"Kill Your Darlings"

Don't Get Duped: Guru Worship Is A Form Of Groupthink

In literary and creative writing education, we have a saying: "Kill your darlings." Various authors such as Oscar Wilde, G. K. Chesterton, and William Faulkner have been credited with coining the phrase, but British writer Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch wrote in his 1916 book On the Art of Writing: “If you here require a practical rule of me, I will present you with this: ‘Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it—whole-heartedly—and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings.’”

In the world of creative writing, if you have extraneous information that doesn't fit the flow of the narrative, no matter how much you have fallen in love with that particular piece of flowery prose, in order to make your writing strong, you will need to chuck it out. Trash it. “Kill your darlings.”

The same can be said for carrying around an unwavering, loyal-to-a-fault love for personalities in the public eye. Logic and common sense would dictate that we should not fall in love with these personalities whole hog, because when we find pieces that don't fit, our loyal but - let’s face it - manipulated hearts will give us a hard time chucking these ideas out when our logic and our intuition tell us that we should know better.

Instead, we try to make the discordant pieces fit. And we end up going down illogical slippery slopes out of our love for these people because we’ve agreed to the rest of what they say, so why wouldn’t we say yes to this part too?

We have a difficult time parsing this out because we love these people so much and personally resonate with them so much that we WANT to agree with EVERYTHING they have to say… not just the things they’ve said which are logically and intuitively sound.

This is when we have a fatal tendency to ignore red flags. It’s like being in a toxic relationship, but it’s with a newscaster, politician, or media personality.

We need to acknowledge that these people have JOBS which necessitate creating a following, inspiring loyalty, and capturing hearts and minds.

Whether these people need us to love them to capture ratings for advertising revenue, to capture the vote (or enough interest to make the falsification of the vote seem plausible to the masses), or to generate enough interest in their work that they retain relevance in the public square, the leveraging of which translates to power and money, the fact still remains that their JOBS require them to capture our HEARTS.

We should make it a point to examine everyone and everything - ALL sources of information, regardless of whether or not we feel a sense of personal resonance. Our love can cloud our judgment. And if we look deeply and we find we have some strange biases toward gurus because we want to resonate with them so much that we fail to see that these people are neutral, dynamic, and often self-serving (as most are) human beings, embrace UNBIASED critique.

"Kill your darlings."

Deeply examine the discrepancies - especially from your gurus. Be even MORE critical of your gurus. Even if they mean well, it will keep them honest. Acknowledge that people are human and therefore flawed.

Don't buy into the cult of personality. Simply accept or reject each idea.

And use that information to stand on solid ground.

Additional Resources:

Pietchell, D. (2021). Cultural Shadow Work: What Happens When Groupthink Supersedes IQ? The Starfire Codes.

Pietchell, D. (2021). Doublespeak, Part Two: Consider the Word Choices of Others Very Carefully. You might assume someone is talking about a certain group of people when they mean another group entirely. The Starfire Codes.

Pietchell, D. (2021). How The Economist Uses Its Magazine's Front Cover as an Apocalyptic Manifestation Tool. What most people don't know about tarot is that you can just as easily use it to manifest as to divine. The Starfire Codes.

Pietchell, D. (2021). Money Laundering and Modern Art: Modern Art Was Developed as a Vehicle for Money Laundering. Basically, anything that can be produced for next to nothing and sold for a great deal of money can be used for money laundering. The Starfire Codes.

Pietchell, D. (2021). Most of you are FAILING this EASY IQ test.... Let's try this again and we'll see if suddenly you're smart enough to connect the dots.... The Starfire Codes.

Pietchell, D. (2021). Pattern recognition is somewhat frowned upon.... The interesting thing is that most of the people who exhibit high level pattern recognition skills in school tend to be moved out of gen pop and into a separate class. The Starfire Codes.

Pietchell, D. (2021). Predictive Programming: Down the Rabbit Hole Volume One. Here, we take a deep dive into what predictive programming is and how it functions. The Starfire Codes.

Pietchell, D. (2021). There Are Things I Can't Say... And they're the most important things you need to hear - so, let's do this.... The Starfire Codes.

Pietchell, D. (2021). Things I Can't Say, Part II: The Dark Triad Plan To Flip The Script. Pay Attention: This Information Could Alter Your Strategy Significantly. The Starfire Codes.

Pietchell, D. (2021). Things I Can't Say, Part III: El Salvador Is A Trap. What part of DECENTRALIZATION don't you understand? The Starfire Codes.

Pietchell, D. (2021). This Is A Culling: The Nine Satanic Sins Show You How To Survive It. This is Mengele meets Saw. Solve the puzzle, you get to live. The Starfire Codes.

Pietchell, D. (2021). Western Society Passes Through The Cultural Crucible: Critical Mass Tipping Point Achieved. We're finally here. People en masse are starting to understand. The rest of you: Kindly wake the fuck up already. This is why we can't have nice things. The Starfire Codes.

Pietchell, D. (2021). Why do you value the opinions of liars? You already know it’s a lie! Why do you need the liar to VALIDATE the lie before you will act upon the truth?! This behavior is just as insane as the behavior from the liars themselves. The Starfire Codes.

Pietchell, D. (2021). World War III is a guerrilla information war with no division between military and civilian participation: Down the Rabbit Hole, Volume Four. Class warfare is culture, not agenda. Gaslighting is the art of linguistic transmutation. The Starfire Codes.

Pietchell, D. (2022). The Global Mafia: The Script Continues To Flip As The Mainstream Media Throws the World Health Organization's Tedros Under The Bus. OK, who didn't see this coming? Bueller?! The Starfire Codes.

Pietchell, D. (2022). If You're Not Ready To Question EVERYTHING, You're Not "Awake." Period. Hate to break it to you. Not even close. The Starfire Codes.

Pietchell, D. (2022). The Making of a Psyop: Did the "X-Files" Spin-Off Series "The Lone Gunmen" Predict 9/11 in March 2001? Watch now (1 min) | The show aired March through June 2001 and was then cancelled due to "ratings." The Starfire Codes.

Pietchell, D. (2022). Never Hang Your Sense of Identity On Being 'Right' or 'Wrong.' If you are intellectually active and honest, your constant commitment to learning will continuously reshape your understanding of the truth. The Starfire Codes.

Pietchell, D. (2022). This Is Very Important To Understand. Please Share and Help Your Loved Ones To Understand This Before It's Too Late. The Starfire Codes.

Pietchell, D. (2022). The Weaponization of Trust. This Is Not Just About Censorship: There Are Chilling Reasons Why You Are Disallowed From Speaking Freely On Specific Platforms and Not Others. The Starfire Codes.

Pietchell, D. (2022). We Didn't Want To Be Right. We NEVER Wanted To Be Right. The Starfire Codes.

Pietchell, D. (2023). Inside The Elon Musk Agenda. Brendan D. Murphy interviews Demi Pietchell of The Starfire Codes on the Further Implications of the Twitter vs. Substack Fiasco. The Starfire Codes.

Pietchell, D. (2023). Twitter vs. Substack: Understanding Elon Musk Through His Lens, Not Yours. There Is No Competition; Competition Is For Losers. The Starfire Codes.

Taylor, S. (2019). The Guru Syndrome. When spirituality turns sour. Psychology Today.

Weiland, J. (2019). You Don’t Need the Self-Help Gurus. You already have all the information you need. Better Marketing.

Welch, K. (2023). The REAL Reason O'Keefe Departed Project Veritas (Hint: Nope, it's NOT the Pfizer Story). O'Keefe, Howley, Webb and Others Can No Longer Hide from the Truth. Moon Maiden Musings.

Welch, K. (2023). Tucker Carlson: "I'm Rupert Murdoch's Bitch." This, and Other Relevant Quotes from the Man Departing FOX News. Moon Maiden Musings.