It seems to me like in the case of Leverage, them working 75 hours per week reduced the time the could have used to use Reason to conclude that they are in a system that’s bad for them.
That’s very different from someone having a few conversation with Vassar and then adopting a new belief and spending a lot of the time reasoning about that alone and the belief being stable without being embedded into a strong enviroment that makes independent thought hard because it keeps people busy.
A cult in it’s nature is a social institution and not just a meme that someone can pass around via having a few conversations.
I think “mind virus” is fair. Vassar spoke a lot about how the world as it is can’t be trusted. I remember that many of the people in his circle spoke, seemingly apropos of nothing, about how bad involuntary commitment is, so that by the time someone was psychotic their relationship with psychiatry and anyone who would want to turn to psychiatry to help them was poisoned. Within the envelope of those beliefs you can keep a lot of other beliefs safe from scrutiny.
The thing with “bad influence” is that it’s a pretty value-laden thing. In a religious town the biology teacher who tells the children about evolution and explains how it makes sense that our history goes back a lot further then a few thousands years is reasonably described as bad influence by the parents.
The religion teacher gets the children to doubt the religious authorities. Those children then can also be a bad influence on others by also getting them to doubt authorities. In a similar war Vassar gets people to question other authorities and social conventions and how those ideas can then be passed on.
Vassar speaks about things like Moral Mazes. Memes like that make people distrust institutions. There are the kind of bad influence that can get people to quit their job.
Talking about the biology teacher like they are intend to start an evolution cult feels a bit misleading.
It seems to me like in the case of Leverage, them working 75 hours per week reduced the time the could have used to use Reason to conclude that they are in a system that’s bad for them.
That’s very different from someone having a few conversation with Vassar and then adopting a new belief and spending a lot of the time reasoning about that alone and the belief being stable without being embedded into a strong enviroment that makes independent thought hard because it keeps people busy.
A cult in it’s nature is a social institution and not just a meme that someone can pass around via having a few conversations.
Perhaps the proper word here might be “manipulation” or “bad influence”.
I think “mind virus” is fair. Vassar spoke a lot about how the world as it is can’t be trusted. I remember that many of the people in his circle spoke, seemingly apropos of nothing, about how bad involuntary commitment is, so that by the time someone was psychotic their relationship with psychiatry and anyone who would want to turn to psychiatry to help them was poisoned. Within the envelope of those beliefs you can keep a lot of other beliefs safe from scrutiny.
The thing with “bad influence” is that it’s a pretty value-laden thing. In a religious town the biology teacher who tells the children about evolution and explains how it makes sense that our history goes back a lot further then a few thousands years is reasonably described as bad influence by the parents.
The religion teacher gets the children to doubt the religious authorities. Those children then can also be a bad influence on others by also getting them to doubt authorities. In a similar war Vassar gets people to question other authorities and social conventions and how those ideas can then be passed on.
Vassar speaks about things like Moral Mazes. Memes like that make people distrust institutions. There are the kind of bad influence that can get people to quit their job.
Talking about the biology teacher like they are intend to start an evolution cult feels a bit misleading.