They fell into a rabbit hole.
Matthew examines the blindspots thrown up by this common and unexamined phrase:
— The assumption that we all know what the rabbit hole is.
— The assumption that right up to the edge of the rabbit hole, the world makes sense.
— The assumption that everyone who avoided falling (or being pushed) in is simply more rational, balanced, and normal.
All of these assumptions can obscure the insanities of the dominant culture.
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Hello everybody, welcome to a Patreon bonus episode of Conspirituality Podcast, where we investigate the intersection of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian extremism.
Today I've got an audio essay here for you called, What is the Rabbit Hole?
And I'll just say, starting out, I'm feeling like these bonus episodes, at least for the next little while, along with the live streams that I'm doing on the Patreon feed, are going to be in the category of cab ride home after our book launch, where perhaps healthily, perhaps obsessively, I'm really zeroing in on where I feel the book And maybe our project in general is either weak or incomplete.
For instance, one big theme in this zone is in how well the book orients conspirituality within a critique of capitalism.
Did we go far enough with that?
I do think that we did a good job in the chapter called Conspiritualists Are Not Wrong, but the more I think about the forces that drive people towards conspirituality and cults, the more it feels like that particular chapter should be expanded into its own book.
And I've had a lot of encouragement in that regard by reading a digital advanced reader's copy of Naomi Klein's extraordinary new book, Doppelganger, Into the Mirror World, where that's a substantial part of her focus.
Namely, how left-wing and progressive movements during COVID did not do a very good job at walking the line between criticism of institutions And the criticism of right-wing responses to institutional failure.
We didn't turn and face our anti-vax and MAGA and QAnon neighbors and say, clearly enough, hey, you're right about some very big things.
The perverse incentives of modern pharmaceuticals, the insane inequalities of globalization, and the utter lack of accountability enjoyed by the wealthy.
You're right.
We actually share those values.
And Let's really take a look together at what the healthiest responses to those realizations might be.
So, that's the general context for this essay today, but my focus will be less political and a little more social-psychological.
And I'm going to do that by looking at a very common phrase uttered countless times a day in the discourse, but I think rarely examined.
And that phrase is, or the variations are, the person fell into the rabbit hole, or I went down a rabbit hole, or I fell into the rabbit hole.
I'm seeing two blind spots in that phrase these days.
So first is an assumption that we all know what the rabbit hole is, and secondly, an assumption that right up to the edge of the rabbit hole, the world makes sense.
And I previewed some of this in two comments in my last bonus episode, which was called Disgust Management.
So here's the first quote.
There's an assumption I need to be more careful about, that people fall into rabbit holes from relative sanity.
But we never really know where they were before.
If you were brought up in an LDS church, for example, Kelly Brogan's Vital Mind Reset program might feel like going to Woodstock.
Now I know why I have this assumption about the fall from sanity.
Because for the last 10 years I've been steeped in a cult literature and discourse that adamantly insists that anyone can be vulnerable to cult recruitment and indoctrination.
And the position makes sense, and I can verify it from my own cult experience and from years of journalism on that beat, that cults are definitely made up of all types.
But I haven't seen any solid data on this really, meaning large sample studies that could really nail down the profile of vulnerability if there is one.
And going down that road is not a palatable prospect.
The taboo against analyzing the cult member's psychology is that it typically, if unintentionally, tilts towards victim-blaming.
And that's why we say it very loudly that there are no predictors for cult membership.
This is supposed to be a ground leveling statement.
It makes the cult into an equal opportunity threat, like a virus.
Like, COVID doesn't care about whether you are rich or poor, black or white, it can get you.
But just as we know that rich and white people fare better in seasons of plague, we can also imagine that potential cult recruits are also more or less vulnerable or resilient by virtue of background, class, education level, and wealth.
So, those are the good reasons behind making that flattening assumption.
It's a way of saying, if you didn't get snow-jobbed into NXIVM, you're not better than those who did.
You're just lucky.
But I think something more subtle creeps into this homogenization of cult victims.
It begins to construct a homogenous society of normalcy that can be contrasted with the cultic environment.
A world in which things are relatively fine, balanced and fair, where institutions are working just great, and capitalism is the best of bad choices, and where liberal democracies are working.
Where everyone who wound up in NXIVM was just a normal person doing normal things in the heartland of mainstream culture.
Where none of the NXIVM leaders were long-time Hollywood workers acclimatized to constant exploitation, sexism, and aspirational emptiness.
Where it wasn't that the top NXIVM lieutenant and filmmaker had actually been a top lieutenant and filmmaker in another cult called the Ramtha School of Enlightenment.
No, none of that.
As they imply now, they were all just doing their thing out in the normal world.
Now in all seriousness, the NXIVM scene is a great example of what I'm talking about here because in terms of recruitment, Keith Raniere expressly did not just choose and recruit anyone.
He managed to find highly trained and compliant people that selected themselves out of industries and sometimes family networks that very much mirrored his own vision.
He didn't create the structures of exploitation.
He amplified them.
So, any line you draw between the normal world and the world of the cult is really drawn in sand, but in the popular discourse, it becomes a threshold that you must not cross because when you do, you will be profoundly and permanently altered.
My point is that, constructed this way, the cult world becomes synonymous with the way in which we typically conceive of the rabbit hole.
But it's not accurate, in my view, to imagine the rabbit hole as insane versus the real world as sane.
Because if you do, you wind up creating a population divided along that same line.
