Theos-Talk Archives (January 1997 Message tl00566)

On Sat, 18 Jan 97, Titus Roth wrote:

>Having come from a pure and good teaching that became a cult
>after the founder died, the words cult and extreme produce a literal gut
>reaction in me. I have personally seen and heard too many horror stories of
>the damage cults have done. 

I agree.  Cults can be very destructive.  If the human race were populated
by only men or only women, that would be destructive, too.  If there were 2
billion women on earth and 3 men, the optimal balance in terms of
maximizing the probability of the survival of the human race would be to
head in the direction of an all-male race.  Either extreme is the worst,
but what makes extremes possible is that what makes them up is part of the
optimal balance.  The only difference between balance and an extreme is the
degree of the mixture of the opposites.  Complete open-mindedness, with no
distinction between ideas, would be just as destructive to a society as
would complete authority and dogmatism be.  Gun-shyness, which the term
"gut reaction" suggests to me, in making sure that one extreme is avoided,
generally results in the opposite extreme being too closely approached.  It
is often said of the Holocaust that it should happen "never again."  But
what does that mean?  It certainly couldn't mean that those who say it need
to remember the Holocaust in order to not commit one themselves.  It means
that it should be remembered in order to prevent others from committing
another one.  The only way I can think of doing this is to forcibly prevent
those who might commit one from committing one.  But, past a certain degree
of certainty, the only way to prevent certain people in power from
committing mass murder is to mass murder them, thus, by trying to be too
sure of avoiding one extreme, causing the same kind of destruction by going
to the other extreme.    

HPB made many dogmatic statements.  Having a society with no authority is
impossible.