he should've just created a Religion and he would've been untouchable lol
Finally somewhere I can talk about this! I've been watching the HBO documentary on NXIVM The Vow, and the thing that never added up for me was how the entire documentary they frame the goals of NXIVM as "saving the world" and "helping people" but economics is completely removed from it and never even mentioned. They spend so much time trying to convince the audience they were tricked and they truly believed in it, and justify their involvement. I ended up chalking it up general lib brainwashing.
Turns out everyone involved made boatloads of money the entire time they were apart of NXIVM, and all of a sudden everything clicked into place. Obviously I knew the people involved in making the doc were formerly part of NXIVM, but it wasn't until I read an article comparing it to the new Starz documentary Seduced that I realized how much time and energy The Vow puts into justifying these people joining and frames everything as "a good thing gone wrong". Apparently Seduced has no interest in this and says everyone at the high levels knew it was all majorly exploitative evil cult bullshit the entire time, but didn't care because they were making bank.
Waiting for a few more eps of Seduced to come out before I start watching but it'll be really interesting to compare the two.
I saw the first few episodes of The Vow and had pretty much the exact same reaction as you. It was clear all along that all of the people involved, those at the top and the victims/recruits, were both very wealthy and also conventionally beautiful. The whole time they're going on about their goal being to help people the world over, even talking specifically (if I remember right) about solving global poverty. But it's a fucking for-profit pyramid scheme and they make no pretense otherwise! I mean, the pretense is that it wasn't a cult, but not that it wasn't a get-even-more-wealthy-quick ponzi scheme. It's one thing to be a fucking misled lib with your "heart in the right place," foolishly thinking the social ills of world can be "fixed" without addressing capitalism... But most of them were already borderline lizard people going in.
So yeah, I completely agree, it made it impossible to have any sympathy for the individuals doing the expose because it seemed clear their agenda was not an altruistic one at any point, despite their constant framing of themselves as pure do-gooders. I wondered the whole time what the show creators were leaving out and felt confident that there was a hell of a lot more going on that would never be presented in this "documentary" series. It also struck me as a haphazard mess as far as the narrative and editing went, making it even harder to follow. So I just stopped even trying to watch it. I didn't know there was another series about it that might actually get into some of those issues, so that's good to know.
