Credit: Dangerous Minds / Heaven's Gate

Cult dynamics make the modern world a lot easier to understand.

Why do people believe in provably false ideas? They’re in a cult. Why do people give their lives to rich dickheads who hate their guts? They’ve found a cult leader. Why does the failure of these people and their causes only strengthen their followers’ belief in them? You guessed it, it’s because they’re in a cult. What’s more, they’re in this cult for a fairly understandable reason as well. It’s the same reason that there’s been such a massive resurgence in Astrology and witchcraft. The simple fact is that the world is basically impossible to understand at the moment.

Everything is fundamentally fucked. No one can understand anyone. Information is everywhere, yet impossible to verify. Everything that previous generations of humans have believed in has as many arguments proving its flawlessness as it has arguments completely eviscerating it, and one can never entirely trust whether either side of those arguments is acting in good faith. Confusing is underselling it, the world makes a Hieronymous Bosch painting look like a Mr Men book at the moment, and yet one day, we’ll look back at this very period where everything’s on fire as “a simpler time”.

Cult logic bypasses all of that. Cult logic is just “whatever the leader says, goes”. If it’s untrue? It’s not. If it’s unattainable, just try harder. If it directly contradicts itself, you’re just not believing hard enough. It’s like the “spa day for my brain” bit from Barbie, but with slightly more suicide. To an extent, I can’t blame people for seeking out something that makes the world easy to understand. God knows I would love some confirmation that I haven’t wasted my time by having a moral code that I’ve tried to stick to.

There are several cults I could pull from to illustrate this, but in terms of how much people will put up with in order to feel like they understand the world, few come close to Heaven’s Gate.

How does Heaven’s Gate survive to this day?

For those of you who haven’t gone through Cult Podcast’s back catalogue like I have (hugely recommended if you haven’t, by the way, Paige and Armando are the best in the game), then a quick catch-up. Heaven’s Gate was the brainchild of Marshall Applewhite and Bonnie Nettles, who met in 1972 with a shared belief that they were chosen by God to fulfil Biblical prophecies, thus giving them higher-level minds than most people. After years of this Folie à Deux, fuelled by a strict diet of Bible studies and Arthur C Clarke, they finally started to attract followers in the mid-1970s.

As time went on, their preaching began to sound less like scripture and more like science fiction. On the day of revelation, so they’d say, they would be killed, resurrected and then transported onto a spaceship to live out the rest of eternity with God-like alien beings. If anyone through their lot in with the so-called “UFO Two”, that would be their future too. By 1996, the group had around 40 members, a mansion in California to their name and in March, several media outlets reported seeing lights in the sky over Phoenix.

That was all Applewhite needed to sound the alarm that the end of days was approaching. By the end of the month, the entire group was dead, having ingested Apple Sauce spiked with Phenobarbital, then tied plastic bags around their heads to induce asphyxiation. This was, or so Applewhite claimed, so that the UFOs nearing earth would pick them up, leaving the unfaithful to the apocalypse on Earth. One might think that this was the end of Heaven’s Gate, but you really can’t keep a good cult down.

The website for Heaven’s Gate is still up (including its grimly hilarious “statement against suicide”). This might not sound like much. After all, the original Space Jam website from 1996 is still up. However, websites don’t just stay up by themselves. There are bills that need to be paid for a website to stay up, and those bills, according to their server provider, are always paid on time. Which is where things get truly surreal, because that implies that a web administrator is still active on the site. Which we can verify because whoever the hell it is, they still answer emails.

Go ahead, give them a shout. You might just get a response from someone who might just fully believe that they are “The Evolutionary Level Above Humanity”. Someone who stayed on Terra while their community fled into the stars. If that’s not proof that cult logic cuts through every other kind of thinking, I don’t know what is. What’s more, before you go about smirking about how stupid all those 40-odd people were for falling for such bullshit, spare a thought for this.

There was probably a time in their lives when they’d never fall for something like this too, but desperation and a promise of community can make anyone, and I do mean anyone, fall for the strangest things. Even you.