Do Cultists Dream Of Sanity?
What follows is a bit of an essay on The Meta of The Web and of cosmic horror as a whole. Feel free to skip it, but I do explain a lot of my reasons on the subject that you're reading about in this article
You know the cliche: Dark gods beyond time and space and the mad people who worship them. It's a pervasive part of weird fiction, particularly cosmic horror. Frankly, I find it ridiculous, outrageously unrealistic, and in some cases, lazy.
Now don't get it twisted, this trope is tried and true. It's been a staple for ages and will continue for ages, even in my own work. However, The Web is a very different place. Cults aren't always the bad guys. There are no bad guys. Their members are not always crazy, as crazy doesn't actually exist.
I explained why cults happen in The Web and what cults are. Now I will touch on the members, hopefully putting the readers in the right mindset for the subject, and giving more than enough reason for why I deviate from the trope.
What the hell is sanity?
Let's go back to our racist great granddaddy of cosmic horror, himself. Lovecraft had a very interesting way of demonstrating madness and sanity in his stories. This is to say he had a bad way of doing it. Granted this is a time when psychology as a science was starting to make a name for itself, but we in the modern day have no excuse.
Lovecraft's concept of Sanity was far less about mental dysfunction and more about a spiritual or societal corruption. When his characters "went mad," they did so because they suddenly realized they weren't at the top of the food chain. They were not special God-fearing Americans, nor did their superior breeding offer any benefit in the grand scheme of things. It's actually kind of funny how this racist individual wrote stories about people suddenly realizing their racism, ideology, and even their religion was unfounded.
On the psychological side, insanity would be the complete inability to distinguish fact from fiction to such a degree, it inhibits the ability of one to function in an everyday environment. It's surprising how insanity and death are such common endings in this genre when there aren't many protagonists who end up dead by the end of the story, in lovecraft's work.
- Example: In The Temple, the characters undergo what is far closer to a manic episode than anything else. The protagonist of At The Mountains of Madness has some really bad anxiety or possibly depression.
Cult Leaders
My approach to Cults began as I started to have less and less fun in the Call of Cthulhu rpg. I went to college for psychology and it kind of ruined things. In numerous scenarios, characters would have to investigate disappearances, or murders which turn into a who-done-it mysteries if the leader isn't made clear. This is not as prevalent in modern stories, but it does still exist. It's a problem.
If you are the leader of a cult and also insane, how in the hell are you able to attract followers and maintain an organization? You can't. If you are completely unable to determine fact from fiction in a way that prevents you from living a normal life, you can't fake living a normal life as it immediately assumes you know what a normal life is as opposed to your own. It's a problem.
Insanity is perceptive. Insanity is a term used by those who are normal to justify the actions of those they deem are not normal. This is why I call using the term "insanity" lazy. With a quick Google search you can easily find information and first-hand accounts of what it's like to have every possible disorder imaginable. If no other argument sticks, Insanity is telling when you should be showing. The closest thing to Insanity as shown in Cosmic horror is an individual having an acute mental breakdown. This is slow, treatable, and can be recovered from, but good luck running a cult while suffering from it.
The Consequences of Survival
While it goes against the way I understand psychology, these are not the main reasons why I eliminate the struggle of sanity from my cosmic horror. In The Web, characters don't go insane or die often. These events occur when it matters, if it all, and not a moment before.
Cosmic horror for me is always about a jumping Point as opposed to an ending. There's a moment when the character realizes something, and then the story ends. In stories where the character survives, its better to continue. Now they have to go back to a 9 to 5 job and live the rest of their days in a normal life knowing what happened but likely not fully understanding it. They have to explain to the authorities, or (god forbid) someone's spouses and children what happened. That's the cosmic horror of the modern day. It's the moment when the family who went through this horrifying experience has to go around living like it never happened. For me, consmic horror is all about the consequences of survival. Maybe no one would believe them, or maybe they just want to forget. That struggle is paramount for me.
The best part of cosmic horror is how it's always one step away from becoming another story. Part two of a story could be a family drama or a psychological thriller. If the story ends in death, or madness, the character gets a reprieve, a way out. In death, their traumas have no significance, in madness, they can't tell what's real and what's not. They are safer. I firmly believe that there should always be survivors in a cosmic horror story, and they should always end the story sane, if a bit traumatized. I'll leave you with arguably my favorite quote of mine from the collector. I apologize if it seems pretentious, but it condenses what you just read perfectly into a single sentence.
For Kendallonian: That's exactly right. Sociopaths are definitely a way of doing it. That's the idea behind that little essay. Calling them insane is not a good thing as its unproductive. sociopath as a character can be very interesting to write and read. As to your argument vs the quote, this is true. Why would logic bring you to this conclusion? These are far more interesting questions in my mind. if forces the writer to imagine why a sane person would do these things, instead of them just being nuts. It's a dark path but man its fun to write.