Osama bin Laden: Cult Psychology and Why Osama Cannot Be Allowed to Die

Where would you intervene in this process of a cult figure deforming a boy child into a person who will kill innocents on command in order to honor ‘the father’ of the cult?

Cult is a highly unusual word because its Latin root holds a group of meanings that almost exactly define the way a cult operates: colere:
to court
to plant
to cultivate
to foster
to worship

First, court the depressed, the obsessive compulsive, those ostracized from their own culture, the drifters, the ones whose lives are ‘going nowhere.’

Then plant the ideas that within the murderous and suicidal group is the only safety, nurturance and understanding available for such ’special’ young men.

Cultivate the images of ‘the enemy,’ and let not a day go by without training to meet the enemy and to receive salvation for having done so.

Foster the deep cry to ‘belong,’ that each member brought with them; let them know they can only belong by enacting the most radical means, that they will be shunned if they choke or hesitate.

Teach them to worship a particular human, to rest all hope, guidance and blessing in him, instead of God. God as thug.

Seeing the distortions in all this, is not allowed. Or else. Exile. Death without honor.

Where could we intervene in this?

Imagine one scenario about how a young person can be caught in this deadly hopper: Were you a young male, feeling left by the side of the road in some way, having a father who may have radical views, but a mundane job, a father who did not live out his rage against injustices, a father who you thought sold out…

Where would we intervene?

Imagine you were a male who wears the uniform of the ‘radical whatever’… whatever the current fashion might be, who has mimed ‘the talk,’ but who is not hooked into ‘the real deal,’ just imagining the real deal, imagining it often, having many and hourly fantasies of being important, a hero, applauded by others, not loved by others but rather feared by others, wanting to be different than your father who you see as weak.

Imagine you are slowly exiled by peers who do not feel disenfranchised like you do. They make their adaptations to cultural pressures differently. They may be tendered by love for family. But you, unable, unwilling to keep up with a wide range of acceptable work and integration in the community… hating your father more and more, and your overbearing mother who does not approve of you as a man, wants you to be a man like your father, the one who sold out. Angry. More angry. Lost.

And along comes Osama, or someone like him… a man, preferably a relatively normal appearing and speaking person who is a madman right under the skin… although could also be a powerful madwoman as well, but one whom according to this now suppurating boy psyche, is the ideal deified father.

The ideal deified father is a pretender Father-God who demonstrates to the boy’s now deadened sights, that he has really big testes by sacrificing his own as well as others, who walks the talk of the end days, who didn’t sell out like the human father… the merely human father, who unconsciously or otherwise may have tried to keep the world alive long enough hoping new leaders and different times would come for the better.

The Father God of such a cult has no woman to bedevil the son… not to soften him, reason with him, plead with him, straighten him. A unholy ‘holy man’ who is a murderer is the now sick psyche’s version of ‘perfect father.’ A child’s most puerile fantasy, to have a father who is really God.

Osama cannot be allowed to die, because he, unopposed by any serious force in this world, is the most powerful ghost who continues to recruit. Why? because a thug-God is needed by all sides in contention with one another: he serves the agendas for all sides.

There is more. But these are essential seed trajectories of how to wow and win a young mind into a deadly obligation. There have to be more ways than one to reroute such matters? But, where do we start?