Cult or Commune
The Thumbnail
The thumbnail features a shirtless man, his face framed by a scruffy red beard and broccoli-top hair, standing before a black sky and a roaring fire. Photographed at a low canted angle, he stares straight into the camera. Confident. Intimidating. Undeniably sinister, the image hints at an answer to the questions implicit in this YouTube video’s title: Cult or Commune: Inside ‘The Garden.’ What is ‘The Garden?’ A cult or a commune? Do the quotation marks around its Edenic name suggest some sort of deception? I wasn’t the only one enticed enough to click. Over 2.4 million viewers had been lured in by this image, this title, the promise of another scandalous story from Vice Media.
The Garden
The video begins with a typical YouTube intro, a trailer for the story to come, composed mostly of TikTok videos. “I’m gonna give you a tour of The Garden,” says the red-haired twentysomething from the thumbnail, his voice unexpectedly boyish and chipper. Then, over a panning shot of tilled land, pickup trucks, and tin-roofed structures, he declares, “This is how we end climate change.”
This is Tree, a central figure in the short-lived cult-or-commune controversy. With electric blue eyes and a disarming Irish accent, his allure is instantly legible. Unlike the menacing figure I’d imagined when I first saw the thumbnail, Tree reveals himself to be cheerful, welcoming, and, above all else, utterly sincere. When he claims to have the solution to climate change, I believe he believes it.
The next few clips draw us further into The Garden. “Grow your own food,” Tree says, walking along a row of budding crops. “Afro, what do you do at the commune?” he asks a man in a straw hat. “I live, love, learn,” Afro replies. Eventually, Tree invites viewers to come check out the property for themselves, advertising the address in the video’s description: #8967galenroad. A series of TikTok comments fly across the screen (“this is so cool”; “I’m on my wayyyy”), but suddenly excitement devolves into suspicion (“getting serious Jim Jones vibes”; “I’m bringing the cops”). A few users claim that these ostensibly fun-loving hippies “eat cats!!!” and soon a chorus of worried TikTokers tell each other to watch out, because The Garden is “most likely a cult.”
Radically Incommensurable Interpretative Frames
Philip Roth, known for his edgy, outrageous, and often salacious fiction, has fallen out of favor in parts of the literary world. Despite his acclaim in the 20th century, many contemporary readers take issue with certain blind spots in his work. Which is a soft way of saying: his obvious misogyny. In the essay, “A Moral Education,” Garth Greenwell takes issue with those who take issue, lamenting the notion that art should exemplify the popular morality of the time.
In the final scene of Sabbath’s Theater, perhaps Roth’s most vulgar novel, the title character urinates on an ex-lover’s grave. Greenwell frames this moment as “an act of love” in the context of their relationship, and yet, when the ex-lover’s son happens upon the scene, he finds this behavior revolting and offensive. “The power of this final scene lies in its presentation of radically incommensurable interpretive frames…The novel forces us to experience both meanings, to live in the dilemma of their conflict.”
My obsession with the “Cult or Commune” story is an obsession with interpretative frames. As a species, we desperately need to combat climate change, racial injustice, economic inequality, and a whole slew of other complex, interconnected issues. This, however, feels increasingly impossible, not because we lack the technology or the force of will to combat them, but because we cannot agree upon the issues themselves. An incommensurability of interpretative frames has become inevitable in debates between diehard Democrats and Republicans—they live in completely distinct epistemological realities—but in this strange TikTok tale, two seemingly progressive groups approach each other with just as much suspicion and antagonism and mutual misunderstanding.
Truly Egalitarian
“The Garden is an off-grid intentional community,” explains Julia, a resident on the property, after the video’s intro. “It is one of the most truly egalitarian intentional communities that I've ever found.” In her interviews with the Vice crew, Julia speaks without the slightest trace of pretension or duplicity. She is simply another TikToking traveler, seeking out sustainable communities, attending Rainbow Gatherings and Burning Man with her now-husband Tree (they got married a year after the cult-or-commune controversy).
What we see over the next four minutes is an unequivocal confirmation of Julia’s description of The Garden. They cultivate the land. They cook communal meals. They hold biweekly council meetings to vote on a variety of issues. “The very mission of this place is that it’s free land for free people,” Tree says in his interview, still oozing sincerity. But when he tries to share this mission on TikTok, the aforementioned accusations begin. And when he denies said accusations, @cultmaker responds, “You shouldn’t have to say you’re not a cult.” @hunterobinson415 confidently claims, “It’s really not safe. Please don’t go there.” @walmart.jenny.humphrey chimes in: “Since everybody is talking about the TikTok cult, I thought I would jump on the bandwagon…”
This initial juxtaposition between the more even-keeled members of The Garden and the outlandish reaction from CultTok is itself an editorial decision. As opposed to opening with any of the TikTokers’ more reasonable critiques, Vice highlights the “bandwagon” mentality, the drive to generate plentiful content (“Part three on The Garden and why I think it’s a cult”), and even one mocking remark from @cultmaker: “And the fuckin’ bootleg Ed Sheeran guy? Like what is this?” At the outset of the video, Vice clearly chooses “commune” over “cult,” portraying The Garden as a wholesome community and the TikTokers as a preposterous digital mob.
Clickbait
Milo—a.k.a. @DirtyHumanTwunk, the only non-hippie TikToker interviewed for the Vice documentary—was chief among The Garden’s critics. Their account exploded when they claimed a cat had been killed and eaten on the property, an allegation that captured the imagination of the CultTok community. “I only had a hundred followers before this, so it’s been really weird to have 20,000 people watching me. From there, I really started digging into the research of The Garden.”
Thrust into a strange sort of stardom, Milo started posting daily updates, adding the #CultTok hashtag to all their videos. Through careful editing alone, the documentarians implicitly condemn Milo for pushing this narrative, contrasting their suspicious TikToks against the reality of life at The Garden. But the irony here is rich: though Vice immediately debunks this “cult” label, they, too, used the sensationalist term in their own video’s title, mirroring the ways in which Milo & Co capitalized on the fearmongering phenomenon. Not to mention the fact that they capitalized in a much more literal sense, building a multi-billion-dollar media brand around these clickbait strategies.
And of course…
…I, too, am piggybacking on this tactic, titling my essay, “Cult or Commune.”
Cults
Whether we’re thinking of historical figures like Charles Manson and Rajneesh or popular movies like Midsommar and The Wicker Man, our cultural mythology around free-loving intentional communities consists almost entirely of cautionary tales. In fact, Vice itself even has a “False Gods” series on their YouTube channel, and posted a video about the Love Has Won cult on March 9th, 2021, during the height of the CultTok paranoia.
The point is obvious but important: these narratives add up. They frame our perceptions. (Or perhaps a better phrase for this essay would be, they comprise our ideological frames.) We have been trained to receive the rhetoric of The Garden as, at best, deceitful, and, at worst, dangerous.
Vice’s clickbait title does, however, have one redeeming quality: it poses an implicit question to the viewer. With its persistent presence just beneath the frame as we learn more about CultTok and The Garden, we start to wonder, which feels more like a cult, and which more like a community?
The Cat
After nine minutes of merely alluding to the murdered cat—surely a strategy from Vice’s editors to maximize viewer retention rate—we finally learn the truth: “What everyone’s been talking about is this [video] where [Rel’s] wearing a hat she made out of her literal cat,” says Milo in a TikTok video. “The story goes: the cat kills some chickens, so she killed and ate it and then made it into a hat. In the US, this is considered animal abuse, and you can go to jail for something like this.”
Meet Rel, another TikToker at The Garden, who calls @DirtyHumanTwunk’s account “a harassment page.” I find myself hesitant to introduce Rel with any particular descriptor. Whatever detail I choose first is itself a sort of interpretative frame. I could start with: she sings songs on TikTok. Or I could write: she is a white woman with dreadlocks, a fact repeatedly maligned by commenters.
“I’m really into animal hides and honoring the lives of animals,” Rel says to the Vice team. According to her and Julia, years ago a wild cat was attacking their chickens, and in rural Tennessee, when an animal preys on your livestock, you simply have to kill it. “And then because they don’t believe in waste,” says Julia, “the people who were here at the time ate it.” Rel, who lived on the property when the incident occurred, explains that she didn’t kill the cat or skin it, but she did in fact make a hat from the hide.
Frames
@rocknrelmusic on TikTok: “This is my dog’s tail. See? He’s still wagging his tail, guys. He’s still a happy boy.” Rel to the Vice team: “One of the animals that I honored the life of was my dog, when he got hit and killed by a truck. I just thought it was the most sentimental and loving thing you could do.”
@yeetpolice8 on TikTok: “Did you hear that that TikTok cult also killed a dog? They ate the cat but one of them also skinned a dog and is like wearing it.”
Watching The Pain of Others
This is a tale of frames within frames within frames. I am framing Vice’s framing of the CultTokers’ collective framing of The Garden, which frames itself as a “truly egalitarian community.”
In the video essay, “Watching The Pain of Others,” Chloé Galibert-Laîné analyzes Penny Lane’s found footage documentary, The Pain of Others, which is composed almost entirely of videos from three female YouTubers with Morgellons disease (or rather, who claim to have Morgellons disease, a controversial self-diagnosed skin condition). When Galibert-Laîné explores these women’s channels without Lane as intermediary, they discover how carefully the women’s respective personae had been curated. In reality, their paranoid beliefs stretched far beyond Morgellons—one was an avid proponent of the flat earth theory; another thought aliens lived inside the sun—but in focusing on the mysterious disease, Lane managed to foster sympathy for her subjects.
I myself had a similar experience researching Rel after watching this Vice doc. A deep dive into her presence online reveals a number of videos that range from aggressive to offensive to just downright weird. The day I found her Facebook page, she’d posted five Reels, one of which was overlaid with the text, OVARIES! THATS WHAT MAKES A WOMAN A WOMAN! “I don’t know if it’s just getting closer to that time of the month— Oh yeah, that’s what makes me a woman, by the way,” Rel says into the camera, her anti-trans attitude loud and clear.
Her current TikTok account—username: @relforpresident, handle: BabyTrump—is filled with ideologically garbled rants decrying cancel culture, anti-Semitism, the corrupt United States government, and even The Garden, explicitly calling it a cult. (She seems to have left the property in the wake of the documentary.) In her less indignant posts, Rel picks fresh berries, plays the guitar, flaunts her armpit hair, diagnoses herself with autism, and tells her followers, “Get off the social media, y’all. Grow some food.” When a commenter calls her “yt,” and then a “colonizer,” Rel replies, “I’m not white…I’m [P]olish.”
In the face of criticism, she burrows into the narrative of herself as a righteous rebel, never considering the possibility that these commenters are identifying real blind spots in her ideology.
Mammy
“Did you hear anything about the scarecrow?” Rel asks the Vice team.
Here the video cuts to Milo showing us an image excavated from Rel’s Facebook:
In this section, the documentary finally covers one of Rel’s more ignorant positions, briefly tipping the scales back toward the TikTokers (at least within my own interpretative frame).
“It just looks like a mammy figure,” says Milo. “Especially with the fact that they’re, like, located in the South, like everybody just saw that, and was like, “this is really shocking to see, even if they didn’t think it was that way. The way it looks is really bad.”
“It was a scarecrow I made last year for Halloween,” Rel explains, as if baffled by the controversy. “It literally has a stuffed animal California raisin as the face… and they’re calling me a racist. Sometimes people, when I mention that I don’t see races, I don’t see genders… some people tell me that that is a white-privileged thing to say.” Here the editors at Vice cut in B-roll of Rel with a black family at The Garden, playing with the baby. “I think telling somebody that they’re white-privileged is a racist thing to say, because you’re calling me a color that I don’t define myself with.”
On their mission to unveil layers of darkness hidden within The Garden, Milo uncovered another scary nugget to share with their followers: the property is located near two sundown towns. One commenter writes in response, “No POC should be going ANYWHERE near here, this is right next to a sundown town and the area is racist. It’s dangerous.”
Patrick Martion, Co-Owner/Founder of The Garden, says, “I don’t know too much about the sundown towns. I know that we’re in the South. I know that there are a lot of people who are prejudiced against others around here. I don’t [think] people are going to kill people in this area though… I think if people come here, they would realize that. And honestly, I also think that being exposed to more diversity would be healthy for the local community’s growth. How are people supposed to stop being prejudiced against people unless they’re exposed to those people?”
I assume I do not need to clarify that Patrick, too, is white.
A Positive Work Ethic and A Family Friendly Environment
At the height of the tension between CultTok and The Garden, Tree posted a video in response to the comment, “are you lgbt+ and poc friendly??”
Directly into the camera, he says, “In this commune, everyone’s welcome, so long as we keep to a positive work ethic and a family friendly environment. It’s as simple as that.”
Here is a small sampling of the comments section:
Tik Toker
translation: no.
Paige
big tip! if you ask someone if they support lgbtq+ and poc and their response isn't "yes" then they're probably dangerous
Mitski Sad Boi™
So by “family friendly environment” I get the strong feeling you mean “no queer pda” which I is obviously not acceptance
impsyched
“FAMILY FRIENDLY” “POSITIVE WORK ETHIC” ummmmmm interesting word choices
skyler
so no, no they’re not
[Deleted comment]
killer jellyfish😛.
I see babies that are of color and kids and they look happy and painting boats so I think they are ?
Cousz
Okay and that 60 sec vid doesn’t show their 24/7 life there. Also how can gay and POC people make something not family friendly
killer jellyfish😛.
Did you not the comment I was replying to ? nobody said that babies of color don’t make it family friendly learn how to read
Cousz
No but by him bringing it up while talking about gay and poc people his insinuating that they can make it not family friendly by just being there
killer jellyfish😛.
Are you stupid ? I was responding to someone who said they wasn’t welcome they clearly are please once again learn to read
Cousz
No you are because you clearly lack comprehension skills but I could already tell that from your broken English
On Morality
“[…] I want to be quite obstinate about insisting that we have no way of knowing—beyond that fundamental loyalty to the social code—what is ‘right’ and what is ‘wrong,’ what is ‘good’ and what ‘evil,’” writes Joan Didion in the essay, “On Morality.”
In a culture fixated on a strict social code—whether that code comes from progressive or far-right politics—any transgression becomes a total moral failure. This creates a positive feedback loop: Clear lines are drawn between “good” and “evil” > the “evil” are ostracized > the “good” become firmer in their ideological positions, to avoid ostracization > the line between “good” and “evil” becomes clearer, and widens. This feedback loop accelerates when the very definition of the “good” involves that process of ostracization, which seems to be the case for figures like Milo. Even worse: when these categories are so strictly delineated, any attempt to create a bridge between interpretative frames (between codes, that is; between “good” and “evil”) becomes itself a sort of transgression.
Cops
Milo’s social code, to anyone who’s lived on a progressive college campus in the past decade, is instantly recognizable. They believe in everything listed on an “In This House, We Believe” sign, with a stronger emphasis on trans rights, anti-capitalism, and ACAB. Not everyone in the CultTok community, however, seemed to understand that All Coppers Are Bastards.
“Personally, I don’t believe in, like, calling authorities on things like this,” Milo explains. “But they have a public address, so I can’t control what people do. And that’s kind of been my stance from the get-go—is that I can only do my best to be responsible with what I put out. And with what people do with that, I can’t really be held responsible…”
In a particularly critical moment of the Vice documentary, we cut straight from this quote to a TikTok in which Milo says, “Alright, part two of why The Garden is probably a cult.” The implication is that they are, in fact, partially responsible, since every conceivable authoritative body (including the FBI) was called to investigate The Garden. Recall their assertion in an earlier video that “you can go to jail for [killing and eating a wild cat].” Milo, in the process of ostracization, accidentally encouraged 20,000 CultTokers to violate their own social code.
Forensickness
In another video essay, “Forensickness,” Chloé Galibert-Laîné analyzes Chris Kennedy’s Watching the Detectives, an experimental film about a community of Redditors who tried to catch the Boston Marathon bombers by sharing amateur photographs and analyzing the evidence together. In an exemplary post, one user writes, “To all my homies, please go through these photos… These are the mother fuckers who bombed our city, look at their face, memorize them. Let’s find these bastards and put them away…”
Considering these Redditors and these TikTokers and these members of The Garden side by side, I wonder if there is a relationship between political powerlessness and the urge to narrativize one’s daily activities as increasingly powerful, or meaningful, or politically effective. Tree believed his TikToks would combat climate change. Milo believed theirs would protect people of color. The Redditors believed their posts would help defend the United States against terrorist attacks. The latter two fulfilled their duties entirely online, digging through digital archives, trying to catch the “bad guys.” We see this same pattern in the rise of QAnon, a kind of paranoid digital religion which centers around combatting pedophilia, famously turning its acolytes into parapolitical detectives, who try to decipher each “Q drop” as if cracking a German code during WWII.
This forensickness—Galibert-Laîné’s clever portmanteau—has infected cyber detectives across political lines. The CultTokers who unearthed old Facebook posts and YouTube videos from The Garden were no different. Which is why I find it ironic that Milo’s first line in the Vice documentary is, “Many people involved in this cult are [bleep]ing QAnoners.”
And once again…
…I, too, am infected with my own strain of forensickness, attempting to unpack all the layers of this story.
Inherently Evil
“I've… learned, like, a lot of people have no self-awareness. And that can honestly apply to me, too. I think this also taught me that maybe I'm not as self-aware as I thought…” This moment from Milo is the closest anyone in the cult-or-commune controversy comes to acknowledging an ideological blind spot, or even just a simple regret. In the end, they finally admit, “I really don't think that many of the people involved were inherently evil.” And though I find this reflection refreshing, the use of the word “evil” still makes me think of Didion.
The day after Vice released the “Cult or Commune” video on YouTube, Milo took their TikTok account offline. Perhaps there is another acknowledgment implicit in this decision.
The (Fully Automated) Culture Industry
“Those who produce [mass media entertainment] follow, often grumblingly, innumerable requirements, rules of thumb, set patterns, and mechanisms of controls,” writes Theodor Adorno, “which by necessity reduce to a minimum the range of any kind of artistic self-expression.” This is an elaboration of his and Max Horkheimer’s theory of “the culture industry,” the idea that mass- produced media robs artists of their creative agency, and viewers of all novelty and nuance.
“I did, in the beginning, say, like, this is definitely a cult,” Milo explains. “Once I learned more, I was like, I'm not so convinced. I see it more as poorly run, full of problems, not necessarily like, ‘a cult.’
But I still referenced it as that because that’s what gets it to the For You page…I'm not doing it to brand it a cult; I'm doing it to brand my videos, so they get seen.”
Adorno and Horkheimer lamented the prominence of the culture industry back in the 1940s, when the “rules of thumb, set patterns, and mechanisms of controls” were enforced by studio executives—i.e. human cogs in an industrial cultural machine. Nowadays, we’ve automated the process, allowing an unfeeling algorithm (beholden only to the profit motive) to set these requirements, focused solely on optimizing retention rate and viewer engagement. And TikTok, for anyone who has spent five minutes on the app, is the modern apotheosis of that automation.
The techno-utopians of the 1990s promised the internet would democratize culture. And while this has to some extent come true, they failed to anticipate that democratizing culture would also democratize the culture industry. Now we can all express ourselves freely, as long as we follow an algorithm’s innumerable requirements, rules of thumb, set patterns, and mechanisms of control. Sure, Milo chose to sensationalize this story, but if we consider the demands of the algorithm, the decision was not entirely theirs. That is, if they wanted their content to “get seen.”
Alone/Inside
It’s hard not to notice that every single video critiquing The Garden features a single human being, alone and inside. This stands in stark contrast to the majority of Rel, Tree, and Julia’s videos.
It’s entirely possible that everyone involved with CultTok has a rich social life; what feels less likely is that CultTok itself constitutes a rich social life. We live in a time in which social relationships are increasingly replaced by parasocial relationships—a cultural shift epitomized by Gen Z’s migration from Facebook to TikTok, a platform more focused on performance and consumption than intimacy. Though I hesitate to psychoanalyze people I do not know (especially behind the shield of my own lonely computer screen), I wonder if there is a touch of envy mixed up in this mass hysteria. These TikTokers see a group of people living together, growing their own food, building a community, and maybe they feel a complex set of feelings, which are spoken only as suspicion.
Fame
There is a nexus at which loneliness and a will to power occasionally collide: the desire for fame. In this regard, Milo and Rel have already been covered. So let’s turn back to Tree (@treeisalive, 132K followers) and Julia (@juliatokgod, 42K).
One of the more subtly striking moments in the Vice doc comes when Tree is talking about the various authoritative bodies who investigated The Garden. “The Child Protective Agency came and they had”—here he breaks into a smile—“been watching my TikToks for weeks, and loved them. They even wanted my signature.”
On their own YouTube channel, Tree and Julia uploaded a video two months before the Vice doc responding to the claim that they were cult leaders. More specifically, Tree wanted to provide context for an older (now deleted) video he’d posted, which had been excavated and analyzed by the CultTok community: “There’s, like, a YouTube video of me that's, like, being brought up that I filmed, like, two years ago… This was… like this improv challenge. You turn on the camera and you see what comes out. And I thought I would give a go at improv acting… Hopefully it might get picked up as like an audition and I could use it…you know, like maybe get an acting gig from it…”
This recalls Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man, the story of Timothy Treadwell, a man who spent his summers living among grizzly bears in the Alaskan wilderness. Halfway through the documentary, Herzog reveals that Treadwell had originally tried to make it in Hollywood, allegedly scoring a part on Love Connection and almost landing the bartender role on Cheers over Woody Harrelson. We realize that the grizzly man wanted to live with these ferocious animals at least partially because he wanted to be seen living with them. Hence the 100 hours of footage he recorded, Steve Irwin-style, discussing his knowledge of the bears, despite a complete lack of formal education on the subject.
Tree is certainly not so extreme a figure, but the two stories at least appear to rhyme. In both we see a dream of stardom, a sincere wish to protect the natural world, and a persistent effort to document one’s commitment to the movement.
We Made It!
A number of Rel’s TikTok accounts have been taken down by the platform, a fact she often laments in recent videos. Milo removed their account voluntarily. Julia has been on and off TikTok since 2021. And yet Tree’s videos still come consistently, including this announcement on April 7th, 2023: “Y’all, we made it! We’ve got 55 acres of this”—he pans over untilled land, trucks, and painted buses—“to turn into an off-grid paradise for TV.” The hashtags in the caption include: #offgrid #tvshow #naturelover #homestead #ecovillage #commune #intentionalcommunity.
Hunter Robinson
“In terms of safety, we have a different way of organizing,” Julia says, defending The Garden’s open invitation to TikTokers to visit the property. “People are used to things like background checks, but then, you know, there also can always be a first time that somebody ever does something… And also, we do ask people to leave, you know, and then a lot of those people are the people that are also now speaking bad about us on the internet. Of course, because it's really hard to get rejected.”
Only one active TikToker from the Vice documentary claims to have visited The Garden: @hunterrobinson415, 15K followers. “It's really not safe,” he says. “Please don't go there. I already did. It's not worth it.” And here we find perhaps the most instructive character in this story.
Hunter Robinson, with his long hair and wiry beard, has the weathered look of a man who knows what it’s like to walk on the side of a highway. His TikTok account gives us insight into yet another unique ideology. In one video, he tells his viewers, if you “have to get to another state because… you’re… picking up a new car there or something, whatever, who cares, doesn’t matter why you’re traveling, this is America,” you could always try train-hopping. The post is captioned: “Roe vs Wade. #eattherich #republicanssuck.” In another, he walks by a group of Westborough Baptist church protesters at a Pride parade with his middle finger raised high. In another, he castigates those who complain about what unhoused people buy with panhandled money. “Bitch, you ever slept outside? It’s fucking cold. Who gives a shit if they wanna drink a beer?”
From Robinson we hear neither the politically correct language of TikTokers like Milo nor the hippie-dippie rhetoric of intentional communities. Instead, these videos paint a picture of a righteously angry road dog ready to bust a head for justice.
Hunter first started posting on TikTok during The Garden controversy, jumping on the opportunity to provide a first-hand account. In the 235 videos he uploaded from March 23rd to April 7th, 2021, we learn that he lived on the property years before, that he built a few of those tin-roofed structures still in use, and that no one he knew (except Patrick Martion) still resides there.
His critique of The Garden centers around a few primary talking points:
1. Patrick, “owner” of the property (recall that Vice labelled him the “co-owner”), barely ever worked, often traveling to Rainbow Gatherings “looking for vulnerable people and convincing them that this is the place to be. Much like their advertising on TikTok,” says Hunter. “They indoctrinate people long before they get to the property, and when they get there, they put ‘em to work.”
2. During one of these trips, Patrick left his “dying dog” with someone on the property and, when he returned, was furious to discover the dog had passed away. Seeking revenge, he poisoned the dog sitter’s dog.
3. Tyler Holmes (Patrick’s then right-hand man) tied his own “super aggressive” dog to a tree “with no shelter,” which was both abusive toward the animal and hazardous for the children living on the property.
4. Some of these children did not receive proper schooling.
5. Alcohol and drugs were regularly consumed at The Garden, which left Hunter (who was sober) with more than his fair share of the work.
6. The residents stole from local stores, and even held a community council meeting to agree upon the distance they should travel before shoplifting. “This was something that they openly discussed on the property…These people actually are a cult. They’re a fuckin’ philosophical cult.”
7. When Hunter finally complained about Tyler Holmes’s dog, he was forced to leave at gunpoint.
Whether or not you choose to believe Hunter, I find his interpretative frame more compelling than anything in the Vice documentary, since he applies a much-needed material analysis to The Garden: Who owns the land? Who handles the work? How is food secured when the community’s needs exceed its crop? What are the underlying hierarchies beneath this “truly egalitarian” community?
In 2013, a friend and I spent time in a Hawaiian eco-village called Cinderland, as doe-eyed and naïve as any teenage wannabe hippies would be. What we found there was neither a cult nor a commune, but instead a loose group of burnout idealists, backpacking New Agers, and borderline drug addicts, all living in slapdash structures, surviving on picked fruit and food stamps. After all this, maybe the answer was neither cult nor commune, but something entirely different. Or maybe much has changed since Hunter’s tenure at The Garden.
Garbled
Itsgriffinsworld
“doesn’t matter why you’re traveling, this is america.” Man, how much longer do you think this statement will ring true?
HunterRobinson416
As long as we have guns
This is America
There is no clear-cut definition of a cult. The application of the word depends entirely on one’s interpretative frame. Whether we think of it as “a religion regarded as unorthodox or spurious” (Merriam Webster) or “a small group of people who have extreme religious beliefs and who are not part of any established religion” (OED), the emphasis is less on the objective incorrectness of a community’s claims and more on the way they fit (or do not fit) into a larger cultural ideology. The amorphousness here is unsettling. A small group could conceivably start as a cult, grow in numbers, and then transition into a religion, a culture, or a country.
What exactly is the difference between a cult and a culture, two words which share a Latin root? (Both are from a past participle stem of colere: “to tend, guard; to till, cultivate.”) And on that note, what is the difference between a cult and a country? Those on TikTok were suspicious of Tree partially because—in exchange for time, labor, and residency—he promised his viewers equality, community, and freedom. Hmm… where had they heard that before?
Hunter Robinson hates The Garden because he believed those promises, working hard while those who owned the land attended Rainbow Gatherings, and ultimately he was left with nothing to show for his labor. Residents are free to come and go as they please, but in the end only Patrick profits.
Keep in mind that all this occurred in the heart of the COVID-19 lockdown, within a politically paralyzed United States, which was revealing itself totally inept in the face of a collective crisis. Almost ten million US workers had lost their jobs while the ten richest men on earth had all doubled their fortunes. And suddenly this collective howl on TikTok makes perfect sense. After all, what question could better summarize this national catastrophe than: is The Garden a cult?
This is how we end climate change
“Only the experience of sharing a common human world with others who look at it from different perspectives can enable us to see reality in the round and to develop a shared common sense,” writes Hannah Arendt in The Human Condition. “A noticeable decrease in common sense in any given community and a noticeable increase in superstition and gullibility are therefore almost infallible signs of alienation from the world.”
This is what I find so disheartening about the clash between CultTok and The Garden: all the characters involved, despite their disparate perspectives, seem to agree on a few fundamental points.
1. The American government is destructive and oppressive, working in service of the elite.
2. We live in a time of cascading crises and profound inequality.
3. We should try to lead a moral life, to confront these crises.
In other words, they do all share a “common human world,” and their interpretative frames are not even close to incommensurable. But no one on either side makes any effort to engage with each other, to find common ground. No one treats those on the screen as three-dimensional human beings, each with profoundly different upbringings and personal experiences. No one listens to criticism. No one takes a moment to rest in dilemma. No one attempts to see reality in the round.
And who can blame them? On TikTok, every human interaction comes in the form of hyper-commodified content. The other, collapsed into the flatness of the screen, becomes a mere cog in an algorithmic culture industry. So why wouldn’t viewers be wary of the ulterior motives beneath Tree’s cheerful spirit? Especially those in the United States, a country founded on empty promises. Hell, if Jesus Christ himself descended on modern America, we would probably call him a false prophet, paying lip service to universal love in search of fame and fortune. The first step to solve climate change, or racial injustice, or economic inequality, will involve a sort of trust that has been hammered out of us by history. By technology. It will involve a leap of faith, an acceptance of those with all kinds of social codes and interpretative frames, a rejection of suspicion in favor of curiosity.