Cults

Seven men were arrested in England last month on suspicion of involvement in a “castration cult.” Led by a man from London who apparently goes by the name “The Eunuch Maker”, the group is alleged to have castrated people and uploaded footage of the dangerous deeds to a pay-per-view platform. I suspect the use of the term “cult” is overheated. Certainly, castration has resulted from deranged theological or ideological tendencies. The Skopty sect in the Russian Empire believed in the removal of male genitals and female breasts on the basis that they represented the two halves of the forbidden fruit. (This must have made it remarkably difficult for the sect to grow.) Members of the Heaven’s Gate cult believed in castration as well, seeing it as a means of achieving ascetism.

Perhaps you’ve noticed that America isn’t holding it together very well. Every airplane seems to have a middle-aged man throwing a temper tantrum about his facemask, every state house has some woman with artificial hair coloring and too much facial filler screaming about some imagined threat to “the children,” and every time I think I have found a normal person on Twitter it only takes twenty seconds of browsing their timeline to find a post that compares the Covid-19 vaccine to the Holocaust. It would be easy to dismiss this as just a particularly nasty lull in our collective sanity, but it’s time to be real. We have always been like this. Our nation wasn’t founded when the Mayflower arrived at Plymouth Rock, as they taught us in kindergarten.