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Rachel Abel
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“People do not knowingly join “cults” that will ultimately destroy and kill them. People join self-help groups, churches, political movements, college campus dinner socials, and the like, in an effort to be a part of something larger than themselves. It is mostly the innocent and naive who find themselves entrapped. In their openhearted endeavor to find meaning in their lives, they walk blindly into the promise of ultimate answers and a higher purpose. It is usually only gradually that a group turns into or reveals itself as a cult, becomes malignant, but by then it is often too late.”
― Seductive Poison: A Jonestown Survivor's Story of Life and Death in the Peoples Temple
― Seductive Poison: A Jonestown Survivor's Story of Life and Death in the Peoples Temple
“When a population loses any sense of a shared story—when each segment of a population believes that only its own perceptions are valid—then that population can become ungovernable.”
― The Threat: How the FBI Protects America in the Age of Terror and Trump
― The Threat: How the FBI Protects America in the Age of Terror and Trump
“Those who are comfortably established in life tend to have no need to ask what it means. They are the insiders, and for them, how things are is how they should be. The status quo is so much a given that it goes not just unquestioned but unseen, and the blind eye is always turned. It is those whose place is uncertain, and who are thus uneasy in their existence, who need to ask why. And who often come up with radically new answers.”
― The First Muslim: The Story of Muhammad
― The First Muslim: The Story of Muhammad
“When your own thoughts are forbidden, when your questions are not allowed and our doubts are punished, when contacts with friendships outside of the organization are censored, we are being abused, for the ends never justify the means. When our heart aches knowing we have made friendships and secret attachments that will be forever forbidden if we leave, we are in danger. When we consider staying in a group because we cannot bear the loss, disappointment and sorrow our leaving will cause for ourselves and those we have come to love, we are in a cult… If there is any lesson to be learned it is that an ideal can never be brought about by fear, abuse, and the threat of retribution. When family and friends are used as a weapon in order to force us to stay in an organization, something has gone terribly wrong.”
― Seductive Poison: A Jonestown Survivor's Story of Life and Death in the Peoples Temple
― Seductive Poison: A Jonestown Survivor's Story of Life and Death in the Peoples Temple
“It is horrible to think that the world could one day be filled with nothing but those little cogs, little men clinging to little jobs and striving towards bigger ones - a state of affairs which is to be seen once more, as in the Egyptian records, playing an ever-increasing part in the spirit of our present administrative system, and especially of its offspring, the students. This passion for bureaucracy ... is enough to drive one to despair. It is as if in politics ... we were deliberately to become men who need "order" and nothing but order, become nervous and cowardly if for one moment this order wavers, and helpless if they are torn away from their total incorporation in it. That the world should know no men but these: it is such an evolution that we are already caught up, and the great question is, therefore, not how we can promote and hasten it, but what can we oppose to this machinery in order to keep a portion of mankind free from this parcelling-out of the soul, from this supreme mastery of the bureaucratic way of life.”
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Rachel’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at Rachel’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
495 books
|
28 friends
1,340 books
|
90 friends
183 books
|
113 friends
787 books
|
77 friends
225 books
|
21 friends
645 books
|
123 friends
34 books
|
47 friends
297 books
|
149 friends
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