By Actaeon
This is in response to The Human Experiment: Module 9 – Nxivm Perv Leader Keith Raniere Taught Sex With Children [i.e. Teen Girls] Can Be Just Fine.
In teaching or discussing ethics, a branch of philosophy, there is nothing wrong with asking provocative questions or posing outrageous hypotheses. It gets students to think, it challenges them. Philosophy, after all, is not about accepting what is generally thought and accepted as being some kind of eternal truth. Asking difficult questions is part and parcel of philosophical inquiry.
But Nxivm wasn’t about inquiry or discussion. Rainiere was the guru, the holy man, the expert on all subjects, and what he said was not to be questioned. Good teachers do not act that way, at least not when they’re teaching adults. A good college professor, in a seminar, will challenge his students with questions, get them involved. A good professor enjoys being disagreed with, having his statements challenged by his students. That is, after all, how they are to learn. Every impression I’ve gotten of Nxivm is the exact opposite. Raniere’s word was law. So these questions he posed weren’t questions at all. He wasn’t inviting debate.
What he was doing was raising doubt. His followers were intended to doubt their own minds. Their moral standards, their principles.
I remember back when Allison Mack posed a question on her blog as to what people thought of the idea of “human construct”. Seemed odd to me, and I suspected Keith Raniere her “friend and mentor” had put this idea in her head. The concept of human construct is central to Postmodern theory. Postmodernists are big on the idea that nearly everything is a social construct. It’s an interesting concept, that things we take as “natural” are in fact the products of culture, and could be, or maybe should be different. I mean, not that long ago, it was considered “natural” that women stayed at home and took care of the cooking and the kids while men were the breadwinners. A lot of gender roles are pretty clearly social constructs.
It’s an interesting idea that can be dangerous when misused. Raniere was of course misusing it, transparently for his own purposes. He was instilling the idea in his followers that social constructs are somehow illegitimate. In fact socially constructed rules, even arbitrary ones, can be very useful and even essential. The idea that a drivers license expires, say, four years from the date of issue is a social construct and pretty arbitrary. Why is the license in my pocket that was valid yesterday no good today, and why am I in trouble with the law? Why is it legal to have sex with the girl the day after her eighteenth birthday, and a felony the day before her birthday? Because these arbitrary socially constructed rules are useful.
Raniere’s dumbass followers were too stupid, or too cowardly, to question his idiotic teachings. His transparent sophistries. They chose to believe every thing the self serving jackass said, and some of them are going to prison on account of it. Serves them right.
***
They are all going away for a time — some longer than others.
Frank Parlato 
Janine Morrison 
J.J. O'Hara 
Richard Luthmann 
Marie White 
Paul Serran
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“Human construct” is a meaningless term to me.
How Do Cults Work?
By Getting People to Suspend Their Disbelief!
Intelligent people survive by taking everything with a healthy grain of salt.
You say that you’re the world’s third smartest man?
PROVE IT!
Like the old saying went: “I’m from Missouri. Show Me!”
The Hell’s Gate Cult near San Diego worked by having people believe that an incoming Comet was an alien spaceship and if cult members committed suicide they could hop a ride on the comet.
Up to 39 people hopped on a comet ride by committing suicide.
These people paid the Ultimate Price by suspending their Disbelief.
Look at the goofball Ramtha Cult.
How does it work?
The so called documentary film about Ramtha was titled “What the Bleep Do We Know?”
In other words don’t believe reality and experience.
Believe what the cult leader tells you.
So believe the woman who channels the spirit of a 35,000 year old dead Lemurian warrior named Ramtha.
Raniere taught people that they should suspend their disbelief in reality and societal norms.
Jewish women should believe that they are reincarnated Nazis.
“It rained on a woman but did not rain on the Vanguard who was walking beside her.”
Societal norms like not molesting children should be thrown away so that the cult leader can get his rocks off.
When the best thing you can say about Allison Mack is that she is STUPID, you see how bovine these cult members are.
This monster pervert who calls himself an ethiticist whilst talks about oraly stimulating babys, WTF!
That was constructive.
Very well put, thanks for fleshing this out Acteon.
A good teacher also cites sources and provides readings or references, including research if appropriate, so that students can look to established expert perspectives – though possibly if not even preferably disagreeing – and even empirical data.
The one thing I would add, specifically in relation to high control groups or cults, and Raniere in NXIVM in particular, is that raising doubt in the way being done in such indoctrination sessions is intended to put people into a state where they suddenly feel unsure of fundamental values and truths, so that the group’s or guru’s philosophy and beliefs can be substituted as a new source of seeming answers and certainty. This is related to “confusion technique” as pioneered by the hypnotist Milton Erickson (though his contemporary Hubbard, of Scientology, understood it as well) and incorporated in NLP, in which the subject is deliberately put in a situation in which they are uncertain what is going on, and then given a new direction determined by the operator. Modern cognitive and behavioral research confirms that when people are in a state of confusion, they will latch on to the first seemingly clarifying conception, even if incomplete or false.
Raniere taught his followers to question the social constructs of society but none of those followers were clever enough to question the bogus social constructs that Raniere was trying to implant in their minds.
The notion of “Age of Consent” for sex is a social construct based on the observation that young teenagers are not mature enough to make wise decisions concerning sex.
Their bodies might be physically ready for sex but not their minds.
“Age of Consent” is a social construct based on generations of personal experiences and observations.
And Raniere had his followers chuck away generations of common sense to overlook and even enable his own carnal desires.
The best advice I ever received in high school was from a teacher who told us to avoid taking a class in Philosophy.
He explained that Philosophy was a BS course.
It was existential philosophers like Simone Beauvoir and Jean Paul Sartre who preached against age of consent laws.
And when Allison Mack wanted to take classes while awaiting the trial which course did she want to take?
Philosophy.
Giving a Philosophy course to an idiot is like giving a child a loaded gun.
If you don’t believe me, read some of the writings of Pea Onyu/Monte Blu or Shivani.
Some of those writings don’t even make sense even if chopped up into smaller more digestible pieces.
I have taken one college level philosophy course. It was very useful. I have also read several philosophy books, Montaigne, Spinoza, Plato, Nietzsche, Sartre, Kant, and a few others. I found many of those useful as well, at least the ones I could understand. The most valuable principle I learned from Philosophy 101 is that one studies philosophers not to find answers, but to learn how to ask questions. To ask questions rigorously and productively.
Keith Raniere was not a philosopher, he was a salesman. Now, he’s a prison inmate.
Many young people actually need a good philosophy course to understand things like social constructs, and to be able to recognize the flaws in various philosophical interpretations including existentialism and postmodernism. A bad philosophy class may be detrimental in some ways, but it’s also not a good thing to just be left to absorb unquestioningly from the surrounding environment, and not engage in reflection without any training in analysis or exposure to the examples of great thinkers.
The whole point, exemplified by writers like Pea Onyu/Monte Blu, is that people without any grounding in real philosophy and related disciplines, are easily misled by shoddy or culty amateurs like Raniere, vulnerable to cults and, related, fallacious thinking like conspiracy theorizing.
JR Bourne was in NXIVM.
https://mobile.twitter.com/iamjrbourne
Aliyah O’Brien was in NXIVM.
https://mobile.twitter.com/aliyahobrien