discoursedrome:

Everyone I’ve ever met who worked for Wal-Mart talks about how it’s run like a cult and while that’s an overused accusation it totally sounds true in Wal-Mart’s case. Wal-Mart’s corporate culture is like a Christopher Guest mockumentary. That much is a cold take.

But okay, what I’m thinking is: Wal-Mart has come closer to replicating the social technology of religion than any other major corporation. What if you schismed into a heretical Wal-Mart sect? Like, you distribute some kind of manifesto about how Wal-Mart has betrayed its tradition and become corrupt, and you are the true heritors of the teachings of Sam Walton, and you cite your various doctrinal disputes, and then you take a bunch of former Wal-Mart employees and move to cheap land in the midwest and set up a sort of combination of church and mission thrift store to preach your message of low prices to the people, and you still use all the Wal-Mart language and clothing and iconography except changed just enough to skirt trademark law.

I really want to see this, if it was done seriously and got big it would justify every bad thing that’s’happened in modern America. Ideally, they’d be agile proselytizers and respond to legal attack by replicating the culture of martyrdom in early Christianity, and you’d get disputes over whether people who renounce their ties to avoid legal repercussions can be reintegrated into the community later, and so forth.

Sam’s Cult