Of course there are cults in the MCU
We'll never see a series set in one of the cults, but we can admit they all exist,right?
One of the things that delights me about the evolution of the Marvel Cinematic Universe is the emergence of cults as part of its social landscape.
I don't know who did the social studies homework in the writers' rooms, but going full cult makes absolute and perfect sense for a planet that has spent the last ten years trying to react to:
billionaires in flying metal suits
successive waves of space aliens bouncing on and off the planet
radical and sudden depopulation
radical and sudden repopulation
the discovery that multiple deities in various polytheistic religions are either petty weirdos or thin client computers operating on behalf of giant planet-eating Celestials
the emergence of peevish wizards as a thing
whatever is going on with the freakin' DRAGONS and Shang-Chi or the Defenders.
Who wouldn't want to join a cult after trying to live through a decade of those massive and unpredictable changes?
I'm not giving the MCU credit for how they handle the cults from a plot perspective. Most of the time, these organizations are seen as The Baddies, even if one person is allowed to make a salient point about human exploitation before being killed by a defender of global capitalism.
But I do think it's shrewd that this money-making franchise has correctly identified why people would go full cult.
The Enlightenment's great idea was the premise that we can observe an objective reality, understand the world through this lens of objective and quantifiable reality, then change the world. And we've largely done that -- for hundreds of years, we controlled our environment for maximum comfort, we reduced mortality rates from diseases, we reduced food insecurity, we reconfigured the meanings of distance and elapsed time thanks to breakthroughs in transportation and communication technologies.
And now, we are faced with cascading crises that are a direct result of the last four hundred years' worth of societal development. People raised on a cultural history of "And the arc of progress continued, moving ever forward!" are not equipped to handle the modern crisis stack of pandemic, war, food instability, supply chain issues, widening economic inequality and climate upheaval.
The U.S. Army War College introduced the acronym VUCA -- volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity -- to its training in 1987, and used VUCA to describe how people assess risks, plan ahead, and respond to events and conditions. Since the 2000s, managerial publications have begun talking about it as the default mode for corporate operations and management.
Cults are great for people who hate VUCA. Cults offer a simple framework for understanding reality. They offer a sense of community. They offer a sense of control. And they're an escape from reality.
Two pieces I read while having my morning coffee made me think about the role cults play in times of tremendous turbulence.
In Vox's "How Catholicism Became a Meme," the article outlines how the young and hip have begun gravitating to the aesthetic and social carapaces that characterize the Church of St. Peter, and one person's explanation really struck me: “What’s so great about faith is that it doesn’t have to be grounded in rational thought. We are seeing a lot of people return to religion because everything feels so senseless and pointless, so why not be a Catholic?”
And the second piece, Slate's "Prove to the World You've Lost Your Son," outlines Kelley Watt's devotion to harassing the grieving parents of children slain in school shootings and her commitment to conspiracy thinking around the Sandy Hook massacre. In it, Watts' daughter assesses her mother: “There’s a great deal of narcissism in this idea that ‘everyone’s got it wrong and we’re in this select group of people that knows.’ It would explode her own persona to allow any doubt to come in. Her whole identity has been built on this for so many years. She’s invested so much.”
(Emphasis mine.)
The allure of the MCU is that someone is always ready to react and reduce the VUCA to a finite conflict with a pat (if not remotely rational) explanation. The wonder is that the people engineering this money-making machine have included a relief valve for the dissonance people feel of living in any world where the VUCA keeps coming.