#patriarchyisacult — Public Fediverse posts

@KimCrayton1 This is exactly what a lot of cults do, especially Bible-based cults like Mormonism where I grew up. Get 'em into marriage as early as possible, get 'em making babies for the Lord (Lords need serfs!), get 'em locked in to a family with nowhere else to go.

Society focuses on the plight of the trad wife in this situation, but how many men have I talked to who want to leave or left Mormonism — except their wife is still in, and now there's a messy relationship or a divorce with kids involved?

This taps into the question I've wondered since I left in the 00s and started studying cults: How is our society a cult?

As I've discovered, this is how.

Whiteness is the cult. Patriarchy is the cult. Decolonization is deprogramming.

#WhitenessIsACult #PatriarchyIsACult #AbuseCulture #decolonize

Assumptions are mental walls we build between things. I like to compare politicized ideas to similar non-politicized ideas to break down assumptions.

Race is a construct.
Gender is a construct.
Money is a construct.
Language is a construct.
Art is a construct.
Music is a construct.

But! But! But!

Yep. Yep. Yep.

#AbuseCulture #WhitenessIsACult #PatriarchyIsACult

We unite under the banner of "Everyone deserves personal empowerment, fair treatment, an equal voice, an equal slice of power, and to be free from harm. An injury to one is an injury to all." Only those who prove through their behavior that they intend to cause harm or control others will be excluded from this, and only to subdue their power to cause harm.

This includes everyone. There's no need to lick the boots of the dividers and controllers here for only a few of us to gain a little.

We all stand for each other, or we stand for nothing.

#AbuseCulture #WhitenessIsACult #Patriarchy #PatriarchyIsACult

This is why intersectionality is so powerful. Because when you only dismantle each dividing control element one at a time, the other gaps can easily be filled by the other dividing control mechanisms.

So feminism that only tackles sexism ends up as TERFdom, which must reinforce its transphobia, then quickly taps into racism, and suddenly they're breaking bread with full on fascists.

Intersectionality heals all rifts and exposes the contradictions and control mechanisms across the entire colonizer cult.

You can't just pick and choose. The whole thing needs gutted all at once. We're all in this together against all abusers and powertrippers, and we must reject any doctrine that says otherwise.

#AbuseCulture #WhitenessIsACult #Patriarchy #PatriarchyIsACult

It would be interesting to explore the differences between racism and sexism/gender essentialism in smaller cults, to understand the roles of control each concept plays, then expand that out to larger society.

The clear difference is that gender divides happen within a group as small as a family. A child of either binary sex can be born within a white family. Thus gender can be used to divide *inside* a racial group. It divides a population within itself, against itself, to be leveraged internally.

Race is about making an other within a much larger grouping. As a factor of control within say a predominantly white group, the concept of race unites. "We are the chosen people, THEY are the scapegoats."

LGBT issues have been interesting within Mormonism, because Mormons have such large families, increasing the likelihood of a child being queer. Since Mormonism centers the family unit, the dissonance it causes when a child comes out as gay or trans has caused some extreme rifts and difficult to resolve problems for the LDS church.

Race though? It's pretty rare to have an unexpected POC child in a white Mormon family (and that's going to raise entirely different questions).

It seems these are matters of internally dividing forces of control, and externally dividing forces. And as with other lines cults use to divide (purity tests, levels of faith, clothing, status internally vs all the ways of othering outsiders) it seems that both internal and external divisions are required to maintain control.

Gender and race play these internal and external dividing roles in the larger whiteness/colonizer societal cult. However there, these control factors play on everyone in some way, regardless of their race or gender, besides even "outsiders" are on the inside.

I have more thinking to do, but this question has been floating at the edges for awhile, so I thought I'd capture something concrete.

#AbuseCulture #WhitenessIsACult #Patriarchy #PatriarchyIsACult

Most American (and Western) cults are tied in some way to mainstream cultural ideals. Yes, cults are countercultural, but only to a degree, and these patriarchal ideas are deeply core to most, even those that seem to be pushing against them.

(Racism plays the same role in many such cults as well, like Mormonism and other Bible-based cults, but this one seems less consistent. Even most feminist cults buy into gender binaries at some level, but Jim Jones' People's Temple was very anti-racist. This one topic alone is with further study and could be a thesis, if only I could live in a forest hovel and write whatever I wanted for eternity.)

It's because dividing a population is key to controlling them, and gender is an easy, basic, essential way to do that which taps into people's core identities. Whether it's a cult of 6 or a nation of 330 million. Nearly everyone has been conditioned to buy into this division one way or another, at one point or another.

Covert fascists in a society that is unpacking gender essentialism have no choice but to come to the fore and wrest control of the entire apparatus, or they will lose not just political power over the nation, but at every level, including domestic power over their families. Once the lie of gender has been exposed and is questioned by enough people, they've lost control for generations. Possibly forever.

The cult of fascism is fighting for its life.

#AbuseCulture #WhitenessIsACult #Patriarchy #PatriarchyIsACult

The confusion anyone feels when encountering queer issues is cognitive dissonance trying to make sense of patriarchy, which only makes sense under false pretenses, so there's a drive to cling to those false pretenses to maintain a sense of sanity.

It's exactly the same as when a cult member first encounters disconfirming information from outside the cult milieu. The exit story of an ex-member they trust for some reason, troubling financial information, historical details the cult hasn't inoculated against, becoming aware of doctrinal conflicts.

Anyone who feels confusion trying to explain to their children how two men can get married, or how a trans woman can be a lesbian, or what nonbinary even is, that is a person feeling the threat of their internal Rube Goldberg machine of lies shaking at its seems [sic]. If that structural support falls, their entire worldview about everything else is in danger of being questioned along with it, because is all linked up in their minds. It's why many scramble to repair the damage in any way they can, even if it means hurting people they otherwise love.

It's not just their gender beliefs. They are fighting for their psychological life.

This is how it works in cults, too. This is what happened to me each time I encountered troubling information about Mormonism, until I could no longer ignore it, the whole machine collapsed, and I had to rebuild my entire world from scratch.

With Mormonism, I could reach to the outside world for stability.

Gender though? That underpins everything we trust about society. These are dangerous questions to ask. The status quo cannot withstand an entire population coming to new conclusions.

#AbuseCulture #WhitenessIsACult #Patriarchy #PatriarchyIsACult https://defcon.social/@corbden/115424460993737875