It’s a cult thing

I have decided to set up a cult, which you are all welcome to join, especially those of you who are young and very attractive or stupendously rich. The former will get exclusive membership of my JiggyJiggy Fun Club™, while the latter will be essential in financing all the cool shit I need on my 500-square-mile estate, viz: hunt stables and kennels, helipad, private games room with huge comfy chair, water slides, grouse moor, airstrip, barracks for my cuirassiers, volcano with battery of rockets inside, and so on.

What gave me the idea was this new Netflix documentary series everyone is talking about called Wild Wild Country. It tells the story of the Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, the bearded guru who in the early 1980s decamped from India with his thousands of followers to set up a utopian colony on a remote and beautiful ranch in the wilds of Oregon.

If you didn’t know it was all going to go horribly wrong, you might find the early episodes ever so slightly dull. ‘Yeah, yeah. Beard. Twinkly eyes. Namaste. Hideous orange clothes. Rolls-Royce. Free love. Money-making machine. We got it,’ I muttered after the first part, which lasted an hour but felt like two. For example, the bearded guy (not that that narrows it down much) who used to be a hotshot LA lawyer but then became the cult’s attorney: did we really need to have quite so much of him expatiating ad nauseam in his neat clothes and stripped-wood loft space on how delightful and misunderstood the cult was, how charismatic its leader, how foxily cunning and dedicated its modus operandi?

This is the series’ blessing and curse. Directors Mclain and Chapman Way have secured in-depth interviews with all the story’s surviving participants.