Love Has Won, Robin Williams and the Narcissistic Insanity of Assembling an Etheric Dream Team
My wife and myself are big fans of true crime in both podcast and mini-series form. So when we saw that there would be a three part mini-series on Amy Carlson and her cult Love Has Won on Max we were psyched.
Even by the exceedingly lenient standards of kooky cults Love Has Won stands out for being particularly bizarre.
There are many curious elements to Love Has Won, including the fact that its messiah previously had a promising career in management at McDonald’s that she cavalierly threw away so that she could be worshipped as a God.
Carlson’s final boyfriend, who was known, of course, as Father God, similarly abandoned a potentially solid gig as a Blockbuster manager to be the partner of the messiah and also the Father of All Creation.
Love Has Won has a lot of questionable beliefs, like its conviction that Hitler was a “creature of light” who tried to teach Jews to work through concentration camps although they also think that the Holocaust, like COVID 19, are hoaxes.
Carlson and her followers believe that there was an “Etheric Team” made up of prominent dead celebrities, that helped and guided Carlson on her spiritual quest to save humanity.
For a group whose members believe that Hitler was a light-worker out to help the Jews the Intergalactic A-Team sure has a lot of Jews in it, such as Gene Wilder and Rodney Dangerfield.
But the most important member of Carlson’s Etheric Team was Robin Williams, or rather Robin Williams’ ghost. Robin Williams’ ghost had a lot of power within Love Has Won, and Carlson thankfully was able to channel Williams when extremely drunk, which was much of the time.
Some of the members of the Etheric Team are confusingly still alive, including Donald Trump and Carol Burnett. Carlson was unsurprisingly was a big proponent of QAnon and thought of Trump as a savior figure not unlike herself.
What is QAnon if not a parasocial relationship taken to pathological extremes? Q allows cultists to believe that they can actually work with Donald Trump in his holy crusade to save the babies from child rapists like Tom Hanks.
They could never hope to be even a fraction as powerful and saintly as the disgraced, twice-impeached ex-president but they could support him in his holy war against cannibalistic pedophilic Satan worshippers, the Deep State and the press.
QAnon is not the only cult idea that Love Has Won blatantly stole. They similarly “borrowed” the idea of Twin Flames from an analogous cult that similarly posits that its leader is Jesus/God yet still manages to be decidedly less insane than the Love Has Won folks.
Love Has Won inverts the power dynamic found in most parasocial relationships by creating a world where the cult’s leader, a former McDonald’s manager who decided that she was God somewhere along the way, doesn’t just have a relationship with celebrities, many of them dead; she has the power in this relationship, as it is now the mission of her Etheric team to help her achieve her goals on earth.
That is some next level narcissism. It would be like me imagining that in a spiritual world the ghosts of Roger Ebert, Harris Wittels, Robert Evans and Phil Hartman are all part of my Etheric Dream Team and want to spend their afterlife helping me.
I can assure you that one thing that all of those people share is a deep and understandable unwillingness to spend their afterlife helping my sorry ass out of various binds.
For some reason I think that the dead celebrities that I loved and felt like I had a personal connection with would rather be in heaven shtupping Marilyn Monroe than assisting me in my various endeavors.
So who would be in your Etheric team? What dead celebrities do you delusionally imagine are part of a posthumous squad of supporters? Feel free to include me on your team. I’m only dead inside and I would be happy to spend my afterlife helping you. Or shtupping Marilyn Monroe. It’ll be a tough choice but I think I will choose wisely when the time comes.
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