Commentary: Randy David’s A Society of Cults

It’s all a matter of perspective… and this I shall justify at the later part of this commentary.
I can remember my highschool fieldtrip to Mt. Banahaw. Prior to the actual trip itself we were already briefed about what to expect. Leave nothing but footprints, burn nothing but calories, take nothing but pictures…those were the typical taglines, which pretty much summarized how we should deal with the environment that we were about to venture into. But how to deal with the people we would be meeting there?! Well it merited an entirely different discussion. “Ladies, heighten your sensitivity and learn how not to be discriminatory”… obviously referring to the Rizalista’s that had their “kuta” beside the Husgado Cave, our teachers and tour guides warned us over and over, never to mention the word “kulto” in their presence.
Obviously the word in itself connotes a sense of derogation. As defined by trusty Mr. Webster a cult is: a quasi-religious group, often living in a colony, with a charismatic leader who indoctrinates members with unorthodox or extremist views, practices or beliefs. Adopting this definition makes it sound less harassing but in reality it makes the subject matter even more ambiguous and controversial.
As how I understood it to be, what Randy David was trying to underscore in his article was the unexplainable yet existent phenomenon of fanaticism. That when one is considered to be such, it’s hard to delineate figurative from literal; actual from idealistic, pragmatism from romanticism and more importantly actual reality and subjective reality. My mom once told me, in her wisdom and knowledge never to argue with a fanatic. I never really realized the seriousness of what she said until I did… and based on experience it’s not something that you would wish to re-live.
People who go by the flow of the mainstream couldn’t quite understand why, extremists like these exist in society. The followers of Hitler were such fanatics, that one could only wonder what kind of indoctrination was done unto them to make them so mad at an entire race and resort to killing approximately 6 million of their kind. Same as with the group of Osama bin Laden, which in the same way made their followers believe that they have to be suicide bombers to fulfill their destiny. We can call them fanatics and their group cults simply because we do not know where else to classify them.
Ecological radicals which believe in three frameworks none of them part of the mainstream can again be labeled as such. Eco-radicals believe in deep ecology, eco-feminism and social ecology that basically put the blame on the human race for the destruction of the environment. A true blooded eco-radical would be one who wouldn’t eat meat or freshly picked fruit and would be very careful not to step on plants because they believe that it is a form of murder. The preservation of nature is paramount that they aim to reverse and phase out all forms of technology so that our species may once again live in harmony and amidst the purity of nature. For some it is a form of psychosis to be this extremely attached, for others it is a case of absolute and unrecoverable fanaticism.
Even the leftists are not spared from this. Mainstream believers accuse leftists of penetrating the barrios and indoctrinating people who are not formally educated because they are the most vulnerable thus easy to sway. Karl Marx and his contemporaries (the Communist Manifesto as their bible) would serve as their “prophets” because leftists live and hang on to their every word. Protracted war is by all means justifiable to eradicate the current system.
I can actually continue mentioning all sorts of beliefs/ advocacies that people find worthy of their efforts yet relative to others is just a mediocre ideology; my point is: if there is one thing that I agree with in what Randy David has written, it is that fanatics exists and that our society is indeed a mish mash of different and sometimes clashing cults…. But sometimes it’s also a matter of perspective…