Eleven Things David Koresh And I Had in Common
Confessions of a wannabe cult leader
David wasn’t after your money. He didn’t want to put you down. He would go out of his way to help you if he could. All that he really wanted was for you to join with him in Bible study. Can you imagine anything more wholesome? What could be the harm in that?
While researching my previous article on David Koresh, I couldn’t help but notice certain similarities between David and myself.
- David was teased by other kids in school, and so was I.
- David was a ninth-grade drop-out, and so am I.
- David stayed up very late, and so do I.
- David had a great sense of humor, and I am hilarious.
- David was humble. I can only aspire to be as humble as he was.
- David was driven, but not by money or status. Same here.
- David was rebellious. I was called the Instigator growing up.
- David was reclusive, locking himself alone in his room to converse with God. I enjoy the company of my cat.
- David was skinny and not very masculine looking. I’m … sure you don’t need everything spelled out.
- David was hypersexual with a harem of wives. I play Japanese hentai video games in which I, too, have amassed a harem of virtual ‘wives.’
All of these similarities reminded me of an article I had read recently on a blog. The article listed the traits commonly possessed by geniuses.
According to the author of the article, the majority of people in our society are descended from farmers. A small minority of people, however, have genes from hunter/gatherer ancestors.
Farmers Gonna Farm
We can see from the chart that farmers are conservative, hard-working, and status-seeking. The men are real men, and the women are real women. They stick within their groups, their family, school, hometown. They don’t like outsiders.
They are more concerned with owning status symbols. They are good at routine work. They do not worry about political correctness.
They get up early. They enjoy small talk and gossip.
Hunters-Gatherers Won’t Do What You Tell ‘Em
The hunter-gatherers are at the other end of the spectrum. They are liberal, and they are lazy when forced to do routine work. When doing work they enjoy, they are hyperfocused. The men aren’t usually built like Thor, and the women don’t necessarily look sexy and feminine.
They are outsiders, and they welcome the company of other outsiders. They understand the necessity for tact and diplomacy.
They sleep late and stay up late. They talk about ideas and not sports.
Hyposexual or Hypersexual
Geniuses are often hyposexual or hypersexual. For instance, Newton, Tesla, Kant, and Warhol are all said to have died virgins. Perhaps this was due to their sensitive natures and being forced to live in a world dominated by the descendants of farmers.
The hypersexuality displayed by many geniuses may be due to the way children were raised within the hunter-gatherer community. The community as a whole raised the children. That’s what David had created at Mount Carmel, a community to raise his many children together with the members’ children.
David Koresh was a Hunter Leading a Community of Farmers
David gathered a community of farmers. He did so with his ability to interpret the Bible. He claimed to have memorized the entire Bible, a feat that amazed his followers. This is not to suggest that his followers were just a bunch of simple uneducated people. Among his followers was a Harvard educated lawyer and a successful architect. There were people from the Caribbean, Mexico, the Philippines, New Zealand, Canada, and Australia.
That’s the thing. The majority of people are from farmer stock. All economic classes, all levels of education, all political affiliations. As the farmer community is centered around seeking status and making money, their defenses are designed with those sorts of threats in mind.
If someone isn’t trying to take their money, insult their character, or threaten them with harm, they aren’t perceived as a threat. Evolution-wise, hunter-gatherers have never presented enough of a threat for natural selection to have developed any protective responses.
David wasn’t after your money. He didn’t want to put you down. He would go out of his way to help you if he could. All that he really wanted was for you to join with him in Bible study. Can you imagine anything more wholesome? What could be the harm in that?
Let’s All Do Some Bible Study!
That’s another thing David and I have in common. The love of interpreting the Bible. Here are a few things David has said about his understanding of the Bible:
“I learned huge swatches of Scripture by heart and bored other kids at school with Bible lectures. I was thrilled by holy writ and knew that the great book was a puzzle of the truth I just had to decode in my very own way.”
“I was taken up past Orion, to meet God. He spoke to me, and I saw that he was made of unblemished flesh. In a flash, I received a complete key to the Scriptures, how the puzzle fit together. I knew then it was my destiny to unlock the Seals and open the way for our community.”
‘David’s essential message derived from his vision that the entire Bible, from Genesis to Revelation, was an integrated, coded narrative describing humanity’s spiritual history. He claimed he’d been given the key to unlocking this coded story, thereby making the events prophesied in Scripture about the end of human history actually happen.’¹
The text below is from the second book in my series, The Gnostic Notebook, which I wrote five years ago, well before I became interested in David Koresh. Notice how we both approach the Bible as a puzzle.
… my primary desire was to find a map, if you will, which would lead to the next section of the Synoptic Gospels we need to unlock. I look at these Gospels as a sort of literary puzzle box. The section where Jesus revealed that the parables were designed to conceal information as well as to transmit it to those he wished, operates similarly to a panel on the surface of this puzzle box which can be slid to a new position, unlocking various other pieces of the puzzle in the process. And for a while, it was working, and there was a thread to follow leading from reference to reference. Eventually, however, we ran out of leads. If only there was an external text that could provide us with a map of sorts so that we knew where exactly to look, or to return to my puzzle box metaphor, a map of the box's surface indicating which panels one should focus one’s attention on.
David and I apparently approached the Bible in a very similar manner. I am not sure, but I don’t think that most people look at the Bible as a puzzle to be solved. But for those of us who do, I’m afraid that we run the risk of ending up like Frank Cotton in this clip from Clive Barker’s Hellraiser (1987).
- Thibodeau, D., Whiteson, L., & Layton, A. (2018). Waco: A survivor’s story. New York, NY: Hachette Books.