Cultish
Language is very important to me. At its most basic this is because I want to be understood when I speak or write; at its more specific this is because I’m a writer and therefore language is my tool of choice and it’s always good to master the tools you use a lot. As such, I’m always looking to get fairly unambiguous definitions to words that tend to be used fairly ambiguously.
I covered one of these before when I pointed out that I had finally been given a good definition for love, one that covered both romantic love and non-romantic love. The definition being that love is when you would rather do something for the object of your love than have them do something for you. The new one that I’ve got is for the word “cult.”
I was complaining to god this week that the word cult is very poorly defined. The best that I had going for me was the old joke that a cult is a very small religion and a religion is a very large cult. The humor of the joke of course comes from the tautological nature of its self-referential definition, but the lack of real utility to that definition came from the exact same thing. Sometimes a joke is a cover for the truth, but sometimes a joke is just a joke. In this case I think it may have been both.
But God set me straight (so to speak). She gave me a much more useful definition for “cult.” She told me that a cult is an organization that is partially defined by secret knowledge about its beliefs. This does away with the whole size thing that is referenced in the joke and also gets past the notion that cults are inherently religious. They aren’t, although the nature of organizations that have “beliefs” is that they tend to be religious. It also pulls away from the notion that being designated a cult is inherently a negative comment and lets us move on to the notion that what negative we have to say about such organizations is actually entirely separate from their status as cults.
So for the record let me just say that Masons, Scientoligists, and Mormons are all members of cults but that fans of Rocky Horror are only cultists if they believe that The Rocky Horror Picture Show is the best movie ever. Those of us in the know, know that Rocky isn’t the best picture ever. But it’s close.
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