On Political Cults
I have first-hand experience of seeing a cult in operation. I was never a member, but I was close enough to it to witness how a group of young people who all shared a hobby ended up being part of a genuine cult, with its own Svengali like figure and adopting an apocalyptic vision for the future. I witnessed friends suddenly drop out of their studies, become distant from their families and, on one occasion, watched an initiation ceremony take place from a distance and all because of one man, who claimed to have had great wisdom and “insider knowledge” and who gathered enough people around him to make his cult happen.
8 min read
29/10/2021
You Will Own Nothing and Play Rollerball
A few years ago I wrote an article about the 1975 science fiction movie, “Rollerball”, on my own website explaining why I thought it was the best movie about sports ever made. My argument was that it avoided two things that have made sporting movies cliched: One was that in other sports movies the actors can’t play the sport and the real-life sportsmen and women can’t act. As “Rollerball” is a fictional sport we have no real-world examples to compare with what we see on screen so the viewer can’t be taken out of the movie by spotting the faults in the sporting action.
14 min read
04/10/2021
