The Guru

 

Collectivism is a very ancient, powerful, instinctive drive at work in all humans. The human desire to be well esteemed by the pack, to have and extend and increase that status and specific rank within its hierarchy of value and rank—it is every human being’s preference to increase that rank, by endeavors undertaken, by the spoken word and by how one carries oneself.

 

One then associates with others popular and of higher rank socially to grow in group status and esteem with them. Should someone be of lesser status, they are to be snubbed and shunned to remind them of their lower status. To associate with them is to see one’s social rank reduced. That is the worst news to receive for a collectivist. Rank trumps all. The hierarchy is the religion, the abstraction worshipped is their god, and the guru is their prophet and leader.

 

This is Lera’s key weapon for keeping people in bondage and sin. People are warned not to maverize, leaving the group, proclaiming their independence from it. Such people, maverizers, or merely just non-individuating loners, are outcast: they no longer exist. As aliens it is acceptable to treat them with great cruelty and extreme force.

 

Since people crave being a popular joiner of some degree of social rank, they rarely elect to leave the group and self-actualize, but the latter commitment is exactly what the Good Spirits demand of each of us, but few are strong enough, willful enough or courageous enough to summon the energy and resolve to bring that separation about. This is why there are so few good people in the world.

 

Now every prime minister, every strongman, every demagogue, and every guru take full advantage of this herding instinct and the bottomless ambition to grow in rank and popularity. By making the people swear allegiance to the ideology favored by the guru, by pointing to this true believing allegiance and state of existence as the litmus test of ultimate loyalty to the pack and its cause, that that allegiance and devotion must be affirmative, immediate, unswerving, enthusiastic, absolute and immediately yielded less the hesitant one or naysayer be cast out of the flock forever, a fate worse than death for the faithful.

 

In their weird way, the herd members, based upon rank within the pack, rank based upon purity of unthinking commitment to the group’s narrative, its groupspeak, its groupthink, speak the truth that the most popular are superior in value to their inferiors of lesser rank and popularity.

 

This assignment of personal worth is not based on meritocracy of achievement, original thinking, talent, hard work, or spiritual or moral goodness—objective measurements of personal superiority and worth. Instead this assignment of personal worth is entirely subjective, based on irrational assignation of worth, popularity and rank granted each member by the guru or his lieutenants. The more pure the allegiance that a member shows and expresses to the guru, his organization and his cause, that person enjoys the highest or higher group status. The most popular member has no soul left, has completely surrendered his will and soul to the group. He will do anything, anything at all to retain and increase his status, and this is how mass movements are born, and how they become radicalized agents of pure evil unleashed to destroy people and civil society.

 

God and the Good Spirits are at work too. They nudge each member of every pack to leave the pack, to moderate and maverize, to lead a rational, uplifting, individuating, liberated life. Each liberated maverizer is invited to and will be rewarded for serving the Good Spirits.

 

These great souls and living angels will begin to multiply in number, but, they should realize that the price for being free is that the guru and his slaves will come howling after her, a festering, violent enraged mob seeking to get her to change her mind and go back into the pack, back into bondage and a life of sin and worthlessness. The mob will resort to terror, violence, even murder to send a message to the dissenters that rebellion against the guru and his cause will not be tolerated whatsoever. The vicious mistreatment of the maverizers by the hysterical, angry groupists is a warning to others group members that should they seek to  or leave the pack, parallel mistreatment immediately awaits them.

 

The maverizers must by their words and deeds serve as examples to their fellow humans that no individual is to accept being enslaved or abused by another in a pack setting, or to enslave or abuse others of lesser rank and power in a group setting—the latter mistreatment of others is how a ambitious young guru grows in power, rank and wickedness.