Word: cults
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...like that of Venetian glass, redundant and stuffed with reminiscences of Greek and Roman splendor. pseudo-Biblical, pseudomystical." A whole generation of Italian youth accepted his vision of life as an opera with bogus lyrics but real swords. Filippo Marinetti, founder and chief exhibitionist of the crackpot futurist cult (he later proposed kidnaping Pope Benedict XV in an airplane and dropping him into the Adriatic), hailed D'Annunzio as "the prodigious seducer, the ineffable descendant of Casanova and Cagliostro...
...morality of altruism that men have to reject." And why? Because this Christian virtue leads to self-immolation, tolerance of the "incompetent" common man, the welfare state, and ultimately to the slave labor camp. By hindering ego, altruism destroys human "reason." Nurtured by a small Manhattan cult, Author Rand's unaltruistic philosophy of "objectivism" is objectified by the gold dollar sign that she often wears as a brooch ("The cross is the symbol of torture; I prefer the dollar sign, the symbol of free trade, therefore of the free mind...
...minstrel poets of the late Middle Ages. Medieval ladies spent half their time racing across the jousting fields with buckets of hot water, bathing and bandaging strange men. It remained for the troubadours to glamorize the knight-lady relationship and raise it to the level of a semimystical romantic cult. For all their platonic, fig-leafy sentiments, the troubadours themselves were a crudely carnal lot, and they gave romance in France a lasting split personality: love and marriage became contradictory terms...
...cult of hardy sailors in the New York City area, the winter weekend is counted a happy one when the thermometer crouches in the low 20s and a breath-catching wind sweeps snow across the grey waters of Long Island Sound. This is prime sailing weather, and down to the Sound they go, heavily bundled and goggled against the cold, to race one another in frisky, flippy, 11½-foot frostbite dinghies...
Back in England, Ellis toyed with the idea of entering the Anglican ministry, but lost his faith and then decided to become a physician, which he eventually did. He became absorbed in a cult, the Hinton circle. Its late founder, James Hinton, had been a blend of crackpot and sexpot. Under the doctrine of "service," Hinton preached polygamy and practiced promiscuity among lonely women and errant wives. High-minded Havelock saw in this only a band of free spirits snapping the moral chains of Victorian bondage. He adopted the Hinton motto, Fay ce que vouldras (Do What Thou Wilt...