Washington: A murderous cult leader from the 1960s, Charles Manson, died on Sunday, in prison, where he had spent most of his life. He was 83, had achieved global notoriety and haunted punk culture as a spectre. On two nights in August 1969 his followers killed nine persons, including pregnant Hollywood star Sharon Tate who had joined his cult.
Strangely, Manson’s monstrosity had emerged from a warped interpretation of a Beatles song, ‘Helter Skelter’. That 1968 song from The White Album impacted subsequent happenings in at least two ways. First, as later critics determined, it was the first ever heavy metal or proto-punk rock number. Surprisingly, it came from the Beatles, who are better known as purveyors of universal love, peace and mystical lyricism.
Its second impact, however, turned out to be baleful. Manson, who was a Beatles fanatic but led an apocalyptic cult that believed the world would come to an end through a race war, heard the lyrics in a way that convinced him the Fab Four were the biblical Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. The song to him was a coded ode announcing an imminent end of the world. So, he ordered some of his followers to murder others brutally on August 8 and 9, 1969.
Paul McCartney, who wrote the song, sang it like a maniac and played lead guitar (if you’re into rock trivia, John Lennon played bass and sax for this one), expressed complete bafflement at Manson’s take on the number. “He interpreted the whole thing, that we were the Four Horsemen…and arrived at having to go out and kill everyone,” McCartney said in an interview. He told his biographer: “I was using the symbol of a helter skelter (a downward sliding tunnel ride, then common in British fairgrounds) as a ride from the top to the bottom, (like) the rise and fall of the Roman Empire, and this was the fall, the demise, the going down.”
Be that as it may, what is it with cults that members invariably see all evidence contrary to their dogma, alternative interpretations and plain logic as thoughts to be shunned and denied? The sealed chamber they inhabit within their Platonic caves walls them in. They don’t want to wake up to the openness of sunlight. By common understanding, a cult is a social or religious or ideological group that is defined by its specific, often blind, belief. It is a system usually founded by an individual or group that demands subservience, loathes challenge and often hates others.
Usually, we see cults as isolated groups of devotees infatuated with a cause or personality. Manson’s group was a violent manifestation. There are or have been many others. A few preach love and tolerance, like the Hare Krishna movement. India’s tantrics had cult followings that were only for the initiated. But we generally tend to discount the cultishness of swathes of people who, in the name of religion or ideology, display similar tendencies. Like fundamentalists of all kinds, Christian, Muslim, Hindu, even some Buddhists. There also are secular cults that deny empirical evidence and facts of history, such as the cult of Stalinism.
There even are nation-states that are effectively huge cults with obedient or silenced citizen followers. Nazi Germany was one such. Today, Saudi Arabia is a cult-like monarchy that by consolidating Wahhabi Islam as state ideology demands unquestioning faith from its citizens, as defined top-down, and exports its intolerant version of Islam as a tool of foreign policy backed by enormous resources to exercise mind control over Muslims worldwide.
Hindu fanatics in India seem to aim for a similar goal by trying to enforce a bigoted and ahistorical version of a millennia-old, gloriously diverse civilisation that today is the secular republic of India. In the US cultish behavior now seriously infects rational discourse in politics, mostly on the white, Christian right but also on the far left where intolerant or anarchistic voices are shrill. Each camp views logical but contrary evidence as poison. In defence of blind belief, and fearful hate, they are quite willing to let the world go helter skelter.