Thread on normies, cults, self-sovereignty, and the brutal process of transformation in the crucible--

When you're synced with regular society, you have solved the loneliness/belonging problem and also the "what is reality" problem (it is whatever the narrative silently says it is) but without self-awareness or self-sovereignty. You are like Romeo & Juliet.

When/if you first desync totally from regular society, it'll often be by leaping to a different totalizing ideology. You solve the loneliness problem and create a new reality, but at the cost of an unintegrated psychological schism. This split can be mild or extremely severe.

(For this phase, see: every intellectual as a young man (or woman).)

In this phase, you solve loneliness/belonging and you begin the journey towards sovereignty on the reality/truth question, if only by looking somewhere besides the first place you ever laid eyes on (norm soc).

When/if you ever desync from the new totalizing ideology, beware! You can't go back to society for connection or reality bc of all that was shown untrue about it by leaving.
You now have before you, unsolved, the belonging/connection problem AND the reality/cosmos/truth problem.

You don't know who to ask about either one.

Think about it. Who do you ask?

This is why leaving a cult is such a fucking 3-layer-cake of miserable for most people.

I don't know the next step, but I'm starting to consider that this miserable fucking parade ground of disorientation is the birthplace of two prerequisites to self-sovereignty-- willingness to be lonely/isolated (belonging problem) and profound self-trust (reality problem).

Self-sovereignty, if we're to believe Erich Fromm and oh, everybody else, is the prerequisite to the kind of love that is not reactive, codependent, or unseeing. Which would solve the belonging problem.

It's also the prerequisite to living from one's direct and trusted perception, which, if it includes a constant delightful willingness to be surprised and an almost scientific desire to update one's models, may be the sort of orientation which solves the reality question.