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My Mom's Rules For Cults - Ben Landau-Taylor

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I wasn’t the first person in my family to run off to San Francisco to join a movement of fringe countercultural weirdos that later somehow found itself at the vanguard of American elite culture. San Francisco today is known for a mishmash of movements that overlap with and support each other, for social scenes and group houses that are incredibly insular and sometimes verge on outright cults, for great teachers and their devoted followings, for free love and libertinism justified with a veneer of revolutionary radicalism, for thinkers and authors who lack the formal markers of prestige but nevertheless end up writing the thoughts that everyone else repeats five years later, and generally being the petri dish where new cultural mutations grow and spread from. And that’s all true. But it’s not new. My parents’ generation was dealing with a lot of the same stuff. So my mom went to San Francisco back in hippie times. She almost never talks about it these days but she was deep in it. She wa

My Mom's Rules For Cults Ben Landau-Taylor Feb 07, 2024 39 4 2 Share I wasn’t the first person in my family to run off to San Francisco to join a movement of fringe countercultural weirdos that later somehow found itself at the vanguard of American elite culture. San Francisco today is known for a mishmash of movements that overlap with and support each other, for social scenes and group houses that are incredibly insular and sometimes verge on outright cults, for great teachers and their devoted followings, for free love and libertinism justified with a veneer of revolutionary radicalism, for

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