The Manson Family has been in the backdrop of American pop culture for some time now. A dangerous and violent cult who represented the worst out of kids today™️ killing famous celebrities is bound to get you stardom. A more interesting take is examining demographic data and historical analysis of the Manson Family’s place in American religious history, a take based on material analysis. I will be looking at the five Ws and comparisons with other religions to find out the how.
The Manson family was a tight-knit, relatively diverse group of losers under a very folksy and very successful reader of emotions. Charles Manson was, in many ways, a f•••up drifter. A “country boy who never grew up” when he should have in Cincinnati, he was the product of changing times and displacement. The TVA forced his family out and left them utterly broken and atomized in Cincinnati. Through child abuse through neglect, alcohol, and him being generally without any sense as a rascal—he never had a chance to grow up normally. Incubated around “men in uniform”— police, prison guards, chaplains, and priests—he was well familiarized with rape culture and the power of sexual trading through himself being raped and pimped in these environments. Taking such rape culture with him wherever he went, he became an incredibly violent conman who could and would take what he felt was his. His insecurities about himself would provide a necessary reason for the creation of his harem, as it was only when he saw no chances at his music career did he go straight to religion as a way to attract anything close to the love from groupies the Beatles got. Given the fetishization for anything that appears country and working class, as evident to Fetterman and coal miner stanning by neuroma abnormal establishment “common knowledge”, no wonder people saw something in him.
The Manson family and it’s associates were
not hippies. They were not the rich trust-fund babies who started the movement, but a diverse group of precarious Middle-income kids desperate for a place and a well-under appreciated inflection of working class individuals who were held up by the glass barrier. Whether coming for work or for finding a new family among the hippies, they found neither. They only found a conman by the name of Manson who was a quick learner. He loved dope and he didn’t see the old religion of Kentucky-fried Christ very appealing. Instead, he and a few others did as the other rejects did and discovered Yogis, Gurus, and Xenu. Manson and Atkins went from Scientology, to environmental ScienYogiism (Process Church), to fried Beatles and the Bible with a dash of intersecting Dualism. The willingness to try and go to the next limit with a diverse crowd of displaced people cross-country to go across the West set the stage for growth. Hippies had no hierarchy or structure, the Manson family did.
The when and where are vital in explaining why California attracted these misfits in the first place. The Bay Area and the outer fringes were countercultural havens bustling with rich trust-fund cultural workers enjoying money. Hollywood was still selling a story of opportunity there, the AMERICAN DREAM. However, under the surface conditions were absolutely terrible. Class structures in the US then made it unrealistic for drifting poseurs to make it at all, living under rent by abusive landlords while seeing the pretty people live high in part from a surplus of labourers giving all their productivity into even more surplus profits, and that is a recipe for disaster when you have people with mommy and daddy problems. Everyone in this Age of Aquarius were “plastic people” where there was nothing real. And in all honesty, inability to socialize aside, there wasn’t. New ideas took hold and grifters saw opportunity to be made, using the early-life crisis to get people to buy their brand of immaterial product to plug the hole of being a have-not.
So why did they do the numerous crimes they did. Well according to Manson’s own words compiled in
http://www.atwaearth.com/index.html and
http://mansondirect.com/, it both didn’t happen and their organization was trying to save the environment. That is not true, and the religious crap Manson fed them wasn’t the innate urges and feelings that made them kill. Instead, outside of Manson losing it for not getting a music gig and running out of cash and loyalty fast from a lack of skill in pushing their dope, it was hatred of Black people. Like, the whole thing was Manson trying to keep his harem from having sex with black people, so they self-segregated in order to recreate the order in the Antebellum South. Given the US government wasn’t doing as much protecting against integration as Manson thought, he took matters in his own hands.
In doing so, he and his harem and guards did too well a job of segregating. They already stood clear of African American neighborhoods and never socialized with anyone outside themselves, so outside the black people they most likely murdered on the downlow to the media, they went far. They were however too close to the rick coastal elitists and beautiful people though; and when the dope money stopped rolling, they got evicted from The Beach Boys’ studio and home, and the music gig fell through they then got economic anxiety and started murdering the liberals.
How did they get so big? Well that is a question that has been tested many times by many other movements, and it is called moderation. See, Manson was not a well literate person compared to the members who got college education, so he could not use big words, you dig? Instead, seeing how he needed to use some complex terms, he adopted the religious iconography of upscale Scientology and hook of environmentalism of the Process Church and dumbed it all down. He also got in good income to sustain their communes through pimping, drug dealing, and contracting manual Labour to richer celebrities and gangsters like the Bandidos or The Beach Boys. He was flexible in his bare beliefs to make it to the top, and he gave these ••• in his harem drugs and a home. It all could have been a success had the Family not have been unstable idiots who thought by murdering rich celebrities that they could get Bobby and Chris out of prison. Unlike Christianity, the leaders and middle men did not know how to keep cool.
Unlike Christianity, the demographic movement of Bay Area drifters did not present a locus to really spread nationwide in any meaningful capacity like the exiled Jewish population after the fall of the Temple, Manson worship is a west coast phenomenon mostly. However, things are changing. Given the fact that we are seeing similar precarity metrics in the 2000s and polarization, along with a major rural exodus to the city and for the unaffordable cultural capital’s to see flight to the heartland. That sort of mingling is ripe to fruit new orders and seek a need for hierarchy. Politics and its nastiness is seeping in too. Most of all, given the fact that the amount of desperate females and man children is at an all time high, yeah, we are due for another Messiah.
This post was made by the contribution of sleep deprivation and Kentucky bourbon.
