Cults, the fallacy of bear hibernation, and the fundamental brokenness of America
Just because 0 is not the exact same as 2, it does not mean that 100 is the correct answer
I’ve been sitting on this essay for nearly two years now.
Part of it is because there’s just so much I want to explore, and I’m slowly adding or subtracting bits of writing like a fastidious painter painstakingly putting down a layer of color, stroke by stroke, over the course of their entire lifetime. But if I’m being completely honest, I think I’ve probably been procrastinating on hitting publish—not because I’m don’t think the piece is ready, but because I don’t know if it will do any good. I’m not aiming to change the world or anything with it, but I also don’t know if the act of making this essay public will materially help or harm.
I do know that this subject has been on my mind for a very long time, longer even than the writing of the essay. I started writing this essay in the fall of 2020. There comes a moment where you gotta shit or get off the pot, as my grandfather would say. And for me, that moment came on May 25, 2022 when 19 babies and 2 teachers were massacred at an elementary school in Texas and instead of rage, all I could muster up was an overwhelming sense of despair. I’ve felt helpless before, but this is the first time I’ve ever felt hopeless.
So here goes: a 3000+ word essay on cults, mob mentality, tribalism, and the fundamental brokenness of American culture. Go easy on me, friends.
At some point in early 2021, I was in the shower when I realized that the fallacy about bear hibernation was a symptom of the cancer that was eating away at our society.
Turns out, bears don’t hibernate precisely as we’ve always thought, and this simple revelation—clarification—had caused quite a stir with the chronically online.
“What happens on the internet,” John Green was saying to his brother Hank through the waterproof speakers of my mini Bluetooth player, “is somebody says, hey, a piece of wisdom you’ve been told is true your whole life is turns out to be slightly oversimplified, and then everyone concludes from this bears don’t hibernate.”1
I tilted my head back and rinsed the shampoo suds from my hair. Sulfates, I know, I know. Even though I have wavy hair, I don’t really follow the Curly Girl method, not anymore. Application more than product seems to make a difference for me. Squirting a generous dollop of conditioner onto my palm, I flipped my head over and began running my hands through my hair, watching waves form beneath the water.
Bears do hibernate, of course, as John and Hank reassured each other; they just hibernate in a slightly different way than common wisdom would have us believe. Just because they don’t stay asleep through the entirety of winter doesn’t mean they don’t hibernate at all.
“If you think about being right about bear hibernation being a 2 on a scale of 1 to 100,” John said, “then we’ve gone from 0—which isn’t right, but is close to right—to 100, which is really far away from 2.”
I paused, then resumed squishing to condish.
“We need to live in a world,” he continued, “where just because 0 is not the exact same as 2, it does not mean that 100 is the correct answer.”
I turned off the faucet. The scent of roses bloomed in the humidity of the bathroom as I soaped up, then hurriedly turned the hot water back on to rinse. My mind wandered back to news headlines I had skimmed on my phone while cycling that morning—Marjorie Taylor Green, cancel culture, QAnon. Then I thought of The Discourse™2 I had glimpsed for a second on Twitter before closing the app.
Just because 0 is not the exact same as 2, it does not mean that 100 is the correct answer.
I shut off the spigot, opened the shower curtain, and reached for my bathrobe, turning down the volume on my mini Bluetooth speaker as the Green brothers continued to talk, answering questions and giving dubious advice as they always do on their podcast. But it was The Discourse™ that was stuck in my mind as I ran curl cream through my soaking locks—The Discourse,™ and the increasing isolation I felt whenever I logged on to Twitter. The isolation, the unease, the worry.
Because I’m afraid that we all think we’re at 0, when in truth we’re really at 100.
In the summer of 2020, I binge-watched a lot of cult documentaries. The Vow. Seduced: Inside the NXIVM Cult (for which I had signed up for a free trial of Showtime, then promptly canceled once I’d finished). Heaven’s Gate. I fall into the same category as a certain type of white woman who enjoys true crime everything. Law & Order. Forensic Files. Every show on the Investigation Discovery channel. Podcasts. Everything except My Favorite Murder. I’m not white enough to enjoy My Favorite Murder.
Cults, I think, are somewhat related to my interest in true crime—the slightly seedy sense of lurid voyeurism, the morbid curiosity, the constant fitting and imagining of myself in those situations. What would I do if a serial killer broke into my house? How would I defend myself? Would the self-defense moves against knife attacks I learned in taekwondo be useful?
And:
Am I susceptible to a cult?
My cult-documentary binge took place in the months leading into the fall before the 2020 US election, and QAnon was everywhere. Perhaps not as visible as they would be just before and after the Capitol riots on January 6, 2021, but everywhere nonetheless. I had been listening to an NPR podcast called No Compromise, which was about far-right gun activists, not necessarily QAnon, but there was no escaping QAnon when talking about the far-right. I was watching a YouTube video about Flat Earthers by Dan Olsen of the channel Folding Ideas, and yes, even here you can find QAnon along with other conspiracy theorists.
I was developing a fixation with QAnon in my own way—not the content of what they believed, but why they believed. Where they came from. How they got to Q. The rejection and repudiation of facts and truth interested me less than the journey from Fox News to Fucking Nah. I’m bipolar. I’ve been manic. I know what it’s like to reject objective reality for one of my own making, so I wanted to know how everyone else got there. They couldn’t all be crazy like me, could they?
Could they?
In one of the many documentaries I watched that fall, one of the therapists said that anyone was susceptible to a cult. In fact, the sort of person cults liked to recruit was generally idealistic, highly educated, and well-placed in their communities—the sort of person who believes the world can be a better place, and possesses the drive to bring that vision into reality. The ones who yearn to believe in a cause.
In short, romantic idealists. Romantic idealists with savior complexes.
And what are Americans if not romantic idealists with savior complexes?
It turns out, I am actually susceptible to a cult.
I used to believe in the myth that the United States was somehow more free, more democratic, more wonderful, just…more than the rest of the world.
A lot of this belief was passed down to me by my immigrant mother, and not my white father. This bootstraps narrative seems to have worked on and for her; my mother grew up under a military dictatorship in South Korea with no freedom of speech, expression, or opportunities for women. She grew up working class to two parents who had literally lost everything but their lives while fleeing the North. My mother was bright, driven, and incredibly gifted with languages, and managed to make it to the United States in search of a better life.3
And she did make a better life. She worked as a bank teller while earning her undergraduate degree, and slowly managed to climb the ladder of the network of Japanese banks proliferating southern California in the late 80s and early 90s due to her fluency in Korean, English, and Japanese. It was at one of these Japanese banks where she would meet my father, who was also working there. The story ends happily. They fell in love, they had a family, they provided for their family. My parents managed to build something together.
Is this not the American Dream? Immigration! Diversity! Education providing opportunities! My mother had chafed under the cultural constraints of a neo-Confucian society while growing up; she had always been too smart, too bright, too much for the quiet, demure, stoically enduring woman she was expected to become. Here, in America, she could be bold, she could be brash, she could be who she truly wanted to be and truly was. That was freedom to her. That was why America was the greatest country in the world.
I’m glad it worked out for her.
I’ve admitted before that my own upbringing was charmed. It was the very picture of a 90s PBS kids show—children of every color bringing their own flavors and cultures to a melting pot and living in love and harmony. I was born and raised in California, where no racial group makes up a majority of the population, so my sense of self as anything but an American with extra seasoning was never challenged. This country was mine; I belonged to it and it belonged to me.
It wouldn’t be until 2016 that I would realize this was a lie.
Trump was not the reason, but he was the warning sign I could no longer ignore.
Roshani Chokshi jokingly calls me an Oracle because I often appear to have a lot of foresight or a too-prescient read on things, but it’s really more that I draw conclusions after a lot of self-analysis which I then extrapolate to the world around me.
I remember having a glass of wine with her at her apartment the night after the 2016 election at her apartment. “I mean, he’ll just be a single term president, right?” she asked hopefully.
I swirled the glass in my hand. After a moment, I shook my head.
“No?” And it was the tremble in her voice that undid me.
That night, I could see clearly that the road ahead would be dark, but moreover, that the path behind me had always been dark. It’s just that I had always had my little circle of light around me, keeping the predators of American exceptionalism at bay with my optimism. We had just elected our first Black president, and a woman president had seemed to be the next logical step. Progress!
But the batteries in my flashlight were dead now.
Those predators of racism, white supremacy, Christian nationalism, extreme individualism, narcissistic self-importance, callous indifference, and insecure defensiveness had always been present. I was just able to ignore them in the middle of my little circle of light.
Trump’s shadow looms over the country, far bigger and far darker than the person sitting in the White House. And frankly, that shadow is far bigger than Trump himself. His cult of personality is slowly transforming into an actual cult, and I can’t help but watch with increasing unease as more and more Americans succumb to it.
In the weeks before the 2020 election, I would bemoan the state of reading comprehension and the failure of the American education system to Lemon, but the truth was that Trump supporters could read just fine; it was what they were reading that was the problem. They were consuming what was the equivalent of clickbait news, the You Must Stop Eating This One Thing to Lose Your Belly Fat of articles.
“Part of the reason that these You’ve been lied to takes are so compelling to us is that they feel like a shortcut to true expertise,” John Green said on his podcast about bear hibernation (it was not actually about bear hibernation).
“And a superiority thing,” added Hank.
John snorted. “Yes, I know the real truth of hibernation."
The Green brothers laughed, but as I stood in my steam-filled bathroom and diffused my hair dry, I was struck by a sudden understanding of what drew people toward cults in the first place—that feeling of superiority, of feeling smug in your specialness.
진실도 거짓이 돼
Even truth becomes lies거짓도 진실이 돼
Even lie becomes truth이곳에선 모두가 도덕적 사고와 판단이 완벽한 사람이 돼
Here everyone becomes someone with perfect moral thinking and judgment웃기시네
It’s funny—BTS, 욱! (Ugh!)
In my favorite (only?) anti-Karen anthem ever, Suga raps about how nowadays, people are far too eager to get riled up over the smallest thing, in part because we like to get high off our sense of righteousness. We be out here doing whip-its off our moral superiority, and it’s not doing us any good.
It wasn’t just QAnon. It was the mansplainer I used to work with, my old NYC landlord who called me an Oriental, my best friend gleefully reveling in the downfall of her nemesis, fellow marginalized authors on Book Twitter policing how we expressed our identities, me. It was more than the obvious bigots; it was the people I called my colleagues and peers. It was the progressive activists on social media defining the meaning of someone else’s pain in the name of justice. It was leftist UK Twitter commenting on the racial politics of a country in which they did not live or vote—mine.
It wasn’t just an American problem, but the problem was definitely American in its scale—large, fractious, expanding, colonial, smug, and insufferably righteous.
The American problem was not just pretending this was normal, but deluding ourselves into thinking this was good.
This is not a problem limited to political ideology. The left is just as susceptible to cult mentality as the right. We excoriate those who are not progressive enough, who aren’t progressive in the right ways, who don’t express their progressive ideals properly, and so on and so forth. We have no ethical framework to guide us, so we fling our individual morality at each other in a battle royale that will have no winner.
During the pandemic, when masking had become a type of shibboleth signaling our political leanings to one another, I couldn’t help but think of the difference between the United States and Korea in terms of our cultural conceptions of society. For Koreans, society is something in which we are all a part, willing or not, so we must make the best of it. For Americans, society is something in which we can choose not to participate, because that’s what individual freedom means.
Or that’s what individual freedom has come to mean.
Masking was common in East Asia long before the pandemic for multiple reasons: to filter out pollutants in the air, to hide your face after a plastic surgery procedure (in Korea), to prevent your germs from spreading to other people, if you were just having a bad skin day. It’s just another item of clothing to some extent, more utilitarian than fashion. People here often focus on the fact that Asian people wear masks when sick “as a courtesy to others” but the honest truth is, yes, it is a courtesy, but it’s also to avoid public shame. Shame is a powerful corrective tool, as any child of an Asian parent would intimately know.
Americans are shameless.
This isn’t to say we don’t feel shame; it’s just that we refuse to acknowledge shame exists. It’s a mark of pride for us to ignore our uncomfortable feelings, to come back from being “cancelled,” to be as crass and vulgar as possible. To some extent, this can be a good thing; there is a certain learned resilience in resisting shame. Too much shame is bullying, but too little shame is narcissism. Surely there is a balance.
But balance doesn’t exist in times like these. Americans don’t know shame; they only know humiliation. We equate being shamed with demoralization instead of what it should be: accountability. South Korea—having learned hard lessons from the MERS outbreak in 2015—willingly gave up a lot of their privacies to keep themselves safe during the early days of the COVID outbreak. They allowed their phones to be tracked, for their information to be made public, all in the name of public health and safety. Those who found in violation of quarantine or isolation were often shamed by netizens online, their names dragged through the mud in public forums and local media. There is a dark side to all of this, of course, as online bullying is a serious epidemic in South Korean society, and suicide rates for young people are some of the highest in the world. Is shaming always a good thing? Not in the least. But it is a tool of accountability, and tools work best in a set. If a hammer’s all you’ve got, you’re gonna be fucked when you need a screwdriver. Shame, along with encouragement, along with support and resources, along with a whole host of societal functions keeps people in community with each other.
We are slowly losing the tools in our set. Soon there will be nothing left but a handful of loose screws, some sawdust, and leftover fastenings from long abandoned projects.
For the past two—six years, really—I’ve been thinking and thinking and thinking about how on earth we can save ourselves. I used to have optimism, to believe that ultimately every American had the same desire for progress. We might have different about the means, but the goals were the same.
I know now that’s not in the least bit true.
Back when I was still eyeball-deep in my cult hyperfixation, I kept thinking about something John Green said once.
Literature is in the business of helping us to imagine ourselves and others more complexly, of connecting us to the ancient conversation about how to live as a person in a world full of other people.4
This idea of imagining ourselves and others complexly is a theme that runs throughout John’s work—his videos, his podcasts, and what writing he does nowadays. His conception of “complexly” would be limited, of course, by the very nature of who he is, but he’s not alone in that. My view, my perspective, is limited by the nature of who I am, the experiences I’ve lived. Amongst a few of my friends and peers, John’s talent and celebrity is viewed through the (rightful) skepticism that we should afford all middle-aged white men, but I’ve always liked his work—less his novels than his other writing, perhaps. John seemed to have a way of bringing nuance to things, of changing the perspective just enough to make me realize that I wasn’t looking at something flat and two-dimensional, but something weighty and full of matter.
But I like the Green brothers, so maybe I’m inclined to go easy on them. Because I’m an Old, I remember when John Green was a YA author and when Hank Green was his little brother who asked him to start a YouTube channel where they talked to each other everyday via video. (Filmed, edited, and uploaded, not via Zoom.) If we were to measure my age in iterations of Green brothers, I’m Brotherhood 2.0 old. Looking for Alaska winning the Printz Award old. I’ve been bought into their cult for a long time, and for that length of time, I’ve always believed treating people with empathy, compassion, dignity, and nuance was the way to heal wounds.
But I’m not so sure I believe this anymore.
Over the summer of 2020, I developed a fixation with QAnon because I had come to understand that there was no “fixing” them. Most deprogrammers and therapists would say that the necessity of trust is the most essential part of breaking someone out of a cult. From within the fishbowl of groupthink, everyone on the outside looks ghoulish—warped and stretched beyond recognition. You have to find a way to become human to those swimming in ideology. If I were the goldfish, I would have to remember that the frightening figures outside my fishbowl are human. I can’t flatten them into an avatar, to an unfeeling image on the screen. I have to imagine them complexly, as persons whole and individual.
But that trust has to be a two-way street. The far-right cannot not be reasoned with, their outlandish ideas cannot be debunked. We live in two different realities and ne’er the twain shall meet. The moment they began twisting truths into their own narratives was the moment I should have realized they were lost, but it was also the moment I should have realized I cared more about winning than solving the problem.
Just because 0 is not the exact same as 2, it does not mean that 100 is the correct answer.
Reality has been rewritten, the rules changed. 100 is now closer to 2; anything else is the wrong answer.
There is something deeply wrong with the world.
I feel in the water. I feel it in the earth. I smell it in the air. Much that once was is lost, for none now live who remember it.
—J. R. R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring
It’s funny how we can all agree that something is wrong, but none of us can agree on the cause. We have wrecked havoc on the planet, and soon it will wreak havoc on us. The rich grower richer, the poor grow poorer. We are not safe. None of us are safe. Recursive thoughts, over and over, my mind keeps circling concepts like a vulture, picking at ideas until there’s nothing left but bones.
And the bones are broken.
One Quirk Too Many, Episode 227, the Dear Hank and John podcast
What discourse? Does it matter? The players and the play itself may change, but the Discourse™ remains eternal.
There is…a lot more to this story than I will share, but this is the gist.
John Green, speech given at the 2008 ALAN conference
I'm feeling a lot of this.
Re: Qanon: This is when I started reporting-and-blocking all the misinformation, harassment, trolling, etc I came across on Twitter. I deliberately sought it out - block people before they can find out you exist, before they decide to target you for their followers to pile on. I'd do this for hours every day. I still do, though this past week or so, I've spent hours instead window-shopping on eBay. Twitter must automatically disregard my reports. But I wouldn't send them so many reports, if there wasn't so much stuff to report.
Re: cults: Maybe my concern for Qanon people arose from the fact that I could have been one of them, had I not seen warning signs. I discovered a website when I was looking to find out what a music video was about. That was interesting. I dropped the website, however, when realising that every person who covers one eye when photographed is likely not a victim of sex trafficking. Mostly, covering one eye is not that deep. So I unsubscribed from the site, and blogs and feed readers were being phased out, anyway. (I miss Google Reader.)
Re: feeling superior: Every time I hear of a school shooting - or any mass shooting - in the USA. Because I was born, raised, and still live in suburban Australia. Never had live-shooter drills, because no reason to. If there are guns, they belong to farmers with livestock. The motorcycle gangs and crime families. Not suburban Australians. Not people owning them claiming that they do so in order to "protect". There was a gun amnesty after Port Arthur, of which I was too young to remember at the time. Even with a prime minister whose party I don't like, the politicians of all parties came together to do what was right. The superior smugness of "we did it, so USA could too - they just don't want to". Or not enough to. American gun culture is a thing that maybe suburban Australians like me might never truly understand. And that's a blessing. Not personally having a reason to worry about gun violence is a privilege, when it should be a right.
I don't think your essay harms. I don't know if it helps, but it lets readers know that we're not the only people feeling this way, or at least in some aspects.
Thank you for sharing it.