Secular pietism: striving for purity through ‘sacred science’

Whilst researching Jacque Fresco, the Venus Project and the Zeitgeist films (yet another word stolen from our lexicon!), I happened upon an explanation for the underpinnings of thought accompanying this type of movement.

What follows will help clarify to the small-l libertarian and the average Internet user what exactly is happening with regard to what I call secular pietism: a striving for purity.

On a site — Zeitgeist Movement Exposed — which debunks the Venus Project and its attendant films, blogger James Kush walks us through the process, which includes communitarianism, Abraham Maslow’s ‘peak experiences’ and a drive for personal purity. As far as I am concerned, the following excerpts have less to say about leftist Jacque Fresco’s Venus Project and carry a greater bearing on bans on this, that and the other which have been strangely endemic over the past 30 years.

In ‘Zeitgeist Cult Characteristics’ Mr Kush has two sections of import, borrowed from Rick Ross’s cult-busting site, which appears to have been taken down.  One is called The Demand for Purity.  Emphases mine (and italics in the original) in the passages below:

In the thought reform milieu, as in all situations of ideological totalism, the experiential world is sharply divided into the pure and the impure, into the absolutely good and the absolutely evil. The good and the pure are of course those ideas, feelings, and actions which are consistent with the totalist ideology and policy; anything else is apt to be relegated to the bad and the impure. Nothing human is immune from the flood of stern moral judgments. All “taints” and “poisons” which contribute to the existing state of impurity must be searched out and eliminated.

Thought reform bears witness to its more malignant consequences: for by defining and manipulating the criteria of purity, and then by conducting an all-out war upon impurity, the ideological totalists create a narrow world of guilt and shame. This is perpetuated by an ethos of continuous reform, a demand that one strive permanently and painfully for something which not only does not exist but is in fact alien to the human condition.

It rather sounds like Rick Warren’s New Age-inspired Daniel Plan for health.  I hope the participants don’t end up like this:

The individual thus comes to apply the same totalist polarization of good and evil to his judgments of his own character: he tends to imbue certain aspects of himself with excessive virtue, and condemn even more excessively other personal qualities – all according to their ideological standing. He must also look upon his impurities as originating from outside influences – that is, from the ever-threatening world beyond the closed, totalist ken. Therefore, one of his best way to relieve himself of some of his burden of guilt is to denounce, continuously and hostilely, these same outside influences. The more guilty he feels, the greater his hatred, and the more threatening they seem. In this manner, the universal psychological tendency toward “projection” is nourished and institutionalized, leading to mass hatreds, purges of heretics, and to political and religious holy wars. Moreover, once an individual person has experienced the totalist polarization of good and evil, he has great difficulty in regaining a more balanced inner sensitivity to the complexities of human morality. For these is no emotional bondage greater than that of the man whose entire guilt potential – neurotic and existential – has become the property of ideological totalists.

Isn’t that the truth?  So many people these days are hostile and judgmental.  I really do believe a fair number of them could work great acts of violence if given the go-ahead.  That includes some churchgoers, I’m afraid. Meanwhile, the rest of us look on from the sidelines, aghast.

Mr Kush adds a few prescient observations of his own, one of which really nails leftist thought — the notion that anything they disagree with represents destruction.  (This recent edict of don’ts from the City of New York to its Health Department employees follows this line of thought.)

An example of zeitgeist dividing the absolute good from the absolute evil includes a segment (audio was made exclusive only to members that downloaded the program from the official site; once the segment was exposed, the complete radio broadcast was removed) … The Zeitgeist movement believes that everything in the world today is destructive, including families, laws, governments, currency, nations, cultures, states, languages, religions, god, the list goes on and on. Everything is destructive except for The Venus Project which is “perfection” and “heaven on earth”.

The next section, also from the Rick Ross site, is about ‘sacred science’.  And, those of us who have been following the Church of Gaia (aka the ‘Climate Change’ priesthood) along with the many worldwide bans and excessive taxation on legal products.  When he speaks about the Word, he does not appear to be referring to the Bible but a received secular paradigm:

The totalist milieu maintains an aura of sacredness around its basic dogma, holding it out as an ultimate moral vision for the ordering of human existence. This sacredness is evident in the prohibition (whether or not explicit) against the questioning of basic assumptions, and in the reverence which is demanded for the originators of the Word, the present bearers of the Word, and the Word itself. While thus transcending ordinary concerns of logic, however, the milieu at the same time makes an exaggerated claim of airtight logic, of absolute “scientific” precision. Thus the ultimate moral vision becomes an ultimate science; and the man who dares to criticize it, or to harbor even unspoken alternative ideas, becomes not only immoral and irreverent, but also “unscientific.” In this way, the philosopher kings of modern ideological totalism reinforce their authority by claiming to share in the rich and respected heritage of natural science.  The assumption here is not so much that man can be God, but rather that man’s ideas can be God: that an absolute science of ideas (and implicitly, an absolute science of man) exists, or is at least very close to being attained; that this science can be combined with an equally absolute body of moral principles; and that the resulting doctrine is true for all men at all times. Although no ideology goes quite this far in overt statement, such assumptions are implicit in totalist practice.

This explains so much, so clearly.  But, why is this true for a vocal minority when it isn’t for most of the world’s population?

… the totalist sacred science can offer much comfort and security. Its appeal lies in its seeming unification of the mystical and the logical modes of experience (in psychoanalytic terms, of the primary and secondary thought processes) … Since the distinction between the logical and the mystical is, to begin with, artificial and man-made, an opportunity for transcending it can create an extremely intense feeling of truth ...

Yet so strong a hold can the sacred science achieve over his mental processes that if one begins to feel himself attracted to ideas which either contradict or ignore it, he may become guilty and afraid. His quest for knowledge is consequently hampered, since in the name of science he is prevented from engaging in the receptive search for truth which characterizes the genuinely scientific approach. And his position is made more difficult by the absence, in a totalist environment, of any distinction between the sacred and the profane: there is no thought or action which cannot be related to the sacred science. To be sure, one can usually find areas of experience outside its immediate authority; but during periods of maximum totalist activity (like thought reform) any such areas are cut off, and there is virtually no escape from the milieu’s ever-pressing edicts and demands.

This is still the best explanation I’ve read yet of the attraction to secular pietism and healthism coupled with bogus ‘sacred science’.

N.B.: Whilst reading the Rick Ross pieces, I gathered that he was not Christian.  However, his blog has news archives about all types of cults of various secular and religious persuasions from around the world.