I can't get over how vulnerable the mind is and how little we want to believe that we are vulnerable, too
On the Mother God cult, our vulnerable human brains, and why we don't really want to be here
image from the documentary “Love is Won: The Cult of Mother God” on HBO
There’s something utterly terrifying about a group of people who all agree. I didn’t know I felt this way until I finished Love is Won: The Cult of Mother God, an HBO documentary about the truly ghoulish and frightening but also incredibly stupid Love is Won/Mother God cult, a combination that gets me every time. I won’t get into the specifics of the cult, which are mostly a mishmash of New Age spirituality, Qanon, and UFO escape fantasies, or the figure of Amy Carlson, a woman who we first meet as a mummified corpse on shaky bodycam footage, her body emaciated and skin blue-tinged from chugging colloidal silver, covered in a quilt and Christmas lights. It’s the followers that interest me the most, though.
I can understand one delusional woman with the tragic gift of charisma attracting a partner, or maybe a couple of close friends, but it’s difficult to swallow the idea that at least a dozen people, most in their twenties, but some in their thirties and older, willingly devoted themselves to a woman who claimed to be God and channeled Robin Williams, who claimed that Donald Trump was her father and that she was being spoken to by aliens. In videos, she is either serenely dissociated or nearly spitting with drunken rage. What did people see when they looked at her that said anything but deep illness and substance abuse?
The members sit together in the livestreams shown on the documentary, all smiling and telling the same story of how Mother is upset because of their bad vibrations, or mother is channeling a person who is not so gentle, or mother is taking on the suffering of the world. They all agree that Mother is suffering a great deal because of them, because they are not pure enough or good enough, nobody else is, either. They all look forward to ascending 3d reality, which makes them sick, it is so empty and pointless now that they’ve experienced 5d reality with Mother. What is 5d reality? Seems to be getting extremely high and looking at the clouds for spaceships.
They all sit in front of a camera for grueling livestreams, desperately holding onto this idea that they are all in it together, that they all agree, they are on the same page. When anyone expresses doubt or fear or anxiety, Mother God herself hurls insults at them. It’s a suffocating space of compulsory certainty, and none but the people who escaped understand why they’ve twisted their brains so dramatically to believe this is heaven.
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Sometimes I only half understand why I do the things I do, and most of that awareness has happened since turning thirty, so I’ve lived more than half of my life often driven by murky motivations. I suspect I’m not alone in this. While I feel relatively sure of my own choices in the moment, of my own rightness, so often I’ve been hit five, ten, fifteen years later with my true motivations. I consider myself to be a pretty self aware person, introspective as a habit, and even I regularly get sucked into the swirling vortex of my own needs and longings.
When we learn some of the backstory for each cult member, it becomes tragically clear, from the outside, what attracts them to this absolutely self-assured woman who confidently says she’s literally mother earth, all while also being a pretty standard delusional, drunk white lady on the internet. These are all people with a loose grasp on their own identities, searching for some relief from trauma or mental health problems or a generally feeling of not fitting in with family or the culture around them. There’s also the ones who seem to get off on the power of having such control over so many lost people - I’d cite Amy and Jason (the last “Father God” figure, which is what Amy called her various boyfriends), though both also seem deeply ill in one way or the other. What all of them share is this fierce disgust with the world, though also a confusing adoration of it, too. They hate corporations and the world of conventional medicine, but they also worship celebrities - their pantheon of deities and figures is almost all celebrities.
There’s something so bleak about these emaciated, fucked-up people rapturously worshiping a woman who claims to literally be possessed by celebrities, but it also makes perfect sense: when nothing much feels real, it makes sense to reach for the most obvious sources of comfort - whatever inhabited your television when you were a child, or a figure of certainty and universal love, or perhaps a figure like Trump, who has become decoupled from his actual words or actions into some larger symbol that means something different depending on who you are speaking to.
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Recently I watched a video essay about loneliness and the loss of third places by Mina Lee that made me think about this documentary and the larger problem of us all living in our own individual bubbles, stuck in our houses, constructed our own bespoke versions of spirituality and community. Part of me hesitates to name this as a problem, because I’m aware that often, pulling away from larger communities (I’m thinking of evangelical Christianity, allegiance to a particular political party, or any community that denies important parts of one’s identity) is essential for survival. I know it was for me. But simply going it alone for the rest of my life is also not a good answer, as much as it feels easy and seductive. Why would I want to haul myself to some group event when I’m not sure it will be a good fit? What if somebody there is annoying? What if something is said that I don’t like or agree with? The idea that our experience can be perfectly curated like an Instagram feed or vision board makes any deviation from expectation or moment of discomfort feel like violence.
It sounds like I’m blaming individuals for what are also larger problems, but I’m not: I’m pointing out that I can’t see a way out of this problem that doesn’t include an individual choice to push against the comfort of living directly from our phones. I wholeheartedly support the funding of public spaces of libraries, of local, low-cost activities that help our minds to be less likely to see the world as something we want desperately escape. I also have little faith in elected representatives to do this. I suspect we have to do this work ourselves, both individually and in small groups, to the best of our ability.
Which is not to say I think members of deeply silly cults like Love is One are all victims of the culture. Most seem to be struggling with mental illness and addiction. A lot of them are also garden variety bigots, willing to say the most disgusting, anti-Semitic statements on camera, seemingly with little awareness of how truly bonkers their beliefs have become. The more disconnected you are from other people, the more you can begin to see them as less human, polluted, corrupting influences that threaten to take you away from the perfect reality you’ve developed in your head.
While I’m not particularly vulnerable to cults, I am vulnerable to isolation, to starting to despair when I spend too much time on the internet and not enough time around actual people. I can’t give up on people or assume that what a person says or does at their worst moments is all of who they are. This hope is more for me than anyone else: I can’t see the world as consisting of an us or them, enemies or allies, good guys or bad guys. It closes too many doors and ignores what feels just fundamentally true about humans: usually, we don’t know what the hell we are doing and are overwhelmed with contradictory longings that feel impossible to fulfill. I’m not arguing for moral relativism around things that are pretty fundamental (and not excusing this cult for their poisonous, disgusting views), but a humble awareness that it’s really easy to be fooled, to think you are the “good guy” and to realize later that actually, you were acting out of needs you could barely speak or traumas that you projected onto other people.
I get why the Love is Won cult members wanted a spaceship to take them away. They’d created an unsustainable reality that said the only endpoint is escape. The only solution is to do the opposite and really be here. Maybe this whole essay is me saying touch grass to myself, because I recognize that often I, too, want escape from a world that seems both lavish in opportunity and contrast to where I came from (I mean, once I didn’t even have a toilet inside my house) and also devoid of meaning or ability to even do the kind of work I want to do.
It’s deep winter, so I don’t have grass, but I did walk my dog this morning and try hard to feel my feet on the ground. I tried to write in my big notebook this morning about how I want my life to look, what I want to DO. I want to read more books. I want to take myself to the local coffeeshop once a week. I want to travel this summer, driving all around the country in our used van. I want to finish this next novel and start the next two. I want to have more incidental interactions with people.
I’m an internet dweller, and that’s not likely to change, nor do I want it to, but what I want most for myself is to remember how much of what happens here is performative, partial, and driven by needs outside of people’s awareness. Which gives me empathy, which softens me toward the world, which makes me more able to be in it. And I want to be in it. I want to be here. Feels strange to type that, but I do, as baffling and terrible as here so often is.