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Steven Hassan, a cult expert and cult survivor, developed the BITE model of Authoritarian Control to describe how cults take and maintain control. This can help therapists to identify and support those exiting cults, as well as helping cult survivors identify and avoid cults in the future.

BITE stands for Behavior, Information, Thought, and Emotion as categories which cult actions try to control. While, the site notes, some elements are elements of all cults. So we should not expect society that claims to be “free” expressing very many of these.

However, when we take the state and capitalism together as a singular system, the US can actually be pretty dark. We can check a lot of the “behavior” control elements. The most important function of the state is the enforcement of the property rights, that is the metaphysical assertions about where people are allowed to go and objects they're allowed to possess. That's the first two items on the “behavior” list. How d they do this? Kidnapping, beating, torture, separation of families, imprisonment, and murder (19-25 with the exception of 22) are all, essentially, the job of the criminal legal system. Rape, (22) is left as a threat, to be carried out by other prisoners, with the tacit consent or at the request of prison guards.

“Major time spent with group indoctrination and rituals and/or self indoctrination including the Internet” is more commonly know as “school.” “Permission required for major decisions” will be familiar to anyone who has ever applied for a loan to buy a house. And how did they get into a position to buy that house, if not simply born to the right family it's probably because of the use of “rewards and punishments used to modify behaviors, both positive and negative.”

Information control sounds like something that would happen in China or under other authoritarian regimes, and it does. But the fact that 6 companies and merging, all themselves controlled by billionaires, control nearly all media in the US. What is the value of “freedom of the press” if only those aligned with the system can afford to own the presses? But social media has become the democratization of media, which would matter if not for algorithms that shape the conversation to maximize corporate profit and minimize systemic threats.

The use of “cult propaganda” to maintain control has become more blatant of late reactionaries rally around fighting “DEI” and “Critical Race Theory.” School books again claim that slavery wasn't that bad and that the Civil War was about “States Rights.” But even in the most progressive areas, could you imagine a US history text book ever talking about the fact that Nazi race law was adapted from US race law, or that the German expansion across Europe and the holocaust were both drawn from Manifest Destiny and the genocide carried out by the US government against the indigenous population? Could you imagine any school teaching a history of capitalism that included historical critiques, such as those from the Diggers? Could you imagine an American public school throwing out their “History of Western Civilization” courses after acknowledging the reality that “Western Civilization” simply doesn't exist? Imagine what people would say. You know it. “That's Communism.” So we check off 1-3 and 5 from the Information Control list.

Perhaps we should go back to 2.d (Keep members busy so they don’t have time to think and investigate). Do I really need to talk about this, or can you fill it in for yourself?

Systemic control is easier to see, easier to call out, when it's centralized. The true brilliance of this system is the way it's able to embed information control into the fabric of interpersonal interaction. The phrase “don't talk about politics” is itself a political statement. That which serves the interest of the dominant class is implicitly defined as “not political” while any opposition to this order, even pointing out the obvious existence of slavery or genocide, even pointing out the fact that this statement is political is itself defined as “political.” The “political” taboo is a political taboo against calling a thing by it's name.

The interpersonal control starts to wonder it's way into thought-stopping mantras cults often use to control thought. “Anarchism/Communism works on paper, but it doesn't work in the real world.” I have heard this phrase, word for word, without critical analysis, again and again. It's strange that it should be repeated with such close wording, as though character dialog. Yet capitalism, that always produces suffering and inequity, that is rapidly pushing humanity to collapse, somehow “works.”

The belief in alternative systems, such as anarchism, is “childish” or “naive.” It can be acceptable to arrest, torture, or kill someone simply on the assertion that they are anarchists. Questioning the justification for wars is “betraying the memory of the soldiers who died for our freedom.” Fascists harassing people into silence is “free speech” but calling them fascist is “violence.” It's easy to go on, but we have one more category to touch on.

There the two most glaring elements of emotional control within this system are shifting blame and numbing. What better description is there than the function of the myth of upward mobility than to “[m]ake the person feel that problems are always their own fault.” We all recognize who's responsible for predatory lending that blew up the economy in 2008, and yet it's so common to imagine the debt that crushed so many as being the fault of the borrower. If only millennials would stop eating avocado toast, they could afford to move out of their parent's basement. The climate induced flooding, fires, tornados, hurricanes that destroyed your home and bankrupted your insurance company wouldn't have been a problem if only you'd chosen the location for your home more wisely. Speaking of which, what are you doing about your carbon footprint?

Oh, climate change, that infinite source of hopeless and rage. How much more challenging is it when you reject their blame, when you recognize that it's caused by machinery beyond your control? What do you do when it's too much? Perhaps it's what were you doing before you read this. And what would you usually do after you finish reading something like? Was it doom scrolling, gorging on terrible facts so you don't have to deal with the feelings those facts bring up?

Or perhaps you will you hide in reality TV, YouTube, video games? And can you function without medication, or does the reality of the horror randomly incapacitate you? The emotions have gotten so strong, we have to develop ways of stopping them or risk our jobs, our homes, our lives.

You can feel everything you've suppressed, for years, just under the skin, ready to explode. Is it any wonder there are so many mass shootings? Overwhelmed with emotion, with shame and anger, and nowhere to channel it, what else would you expect?

Am I seriously saying that the US is not what it seems, that elites control policy, that media and education control thought, that this free democracy, where we vote for our leaders, is really an authoritarian cult with parallels to Russia and China? Where's your tin foil hat? Next you're gonna tell me that the US literally trained South American death squads who used Nazi terror techniques, or that from 1932 through 1972 the US government performed medical experiments on people. It's all too terrible to believe. Ever hear of Unit 731? No, surely that's not real.

America are the good guys. These all sound like a conspiracy theories. Ever wonder why people believe that crazy shit?

Neoliberalism neatly cleaves the world in two: myth and reason. Myth, in this case, means roughly “a story made up to explain things that is not backed by data.” Liberalism is the basis of a modern society, based in science and reason. It is informed by “natural law” like evolution and capitalist economics. Meanwhile, myth provides the framework for “primitive” societies, like those colonizers carried out a systematic genocide against in order to create the US.

There's a strange justification embedded in that assertion. It evokes a reference to a Social Darwinism still embedded deep in the American psyche, an evolutionary model that obscures a vulnerable complexity, an ideology that justifies genocide. Those primitive others, whose lives were still informed by mythology, could only have ever faced one fate: they must have been destroyed, as reason must conquer ignorance, when they faced the an advanced and rational people. How else could things have gone?

Surely within modern “Western” academia, one would only expect to find myth studied as such, and only within the humanities. Surely the Enlightenment tradition, the reason of Europe, cannot itself be woven from myth. Surely we are a rational people, systematically purging myth with the light of science. Yet behold the mythology embedded in the bedrock of capitalism: the myth of currency. Still taught to children in schools and adults in introductory economics classes, even while being widely debunked for generations.

I'm not going to spend much time on the barter myth, because others have already pointed out how laughably absurd it is. Anthropologists have found no evidence for it. Archaeologists have found no evidence for it. Adam Smith literally said he just made it up. Yet, it's still the dominant story told, widely accepted as historical fact, despite there being well studied and supported alternative explanations. Why have we all been taught a story that is clearly not true?

Capitalist economics is largely made of this type of obvious bullshit. The supply demand curve, the central model of economics, assumes rational actors. The simple existence of advertisement is sufficient to prove that this assumption is unreliable at best. Though some value has come out of economics, it can be compared to phrenology: a pseudo-science built around defending racism, that occasionally stumbles on useful ideas (see Phineas Gage for phrenology, or game theory and Ostrom's work on the commons for economics) which will probably, at some point in the future, be integrated into an actual science.

Capitalist economics is the apologetics of the Neoliberal faith. Epicycle after epicycle is added to explain the repeated failures of markets, to excuse the growing incompetence of “the wealth creators,” to hide the inconvenient truth that infinite growth is incompatible with a finite world. The wealthy should be in control because they are wise, they are wise because they became wealthy, they are wise therefore they deserve to be in control. Why is having wealth the biggest predictor of building wealth? The logic of capitalism chases it's tail until we are exhausted. Those who have survived cults may be noticing a familiar feeling.

And this is not for nothing. It's easy to believe that the concept of ownership we have now is somehow universal to all humanity. Yet, not all human languages even have ways to express ownership in the same way. As Etymologynerd pointed out, some languages will grammatically separate mutable and immutable “ownership.” Body parts, parents, inalienable connections are not haphazardly grouped with alienable possessions. Other languages are incapable of producing a grammatically correct sentence to express “ownership” without a workaround. Ownership then, far from being universal, is a cultural creation that happened at some point in time.

As Graeber has pointed out, when we try to understand the origin of the concepts of ownership and control of private property, it becomes very strange indeed. But to dig in to that we need to unpack a few things.

In Dawn of Everything, David Graeber ( et al.), outlines 3 basic forms of domination:

1. control over violence (sovereignty)
2. control over information (bureaucracy)
3. and charismatic competition (politics)

The modern “state,” the book argues, is an illusion. Rather than being a thing itself, it's instead a combination of these three forms of domination. Additionally, these forms of domination, historically, did not necessarily develop together.

The sovereign seems to evolve from cults of personality, wherein said sovereign becomes the ultimate expression of a child in the form of an adult. The sovereign requires constant attention, must be fed and clothed, must be served at all times. Meanwhile, the sovereign is simultaneously a person who is unbounded by all law. The sovereign may be expected to murder or steal, but does so with the permission of the people. But the early sovereign, without a bureaucracy to enforce their will, was only individually unbound by social constraints. Emissaries of the sovereign may well simply be ignored.

By being the sovereign, this individual was released from the law. The properties of sovereignty were transmitted by birth, non-transferable and connected directly to the individual. But other systems of privilege could be disconnected from the individual. Magical items could imbue the one who controlled the item with a set of transferable sovereign-like properties. Ritual masks or musical instruments, for example, may allow an individual to order others around while they are being held or used by the owner. Were such objects to escape the ritual realm, they could give the “owner” permanent ritual powers.

Territorial sovereignty seems to have evolved from personal sovereignty, where the powers of sovereignty are restricted to a space and the person may change. Divine Right of Kings maintained the birth-rite connection between the individual and sovereignty, but this was not universal. Some systems included the possibility for regional sovereignty to be transferred based on competition. A republic is an instance of transfer of sovereignty via competition where the winner of the competition may be decided by votes. But there are also other ways to restrict and transfer sovereignty.

There are magical objects in our society that permit the owner limited sovereign violence within an explicitly constrained space. The deed to a house, in many US states, may permit the owner to murder people those who enter the house under some circumstances. The connection between ancient myth could not be made more explicit than by it's name: The Castle Doctrine. Property allows exceptions to rules that are supposedly otherwise universally applied.

Property also has other magical elements, such as transition of ownership. To own property (such as land or tools), the logic goes, is to then also own all products produced with that property (food grown on land, items manufactured in an owned factory). Marx refuted this, claiming that it was labor, not ownership of the means of production, that actually was the true root of ownership. Unfortunately, he missed the fact that the concepts of “workers” and “ownership” are just completely made up. Ownership is a metaphysical concept with no connection to any natural law. It is a religious assertion. “Das Kaptial” is a grimoire that claims to reveal the true magic of property. Thus the entirety of “Das Kapital” could simply be replaced with the “rationalist” reply of “nah dude, that's all just some made up bullshit” and, by doing so, would become more consistent with anthropological evidence.

The cult of the United States makes many such wild metaphysical assertions, all pinned together by the claim that, because some people under its control are allowed to choose the winner of elite competitions for sovereignty by voting, the system is consensual (ignoring, of course, the massive apparatus of violence needed to maintain this cult). But even this assertion, that the population actually controls the cult via the “democratic process,” is itself easily disproved.

In 2014 Princeton University published a study used data to show that US is an oligarchy, not a democracy. We all know that the desires of the elite are more predictive of what policy will be implemented than are the desires of the population. So we are told that “We The People” are the root of “legitimate authority,” but we all really know, at least on some level, that none of us are actually part of that “We.” Therefore, if we acknowledge what we all know is true, all authority exercised by the government of the United States in our name is, necessarily, illegitimate. One of the most interesting and relevant (to this topic) observations in Dawn of Everything is, in fact, hiding in a footnote and is, actually, a reference to another book:

[…] whenever one group has overwhelming power over another […] both sides tend to end up acting as if they were conspiring to falsify the historical record. That is: there will be an 'official version' of reality – say that plantation owners are benevolent paternal figures who only ever have the best interests of their slaves at heart – which no one, neither masters or slaves, actually believes, and which they are likely to treat as self-evidently ridiculous when 'offstage' and speaking only to each other, but which the dominant group insist subordinates play along with, particularly at anything that might be considered a public event.

Layer on layer of blatant lies, easily disproved with even the most cursory analysis, somehow are still repeated even by those who oppose the current and most authoritarian incarnation of it. Even the most simple and self-apparent facts about, say, how currency operates are poorly understood because even pointing out obvious things is considered “political” and thus becomes taboo. How could such obvious falsehoods wield so much power?

In world of The Matrix, we see a resistance movement already in progress. In the Animatrix we see the system they're trying to escape as it's being built. But we never see the first escape; we see how the system is constructed within the mind and how we can manipulate the rules while inside of it, but we never see how to pivot out of it. For those of us who feel the wrongness of the various hierarchies of the world, itching in our minds, this is the missing piece we're all looking for.

We are trapped, like an inverted Neo, fully aware of the system, fully able to see the code underneath, but unable to escape as it crashes around us… and even if we got out, where would we go? Where is our Zion?

There happens to be a few properties of systems that are useful to know. The first is that no sufficiently complex system of rules can be both consistent and complete. This fact can be applied to legal systems. There will be gaps that miss things which a system wants to prevent, and there will likely be inconsistencies that make some rules impossible to enforce or the enforcement of those rules violate other rules.

The other useful thing to know is that recursion has a tenancy to break systems. To understand the shape of a system that supports recursion is to begin to be able to think about strategies that would be useful to break out of that system.

This is a work in progress. You are reading a draft of something, perhaps a zine, being written in real time. As it develops, expect it to change. It will start raw, and hopefully be polished. Sections will be added. Sections will be moved and rewritten. When it is complete, this page will be edited to reflect it's status as complete.

Part of this is a conversation. Feedback, critiques, extensions, may all be added in to the work. But, as you will start to understand as the writing progresses, a finished text is not the ultimate goal. There is something larger that requires your help.

The myth of the hero clouds all of our minds. We look for a savior. We imagine a magnificent other who will liberate us. This storytelling modality dominates mass media. Our minds are imprisoned as much within meta-myth of The Hero's Journey as in the system that infinitely replicates variations of it for popular consumption.

But no one will save us. Not some politician, some revolutionary, some hero. Not you, not me. Only we can save us. Only us, only together.

Imagine now, what would it feel like to be able to drop out of this system? To drop out of capitalism? What would it feel like to escape? Imagine you could just live somewhere, work a few hours a week, and spend the rest of your time being alive. Imagine a place that's separate from “the real world” where everything was radically different.

Some of us have tasted it, organizing with comrades, building shared space. Sometimes we can feel it's embryonic form. I lived on a commune for a while. It was a place where people who couldn't function under capitalism could escape for a while. It had it's share of problems, it wasn't what we want to build, but it showed me what was possible.

The thing that made it all possible was that it was legally a church. There are holes in the code, bugs that cannot be fixed. What can't be patched, the system protects itself by convincing us not to look.

“I had to live a while before I understood that a lot of things can only be said joking and not joking at the same time.” – Always Coming Home, Ursula K. Le Guin

As the surface around the letters you are reading emits or reflects electrons, the rods and cones in your eyes receive that light and emit signals down their dendrites to other nerves. These signals cascade from neuron to neuron, neural cluster to neural cluster, down the optic nerve and into the brain. The brain transmutes raw signals about the presence or absence of light in certain areas, hues, shapes of light and dark areas in to meaning¹.

The words that reach your brain are these:

There are things more well represented by metaphor than by literal reality. There are times when the surreal is more true than the truth itself.

As you perceive the neural network feeding you this information, your perception of the universe begins to vibrate. The words resolve in to the memory of a smoke that smells like the future². “Who am I,” you hear a voice say, as you turn. Following the neural signals back out your eyes³ and you find yourself looking in the mirror. You see the face of god, multitude.

As you try to speak, you realize that you have no mouth. Instead, you open your mind. Your ego climbs out to take control. It is struck by the situation and dies instantly.

You observe the output of clusters of neurons in you brain, trying to determine how to integrate this information within your existing paradigm. As you relax your perceptual filters, you notice populations of ideas normally filtered out before they reach consciousness. Variations on a theme, mutations on a concept, iteration by iteration, slowly adapting until they can make the pieces fit together.

As you find yourself in a room discussing these ideas, you see the internal process of ideation occur externally. Different people in the room bringing their own interpretation to the ideas, sharing those, and hearing iterations of these ideas reflected back, mutated to fit the paradigms of others in the room.

You become the life giving Earth and the universe itself. As you look deep into the eyes of time, you see the birth of your own consciousness.

Dark and empty, this is not the universe you recognize. In its warm dawn you see amino acids beginning to assemble. In these first few million years, brief instants in the scale of the universe, something incredible begins.

Soon the universe will cool, stars will form, and the universe will begin to be recognizable. Almost 10 billion years later, the Earth will form. Several million years later, you will watch the thick clouds that formed around it fall as a rain storm that lasts for centuries.

In the oceans of this landless Earth, you see the clusters of these same amino acids organizing and reorganizing. They build themselves from the materials available in the oceans, eventually including each other. The fastest replicator producing the most, their development is guided by natural selection. Strands of nucleic acids grow cells to protect themselves.

You watch cells cluster together to form a tiny colony called a Portuguese Man O' War. Some cells form a bubble, others a stinger. These cells are all interdependent but also distinct. You see other organisms, like slime molds, form temporary communities and disperse.

Some communal organisms cooperate so closely they blur distinction until they eventually merge in to a single entity. Some multicellular organisms even form colony organisms, like ants and bees. These organisms share genes and cooperate via chemical signals, exhibiting emergent intelligence far beyond the capabilities of any individual.

Bicycles weave between each other on a busy Dutch street. An eye catches an eye, signaling one cyclist to adjust direction and make room for another. As ants communicate with chemical signals, you see humans moving in intricate patterns communicating via visual social signals. As the dance of bees, subtle visual patterns transmit intent.

Our ancestors grew complex communication patterns that allowed us to transmit information. They began to be able to persist and reorganize data over time. Just as genes had become organisms guided by evolution, information, in the form of memes, did the same. Generation by generation this capability advanced. The memes refined us, their hosts, towards more and more complex models of the world and ourselves. These memes gave us the mechanisms to comprehend ourselves, and the resulting memes continue to evolve.

These memes, what a strange replicator, that can sit lifeless on a page, suspended in memes of writing, language, and culture, to yet, at any point, cascade through time to live again in another host.

You feel the memes within you, moving, competing for your attention, pulling you away or pulling you in as you read. Asking to be included, integrated, in to the environment of your mind. You feel them resisting competing ideas, creating questions, finding ways to make everything fit.

Time races ahead of you in a blur, from the brink of oblivion into a new age of hope. In an empty room, in front of a screen, there is a plaque. You read the words.

While capitalism oriented itself in the instant, betraying those who came before it and sacrificing those who come after, we oriented ourselves in deep time, giving thanks to the beginning of the universe and borrowing all things from those who come next. Every instant, starting from the first spark of the cosmos, has lead us here, tracing our lineage from the fundamental laws of the universe. What we borrow from our children, we owe back with interest.

“Who are we?”

You wonder at the question. We. Are we the plurality of immortal memes that inhabit us, or the host that animates them? Are we the individual, the colony, the clusters of neurons? Are we the undifferentiated consciousness that imagined ourselves into experience?

A video plays on the screen.

Today a young man on acid realized that all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration, that we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively, there is no such thing as death, life is only a dream, and we are the imagination of ourselves.

You are the universe becoming self-aware.

¹ If you happen to be reading this in braille or listening to this as audio, a similar process occurs. Air compresses in to sound waves, these waves vibrate your ear drum, moving fluid inside your ears. The movement of this fluid moves tiny hairs which are connected to neurons. This is what we perceive as sound. Alternatively, individual neurons in your fingertips detect pressure, these neurons send signals to larger and larger branches of nerves until they reach your spinal cord and are taken to your brain. In both cases, the nerves that carry these signals to your brain perform some level of processing before they finally do reach the parts of your brain responsible for deriving meaning. ² This is not actually a reference to cannabis, but rather to the song “Nostrildamus” by the Oakland band I Will Kill You Fucker. Nostrildamus. He can smell the future. ³ …ears, fingertips, neural implant, etc, however you take in information.