Everyone here is in a cult - by Cate Hall - Useful Fictions

As you get older, you learn to detect a certain facial expression, a kind of wild absorption that characterizes a recent infection by an all-consuming worldview. It’s the look of someone utterly taken over by a subject or cause. It doesn’t signal rightness or wrongness, intelligence or stupidity. It just signals being lost in it, a state that precedes both works of genius and complete disasters. Sometimes, it feels like this is the default facial expression in the Bay Area. The Bay Area is a place of cults. I don’t mean cults in the most literal sense, the kind where people are cut off from friends and family by force, assemble in communes, and believe no one outside understands the truth. I mean cults in the more pedestrian sense: totalizing movements where people are cut off by tacit social pressure, live in group houses, and believe no one outside understands the truth. Thanks for reading Useful Fictions! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. These movements a

As you get older, you learn to detect a certain facial expression, a kind of wild absorption that characterizes a recent infection by an all-consuming worldview. It’s the look of someone utterly taken over by a subject or cause. It doesn’t signal rightness or wrongness, intelligence or stupidity. It just signals being lost in it, a state that precedes both works of genius and complete disasters. Sometimes, it feels like this is the default facial expression in the Bay Area. The Bay Area is a place of cults. I don’t mean cults in the most literal sense, the kind where people are cut off from fr