Cult Leader is the New Barista
Generation Midsommar (Eyes Nailed Shut)
Let’s do a little experiment. Say that you’re a Sexy Anthropologist. A Cultural Futurist, even. You’ve been doing some research, and you’ve been noticing a trend. At first glance, it may seem outrageous, but you can’t ignore the truth.
Your average Joe is now a cult leader.
Perhaps it’s the death of religion. Perhaps it’s the economy. Perhaps it’s loneliness. Perhaps it’s the communists all up in the institutions. Perhaps it’s some postmodern schizophrenic breakdown of Western Civilization. Yet whatever is going on, you ask the following question:
“Why is everyone a cult leader now?”
Instead of getting honest responses, a bunch of people start asking you where all the cults are. Some people tell you they’ve decided to start a cult. Others ask you to click on the links to their cult startups. They’re so bullish on this whole cult thing. It’s cults all the way down.
What follows is my Cultural Futurist Trend Report on Generation Midsommar.
Cult leader is the new barista. When everyone is a cult leader nobody is a cult leader. You want a ticket to the show? You’ve got cattle posing as guru-superstars. You’ve got everything because you’ve got nothing. You’ve got mail. You’ve got a pandemic of a million cults. Mask up, because the inversion is coming straight to your brain. The role of the cult leader could not possibly be more mundane than it is in this era. Midsommar was a film mocking this type of thing, but of course the message was lost.
Midsommar was not a Manual
What we’re experiencing isn’t just the everyman attempting to brand themselves as a cult leader. Now sex is involved too! A bunch of people are starting sex cults in Silicon Valley. They call them embodiment retreats and ask you to spend thousands of dollars so you can get laid during some “meditation ceremony.” You’ll pay up if you’re stupid and desperate for sex. You’ll pay up if you want to be in style. You’ll pay up if you want to feel like you’re a part of something bigger than yourself and have no idea what cults actually do.
During my research into the field I found the whole thing repulsive. I was, in fact, disgusted by the entire landscape. Perhaps I was plugged into some elite network, as what I found to be boring was the same thing that the average person found to be fascinating. I was getting used to life on the edge by now.
Literally whatever.
"I’m so far ahead I can’t even keep up with myself,” I thought in self-parody. Yet I would not cower into a hell of my own narcissism. I needed to understand Generation Midsommar. I needed to get to the core of the matter. As I ventured further into the field, I casually mentioned how boring and common sex cults were to the users on the terrain. I got the same formulaic joke-response every time:
“I keep hearing about all these sex cults. Why wasn’t I invited to them?”
Now let’s think about this for a moment. It’s possible that if you aren’t getting invited to these sex cults it may just be that you’ve lived a basic life. You’re focused on your programming job that’s about to be replaced by ChatGPT. This is fine, because you’ve dodged a bullet. You’re safe. The only thing you’re missing is a life of getting groomed and taken advantage of. Sexually if you’re a woman and financially if you’re a man.
Vessel - A vessel is a sex slave who is meant to carry out the duties of the cult.
Vessels were huge during the MKUltra era. For those not familiar with MKUltra, it happened. The book Chaos gets into it quite a bit. This is not to say that LSD is bad. I love LSD and think it should be fully legalized. Baby, separate from bathwater. Yet during the 60s, Charles Manson used it to get women to have sex with him so he could carry out his “mission.” Thousands of copycats began doing the same thing and continue to do so to this day.
Again, I could hear the chants in the background.
“That sounds like fun. I want to give women acid to get them to have sex with me and carry out my mission, too!”
Except that they were the women in this case, which is what I felt that I needed to dive into. This is precisely what I wanted them to understand. I knew that I had to get through to these people, one way or another. I knew that I had to share the truth. The truth was all that mattered, for I was a digital crusader.
Eyes Nailed Shut
You know that scene in the film Eyes Wide Shut that everyone can’t stop wanking to? People are missing the point. They aren’t the leaders of the scene sacrificing the innocent vessel. The innocent vessel is the user. That’s right. The user is the vessel, especially if they think they are some type of a cult leader. They are following along with the latest trend and fabric of our era. They are the victim of the orgy scene in the film. They are the guy that just spent his entire savings only to watch a vessel perform her duty. They are the rape victim who thinks they are the rapist.
Beyond the repulsion of observing the herd's neurological cope fest, revealed by templates and spreadsheets, these frameworks of "higher truths" were marketed to these cohorts by the dozen. They displayed a dataset of naked emperors laid bare in the mud, begging for human vessels to participate in their delusions. This wasn’t some underground spiritualism on civilization’s frontier, but a throwback that rebranded indoctrination into the most algorithmic trends imaginable. Cult leader was the new barista, and it was one vessel after another.
The spiritual industrial complex was primed to cash in on this demographic's failures. It was a generational reset shepherding the economically precarious into increasingly hollowed premises - now with extra lattes. Yet what was causing Generation Midsommar? I needed to dig deeper. Some possible answers rang a bell.
1. The mistrust of the government during COVID
Lots of people discovered that the government was lying to them during the pandemic party. Welcome to what the rest of us had known for ages. Now every basic bitch and bro had become some type of cult leader or deranged loser desperate to join a cult. What they didn’t seem to realize was that neither of these things were distinguishable from one another. They both give off the same vibe. The same energy. The vibe and the energy of a low-status cult freak.
2. The Death of the West
The Death of the West was a great scapegoat here. Such an attractive option to blame human behavior on this spook. A Girardian wet dream without a human sacrifice. The social-wide-Jew. We could certainly say that disenchantment, often referred to as The Death of the West, had created this mass formation of guru-wannabes. Tree of Woe and John Carter both provided alternatives to Generation Midsommar, offering solutions for re-enchantment. Yet could all of this really be explained by The Death of the West?
3. The Gig Economy
This became my chosen explanation. A cult leader is a gig like any other, much like the life coach or guru of the past. It’s a way for your average nobody to get ahead in the attention zone, hence proving my theory that cult leader was indeed the new barista. As previous eras birthed subcultures fetishizing outlaws and gangs as escape valves from bleak financial prospects, modern cult fetishization was calculated to rebrand indentured servitude as edgy counterculture.
While all of these possibilities addressed the issue, I still felt uneasy about Generation Midsommer. I needed people to think for themselves. I needed people to get their minds back. I needed people to open their eyes. I needed people to know…
The Truth about Cults
Cults brainwash people. They are not glamorous. If you are thinking about joining or starting a cult, turn away. There is a better path ahead. There is nothing cool about joining or starting a cult, no matter how lonely or disenchanted you feel. You’re better off going to church or synagogue, traveling the world, writing a book, reading a book, or joining The Cultural Futurist as a paid member so you can attend my book clubs and salons.
Now, some more terminology.
Servitor - A servitor is a psychological complex created by a “magician” in order to activate a mission from the magician's consciousness.
Read this one a few times. Let’s go further down the rabbit hole and make sure we get out of it along the way. Read the paper without becoming the thing. This is how we win. A servitor is a psychological complex created by a “magician” in order to activate a mission from the magician's consciousness.
Human Servitor - A human servitor is a combination of a vessel and a servitor.
Do you want to become a living breathing symbol of someone else’s psychotic desires? No? Then do not become a human servitor. Do not allow yourself to do the psychotic work of someone else, no matter what they have to offer. Sex? Money? Community? None of it is worth it. Your consciousness must always remain your own. It is never to be tampered with, not by the mainstream media and not by these guru-wannabe baristas.
Cult leader is the new barista. You will never have a harem. You will never get people to obey your commands. Even if you can somehow pull one of these things off, you will still just be a basic bitch in Generation Midsommar. The mass-scale emergence of cult leaders and their popularity within our culture makes being a cult leader one of the lowest possible occupations you could entertain. You’ll get your 15 minutes of likes, and then you’ll be out the door. Learn to prompt.
What aspires the average barista to bigger dreams than becoming the next cult leader? A lifetime pouring lattes for Becky's gender studies or toiling in service of Jim Jones? Cult cretins, getting piped by saggy old wrinklefucks peddling Scientology 101? This is igniting generations of therapy for grandkids by asking some low-level guru-wannabes to indoctrinate you into their kingdoms of personal psychosis. It was once referred to as Satantic Ritual Abuse.
So, don’t become a cult leader. Don’t become the new barista. Don’t join a cult. Don’t seek out invitations to sex cults. They’re lame. They’re pathetic. Optimize for agency. It’s agency that you need. It’s agency that matters. Your mind must belong to you and only you. During an era of mass indoctrination, keep your mind free. The original red pill was thinking for yourself. That’s what made The Matrix such a good film. It is here that I will conclude my Cultural Futurist Trend Report. Thank you for exploring my deep dive into Generation Midsommar. Please share it with your agency and tell them that they need to hire people with more experience.
If you like what I’m doing here at The Cultural Futurist, don’t forget to buy me a coffee.
I was born into an infamous cult (the children of god, yeah a Californian sex cult of the 60s to the 90s). My parents had fun I didn’t. I grew up a Swiss-Italian kid with a Native American biological dad speaking west coast American in Europe. It was kind of hilarious now that I think about it.
We make baristas without chests and expect of them the ability to resist becoming cult leaders. We laugh at religious craft and are shocked to find enslaving esoterica advocating for blood and boredom. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful, only for them to be used by dull wenches in vain ritual orgies.