The Sedona Cult of Bentinho Massaro

https://medium.com/@bescofield/tech-bro-guru-inside-the-sedona-cult-of-bentinho-massaro-a56314f830ef

by empath75 • 9 years ago

65 41 9 years ago

medium.com

QAPereo2• 9 years ago

“My vision is to buy a large piece of land and start a new city with all of you…As with everything I will succeed.”

Run roh, bit of a flashing red warning sign with hints of Jonestown.

6590876• 9 years ago

I can't figure out whether to upvote this to expose this person, or downvote it to avoid giving this person exposure.

It never ceases to amaze me just how many fools are out there just waiting to fall for something like this. It's terrifying. Instagram douche meets cult leader has got to be the worst personality combo I've ever seen in my life.

On another note, this stuff makes scientologists sound completely reasonable and sane by comparison.

natoliniak• 9 years ago

I agree. But despite the bizarre fact is that there is a real market for these kind of "Gurus" to fill, but unless someone is forced to join or kept in the cult by force then what's the problem? he chooses to lead and followers choose to follow.

6590876• 9 years ago

The problem is that people who are weak-willed enough to fall for the "teachings" of and follow someone like this exist, and in large numbers.

now_l93• 9 years ago

They are forced to stay in the cult through coercion. Members join willingly, and the cult slowly isolates them, encourages to shut out family and friends, takes all their money and makes them financially helpless. By the time they realize what's going on, they have no safe way to leave the cult. That leaves the members vulnerable to all sorts of abuse. That's why joining a cult should be seen as a problem, and not just as someone's preference.

s73ver_• 9 years ago

What's your definition of "force"? Purely physical force? Or are you including brainwashing, emotional abuse, and economic/financial force as well?

sbinthree• 9 years ago

The problem with narcissistic personality disorder is that all attention is good attention, all absence of attention is bad and drives the rage that leads to the abuse.

kiddico• 9 years ago

Does anyone know what a "dharma battle" would consist of?

b6• 9 years ago

I can take a guess. After the Buddha was enlightened, he went back to his old friends the ascetics, and they didn't believe he was enlightened. But they talked and after a while they were convinced. Later, doubters would visit the Buddha and they'd have something like debates in front of the other monks. So I think Horn is saying he wants to show through debate that Massaro's views are bad, i.e., not the dhamma (truth).

QAPereo2• 9 years ago

I mean... something like a battle over fulfilling your life's purpose, according to certain religious/philosophical points of view. Most religions have a concept of internal struggle, and most cults are just slight retellings of previous religions.

cr0sh• 9 years ago

It's kinda like a rap battle, just with more incense and meditation.

bleezy• 9 years ago

This is just a guy with a cult. It's similar to a startup/technology company in only the most superficial ways. The guy who runs this cult plays ping pong and wears sunglasses indoors? Oh what a scathing indictment of Silicon Valley culture.

Apocryphon• 9 years ago

The NYT seems to be finding several of these new New Age cults:

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/04/technology/silicon-valley... (the Esalen Institute)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10906754 (the rationality cult related to Eliezer Yudkowsky and LessWrong)

groby_b• 9 years ago

The NYT hardly "found" Esalen. The thing is around since the early 60s. And has been home to people like Timothy Leary, Buckminster Fuller, B.F.Skinner, Virginia Satir, Allen Ginsberg, Joan Baez...

It's a rather well-known home of counter culture. Silly Valley simply hopes something rubs off on them. Because the realization is starting to set in that you, after all, really cannot take your toys with you.

But really, "finding" is a pretty strong word for writing about one of the major touch stones of 60s culture.

6590876• 9 years ago

"It means that we reach a level of maturity to where we as a collective are able to be contacted openly without us freaking out anymore, without it needing to be kept secret anymore, we have become > are < own government.”

Apparently being god means you don't have to use the right words when communicating.

smacktoward• 9 years ago

This appears to be Massaro's response: http://www.bentinhomassaro.com/read/our-first-official-respo...

It contains a sentence that may be the most perfect thing an "Instagram guru" could ever write:

I have modeled many different jackets, teachings and examples within a short period of time.

6590876• 9 years ago

I couldn't get through it. Rarely have I seen more words used to say absolutely nothing while completely avoiding actually addressing anything in the article supposedly being addressed.

"Love and Light,"

It looks like this guy might be getting his ideas from a certain show on Hulu.

tanepiper2• 9 years ago

Quite a terrifying read, but not unexpected.

These types of cults pop up in America, and usually at least once in a generation there is one that somehow captures peoples imaginations (People’s Temple, Branch Davidians, Heaven's Gate, etc). I don't include Scientology in this list - no matter how insidious that organisation is, it's never lead to a mass suicide.

The people who follow these leaders are lost, usually from broken background - some run away from home and fall in to it.

The leaders tend to be diagnosed (mostly after the fact though analysts) as narcissists. Polyamory is usually a feature of their style, as well as mental and physical abuse of their followers. They have no problem in "breaking" people for their own sick fantasy.

gaius• 9 years ago

no matter how insidious that organisation is, it's never lead to a mass suicide.

Neither did the Davidians, to be fair

jstarfish• 9 years ago

Standing up to the ATF in Waco was nothing short of a suicide mission; dozens of people died as a result.

jvagner2• 9 years ago

It's hard to get the appeal from these videos. He's... not a strong presence.

calbear81• 9 years ago

Especially the early ones where he just seems to be making shit up on the fly and taking really long pauses to think about a good answer. Then again, maybe that makes him more relatable to the average person?

jvagner2• 9 years ago

The shit-eating grin must work for a particular kind of audience. It counter-signals hard to me.

I know some real narcissists, and I think there's a moment before their narcissism is confirm-able that their "power" has more currency than it will later. I guess we can call it "charisma", but once it turns... it can feel rancid. I guess for some people, that rancid-ness doesn't show up.

jondubois3• 9 years ago

I kind of hoped that we were moving towards an age of rationality and reasoning where people will finally be able to think for themselves but it seems that the opposite is happening.

Literally everything these days is a cult. Including companies (e.g. Apple), and money itself (e.g. cryptocurrencies).

It makes me think that there must be some really powerful evolutionary processes in place which make it so that irrational idolists have more children and live longer than rational people.

strayamaaate2• 9 years ago

Something like... https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/idiocracy

danharaj2• 9 years ago

I think you are fetishizing rationality in a world that is intractably complicated.

jondubois3• 9 years ago

People don't need to understand everything, but they should understand that nobody has the answers and that's why independent thinking is so important.

Independent thinking is simply about questioning everything you're taught.

Most people believe that if some idea is popular, then it must be right; but in reality, most of the time the opposite is true.

AndrewKemendo• 9 years ago

This is a big source of existential dread for me.

At one point about a decade ago, not long after college, I had this conviction that over time with more available granular information about the world, people would start to be more epistemic [1] about how they viewed the world. In fact what I found though, was that more information seems to have led to the opposite. That people's interpretation of the same information seems to reinforce already held beliefs about the state of things rather than update their beliefs.

Not sure where that leads the zeitgeist with ever increasing barrage and availability of information, skewed or otherwise.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epistemology

rhizome• 9 years ago

"Most people" don't care why they know what they know, they just know it. I imagine it's a less stressful existence.

That said, every age, every transformation, has its dissidents. Counterarguments for that are Utopia and "global unity" type sentiments, but history tells us those aren't realistic goals. YMMV.

tanepiper2• 9 years ago

I think a bit part of the blame can be put on the internet. When I was a kid most of my information came from one source, the TV - or via books which I could read in my own time.

Now information barrages us from multiple outlets, in real time and at times too fast to comprehend the changes.

With this I think a large part of the population has essentially "switched off" to rational thinking, maybe an evolutionary reaction to what the brain perceives as a something that can harm us.

carapace• 9 years ago

Thinking takes energy.

Like actual ATP molecules.

The world is complicated so we evolved these lumps of neurons on the ends of our spines to help navigate it. They are only as large as they have to be, and their primary purpose is to (re-)program the motor cortex and then go to sleep.

There is a strong evolutionary "pressure" to keep the brain in an "idle state".

If it seems like the evolutionary goals of the organism can be met with a simplified degenerate model then the organism will naturally adopt that model.

There is a possibility to notice that you're mostly-robotic and deliberately strive to become real but this is vanishing rare in practice.

lwhalen• 9 years ago

Nice broem, broheim ;-)

strayamaaate2• 9 years ago

I’m still not 100% sure this is for real. It’s just so utterly insane.

6590876• 9 years ago

It does seem almost like he started off just trolling people, then decided to run with it when he realized people were willing to pay and/or have sex with him in exchange for that trolling.

nkrisc• 9 years ago

Seems like the people who follow him are already predisposed to believe in fanciful ideas like gods and other supernatural beings. Doesn't seem so hard to fool people who already are willing to accept beliefs beyond evidence.

I’ve watched him control the weather a lot of times. We’ll be at a party and I’ll be like ‘Bentinho these clouds are not good, it looks like rain. Within ten minutes they’re gone.

That's a laughably low standard of proof to accept for anything. Let me guess, he can turn invisible too when there's no one looking.

pmoriarty• 9 years ago

I am surprised he is not running for President of the United States.

sunstone• 9 years ago

Smells like Scientology redux. Meh.

The Sedona Cult of Bentinho Massaro

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