Being in the IMT was a miserable experience. But there is much I have learned from it. If there is anything I have learned from reading philosophy, it is amor fati – the love of fate, a concept taught by the Ancient Stoics and also by modern philosophers like Friedrich Nietzsche. It is hard to imagine that something so horrible could have anything positive in it, yet there are still valuable lessons I have learned from being a member of this disgusting organisation.
- How little I know. Socrates said that the beginning of wisdom is accepting your manifest ignorance. When I was in the IMT, we were encouraged to be arrogant and think that we already had the correct answer to everything through Marxist theory. There was no need to think, no need to read non-IMT material, no need to seek intellectual nourishment from any source outside the sect. I had my reservations about this anti-intellectual attitude, but did not fully break free from this idiotic prejudice until just before I resigned. I am filled with an appreciation for just how much there is to discover, and how poorly Trotskyism and Marxism explains reality. If I have a stronger appetite for knowledge and wisdom now than before, it is because this desire was suppressed by the IMT.
- How to work with assholes. As Marcus Aurelius says in Meditations: “When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: the people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous and surly. They are like this because they can’t tell good from evil. But I have seen the beauty of good, and the ugliness of evil, and have recognized that the wrongdoer has a nature related to my own – not of the same blood and birth, but the same mind, and possessing a share of the divine. And so none of them can hurt me. No one can implicate me in ugliness. Nor can I feel angry at my relative, or hate him. We were born to work together like feet, hands and eyes, like the two rows of teeth, upper and lower. To obstruct each other is unnatural. To feel anger at someone, to turn your back on him: these are unnatural.” That first paragraph from Meditations is a wonderful description of the people I had to deal with in my branch when I first joined. I met some awful people in the organisation, but I focused my energies on working professionally for the good of our common goal, and put my personal resentment to one side. That is certainly a good skill to learn for the future, even if I now realise that the cause for which I was fighting was utterly false. Whatever slanders they spread about me, I have a clean conscience, knowing I was a dedicated, loyal and sincere member, and that any betrayal is on their part and not mine.
- How easy it is to be brainwashed. I never thought of myself as the person to join a cult. I considered myself more intelligent than the average person. Yet I was still hoodwinked. It was a humbling experience. Anyone can end up in a cult, including intelligent people. Indeed, intelligent people are good at rationalising to themselves things that a less intellectual person would instantly realise is wrong. One is reminded of Dostoevsky’s distinction in Notes from Underground between ‘direct’ persons and overly conscious persons.
- The value of liberal democracy. If the IMT was in power right now, I probably would not be alive, or I’d be in jail, awaiting my show trial and execution for being a traitor to the working-class. As a Trotskyist, I obviously had nothing but contempt for liberal democracy. Only now that I have fallen on the wrong side of a bunch of totalitarians do I fully appreciate its importance for protecting the individual from the herd, something Trotsky never appreciated even after he was ousted from power. Trotskyism is and always will be nothing more than Stalinism-lite, a ‘controlled opposition’ to Stalinist totalitarianism.
- How much I hate being controlled. I have always been and always will be a passionate individualist and will not accept being the slave of any group or party.
- The importance of critical thinking. We must scrutinise every bit of information that we come across, and not go along with the herd, for conformity is the essence of cultism.
- Cynicism. It is unfortunate that a bad experience in a cult would cloud my whole view of human nature, but there are, unfortunately, bad people out there, and my experience in the IMT has given me a much more pessimistic impression of human nature. It is likely that I will be much more hesitant to form close friendships or even enter into a relationship in the future, since I realise how easily people can disguise their true selves. (Now might be a good time to remind everyone that a ‘comrade’ in this organisation, who pretended to be a close friend of mine, decided to turn on me and leak confidential messages I sent to him via Facebook about my mental health, screenshoted and taken out of context, to destroy me to the other members of the branch.) By the time they reveal what monsters they are, it’s too late. A book which has helped me in this regard is Robert Greene’s recent masterpiece, The Laws of Human Nature. When I read this book, I had not yet come to the conclusion that the organisation was a cult, but it was still an eye-opener. I identified manipulative tactics that had been used on me by members of the sect, but I attributed this to them as people rather than to the organisational culture. It took a while for me to accept that the thuggishness, bullying and toxicity of the group was not just an issue with certain people, but behaviour that was encouraged from the very top. There are characters from fiction that I think mirror my own experience – Prince Myshkin in Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, or Edmond Dantes in The Count of Monte Cristo. The price paid for naivety in human affairs is usually a painful one.
- How much I love music. Music helped get me through the worst aspects of this loathsome sect. I would spend hours listening to 60s music, especially country music, to get me through the day. It did wonders for my mental health.
- How ridiculous Trotskyism is. This is self-explanatory. It is difficult for anyone to truly ‘get’ it unless they’ve actually had the experience of being in such an environment and believing in the bullshit.
- That I am too much of a ‘petty-bourgeois’ intellectual, with too much of an artistic, individualistic and romantic spirit, to be a left-wing revolutionary of any kind, with all the regimentation and conformity that this demands. It seems misanthropic mass murderers like Lenin and Trotsky are best suited to this kind of role. It helps if, like Lenin, you are a philistine who believes that culture is a waste of time and everything must be subordinated to the pressing needs of politics, including art.
- That I have a talent for public speaking which would be very useful in contexts that do not involve parroting IMT propaganda.
- That Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, Camus, Marcus Aurelius and other great thinkers and writers of the past are a million times more profound than any of the garbage written by Lenin, Trotsky and their acolytes in the present day.
- That it is better to be alone and free than in bad company and subject to peer pressure, distress, anxiety and oppression at the hands of other people – i.e. than to be in a cult.
- To shrug off unpleasant behaviour and to move on with my life, doing things that bring me joy. I very much doubt I will experience anything quite as painful as my experience with the IMT. Things can’t get much worse than ending up in a totalitarian political cult which repeatedly ostracises, excludes, bullies and slanders you. In that sense, being in the IMT has made me stronger. If being in such an environment and surviving has made me care less about other people’s opinions of me, that can only be a good thing.
- How cults work. My experience has given me, first-hand, an idea of how cults operate. The reading and research I have done since has allowed me to further understand what was done to me. I have Steven Hassan, Dennis Tourish, Janja Lalich and many others to thank for that.