But Ross Douthat watched the whole thing — with his wife — and says he still can't understand the "mystery." This is the one about the the "sex slave cult" Nxivm.
According to Douthat, in "'The Vow' Is Gripping TV That Doesn’t Solve Its Central Mysteries":
[Y]ou get an intimate familiarity with the kind of people... who ended up deep inside Nxivm’s therapeutic world: unhappy artistic personalities, self-conscious seekers, people who wanted to change the world... And you get a clear-enough sense of [Keith] Raniere’s style and substance... But even after so many hours, the documentary fails to resolve the biggest questions that hover around the cult experience.
It sounds as though Douthat could completely understand the "mystery" the filmmaker chose to solve, but Douthat wants to present larger — or seemingly larger — mysteries that one could go on to ponder. And why not?
First, there’s the legal and philosophical questions of what constitutes coercion as opposed to voluntary (if deeply self-destructive) adult choices and what kinds of group-mediated control should be criminal in a liberal society....
How the law deals with these kinds of situations is an interesting problem, with links to other debates — over drug use and euthanasia, for instance — about when and whether a liberal society can limit “free” choices that tend toward self-destruction....
Second, there’s the question of what Nxivm’s process, its curriculums and retreats and seminars, actually did for the people involved. Because clearly they did something....
Finally... there’s the question of how a cult leader’s charisma works. Because it’s obvious that Raniere didn’t just keep people in thrall with an insidious form of talk therapy or group bonding or brainwashing or even blackmail. He himself drew people in, convinced people that he was the embodiment of all the wisdom they were seeking, the exemplar of the more ethical life they aspired to live....
I have a fair amount of experience with different types of spiritual leaders... and I’ve never encountered one whose narcissism and megalomania are so thinly disguised and whose compensating charisma seems so limited.
I don't think the documentary fell short for not delving into these 3 "mysteries." The first one suggests an endless law and politics seminar. I'm sure you can imagine the kind of readings and debates you'd have. The second and third are about religion — including religion substitutes — and human psychology. Another big, endless seminar topic.
As for charismatic leaders and their "narcissism and megalomania" — surely, this is subjective. When it's your charismatic leader, the narcissism and megalomania don't seem at all as narcissistic and megalomaniac as that of other guy's charismatic leader.
We all have our tendencies to fall for charismatic leaders. Pay more attention to your own vulnerability to charisma and you may gain some understanding of why other people fall for other charisma.
And do you even want to be a person who falls for no one?
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Maybe Maggie Haberman can demystify it for Ross Douchebag.
I watched it. Amazed that so many of them knew that what they were into was not normal and did it anyway.
The world would be a less interesting place without sex slave cults.
So how much of that long documentary is devoted to long-winded scenes of people being talked into things and how much to graphic depictions of sex-slaves in action...is my first question.
Time better spent watching the 15-hour documentary "Vegan Leather Harnesses" sounds like...maybe then Douthat would've gotten some action. Seriously, who are these people. Who binge-watches a 15 hour documentary about a sex culture all the way through? The Douthats...apparently. Kinky.
Lol on ole Inga.
"Don't follow leaders" Bob
World changers are the most dangerous people imaginable.
Always. The world changer’s fundamental assumption is, in transactional analysis terms, I’m okay, you’re not okay. You must be reformed, but I’m cool as I am. If I reform, if I cease to be a world changer, that would be tragic. However, world changers typically grow frustrated by the world’s noncompliance. They seek allies with perceived powers they apparently lack, the perfect Jim Jones/Charles Manson scenario.
We all have our tendencies to fall for charismatic leaders.
"We" explanations are always bogus. If you won't say it with "I," it's wrong.
Leftwingers have a deep-seated desire to be abused and will seek out that which improves their chances of being abused.
We all have our tendencies to fall for charismatic leaders. Pay more attention to your own vulnerability to charisma and you may gain some understanding of why other people fall for other charisma.
These are true words.
Too often this comes down to the need to stay within the good graces of the tribe and to ignore your own intuition and principles.
This is a common reason why people's words and actions do not match. Too often people accept the rationales of others.
There are not very many true leaders out there.
I don't understand the current obsession with dysfunction as entertainment. More Somebody Feed Phil reruns for us...
I didn't see this show, but I watched the Netflix docu on Bernie Madoff. He was something of a cult leader. The Church of True Wealth. He had some legitimate qualifications to be the leader of such a Church. He was a founder of NASDAQ and occasionally pontificated before Congress on securities trading. He looked the part....There's no mystery as to why people believed in him. They believed in him because they wanted to. Money solves more problems than inner peace and is, in many cases, the cause of inner peace. He was the light and the way. It ended badly for him, his family, and for his investors, but, if you invested early and died before 2008, he was the real deal. The trick with cults and cult leaders is to die before the fraud is revealed or you lose faith.
He was tempted, horrified by his reaction, and wanted to dissect all the reasons he is actually safe from his own temptation. Or maybe his wife's temptation set off his chain of reasoning.
"fall for charismatic leaders"
Like, Jesus?
The mystery is why we (well, people like Douthat) treat something entirely normally human as mysterious.
Don't let the discussion around free choices become a distraction. He was convicted for imprisoning and raping a 15-year-old girl.
In my 70+ years I have never been invited to join a sex cult.... dang it.
Oh I don't think I'd be happy to be IN one. But it would be nice to have been invited.
Sex enslaves us.
We try to free ourselves.
But we like the sex slavery.
We give birth to tiny little babies.
The baby is our master.
The baby cries: "Feed me, slave! Feed me now!"
"I'm coming master! I'm coming!"
"I will now chew on your nipple. Your milk belongs to me."
"Yes, master. I love you, master."
"I am hungry for more milk. Give me the other nipple!"
"Master, please, I am so tired."
"Do what I say."
"What do I do? I think I'm your father."
"Go! Work for me, wage slave. I need a roof over my head."
"Yes, master."
Here's an Amazing description, of voting members of the democrat party..
so many of them knew that what they were into was not normal and did it anyway.
Rhhardin 9:24 has it right. 99% of the time, the rhetorical "we" actually means "all y'all. But not me, I'm immune, a dispassionate observer of the human tragedy."
I wonder how many time share properties Douthat owns.
For the purposes of debate; I find these cults no different that the people who travel to Davos each year for the WEF.
What Tom T. said. But I still can't get my head wrapped around a sex cult in Albany, NY.
Eudora Welty said, "There is absolutely everything in great fiction but a clear answer." Of course, "The Vow" isn't fiction and isn't great but... Dramatic works present questions. Those of us who write movies talk among ourselves about what an audience member might be saying to his friends, or himself, as he walks to his car. It starts with, "Wait a minute..."
It makes a difference whether your idols are far away, and only seen on a screen, or they they are people you see up close. Your worship of a movie star or rock star can be relatively harmless because you never come into contact with them. Usually they can't influence you to do much that is illegal or immoral. If Ozzy Osbourne fans get rabies from biting the heads off of bats, that's on them, not on Osbourne.
It's said than no man is a hero to his valet, but close proximity to charismatic leaders can do more to conceal, rather than reveal, their flaws.
Paging Laslo Spatula... paging Laslo Spatula...
Weird religion. That said, keep women... women-women affordable, available, and taxable, and the "burden" of evidence aborted, perhaps cannibalized, then her carbon pollutants sequestered. Demos-cracy dies in darkness.
15 episodes about pathetic submissive people being pathetic and submissive?
Hard pass.
Completely missed the last question.
"Do I want to be the kind of person who falls for no one?"
Yes, of course.
If it "doesn't solve its mysteries" then how can this docu-series be of any more value than the easily-found news reports about its subject? ... but thanks Ross for doing that valuable TV recon on our behalf
I will never understand how this was considered criminal at all.
Grown adults want to give their money away, get branded, have sex with some creep?
Who cares?
I have always wanted to be the leader of a sex cult and get incredibly wealthy while fucking young, nubile, impressionable women.
My wife won't let me...
All y'all who are commenting as though the series portrays mostly sex---it does not. In my opinion the footage deals more with an overall picture of the group and its leader, Keith, especially as seen through the involvement of a few key members. It's worth watching (although it could have been edited down) especially since there is an enormous trove of high-quality, insider footage available. The leader, Keith, had a right-hand man who made documentaries and he gladly took up the task of filming almost every aspect of the group, for years. This same documentarian and his wife eventually began to have doubts and they investigated and filmed that process too.
I thought it was a fascinating look at group dynamics, the necessity of finding higher meaning in our lives, and the tactics used by Keith in structuring, leading, and mis-leading the group.
My main take: so many people have a broken bullshit detector. I can understand, sorta, falling for the dogma initially. This was a group of intelligent, attractive and competent people, many with artistic temperaments, who wanted a sense of meaning and community and fellowship. Keith has the ability to speak with a calm authority while conveying a message that often has some philosophical truth behind it. There's also a lot of mutual love-bombing.
But people were also told preposterous lies about Keith from the get-go: He has the second-highest IQ ever measured in the world. He is an incomparable prodigy on the piano---seriously, all these artistically talented people continued to marvel at his average piano-playing?? And above all, the hagiographic treatment of Keith himself should have warned people away. Let's say that he really did speak with what you perceived as the wisdom of the ages, radiating peace and love. But why, then, would such a loving wise unselfish being organize a huge following to essentially worship him?
Finally, the sex stuff was a small part of the group and, IMO, consensual as to the adults involved.
Matt Taibbi and Walter Kirn labeled 2022 as the year of unresolved stories.
They are on substack. You might have to download the app and subscribe.
I watched it. I have no interest in what Douthat thinks about it (or anything else, for that matter). My main interest was in observing and reflecting on the techniques used to control people. Those observations can then be applied to myself, mainly watching people try to manipulate me.
It is well-known that Raniere studied L. Ron Hubbard and incorporated some of the nastiest techniques used by the Scientologists. They are clearly on display throughout the series. That Douthat considers them "unsolved mysteries" might be an indication that he is insufficiently self-aware to see them operating in his own life.
The two techniques I found most fascinating are: the collection of damaging personal information to use as leverage against members and the co-option of members into becoming perpetrators, making it much more difficult for them to acknowledge abuse. Both techniques are employed (to a lesser extent, of course) by the woke Left.
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