The Green Party Cult: How Political Zealots Ignore Broken Promises While Other Voters Hold Parties Accountable.
All parties lie. But only the Greens created followers so psychologically captive they can't see it.
I may not have learned much during those years at school—left at 15, barely scraped through—but I sure as hell made up for it afterwards. The University of Life provided more education than any classroom ever could. Math, history, geography—turned out to be bugger all use when you’re homeless, hungry, ducking and diving to survive on the streets.
You meet all kinds of people on that journey. You learn lessons you never thought you’d need. And somewhere between surviving and observing, blended with that dry, brutal humour I first learned from Manchester people and the northern club circuit, you develop an eye for bullshit that no credential can teach you.
Politics and religion are the same. Both are selling the concept of something better. Heaven later, prosperity later, equality later—just keep believing and it’ll come. The bishops live in palaces while promising you salvation. The councillors sell off social housing while promising you more of it. Same con, different branding.
And here’s what they both rely on: your willingness to hand over self-governance to a perceived higher power. Instead of taking full ownership and responsibility for your own existence, you deflect what should be self-autonomy to those or something you believe somehow knows better.
What does that say about us? Most people would rather be led than be sovereign. Not because they’re stupid, but because genuine self-governance is terrifying and exhausting. It means every decision is yours, every failure is yours, and every moral calculation has to be worked out without an instruction manual. No higher authority to blame, no collective to hide in, no ready-made meaning handed down from the pulpit or the party.
I write from what Ernst Jünger called the anarch position—not anarchist (most people don’t know the difference). An anarchist wants to dismantle hierarchies. An anarch maintains inner sovereignty while observing the theatre, with no investment in any of the actors. I don’t do politics or religion anymore. I watch both, document both, critique both—but I don’t hand over my self-governance to either.
I’m not perfect, by any means. Never have been, never will be. None of us were designed to be perfect—our flaws define who we are individually, make us unique right down to our DNA. To others, my probable main flaw is that my neurodivergent, probably dysfunctional mind works in three ways: First, is whatever it is practical? Next, is it logical? Finally, what would be the most likely outcome? If something doesn’t satisfy all three, it’s a non-starter.
Whereas I’ve increasingly noticed that people, in general, are driven by their emotions as the default before anything else. Does it feel right in some way? That’s the go-to. And then I sometimes wonder why the world’s going tits up, when really, it’s self-explanatory. When you prioritise how something feels over whether it works, over whether it makes sense, over what it will actually produce, you get Bristol’s Greens selling the housing they promised to build while their followers explain why it’s fine.
Every Political Party Lies—That’s Not News.
Every political party lies. Labour promises transformation, delivers austerity. Tories pledge competence, deliver chaos. Lib Dems swear they’ll fix tuition fees, then triple them. We’re watching this with Keir Starmer’s Labour government now—big promises about growth and NHS investment, struggling reality. Labour voters are disappointed but not surprised.
But here’s the difference: when you point out Labour’s broken promises, Labour voters will argue, deflect, maybe defend—but most will ultimately acknowledge the gap. They can see contradictions. Their political loyalty doesn’t require complete blindness.
The Green Party has pushed this dynamic to a different level entirely.
Same Broken Promises, Cult-Level Denial.
Let’s use Bristol as the laboratory, because the facts are brutal and undeniable.
Bristol’s Green Party promised to build 2,000 affordable homes, with 1,000 being council homes. They got elected to govern the Bristol City Council in May 2024.
Then they started selling council housing. The Cabinet approved the disposal of multiple council properties in its first months of administration.
This is exactly the kind of promise-versus-reality gap every party produces. It’s Politics 101: say what gets you elected, do what’s expedient once you’re there.
But watch what happens when you point this out.
With Labour voters, you get defensiveness, spin, maybe explanation. But fundamentally, Labour voters can engage with the criticism.
With Green Party followers? You get reframing so complete it borders on gaslighting. References to “strategic asset management” and complex housing strategies. The implication that criticising Bristol’s Green administration means you don’t care about climate change.
The Green Party follower—the true believer—literally cannot process that their party has broken a promise. The cognitive dissonance is too great, so it gets automatically reframed into something acceptable.
When you’ve lived rough, when you’ve had to spot the difference between someone who’ll actually help and someone performing concern, you develop radar for this. You spot the gap because you haven’t handed over your self-governance to them.
The Polycule Structure: Why Green Cultism Runs Deeper.
Every party has tribal loyalty. The Green Party has cultivated this to cult-like extremes, organised through what can only be described as a political polycule structure.
Your committed Green activist isn’t just a party member. They’re simultaneously involved in Extinction Rebellion, local environmental groups, progressive housing campaigns, anti-car coalitions, and climate justice organisations. Their friendship circles overlap with activist circles overlap with professional networks. They might be romantically involved with other activists. Their social life, sense of purpose, career prospects, and romantic prospects—all enmeshed in this interconnected web.
When you join Labour, you can leave and keep your friends, job, and identity. When you join the Green movement, leaving means unravelling your entire life.
I chose a different path. Gave up the Catholic religion, never gave in to the predetermined path of marriage, mortgage, and children. Followed my own way. That refusal to hand over self-governance to any institution is exactly what lets you see through bullshit, whether it’s wearing a cassock or a Green Party rosette.
Confirmation Bias Weaponised.
Everyone in your Green network thinks identically, consumes the same media, attends the same events, and validates the same beliefs. The collective worldview stops feeling like ideology and starts feeling like objective reality. This is what happens when you surrender self-governance—their truth becomes your truth through collective reinforcement, not individual reasoning.
Every piece of information gets filtered through this network, with only hive-confirming interpretations surviving. Failure becomes “complex nuance” or “learning process.”
Post criticism of Green Party policy and watch: Within minutes, multiple accounts swarm with identical responses—” You don’t understand the complexity,” “This is climate denial,” “Bad faith argument.” The hive's immune response is more intensely developed because they’ve surrendered individual judgment more completely.
The Psychological Toll: Allostatic Overload.
Maintaining this cognitive dissonance—believing your party is uniquely pure while watching them produce the same failures—creates what psychologists call allostatic overload.
When you’re constantly reconciling “we’re the party of housing justice” versus “we’re selling council homes,” your brain works overtime to maintain the belief system.
You can either acknowledge the contradiction (losing your community, rebuilding identity, reclaiming self-governance) or dig deeper into the belief system, becoming more rigid, more defensive.
Most Green zealots choose the latter because the psychological cost of reclaiming autonomy is too high. They’ve outsourced their self-governance so completely that taking it back would mean rebuilding their entire sense of self. But this rigidity comes at a price: the inability to hold leaders accountable.
When Labour disappoints, it’s annoying. When the Greens disappoint, the true believer’s entire psychological framework is under attack. Because they haven’t just voted for a party—they’ve surrendered their autonomy to a movement that promised to carry the weight of moral certainty.
The Evangelical Playbook
The Greens actively cultivated this using tactics refined by every movement that asks people to surrender self-governance:
Start with an undeniable truth: Climate change is real. Inequality exists.
Escalate to apocalyptic urgency: Existential crisis. Twelve years to save civilisation. This panic short-circuits critical thinking and makes people desperate to hand authority to someone who claims answers. Notice what this does—it bypasses the practical/logical/outcome framework entirely and goes straight for emotional reaction. Fear. Urgency. The feeling that you must act now without thinking it through.
Offer exclusive salvation: Other parties are corrupted, compromised. We alone are pure.
Fuse identity with belief: You’re not voting Green—you’re becoming Green. Your self-governance dissolves into group identity.
Create echo chambers: Surround followers with confirming information until individual judgment atrophies.
Compare to Labour: “Vote for us, we’ll improve things a bit, make mistakes, but we’re better than the Tories.” That’s transactional. You maintain autonomy.
The Green pitch is existential: “Join us in saving the planet. Find your purpose.” That’s spiritual. It asks you to hand over self-governance in exchange for meaning and moral certainty. And spiritual commitments don’t respond to evidence.
Why This Actually Matters.
The danger isn’t that they lie—it’s that they’ve created a follower base that cannot acknowledge they’re lying because doing so would mean reclaiming the autonomy they’ve surrendered.
When Labour disappoints, enough Labour voters retain enough self-governance to push back. The feedback loop functions.
When Greens fail, their zealot base doesn’t push back—they explain it away, attack critics, double down on faith. That feedback loop is broken.
This matters because the Green Party is now governing Bristol City Council following their May 2024 victory. They’re in power in various councils, increasingly positioning themselves as the alternative for disillusioned Labour voters.
When they achieve power with a base that has surrendered self-governance so completely they cannot acknowledge when things aren’t working, you get faith-based governance.
The Anarch’s View.
From the anarch position—maintaining inner sovereignty while observing—the pattern is clear. Most humans will choose comfortable certainty over uncomfortable freedom every time. They’ll hand over self-governance to anyone who promises to carry the weight of autonomy for them.
The Green zealot who can’t acknowledge broken housing promises and the evangelical who can’t question biblical contradictions operate from the same place: they’ve outsourced their judgment to a higher authority, and questioning threatens the entire framework they’ve built for avoiding the terrifying responsibility of self-governance.
The anarch sees this without judgment, but also without participation. I watch, document, critique—but I don’t hand over my self-governance. That’s what makes the contradictions so visible: no investment in defending them, no identity wrapped up in their success, no community I’d lose by acknowledging reality.
The Way Forward.
The planet is in crisis. We do need urgent climate action. But we need it delivered by people operating in reality, not zealots operating in faith. We need voters who’ve retained enough self-governance to demand accountability, not followers who’ve surrendered judgment so completely they can’t see when promises turn into their opposite.
What matters is whether supporters retain enough autonomy to acknowledge reality and demand better, or whether they’ve been absorbed into networks of belief so intense that individual judgment has been outsourced to the collective.
At least when Labour disappoints, enough Labour voters retain enough autonomy to admit it. Try getting a Green Party zealot to acknowledge their council just sold the social housing they promised to build—you’d have more luck asking a megachurch pastor to question whether God really cares about their mortgage.
That’s not politics. That’s a cult. And Bristol’s paying the price.
Hence, I no longer do either politics or religion, and an anarch I will remain. Observing, documenting, and maintaining sovereignty while the theatre continues. Not because I’m contrarian, but because I’ve seen clearly enough that I can’t unsee the pattern: wherever there’s a perceived higher power promising salvation, there are people desperate to hand over the terrifying responsibility of self-governance.
The streets taught me no one’s coming to save you. The only authority worth having is the kind you claim and maintain for yourself. Most people can’t bear that clarity, so they keep joining churches and parties, outsourcing their autonomy to anyone who’ll take it.
Most people operate on emotion first—does it feel right, does it feel good, does it feel like I’m part of something meaningful? My neurodivergent mind asks different questions: Is it practical? Is it logical? What’s the likely outcome? Bristol’s Greens promised 2,000 affordable homes. They’re selling existing council housing. Practical? No. Logical? No. Likely outcome? Fewer council homes, more disappointed people who needed them. That’s not complex—that’s just asking the questions most people skip because the emotional appeal of “vote Green, save the planet” feels too good to question.
I won’t. And from that position, the gap between what Bristol’s Greens promised and what they’re delivering is impossible to miss.
Author’s Note
This analysis draws from documented coverage of Bristol City Council’s Green administration since its May 2024 election victory. All factual claims about housing promises and policy contradictions are documented in public council records and Green Party campaign materials. The psychological frameworks (confirmation bias, allostatic overload, and cognitive dissonance) are established concepts applied to observed political behaviour patterns.
I write from the anarch position—maintaining inner sovereignty while observing political systems without tribal allegiance. This isn’t anarchism (dismantling hierarchies) but rather the practice of independent observation without surrendering self-governance to any movement or ideology.