The Puritans left England for America because they belonged to an exclusive and intolerant sect. They simply could not get on with others. Sadly, they are at the root of both religious and secular North American culture. This explains why North America is today the source of most of the world’s sects.
In order to enter a sect, you must give up something very important: freedom. Anyone who breaks out of a sect, breaks out of the communicational, political, ideological and cultural circuit constituted by the individual sectarians and retrieves his freedom. You can only reach the conclusion that a sect is a kind of secret society. And its closedness or sectarianism increases as the threats to its reign over the souls of the weak, the naïve or neophytes increase.
For all sects start from a notion of ‘exclusivity’ associated with a certain ‘exceptionalism’ or esotericness. This justifies different treatments and understandings which defy all logic. Sects are always irrational. Sects are the foundation of a ‘unique’ culture, Divinely chosen to lead the world. Sects have a Divine, ‘extra-terrestrial’ origin.
It is in this exceptionalism that individualism is rooted. It is opposed to a more collective and cooperative vision of humanity, the Catholicity of the Church. It is in this exceptionalism that the logic of competition is founded – the theory is that the best wins (meritocracy) – as opposed to the logic that founded all human societies – cooperation, the ability to work together.
All sects have their own esoteric jargon and introversion or self-absorption, which originate in the closed circuit in which they operate. The greater the inability to establish bridges and contacts with others, the greater the radicalism of the sect. This embodies a contradiction which sects cannot escape: the more they want to drag normal people into them, the more normal people flee them.
If the vast majority of Orthodox do not fit into the narrow minds of the sect and its followers, then it is they who have to mould themselves to its ideas. This is why sects are always so small – though they may have a huge internet or virtual presence. When reality stubbornly insists on not validating the irrational presumptions of the sect, the sect chooses to wage war against reality, identifying the agents of reality and electing them as its enemies. The result is predictable: either you are with me, or else you are against me! The sectarianism of the sect leaves no room for compromise, co-operation or any kind of mutual understanding.
If you analyse the cultish sect leaders who constitute the sect superstructure and their deeply ideological stance, you will see the irrationality of the sect: it is a cult which is in accelerated divorce from the real world. The constitution of the elite of the sect represents its aristocratisation. It is a return to the time of feudalism, whose lords dress in exclusive bling.
As in all sects, it is the ‘dogmas’ of the duty ‘theologians’ which define from the outset the lines to be strictly obeyed. They produce the centrifugal force that binds the ignorant, weak and naïve periphery to the centre, trying to create a dependency on themselves, at least until they grow up and see through the nonsense and realise that they have been ‘had’. The repetition of their dogmas until exhaustion has a ritualistic function. It aims to keep even the most peripheral neophytes as faithful to the centre as possible, literally like a prayer or litany.
Sects have problems in dealing with the reality that increasingly eludes it. Since reality does not conform to its pretensions, any sect has the option of hysteria, demagogy, hypocrisy and slander. In essence, sects wage war against reality. For example, those who leave sects always do so as the result of the ‘uncontrolled madness or illness of one man’. Of course, this is something that does not play, either in appearance or in substance. It results from the inability, proper to deluded sect ‘logic’, to analyse objectively, to see reality.
Typical of sect ‘logic’ is the claim that its actions are all justified, acceptable and benign; whereas the ‘enemies’’ actions are always ‘evil’. The cultish, supremacist, closed world behind the schizophrenia, paranoia and narcissism of the sect attacks all those who do not uncritically and blindly follow it. The sect is in perfect contradiction with the real and varied world. As was said 2,000 years ago: ‘The truth sets us free’. The idea that ‘in war the truth is the first casualty’ is also just another dogma invented by sects, so that they can lie without being held accountable for it.