That's right, idiots, stay in your cult. Once you get duped you become branded for life as a stupid cultist, so you may as well stay and fester in the only culture that will ever accept you. Get comfortable licking that boot, because you need community to live and we will never allow you to join ours, so don't even think about it as an option.

...sarcasm, obviously. I hope.

[–] Dookieman12@piefed.social 11 points 1 day ago (2 children)

With how badly they've all abused all existing social contracts, I can see how some might arrive at the conclusion of refusing to enter into any more with them.

[–] queerlilhayseed@piefed.blahaj.zone 12 points 23 hours ago

I too understand it. I have spent a big part of my life feeling the same way, after I spent the first big part of my life being immersed in the cult and parroting a lot of the same abusive, authoritarian ideas.

After I got over the collectivized hatred, which included no small amount of self-hatred, I started to get more specific and practical about dismantling the systems that ensnare people in the house of mirrors of learned hatred and distrust. One of the specific practices I find helpful is finding cogs that want to come loose, and helping them come out completely. Other helpful people did that for me, and I try to pay it forward. I think this group is doing something similar.

I also think that grouping everyone who's ever been a part of MAGA into the same "categorically irredeemable" group is inaccurate and counterproductive, and it forces people who want to leave to stay in, because they don't see where else they can go. Cults are fragile, and public ones, like MAGA, cultivate that outside pressure by being heinous on purpose, and on behalf of the group, because it creates a societal debt that its victims feel they can never repay. Once someone becomes convinced that it's too socially expensive to "come clean", so to speak, they are trapped. The only way to get them out is to show them that they have somewhere, anywhere, else to go.