| The cricital pages: index » The malignant cult nxivm (K.Raniere) |
I first heard of this malignant cult (*), in episode 1 of "The vow" which seemed interesting for depicting a (supposedly) very intelligent guy who was trying to make positive changes to the world, but it turned out very different. Earlier that day I had watched the first 40 minutes of the 1st part in the 3 part film adaptation of the book "Atlas shrugged" by Ayn Rand (**). I stopped watching that film after 40 minutes because of the rather simplistic thinking that shone through, at which point I stopped and thought "This is the psychopath's bible!"... Later that day I watched ep. 1 of "The vow", and coincidentally, in it was shown a copy of the book "Atlas shrugged" and Mark Vicente mentioned a concept from her philosophy. Rand's philosophy is about selfishness being made virtuous, which is a typical reversal of values that anti-social people do, and which Raniere did in his creation of the women's 'club' within nxivm. I will publish my analysis on this soon, so you can see how it works.
(*) Note that the word 'cult' does not in itself have a negative nor positive aspect, though the word has been used for several decades at least, in the sense of a cult with negative influence.
(**) In 2011 I watched the series "All watched over by machines of loving grace" by Adam Curtis, about computers and information being available everywhere did not make the structures in society less restrictive. He mentioned Ayn Rand and her influence on many people involved in high tech companies (Silicon valley) who follow her ideas, as indicated too by company names such as Oracle, which is a name from one of her books. I intended to read one of her books, but never got round to that but I did notice many people in such companies acting like, and probably being, psychopaths (such as Larry Ellison, owner of Oracle). Having looked into Rand's ideas a bit more it all makes sense...
What was instrumental in taking down Raniere and his group was the use of 'collateral' in his stupid idea of forming a women's group that should have empowered women. In his reasoning Raniere uses a ridiculous reversed reasoning of feeling empowered by doing what someone else wants you to do, which reminded me of a film with Sean Connery, "The offence" (1972/1973), which I watched in my youth when it was shown on TV. I will go into more detail about this in my analysis of Raniere.
What I already analysed: From certain videos on youtube, I know nearly instantly what he is like in certain aspects. The TV series "The vow" was pretty poor in this respect, it was stretched out far too long, and only showed relevant videos from which you could quickly see what his personality is like, in the last 2 episodes, instead of doing that, say, in episode 2.
What I am interested in further than what I've done so far, is:
1. to find out what materials were publicly available before the court case in 2018, to show what the leader Raniere is like from that (i.e. without taking a course with this guy/company) and to show how soon anyone may or should have realised from public sources, what he is like. I may talk a bit about scientology too. My interest is to see how quickly you can find out the true intent of the leader (and from that, answer the question of whether people could have been warned about it far earlier than what was instrumental in the dismantling of nxivm, namely the expose in 2017 on frankreport on a specific event in the women's empowerment group that eventually paved the way for prosecution of Raniere and others.
2. Analyse some of the course material if it's available online. If you have or know of a printed or digital version, I'd be interested to hear about it.
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Last modified: 2020-11-21