Why do people join cults?
Why do they subordinate themselves to a movement that goes against their own interests? Why do they suspend all logic and reason, and blindly follow people who talk total nonsense?
And is there any way to talk sense to them?
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Psychologists, sociologists and historians have been trying to work this out at least since the 1930s. The rest of us have been trying to work this out since, oh, around the time Donald Trump announced his campaign for president last summer.
Some experts say that cult members just have a type of personality flaw that makes them cannon fodder for would-be dictators. Others say that even normal people can succumb to a cult when they feel their world is turned upside down. Others say that people who join cults are basically just a bit thick.
On “Game of Thrones,” anyone who wants to join the Faceless Men must literally surrender their identities and “become no one” to join. They must be willing to suffer without complaint and obey without question.
In “Blood of My Blood,” which aired Sunday, neophyte Arya Stark finally worked out that this was just a sociopathic group of assassins, and quit.
They had beaten her and blinded her, made her sweep the floors and wash dead bodies. When she first turned up they slammed the door in her face. They had demonstrated their willingness to assassinate strangers on demand. It seemed that nothing they could do would drive her away.
But it wasn’t until they ordered her to murder a complete innocent that the penny dropped.
Arya is not alone.
The High Sparrow and his fanatical followers have two new recruits.
In Westeros, the cult of the aristocracy is crumbling. The rich houses of the Lannisters and Tyrells found they could no longer rely on the support of the peasants they trample on. The High Sparrow challenged them and they backed down. Now, too, he has won over the king and queen as well.
Sam Tarly’s horrible and abusive father found that his cult-like authority over his family has collapsed. And Sam walked out of the castle at night and stole the family’s Valyrian sword on the way.
And the farcical and treacherous Walder Frey has found that the cult of respect he believed he enjoyed existed only in his own mind. Assassinating Rob Stark at the Red Wedding has not stopped people laughing at him. Quite the reverse: After the Tullys recovered Riverrun from his bungling and useless sons, he is more of a laughingstock than ever.
But as many cults fall, others rise. Daenerys Targaryen kept a straight face while delivering a speech of Dothraki gibberish from the back of a dragon. In translation, the speech amounted to an appeal to the Dothraki to travel thousands of miles across the ocean in order to fight and die to help her claim a throne she has never before occupied over a land they have never before seen. Indeed the more we see of miserable Westeros, the more we wonder why everyone doesn’t move to the much nicer lands to the east.
She offered them not one good reason to do so. But they cheered nonetheless.
As Jim Morrison once observed, people are strange.
This article was originally published on Marketwatch.
