The case is drawing all kinds of speculation, but there are some clues in the blog of Phillip Garrido, the man accused of being the co-perpetrator of the crime. While it might be taken down soon, his blog at http://voicesrevealed.blogspot.com is brief, and worth reading. I’m assuming here, against journalistic norms, that he and his wife are criminally involved in the case, but given the circumstances, there seems little cause to question that assumption.

It is clear from the blog that Garrido is somewhat schizophrenic or has at least a milder delusional condition. He speaks at times in what he holds to be a non-human tongue (see the unfortunate affidavits near the bottom of the blog), and holds that we are all being mind-controlled by outside forces. His statements, though, could well be seen as a depiction of Jaycee Lee Dugard’s condition, since she was, obviously, mind-controlled herself. She, presumably, had become the embodiment of the ‘ideas’ he was to propound in later years.

More on this will require the reports of the psychiatrists who will, no doubt, be called on to rule on his condition. But two notions occur to me to mention here.

One is the lamentable tendency of so many people to post pointless and mean statements as comments on such issues. Idiotically, a number have posted their malice to the blog itself, as if Garrido is likely to read them and pay attention.

Yet if you do a Google search, you might come up with http://boards.aetv.com/topic/What-Should-Be/Jaycee-Lee-Dugard/300016004?messageID=300153166 , where one commenter identified as DoSearches noted earnestly five years ago:
I wish and (sic) outside agency would re-open the Jaycee Lee Dugard case. She was sold by mother and stepfather into prostitution in Central America for their drug debts. They both had so many friends in the Eldorado County Sheriffs Department that the case never went anywhere. A private detective in that area has a lot of information on the case, but no one will listen to him.

Which, in an ideal world, might be a cause for conspiracy freaks everywhere to reconsider if their favourite causes are based on false premises. Alas, conspiracy theory works like cell membranes, rejecting anything foreign to the needs underlying its existing assumptions, while ravenously absorbing whatever feeds them. I have found this among people who have linked to the blog regarding The Process, reading into what I’ve written confirmation of the very things I decry. (See, as one example, Cthulhubunny’s anxious post at http://blogs.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.view&friendId=2727893&blogId=296682165).

What fascinates me more deeply, though, is humanity’s tendency to create cults. The Process was one, obviously. But if you swap the word ‘clan’ for ‘cult,’ then a social model that is initially quite disturbing becomes faintly visible.

As a young man, I was very bothered by what I called ‘partiality.’ Or our inability to achieve a universal perspective. As an older man I accept the intractability of the problem, but it still intrigues me. Various spiritual schools promise us at least the possibility of cosmic consciousness in some form (I belong to one today) but I’ve always wondered just how cosmic our perceptions can be while we are in human form – assuming any other is truly possible.

Anxiety, need, desire and all the thousand other dark things inside us create a sense of confusion and ignorance, and we create philosophies to address this. But these philosophies usually sit on a foundation of the anxieties and needs just mentioned, and are hopelessly conditioned by them. This doesn’t mean they are untrue as far as they go, but it does mean they are fundamentally geared towards holding those needs and anxieties at bay while simultaneously addressing the big-picture issues. Or to put it another way, since I was a young man, I have never had much confidence in any view of the world derived from human reason. It’s the best tool our conscious selves have, but the conscious self isn’t really what steers the boat.

To address this sense of uncertainty, we therefore form groups – political parties or lobby groups, religions great and small, social agglomerations, and so on. We create collective mindsets that attempt to address what appears to be marginalised reality (or realities), which become senior entities in our personal and collective hierarchies of need.

Cults, if you will.

A one-person cult we tend to call madness. In Philip Garrido’s case, he appears to have recruited his wife and, subsequently, Jaycee, into some kind of belief-and-behaviour structure that kept the two women locked into a pattern of subservience around him. We don’t have an everyday term for such a dysfunctional cabal, but it presumably had the elements of culthood to it: ego diminishment among the membership, a leader whose pronouncements were taken as the overriding truth, and some sort of exceptional ideology that demonised many of the currents in the societal mainstream.

One of the reasons for which Aleister Crowley has always been demonised is that he dismissed any given faith or doctrine or theology as just as arbitrary as any other. To quote Liber Porta Lucis one of the Holy Books of Thelema, “the religions of the world are but symbols and veils of the Absolute Truth. So also are the philosophies. To the adept, seeing all these things from above, there seems nothing to choose between Buddha and Mohammed, between Atheism and Theism.” It is true in this context that Charles Manson-style murder-cults are a problem because they are criminal by anybody’s standards, but then the issue becomes one for conventional law-enforcement, not philosophical speculation. One reason Thuggee or secret Tantric cults have always remained secret is that nobody outside their very limited membership is willing to sanction their activities.

Garrido wove a cult from his disconnections to societal consensus that included his own right to rape and kidnap women and girls, though doubtless he rationalised his actions in other words. Other people form belief systems of varying profundity or utility, and a very few of these actually bring their dedicated adherents to some form of deep illumination.

But so much of what we do and strive to attain goes nowhere close to enlightenment, but simply fends off the darkness for a while. That doesn’t mean we need fall into the inflated delusional state of a Josef Fritzl, a Wolfgang Priklopil or a Phillip Garrido, and there is a clear line where interference with another human’s freedom to choose a course of thought and action goes too far. But even in our more benign and broadly acceptable cults, we are still struggling to make sense of things with little evidence, little understanding, and little ability to predict outcomes.

If there’s any conclusion to draw here, it’s a Buddhist one, wherein all strivings are seen as compulsive desire, or tanha, to be set aside over immense time, as we learn to subdue the storms of the mind and regulate the cravings of the appetites. But until we realise we are, all of us, in cults of one kind of another, a meaningful process of exit doesn’t begin.