Keep Megacult Delusionals out of Parliament

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So I have planned for this little talk to be fairly eccentric. However, the important argument I am in fact going to present is that I really should be doing exactly what I am doing, and constantly highlighting how insane and ridiculous – and dangerous – it is for our nation’s domestic and foreign policies, and defence forces, to be under the control of adults with imaginary omniscient friends. In other words – mental patients who should be undergoing some kind of cognitive behaviour therapy rather than inhabiting parliament.

I’ll be throwing in some grammar and vocabulary jokes “as a treat”, as millennial trolls - who happen to be some of my favourite folks - like to say.

However, I am very serious about this matter of elimination of megacult influences from parliament, and I humbly, but strongly suggest that you should be too.

Politics and religion. These are two topics famously banned from polite dinner table conversation. To talk about them in the polite company of acquaintances is considered, well, impolite. And awkward. And – socially inappropriate.

Of course this is by no means a hard and fast rule. It’s more of a rather conservative formula for some kind of social quasi-contract. People probably regularly ignore it. Especially if they’re trying to keep life interesting, hate their in-laws, or are trying to find a chickenhearted way to break up with their current partner.

There is a similar kind of social contract operating with a broader scope of application. A socio-political scope of application. At the level of politics and national government the issue of politics and religion becomes incredibly important. It’s no secret that this is largely because stupid megacult doctrines have an inordinate and unreasonable amount of influence over the thinking of the kinds of delusionals that believe in them.

This applies in both aspiringly democratic nation states and autocratic ones. It matters so much so that many nations in the world are theocratic autocracies, or theocracies, where megacults are government, and so the entire population is subsumed under the bizarre, atavistic, infidelophobic idiocy of some megacult writ.

Oh. Here’s the first language digression in this talk. The word ‘infidelophobic’ is a neologism. That means ‘new word’. I made it up. I can do so because I have a PhD in philosophy, and a Master of Philosophy in literary theory and the language of science fiction (which literary genre is famous for its neologisms.) Oh – it’s also because I am a prescriptive grammarian. Although you’re also probably a prescriptive grammarian, and so I cannot claim any special authority on that basis. Although: I can say that people of all cultures do neologisms all the time and they’re mui bueno, feichang hao, and harasho.

Back to business – or in this case the business of politics.

In aspiringly secular nations, like the US, the separation of Church and State – remember we’re talking about politics and religion or politics and megacult delusions - is written into the constitution.

Oh let me just make another linguistic digression and go on a side tangent about vocabulary and grammar again. The word ‘atavistic’ means roughly ‘of a throwback’. It’s applied to something that seems to be a reversion to, or regression to, an ancient, primitive state. As in a kind of evolutionary and historical throwback. In other words – it means ‘like a primitive caveperson’, or actually, ‘like a primitive organism’. You know: fungus, or bacterial slime, or something. Essentially: it means backwards and primitive. If you call someone atavistic you’re more or less calling them a troglodyte.

Rather more than less.

Most well educated and well-read people know the word and how to use it. If you did not know, it does not mean that there is something wrong with my mode of speech or word use. It means that you need to face a more awkward truth, which is that you’re very probably stupid and ignorant.

Well. We were talking about what is and isn’t socially acceptable. I happen to think that stupid, ignorant people who equivocate on their ignorance and someone else’s alleged bad communication skills are socially unacceptable. ‘Equivocate’. There’s another one. Go and google it, if you can spell it.

Now – what was I saying about megacult delusions and politics, which is the real purpose of this talk?

So, if it’s generally regarded by many – well many conservatives anyway - as impolite to talk about religion and politics, and especially if it’s regarded as such on a socially pragmatic basis, why then do I choose to make my lack of faith – or rather the delusional state of our current and past Prime Ministers – a key part of my senate nomination campaign in a country where to do so is considered by most – who admittedly have been hopelessly and mindlessly programmed by megacults - to be an act of political suicide? That’s easy to answer.

Firstly, I just point to those who have set the trend before me in doing so already. They include the current Prime Minister Scott Morrison, who, like many of his megacult conspecifics, is not shy to publicise the link between his bizarre megacult delusions and his job. I put it to you that this lack of concern for revealing such pathological social and personal commitments is precisely because he is mentally unwell. The same applies to John Howard, Tony Abbott, and Kevin Rudd, who all had policies and political personas that were openly and obviously guided by their respective deep, and deeply weird, megacult delusions, doctrines, and bigotries.

Oh - ‘Conspecifics’. Another word the ignorati do not know. I am using it somewhat metaphorically, but again with the organismic inference that’s also associated with the term ‘atavistic’ thrown in. Off you go and Google it. Oh and you probably need to google ‘organismic’ now. Oh – I also said ‘Ignorati’ which is a made up word, but a really good one, trust me: the smart people figured that one out instantly. Look – if you’re having some kind of mental battle over prescriptive versus descriptive grammar, then – I don’t care at all.

But yet again I digress. I said I was going to, and so you should have expected it. So – politics and megacult delusionals.

I mean. Be let’s be realistic as well as pragmatic. Do you really think that Morrison’s bizarre Pentecostal doctrinal commitments and delusions, Rudd’s equally weird Anglicanism, Abbott’s whacko Catholicism, and Howard’s deeply bonkers methodism, had nothing to do with their disdain for each other and each other’s policies?

I guess you might be thinking that those guys didn’t talk about their imaginary friends and megacult doctrines that much. Certainly not in parliament. Well – they did actually, but admittedly nothing like in the US where the separation of church and state somehow results in every President having to talk about some nutty psycho sky fairy, and talk to the ceiling, in public, and wave bibles on a regular basis, so that the memetically programmed delusionals don’t politically – or even actually – lynch them.

When it come to megacultist Prime Ministers and their megacult delusions, it’s not always about what they blurt out of their cake holes. We all know that people communicate with more than just words. They communicate with actions, attitudes, beliefs, behaviour, facial expressions, tone of voice, laughter, eye movements and with actions. Psychologists and philosophers have names for some of these things: paralinguistic, haptic cues, ostension. However, the most important dynamics in this case are those based upon people’s connection to prevailing cultural, political, and social narratives.

Such narratives are very powerful. They’ve been used by megacultists, politicians, despots, autocrats, monarchs, marketers, and propagandists for millennia. They avail those in power of a means to influence and control entire populations with relative and surprising ease. An infidelophobic doctrine like the one that configures the delusional beliefs of clearly mentally unwell leaders like Scott Morrison and Tony Abbott, is literally like a kind of computer program that can control the behaviour of all of the delusionals who internalise it.

Don’t get offended by this. These people have an imaginary all powerful friend. Adults with an imaginary friend are clearly, and unequivocally, sick. Do they have the same imaginary friend? It’s arguably not even a sensible or rational question. Do the specious delusions of two inhabitants of a psychiatric ward have similar semantic and conceptual contents? The language of that question is that of contemporary analytic philosophy, and so it’s quite esoteric. I’m essentially asking if Rudd, Abbott, and Morrison – apart from being clearly delusional and infidelophobic – all have an imaginary friend with the same fictional properties.

Probably, since there is semantic and conceptual overlap between the definitions of the fictional omnipotent overbeings in the doctrines – or memetic narratives – upon which their delusions are based.

Keeping up? If not it’s not because I am incoherent. It’s because you’re stupid.

The term memetic here is a reference to the memetic theory of Richard Dawkins. You know - the guy all of the theistic delusionals really hate. It should not be confused with the term ‘mimetic’, which is about mimesis, or the habit we all have of imitating others. A meme is a transmissible and ‘infectious’ unit of meaning. It’s a replicating meaning ‘virus’. There is a significant metaphorical and analogical basis to the theory, but it is nonetheless, very useful and has serious applications in psychology and social psychology.

Overall - with linguistic and philosophical jokes aside - If you do not find it disturbing and alarming that a delusional with an imaginary omniscient friend who adheres to a two millennia old atavistic, infidelophobic doctrine can send the ADF to war, then you may well have missed something important at some point. Adults with imaginary friends should be in a psychiatric ward being treated, not presiding over the policies of a nation state.

Thank you for your time and attention. I am Dr Bruce Long.

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