves you know and apparently that kind of cult-like mentality can arise in a totally secular setting in a weight loss weight loss and ecology setting and it can arise in a in a you know ornate religious context and so on and so forth too so you know if though if someone asked me my girl was not my girlfriend is not gonna ask me this question if someone were to ask me why do people lose the ability to make their own decisions I think the really obvious answer is because they want to you know they're looking for that experience they're looking for someone to take that away for them you know they're looking for that to live in that breathless overwhelmed state where there's someone else they regard as omnipotent or transcendent or did better than themselves because immuno there were people who are like that with communism they didn't they didn't necessarily regard the leaders of communism as having supernatural powers but you know were they they wanted to give over that part of themselves to a movement to a church to a religious experience you know to whatever was I remember one of the theories of amnesia which interests me amid the whole the question of what is memory now doesn't work you know when you look into it amnesia at nisha it can be barely proven to exist you know okay so you've all right interesting sorry there's no that but you know one of the fundamental theories of amnesia is that it only happens people forget when they want to forget you know it's not what Hollywood movies would make you think it is put it that way it's not as real as sort of tell soap operas and Hollywood movies make it out to be but yet in most cases you're looking at someone who wants to forget who wants to part ways with this this side of their their character or their history they want to want to start again yeah so you know I mean in the case of my own father I regard my own father as someone who basically had a cult mentality that he brought to kind of a long series of things in his life he was I mean you know I think when my father was involved with Christianity which is long before I was born I mean I think he wanted Christianity to be that kind of cult for him he was seeking that out you know he signed up for he was always very left-wing he signed up for some of these Christian socialist groups he signed up he by his own account assuming he wasn't lying about this and he may have been but you know he signed up to become a citizen of Cuba he wanted to go join the revolution in Cuba and you can imagine how that cliques kind of the Christian socialism specifically you know that it wasn't it wasn't that his fantasy wasn't running away to Moscow was running away to Cuba you know joining that being a very Catholic very Christian form of form of communism and so on so you know but by his own account they didn't take him because he didn't have a respectable enough profession at the time he was an actor and they said with the revolution doesn't need actors become a dentist then come back looking freaking kick he says if you if you've recovered that if that is the story as he as he told it you know so yeah I mean he was looking for Christianity be it pardon me he was looking for Christianity to be more than what it was for him he was looking for communism left-wing politics to be more than what they possibly could be for him I would also say even the kind of mainstream European philosophy he studied in university you know whatever he was reading at the time if he was reading cabbar mass or Nietzsche or whatever it was reading some mainstream philosopher Hegel or Karl Marx whatever I think he was always looking for it to have that that quality for him this is very clean to me I mentioned you know ages ago I mean in some ways I recognize I'm I'm a little bit psychologically abnormal myself like I've mentioned this to you I don't feel jealousy I don't experience jealousy and I really have to use my imagination in a very artificial way you know to understand how co-workers are feelings cause even when they feel jealousy because that is something I have never felt you know and I and I'm not bragging I'm not saying this is a moral characteristic or sign it's just it's just an oddity you know one of the differences I really felt between me and my my blond ex-girlfriend I've only had one that was blondes that's what I refer to as such but you know I always felt like looking at her and looking at me we grew up in the same city in Toronto we had access to the same library system we watched exactly the same TV shows on television growing up same education went to the same schools approximately not actually the same yeah we went to same high school that's where I met her you know same University also you know there's a lot they are in common but it seemed to me like at every stage of her intellectual development one of the really deep differences in her and I was just that she was easily overwhelmed and I wasn't you know I'd sit down and read philosophy of Aristotle and kind of finish with sneering contempt like well you know and this is overrated and you know and I could go to an opera or you know see some supposedly great you know symbol of Western culture and civilization of philosophy and politics look at Co Marx call Mark das kapital sorry so the masterpiece by Omar's desk that was so built up for me because my own parents were left-wing extremists they regarded this as as really more sacred than the Bible as this you know book that changed history and when I read it I already had a very robust background in classical economics I knew many of the sources Marx was was quoting and you know again to say I was underwhelmed is is an understatement you know all these all these things that were built up for me whether it was from ancient Greece or the Bible or philosophy or politics or religion whatever it was and again even going seeing great works of architecture for me none of that was overwhelming I'm you know most of that it's like you know you'd see one of these great works of art that you can kind of sneer and be like well you know gee I guess we had to live through five hundred years of the Dark Ages so we could have this cathedral built by slaves you know yeah well good job you did a real good job painting those angels on the ceiling too bad there were people literally being tortured to death in the dungeons just around the corner so we could have this horrible 500 years of let's see things in this very cynical way and it wasn't phony cynicism it was cynicism that led to insight and to some extent came out of you know factual I was just not easily overwhelmed and again like so you know look another another thing we just came up in conversation but I was saying to you the other day or earlier today maybe you know a large part of our national identity in Canada the United States is actually based on World War two based on the start will do it's easy to be overwhelming that stuff I mean you're a child being taught about the Holocaust you're a child being taught about American soldiers liberating people from concentration camps it's easy to go home I gotta tell you I was not overwhelmed you know all of that I was sneering at it and I was looking at the hypocrisy and the inconsistencies and like well what is this stuff about the you know the pact between Joseph Stalin and Hitler and then all of a sudden Stalin is our number one ally you know they're all these weird questions if you're looking at it and if you're just not overwhelmed as a kid there's a lot and what about feign whose side was Spain on it will do but for me these were these were problems in the account of World War two why was it the Canada started combat in World War two like two years before the Americans if the Americans were such heroes why did they join so late all kinds of stuff you know and of course even much more recently though you know the role of Japan and Japan and Russia there's a lot of complexity there so you see my overall view of these things is one not being wrong this is in the context of discussion about cults I think a lot of people want to be overwhelmed they want it and I remember actually one-one cult-like group within and Catholicism so you know there are cults but they're not they're not quite part of mainstream Catholicism I remember reading an analysis of who joined and why and it just said total understand Allah said you know most people who are serious about autism there's not that much to do like once you you know kind of once you kind of graduated you know what see if once you've gone through the basic rituals these were people who were looking for something you know within Catholicism that would be overwhelming and give them a sense of meaning and direction and purpose and that the world was gonna end and you know a grand mission and some kind of overwhelming overwhelming set of set of sentiments yeah anyway look so again you at age 24 you were talking about your girlfriend you said that she's easily yeah just overwhelmed yeah yeah like oh she would hear this this history about World War two and things well America is great at Canada is great sure so so you know gee I remember we once went inside a church together her and I and the church yrden sign slightly clever with the architecture where they had moved forward there's this grill there's this set of bars that traditionally separated the the priestly caste from the commoners I totally forget that story all the oldies have technical terms in church architecture and they had built the church so that those bars were up at the front so you were being welcomed in to you know it was just an architectural shape so he's you know neoclassical this was fake historical architecture and I remember you know she looked at that she thought it was such a beautiful gesture there she broke down weeping you know look just looking at the looking at the church architecture you know hearing uh hearing a choir sing you know rousing church music or something she could break down weeping and she overwhelmed by that kind of thing but sure so I'm just doing but politically what you're saying is true too I think it was basically impossible for her to think in an incisive way about what the Prime Minister of Canada and certain partners to get it done in his career or it failed to do or to think about what happened in World War two and what didn't happen because elements of it were overwhelming because the the emotional narrative like blots out the kind of rational narratives you know I'm saying yeah and you know again maybe she's just wired that way but it maybe it's something she she wants yeah you know what I mean you you've seen me weeping watching Casablanca you know III don't I'm not trying to get rid of that side of my character I'm really happy that in my late 30s I'm able to wallow in sentiment that way you know in an appropriate time what's what's the point of watching Casablanca you know and for me that is really political it's because the movie Casablanca has this kind of weird political depth to it you know it's set as Europe is falling apart and the Holocaust is unfolding and so on sure sure so I've you know I'm not saying everyone should be a rational robot I'm not saying that at all no no I do what you mean that could lend itself to a cult-like mentality yeah right easily impressed by what somebody offers you well I think some people are seeking it out in direct action everywhere within veganism some people are seeking it out within you know well whether or not whether or not the place you seek it is really offering you a cult laying experience I think some people are I don't you know I don't think I'm as cynical is you know I'm sitting on a different way and that like I did see architecture like huge cathedrals when I was a very when I was a really young child when I was 10 you know I went to multiple different European countries and saw and saw things and so like hey there was on one trip anyway sorry you don't have to include this but like I was just thinking about it like I'm gonna include it I was just getting comments on YouTube saying you should talk more the video though god yeah so yeah and then again I went to Italy when I was 14 for a choir tour and we sang in the Vatican like we visited the Duomo in Florence we saw like just really beautiful things and you know I that is that is interesting you know I wasn't brought to tears by anything that I saw it's not like I I was cynical for historically you know but at the same time I wasn't like you know I just wasn't I don't have that that uh yeah issue that I'm like easily impressed and I think that also is reflected in like I'm very unimpressed with most of vegan YouTube like seeing seeing you your channel like you know I was like wow this is actually actually subsea you can dent yeah yeah but people are going to churches and looking to see and feel you know the kingdom of God they're going and hoping to feel you know there are people who are looking for an experience there that's something quite different from what bricks and mortar can ever give you and I think people are looking at you know even Aristotle and hoping for an experience that can't possibly be there yeah in a book that's not just that's not just ink and paper but a book that is first and foremost a relic of a dead society that's now very difficult for us to realize I remember being amazed by the architecture you know it had been built so many years ago and it is such a wonder at the time so in that sense just human ingenuity is impressive but like you know it wasn't it wasn't for religious reasons that I thought it was impressive it was just I I think I have shown you the photos on my hard drive when I was in Sri Lanka yeah see so again this kind of brings it back into this thing is related but I mean like so I went and visited historical sites from ancient Buddhism so architectural room dimension Buddhism I worked on manuscripts and ancient texts and philosophy formation Buddhism but all the time I was thinking about those things analytically you know what I mean I wasn't looking to be overwhelmed you know and it's really sad when you see the cult-like mentality active within Buddhism so like you know with with ancient sites like that and put ISM what you're looking at really is the history of the failure of Buddhism you know you're looking at well yeah look we reach this peak and then we got slaughtered by the Muslims we got conquered by the Hindus it was torn apart and it's all it's all gone now certain legs going to sleep but anyway you know like you know what what does this represent really you know what is the significance of seeing these ruins of what was once great architecture you know I'd be in those locations but other Buddhists would be wanting to see something very different you know from what I'm seeing you're looking at failure I mean a ruin is a ruin you know Rome is not in ruins this is a significant difference you know Mecca is not in ruins and the great cities of Buddhist antiquity are their ruins you know they got conquered they got decimated by Islam you know first and foremost also by certain forms of Hinduism also by the British Empire it's a long series of losing battles of the history of Buddhism so what you see there and how you relate to it and in terms of the texts I mean it's it's really sad because meaning should put his philosophy many of the texts not all many are actually written with real cynicism they're written in a very kind of cynical way so to see people you know modern people wanting to get swept up and then wanting them to be a kind of gospel there are kind of different layers of irony there I think I told you about this I got an email from someone who knew me as a scholar of Buddhism on the on the internet asking for my comments on a on a particular passage from Pelican I had never seen before but she sent me the original patli not just an English translation and the particular passage in Pali was you know obviously written by an ancient Buddhist monk and it was really saying that meditation leads to madness now it says more than just that but the word was madness meaning insanity you know and you could imagine still today if you spend time with people meditating you meet enough of them who were either crazy before they got there who are going crazy with the religious experience you know and it was just a really funny moment I said oh wow okay well thanks for saying with that that's a really interesting excerpt I say you know different passages of the pali canon reflect the perspectives of different authors already that was shocking to the person i was writing to like you know just like some christians want to imagine the whole bible is and i'll magically written by by god you know like as if the polly cat is written by one author it's not but so this is an especially kind of cynical or nihilistic author and this this is really warning you that you know meditation leads to madness interesting this was you know preserved within the the buddhist canon this is obviously an opinion or a perspective that's hostile to a lot of other scriptures you can read that are literally bound into the same book you don't mean terms of contrasting is and yeah the first time starting to you to them this this was just mind-blowing you know what is it they're wanting buddhism to be they're wanting it to be univocal and yoonah focal and you know by what you mean to speak with one voice to have one focus one direction one purpose and to provide them with a meaning in their life that's that's just not there in terms of why those texts were written and and so on see i was i was always in this position of saying like well look guys why can't we work with these ancient texts the same way we work with shakespeare or Aristotle or you know Socrates like you know this stuff is valuable it's worth studying in its own way but let's not pretend you know what it means something doesn't mean let's let's not pretend as evaluate it doesn't has it doesn't have but then you're you're really always crashing into the Coleman the cult mentality and again keeping it all the way real most the people I was dealing with in Buddhism they've been around long enough that they'd kind of outgrown the cult mentality like maybe 20 years earlier when they first started to become a scholar of bosom they were actually cult members I knew cases of that where they started off as members of a cult with a capital C notorious cults that had you know clandestine anal sex and financial abuse and the whole bit cuz there are buddhist monks who are closeted homosexuals and we're supposed to touch money well that's right they're not supposed to touch money they're not supposed to touch anyone's penis not even their own they're supposed to live in total celibacy and there were a lot of cults where sexual abuse is also a part of the the pattern with you know this notion of power what have you you know but a lot of people I knew they kind of grown out of that and we're still haunted by that when I knew them they'd grown up into being a scholar of another kind but then when you talk to them you saw they had never really dealt with they'd never really dealt with those skeletons in their closet with how they got involved Buddhism in the first place and they never dealt with the contrast in what they know and understand now and what they had believed or wanted to believe you know beforehand so getting real real pragmatic for a second here when I talk to people who are members of cults over in a cult-like relationship cult-like situation you know I asked a question which I've raised on this channel before or 200 videos going in a very different context one of the first questions I ask them is okay so your cult your your group your your member of why aren't you going to the local Anglican Church so if they're a member of a Christian college the cult I asked them why aren't you going to a mainstream Christian Church now if it was a Muslim cult it parallel will be asking about Islam I've raised this repeatedly in Buddhism when I'm talking to white people who don't have any answer for why they're part of a weird fringe group that I would either consider a cult or just to have absolutely no legitimacy well okay if this is what you believe and if this is what you preach within Buddhism why are you a member of a mainstream church like the CM nakiya from Sri Lanka why aren't you you know why aren't you a member of any of the mainstream Buddhist organizations that have a formal formal government status and millions of adherents and you know properties and procedures and bureaucracy why aren't you a member of the equivalent of the Catholic Church of the Anglican Church within Buddhism now I don't ask that as a simple shallow rebuke that's not the end of the conversation so I'm talking to a friend who's part of a weird Christian cult the answers you get are complex and meaningful because these people have to justify to you and they have to justify it to themselves why the group they're a member of rejects the authority of rejects in a sense the surveillance of a larger you know church group and of course very often the reality is we can't be members of a larger church group because they're gonna ring alarm bells about either what's going on financially you're sexually or doctrinally they're gonna say look you guys are what you're doing here is madness or it's hurting people they're gonna raise that and you you might think I'm putting a lot of faith in the Anglican Church but actually this is something I think the Anglo churches you know any of those mainstream groups are really accustomed to dealing with you know of course it's a judgment call for whoever whoever in that mainstream group is dealing with you getting someone who's in a cult or in a cult-like situation to recognize that they are insulating themselves in the larger society that they're insulating themselves against criticism even from members of the mainstream Church you know they're they may claim to be connected to you know so why is it you have to separate yourself from all other Christians and be in this self-selected obscurity of this group why is it you have to separate yourself from all sources all the mainstream Buddhist sources of authority and be in this group now it's possible they have a good answer like it's possible you could talk to someone in Buddhism and they'd say well look I'm really a scholar and what I do is really scholarly and the mainstream religion doesn't deal with that so therefore I'm part of this group of scholars and they may say but yeah I'd be delighted to have more of an open door to the mainstream religion and have more let's try to set that up let's try to have more cooperation with the mainstream Church but what we do is really so once in a while there may be there may be a positive answer but just if you can sit down face-to-face and get someone to talk through with you why are you a member of this self selected special group and not of the other group and of course their answers maybe you know incoherent or magical they may say well the founder of the screw had a dream and saw some demons or angels and had a vision and because of that he started his own church fine okay but why wouldn't he just join up with the Anglican Church or the Catholic Church or this mainstream but it's so what is the reason why isn't that he's pulling you away from your family and your job or any other Church it seems and you know they may have an answer that's magical within their group of saying well he says that the mainstream Church is corrupt and evil and what we're gonna do is pure and so on and again don't stop the conference you can't just say to them doesn't that sound ridiculous to you because they're a cult member it's not gonna stick you-let's to them you know another if there were other people in the room they might be standing there saying doesn't that sound ridiculous to you because okay but what what's your role don't you have compassion for the people who are the members of the mainstream Church or the mainstream Buddhist organization if they're so misled if their organization so is so corrupt why can't you reach out to them why can't you be involved why can't you be part of the same congregation and so on to keep challenging them on this issue of of isolation now the other criterion that I've alluded to is this question of losing your ability to make decisions I had a post that's on on Twitter where I just said you know belief makes people perceive weakness as strength and faith makes people seek out the company of other faithful people other people who share their faith because they only want to be around people who are weak in the same way that they're weak they feel so threatened by anyone who actually does challenge their beliefs or anyone who potentially might challenge their beliefs and this is part of the self-selected obscurity of what cult groups do again even if we're talking about a political group a left-wing communist group or a vegan group or what-have-you this can emerge in not so not so not so overtly religious circumstances I think what's what's really hard you've got to be face to face you can't do this by email but when you're when you're with someone who has that cult-like mentality and there's any issue like this like even the gay rights issue where they basically say to you oh I can't I can't make up my mind I have to ask leader I have to ask the person in charge of the in charge of the called what's really powerful you can do it is to sit down and ask them why whatever the decisions are because I mean you know people who are members of cults they may not make their own decisions but what kind of cool thing they wear you know they mean there may be seemingly trivial things that have taken on a sense of gravitas and transcendental importance those decisions now be made by the cult but what have you financial decisions decisions but their own future decisions about their love life who they're gonna marry whether they should break up with her boyfriend when they go and ask the cult leader they go and ask the Buddhist monk but you know whether or not that you break up with your boyfriend or not and it's not just guidance it's not you know it's not getting a second opinion where it really is that person you know making your decisions for you I think the hardest thing but the most crucial thing is try to challenge them on that issue of when and where did you lose the capacity to make your own decisions and I think most of the time people do that because they they wanted to they wanted that sense of abandoned they wanted to be part of a larger whole all those all those reasons that the people have for forgetting multikills yeah if I identify with this term nihilism and nihilist as a critique of a belief as a rejection of belief and you know I see wanting to believe as a real sickness in mankind you know I think if you got that in you whether we're talking about example like my father or what have you I think the people who want to believe the people who want to be overwhelmed will kind of shuffle from one one cult to another or they'll make a cult out of something where there maybe isn't even the raw material there to make a cult out of you know I see that as part of kind of the tragedy of the human condition but it's not universal I mean not everyone feels that way and not everyone feels that whether their whole lives I mean you know I I think I think a lot of the scholars I knew in Buddhism that were in that tragic position where it was like well they wanted to believe I mean for example reincarnation that's a real that's a religious belief in this you know if you actually believe in this maybe at some point they weren't the Buddhism they really did believe in reincarnation they really did believe in meditation and then after those beliefs had died after they outlived them and after also they maybe got more sophisticated in terms of actually reading the scripture and seeing the huge gulf between what the ancient scriptures say and what modern people want to say about them what's left in your life when now your whole profession and your identity is tied to this religion but you can't believe anymore you know your beliefs are dead and you're still walking around living without them you know and look I think those are the people I met in left-wing politics too I think most of the people I knew in left-wing politics including just mainstream you know NDP Canada's left-wing party the new Democrat Party I think they got involved with left-wing politics at an earlier time of the lives when they really believed in something about them that brought them there and then you know you learned that the party's corrupt and you learned that you're never going to comprehend any those goals you'll learn all kinds of things as you get older and then well maybe you're still involved in that party whether it's the Communist Party or the new democratic party or so I mean it's not necessarily an extreme party but then you know life life continues after belief you know as has ended that's it's not Universal this is because I don't live that way I don't think that way I don't feel that way my involvement in politics has never been like that but I think this is a mass phenomenon for millions and millions of human beings that they live their lives wanting to believe and then questioning what they're going to do once they once they run out of belief