Video: Raniere speaks at V-Week on honor, justice, pain and his ‘transformative’ singing group, ‘Simply Human’

The man who set up DOS, the human branding and blackmail women’s slave group, Keith Raniere, speaks of ‘earning justice,’ ‘concepts like honor,’ and making them ’empowered with meaning,’
“We make things meaningful by hurting for them,” he says. [Does he mean branding?]
He introduces NXIVM’s a Capella group, Simply Human, which he coaches. He suggests this group can be ‘transformative to humans.’
Raniere is speaking at the 10-day celebration of his birth – called Vanguard Week. His followers pay more than $2,000 to attend his 10-day birthday celebration, held annually at a resort on Silver Bay, on the shores of Lake George in the Adirondack Mountains of New York State. This is Raniere at V-Week 2016.

Here is the complete text of Keith Raniere’s V-Week speech:

Oh wow, it’s bright up here. Please be seated, if you’re standing. I can see little heads. It is interesting what you were saying. The themes of Vanguard Week and what it’s about normally announces itself well before the week. And one of the issues that have come about is our community, how valuable how important, how meaningful do we want it to be. 

And we give things meaning. I’m not the first one to say something for example like justice. We like to think about justice, but justice is something we earn. Justice doesn’t fall from the sky where we are all just these passive recipients you know sitting on the beach with a drink or something like that and justice is there. 

Likewise, words like honor, concepts like honor, we need to empower that with meaning. And meaning doesn’t sit there, oh yes Honor, huh? That’s very meaningful. The way we make things meaningful is we hurt for them. We pain for them. And the strength of a community is how much effort that community will will put against adversity in any of these things. 

So in-line with that, we’ve had for a good number of years an organism called Simply Human.  And that has had many types of incarnations. There is still some people from the very beginning that are all the way through. Other people have come and gone. And recently Simply Human for a number of reasons has had some personnel change, different things that were going on within it. And there was a real question of: Simply Human, should it exist? 

Should it go on this year? And more than even Simply Human going on, what does that mean to the community? That here you have a thing of the community, And certainly things come and go. But do you just let any identity go? And the answer was, ‘no.’ 

There have been a number of things this year that needed to be fought for to bring our community strength. So I am very devilish. I think I am probably the worst coach in the world because I am just a demon. You know if I am coaching you, I am going to have you do something with your left hand, you’re right hand, your left foot, you’re right foot, your head, and then I am going to ask you to do the hard thing. 

I do this and it is with a twisted sense of pleasure in some ways. The extra effort being able to pull effort out of others and pull effort out of myself. So here we are coming into V week. And the people involved in Simply Human and other things there. I can’t tell you how much they took on this year. The artistic and musical piece that you saw  was original. Completely. 

So we have people who are involved in Simply Human involved in doing that. We have the arts performances, we have them doing all sorts of different things. And they’re in the middle. They are putting all this stuff together and I go up to one of the Simply Human people and say ‘ you know I think we need to have a Simply Human performance. ‘ 

They said, ‘you’re kidding.’ I said no. So we started. And it started out as a little seed of a performance. So we said OK. should we do one personnel that we can get or pull other people in?   

Well you know when you pull other people in it’s like a whole new dynamic. We pulled other people in. Two new people in. And this idea just started to just to evolve. Does this like two weeks before now. It’s like two weeks ago. Not even that, it was, oh well here is like three months we can have this thing. Let’s throw everything together. They come on campus here and start rehearsing. And what evolved from it was an incredibly, at least for me, emotional piece. Simply Human is far more than being just sing type of band. It’s a unit that’s created to express things that are meaningful and more importantly transformative to humans.

And what you are about to see is an incredible work in progress. This has evolved even within the past day. It’s growing by itself. And it’s a series of songs organized around a principle to make a piece in itself. And it’s I think different than anything certainly they’ve ever done and evolving towards something that I think within performance arts, even within education and expression, is something that is very, very important. 

But of course to make matters worse, we didn’t jsut pull in just Simply Human. We pulled in intra and we pulled in so… 

You will see a group of people here Simply Human and beyond that took and incredible step and put it in incredible efforts to make this happen. And you will be seeing stuff again that hasn’t been done until today. 

And it is with the greatest gratitude tribute and just awe that I will if I can hand over the mike to Simply Human. Thank you. 

Frank Parlato