When someone, usually an intellectual, who has gained a cultish following for popularizing a concept becomes so drunk with power, he thinks he can apply that concept to everything.

I, you know, I would love for plumbers to read my essays, but currently my friends aren't reading them. So maybe, maybe we can start there. Right. Um, and this is, um, um, why I think it sometimes makes sense to actually double down on a cult because, um, in a cult you can be radicalized and sometimes that's exactly what's necessary. Um, to give you one simple example, you know, in a world that doesn't really seem to care about animals all that much, it's easy to become disillusioned. But then when, once you don't join a safe space of ambitious do-gooders, you can suddenly get this feeling like, Hey, I'm not the only one, right? There are other people who deeply care about animals as well. And you know what? Uh, I can do much more than I'm currently doing. So it can have a radicalizing effect. Now I totally acknowledge that there are all signs of dangers here. Um, like, uh, you can become too dogmatic. You can be, you know, quite hostile to people who don't share all your beliefs. So I do see all of that. I just want to recognize that if you look at some of these great movements of history, the abolitionists, the suffragettes, yeah, they have cultish aspects. They were, they were in a way.

by cultish devotion to Charles Manson.

That's not to say that serialism hasn't always had a cultish following