In looking at the Heaven’s Gate site first and then reading the essays, I understood after the fact what everyone else did as they were reading. Even then, the first thing that caught my attention were how outrageous it all sounded, which is something Applewhite thankfully acknowledged in the video that Amy linked us to. What does validate his words is his confidence though, the conviction that what he is telling us is the Truth whether we like it or not or even believe it. That he actually says outright how the rest of society will look at them works to keep potential believers interested. Someone who knows they’re different trying to get other people to join them is much more convincing and likable than someone who tries to play off that their very different group is normal.
It’s how you get Nichelle Nichols’ brother to join your cult, after all.
What interested me the most abou Heaven’s Gate was probably how they treated themselves as, I won’t say school, but they have training videos and all these learning supplements and the students of this cult were called students. I also think it’s important to note how there was reported shift in Applewhite’s behavior after the death of Betty Nettles following her bout with cancer. His heart attack may have led him to suddenly believing that he was some type of reincarnated/inhabited Christ but it was after her death that he began to appear close to the man who advocated suicide to escape Earth when suicide had been one of the things they had previously been against.
Of the three essays, I found myself most interested in the seventh one on psychology. Initially reading it, I found myself disagreeing with what Muenster and Lotto had to say about forgiveness first and foremost. The way that they explained it essentially ignored how people reflect constantly on behavior and will change their minds on things. For me, revenge is more a state of mind than an emotion – the emotion felt would be the rage they were discussing as well as pain, or hurt – and saying that forgiveness is the opposite of revenge doesn’t take into account how emotions are fluid, how states of mind are always changing, and how you can feel multiple emotions at once when faced with a situation. There is that initial humiliation and/or shame that is almost immediately there. There’s the instant need for either fleeing or fighting, for crying or yelling at whoever’s causing the pain, and escaping, no matter what was done before. Humans have the tendency to reflect afterwards and then sort how their emotions, figure out how they actually feel after the initial shock of the humiliation.
We see this with children who feel wronged by whatever punishment they’ve been given by their caretakers or throw tantrums but then calm and either apologize or not talk to the person. They understand after the fact, they’ve thought it through.
Now, that was all before remembering that this is talking about the fundamentalist mindset and these are people who have no sense of fluidity because it does not benefit them or their beliefs. Which complicates things because fundamentalists are quite sure in their binary thinking and like opposites because it simplifies their world into concepts their unstable minds can comprehend easier and makes it easier to create the “us versus them” camps. I would say that revenge doesn’t equal justice because to be just in judgment and to right a wrong done unto you can’t be done at the same time. Justice, essentially, needs to be done by an outside party not by the person feeling wronged, in the sense of the fundamentalists, this other person would be the God who punishes the sinners. Those who equate revenge and justice and use it to justify their violence are undermining their own God and their own beliefs in order to empower themselves against wrongs done to them. That sense of self that’s been attacked is suddenly strengthened, is not the weak self that allowed such a humiliating attack in the first place, and is the bigger person suddenly because they have this enlightened sense of mind that’s much more powerful than their attackers.
The conclusion of the essay is spot-on though. America had been victimized, it had been attacked on its own soil by an outside force when that’d hadn’t happened since probably the 1700s. And even though there was most assuredly the “us versus them” mentality, the face of the them changed the more people began to see what it was doing to our population. Initially, anyone wearing a turban or a hijab was a threat. And then, people suddenly remembered that people in this country were Americans as well. The shift was even more focused externally. And then people realized that no, in some of these countries the very citizens are being attacked by their own domestic threats. And slowly but surely, too slowly really, the other gained faces and joined the us. I’m not saying there’s no racism still out there and this instinctive alertness in some people when people of other races are nearby but opening up your mind and seeing people as they are creates a fluidity, an openness to accept others once you see they have the same plight. What fundamentalists are doing then, if this isn’t the case for them, is isolating themselves even more and not allowing others in to share in their salvation, which is actually not their plan at all if they’re supposed to be trying to save everyone and get in their faces about it. It’s weird.
