Documentary follow-up
I finished the NXIVM documentary (first season) last night. There's a second season coming, apparently.
There were a couple of things worth mentioning that I forgot to include yesterday. The first is that one of the cult's initial appeals to someone was that their deserved station in life was higher. They were superior, but they were holding themselves back. All they needed to do was follow this "process" to get their reward.
That kind of appeal to superiority is especially appealing to people who have narcissistic tendencies (like actors). People who think particularly highly of themselves, but weren't at the success level that they thought they deserved, were particularly vulnerable.
The other thing that really struck was just how mediocre the guy who led the cult actually was. He claimed to have done all kinds of incredible things, but it was pretty obvious right away that he hadn't done any of them. He was just a dumpy, unremarkable person who was "good" at exactly one thing: being a predator.
An example: he claimed he had a 240 IQ (sure you did, buddy). But when he was writing on a tear sheet during a presentation, he wrote the word "stolen" as "stollen." Not only did he do it, but he stared at it while he was talking about the point he was trying to make.
Whenever he explained something, he just spewed out a word salad that was incoherent to anyone thinking critically. But it's hard to think critically in a claustrophobic environment that constantly reinforces everything he says.
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