Struck plagiarizes the AFR-cult essay
often not only isomorphic with but activally opposed to the cultists’ own individual pleasure, comfort, cui bono, or entertainment as to be all but outside the ken of both the sophisticated predictive models of psychosocial science and the rudimentary comprehension of human reason.
Context
Phelps's thesis defines the AFR by exactly the appetite they lack, and in doing so names the American condition by its inverse. The Canadian Root Cults, the essay argues, direct their fealty toward principles "activally opposed to the cultists' own individual pleasure, comfort, cui bono, or entertainment" — a fanaticism so indifferent to self-interest and diversion that it's "outside the ken" of both social science and human reason. That incomprehensibility is the point: to a culture organized entirely around individual pleasure and entertainment, a people who choose principle over pleasure are literally unthinkable, unmodelable, alien. The AFR are the photographic negative of the spectation-nation — where America can no longer say "Non" to a fatal pleasure (145), the Wheelchair Assassins have made opposition-to-pleasure their whole identity. The theme's "choosing your master" gets its clearest foil here: a cult that has chosen something over its own comfort, described by a scholarship that finds the choice barely human.