In July of 2011, when North Korea's butcher-dictator Dear Leader Kim Jung-Il died, all the NK Communist Party members in the land were ordered to cry hysterically, to ululate in grief at the death of Dear Leader, in public, altogether, on command. You can see it in this video, the Party cadres lined up on the hard snow in military platoon formation, men and women, bursting into tears when the command was given.  

The BBC wondered at the time whether all that public crying was real or not, since Dear Leader controlled every human being in that country, by sending any wrong 'uns to his vast concentration camps to be starved and worked to death. Every tear-stained face in those black-clad platoons knew with absolutely certainty that they would be arrested and sent to death if they failed to show enough dramatic grief. Some unconvincing mourners were undoubtedly grabbed and taken away to the camps.

North Korea's national cry-in for the loss of Dear Leader is an important lesson about human politics: the power of closed cult indoctrination. Turns out you don't even need death camps. The famous Stanford Prison Experiment showed how it could be done with legally free Stanford students in the prime of life, able to walk away from the experiment any time they liked, without murderous guards armed with guns. All you needed was a Stanford grad student wearing a white lab coat. A whole series of experiments showed the same kind of thing.

The iron key to mind control is having one source of "real" information, and shutting off any competing ones. It's all Scientology has to deliver for its faithful followers to stay in that imaginary world. Most of the more fanciful religious and non-religious cults on the web have followers who indoctrinate themselves. The Five Star Movement in Italy started as an internet cult in the ‘90s telling teenage kids about airplanes spreading out chemtrails to control the minds of Italians; today the Five Star Cults controls a plurality of votes in the Parliament in Rome. Today "brain hackers" are no doubt using the same dark arts on the more gullible of their webizens. It's one reason why teenage kids a decade ago started to put metal objects through their ears, lips and noses. To them those were magical symbols as surely as a reversed swastika was an object of power to the Hitlerjugend.

Cults are human universals. A lot of tribal groups are nothing but cults: The key is always restricting information, and crushing dissent. That's why U.S. cults often block communication between members and their families.

Karl Marx had only a few precepts for his followers to remember, and the most important one was, 'First, conquer the organs of propaganda." Which meant the schools and the newspapers in 19th century Berlin. Marx was employed as a "journalist," a word that was just as phony then as it is today. His real passion was mass agitation, and in that way, he was a kind of genius. When you control every message a person receives 24/7, through teachers and professors, through news media, and through their peers, you imprison people just as effectively as concrete blocks and iron bars, complete with AK-47s. 

The United States used to have about a hundred newspaper owners, most of them small. Today we have half a dozen giant transnationals that can reach perhaps 90 percent of the population. If you wonder how it is that the American Left has all that power, the mental media monopoly is all you need to look for. They are so convincing that they even persuade themselves about plainly false superstitions like global warming. We may think we have made progress since the Dark Ages, but the fact is that humans are as superstitious as ever, perhaps more so. If you were a medieval peasant walking behind an ox plow all day you probably had more contact with reality than today's college indoctrinees.

So today we see the same thing happening on the American Left, for pretty much the same reason: Ever since the late 1960s, the Hard Left has run our schools, colleges, and mass media, with the inevitable result that American liberals live in a mental box where only one truth is allowed to be voiced: the Left created the worship of Obama the Savior (we will slow the rising of the seas), and Hillary the Woman of Destiny (who will liberate women for the worship of Gaia). These people are not technically crazy, although their beliefs do not correspond to reality. They are only deeply indoctrinated and protected from contradiction.

Today's Butcher of North Korea, Kim III, may have just murdered his wife, probably with an artillery piece, as he is wont to do to express displeasure at family members. But when Kim inevitably passes on, the national outburst of grief will be just as loud and dramatic as before.

You might object that American Leftists do not live in fear of imminent execution if they fail to cry hard enough at the Victory of Demon Trump. That seems true enough, but it ignores a basic fact about mentally closed cults, namely that they create their own realities, and if enough young feminists at Wellesley believe that Hillary's defeat equals Mass Mind Rape, they will feel and act exactly as if it's true. Cult fantasies are incredibly powerful, even with otherwise normal people. You don't need an actual artillery piece to blow up the victims: They create that reality all by themselves. Since every faithful member of the college Left is pledged never to listen to a dissenting opinion, they have cultified themselves. There's nothing we can do to make any difference: they are mentally armored. All we can do is wait for reality to assert itself.

Meanwhile, kids, have a good cry and don't forget your hanky.