You are arguing by definition here; please consider what could falsify your mental model of cults. If my local gym discovers only 1% of the people joining after New Years will stick around for more than a year, does that necessarily imply that the gym is ruled by a charismatic leader driving people away so as to maximize the proportion of unthinkingly loyal subordinates?
Low rate of retention is simply low rate of retention. This can be for a great many reasons, such as persecution, more attractive rival organizations, members solving their problems and leaving, or (way down the list) extreme filtering for loyalty which drives away otherwise acceptable members. How often do you see a cult leader going ‘well, sure, we could have thousands more members if we wanted (people are pounding down the doors to convert), and majorly increase our donations and financial holdings, but gosh, we wouldn’t want to sell out like that!’
Of course, like any organization, there’s concerns about freeriding and wasting club goods and it’ll seek to strike a balance between inclusiveness and parasite load; but a cult which has ‘successfully’ shed all but a few fanatics is a cult which is about to become history.
The cults try to get members to sever ties with the family and friends, for example
Recruiting through family and friends is a major strategy of cults—indeed, perhaps the only strategy which does not have abysmally low success rates.
Low rate of retention is a product of many reasons simultaneously, including the extreme weird stuff creeping people out. If your local gym is creepy, it will have lower retention rate, than same gym that is not creepy.
My mental model of failed retention includes the general low retention rate, in combination with the weird things that cult does creeping people out, on top of that.
How often do you see a cult leader going ‘well, sure, we could have thousands more members if we wanted (people are pounding down the doors to convert), and majorly increase our donations and financial holdings, but gosh, we wouldn’t want to sell out like that!’
I rarely see people reflect on their motives or goal structure. You often see a cult leader abusing a cultist, which leads insufficiently dedicated cultists to leave. Such actions sacrifice quantity for “quality”.
Recruiting through family and friends is a major strategy of cults—indeed, perhaps the only strategy which does not have abysmally low success rates.
Yes, and a lot of the time that fails, and the family members start actively denouncing the cult, and the member has to choose between the family and friends, and the cult, at which point, well, few choose the cult.
Low rate of retention is a product of many reasons simultaneously, including the extreme weird stuff creeping people out.
As pointed out in the OP by one author, the cults in question have in many ways been assimilated by the mainstream and so are far less ‘weird’ than ever before. Has that helped their retention rates? Environmentalism and meditation are completely mainstream now, have the Hare Krishnas staged a comeback?
If your local gym is creepy, it will have lower retention rate, than same gym that is not creepy.
The counterfactual is not available or producible, and so this is meaningless to point out. If the Hare Krishnas did not hold ‘creepy’ beliefs, in what sense is this counterfactual organization similar to the Hare Krishnas? If Transcendental Meditators did not do as weird a thing as meditate, how are they Transcendental Meditators? Defining away all the unique characteristics does not add any insight.
You often see a cult leader abusing a cultist, which leads insufficiently dedicated cultists to leave.
“You often see a boss abusing a subordinate, which leads insufficiently dedicated employees to leave. This is because bosses wish to sacrifice quantity and being able to handle work for ‘quality’ of subordinates.”
No, there is nothing unique about cults in this respect. Monkeys gonna monkey. And for the exact same reason businesses do not casually seek to alienate 99% of their employees in order to retain a fanatical 1%, you don’t see cults systematically organization-wide try to alienate everyone. You see a few people in close proximity to elites being abused. Just like countless other organizations.
the member has to choose between the family and friends, and the cult, at which point, well, few choose the cult.
Which explains the success of deprogrammers, amirite?
Environmentalism and meditation are completely mainstream now, have the Hare Krishnas staged a comeback?
I would suggest that if beliefs believed by cults becoime mainstream, that certainly decreases one barrier to such a cult’s expansion, but because there are additional factors (such as creepiness) that alone is not enough to lead the cult to expand much. It may be that people’s resistance to joining a group drastically increases if the group fails any one of several criteria. Just decrementing the number of criteria that the group fails isn’t going to be enough, if even one such criterion is left.
“You often see a boss abusing a subordinate, which leads insufficiently dedicated employees to leave. This is because bosses wish to sacrifice quantity and being able to handle work for ‘quality’ of subordinates.
The level of abuse done by bosses and cult leaders is different, so although the statement is literally true for both bosses and cult leaders, it really doesn’t imply that the two situations are similar.
It may be that people’s resistance to joining a group drastically increases if the group fails any one of several criteria.
Maybe, but I don’t know how we’d know the difference.
The level of abuse done by bosses and cult leaders is different, so although the statement is literally true for both bosses and cult leaders, it really doesn’t imply that the two situations are similar.
Is it really? Remember how many thousands of NRMs there are over the decades, and how people tend to discuss repeatedly a few salient examples like Scientology. Can we really compare that favorably regular bosses with religious figures? Aside from the Catholic Church scandal (with its counterparts among other closemouthed groups like Jewish and Amish communities), we see plenty of sexual scandals in other places like the military (the Tailhook scandal as the classic example, but there’s plenty of recent statistics on sexual assault in the military, often enabled by the hierarchy).
I don’t see how environmentalism or for that matter meditation itself is creepy.
What’s creepy about Hare Krishnas is the zoned out sleep deprived look on the faces (edit: I am speaking of the local ones, from experience), and the whole obsession with the writings of the leader thing, and weirdly specific rituals. Now that environmentalism and meditation are fairly mainstream, you don’t have to put up with the creepy stuff if you want to be around people who share your interests in environmentalism and meditation. You have less creepy alternatives. You can go to a local Yoga class, that manages to have same number of people attending as the local Khrishna hangout, despite not trying nearly as hard to find new recruits. You can join a normal environmentalist group.
No, there is nothing unique about cults in this respect. Monkeys gonna monkey. And for the exact same reason businesses do not casually seek to alienate 99% of their employees in order to retain a fanatical 1%, you don’t see cults systematically organization-wide try to alienate everyone. You see a few people in close proximity to elites being abused. Just like countless other organizations.
The difference is, of course, in extent. For example, putting up a portrait of the founder at every workplace (or perhaps in a handbook, or the like) would be something that a cult leader would do in a cult, but what a corporation would seldom ever do because doing so would be counter-productive.
edit: actually. What do you think makes joining a cult worse than joining a club, getting a job, and so on? Now, what ever that is, it makes it harder to get new recruits, and requires more dedication.
I don’t see how environmentalism or for that matter meditation itself is creepy.
Which goes to show how far into the zeitgeist they’ve penetrated. Go back to the 1960s when the cult panic and popular image of cults was being set, and things were quite different. One of the papers discusses a major lawsuit accusing the Hare Krishnas of ‘brainwashing’ a teen girl when she ran away from home and stayed with some Krishnas; the precipitating event was her parents getting angry about her meditating in front of a little shrine, and ripping it out and burning it (and then chaining her to the toilet for a while). To people back then, ‘tune in, turn on, drop out’ sounds less like a life choice than a threat...
What’s creepy about Hare Krishnas is the zoned out sleep deprived look on the faces (edit: I am speaking of the local ones, from experience)
Well, I can hardly argue against your anecdotal experiences.
the whole obsession with the writings of the leader thing,
Supreme Court—jurists or cultists? Film at 11. We report, you decide.
and weirdly specific rituals.
I don’t even know what ‘weirdly specific’ would mean. Rituals are generally followed in precise detail, right down to the exact repetitive wording and special garments like Mormon underpants; that’s pretty much what distinguishes rituals from normal activities. Accepting Eucharist at mass? Ritual. Filling out a form at the DMV? Not ritual.
You can go to a local Yoga class, that manages to have same number of people attending as the local Khrishna hangout, despite not trying nearly as hard to find new recruits.
Hmm, where was one to find yoga back then… Ah yes, also in cults. Ashrams in particular did a lot of yoga. Interesting that you no longer have to go to an ashram or fly to India if you want to do yoga. It’s almost like… these cult activities have been somehow normalized or assimilated into the mainstream...
You can join a normal environmentalist group.
And where did these environmentalist groups come from?
For example, putting up a portrait of the founder at every workplace (or perhaps in a handbook, or the like) would be something that a cult leader would do in a cult, but what a corporation would seldom ever do because doing so would be counter-productive.
Really? That seems incredibly common. Aside from the obvious examples of many (all?) government offices like post offices including portraits of their supreme leader—I mean, President—you can also go into places like Walmart and see the manager’s portrait up on the wall.
What do you think makes joining a cult worse than joining a club, getting a job, and so on?
Personally? I think it’s mostly competition from the bigger cults. Just like it’s hard to start up a business or nonprofit.
I wasn’t around in the 60s and wasn’t aware for any of the 70s, but… Environmentalism seems qualitatively different from everything else here. Is there some baggage to this beyond, say, conservation, or assigning plants and animals some moral weight, that is intended here?
Something may have seemed weirder in the past because it was weirder back then.
I suspect few modern Christians would sign up for AD 200 Christianity.
Environmentalism seems qualitatively different from everything else here. Is there some baggage to this beyond, say, conservation, or assigning plants and animals some moral weight, that is intended here?
Not really, aside from the standard observation that you can just as easily play the ‘find cult markers’ game with environmental groups like Greenpeace or ELF. Cleansing rituals like recycling, intense devotion to charismatic leaders, studies of founding texts like Silent Spring, self-abnegating life choices, donating funds to the movement, sacralization of unusual objects like owls or bugs, food taboos (‘GMOs’), and so on and so forth.
Of course it makes sense. As I’ve already claimed, cults are not engaged in some sort of predatory ‘brainwashing’ where they exploit cognitive flaws to just moneypump people with their ultra-advanced psychological techniques: they offer value in return for value received, just like businesses need to offer value to their customers, and nonprofits need to offer some sort of value to their funders. And these cults have plenty of established competition, so it makes sense that they’d usually fail. Just like businesses and nonprofits have huge mortality rates.
Rest likewise doesn’t seem in any way contradictory to the point I am making, but is posed as such.
I’ve given counter-examples and criticized your claims. Seems contradictory to me.
The question was, “What do you think makes joining a cult worse than joining a club, getting a job, and so on?” . How is competition from other cults impacting the decision to join a cult—any cult?
As I’ve already claimed, cults are not engaged in some sort of predatory ‘brainwashing’ where they exploit cognitive flaws to just moneypump people with their ultra-advanced psychological techniques: they offer value in return for value received
Well, I know of one cult that provides value in form of the nice fuzzy feeling of being able—through a very little effort—to see various things that, say, top physicists can not see. Except this feeling is attained entirely through self deception, unbeknown to the individuals, and arguing that it is providing value is akin to arguing that a scam which sells fake gold for the cheap is providing value.
(Then there’s of course Janestown, and so on and so forth)
How is competition from other cults impacting the decision to join a cult?
Exactly as I said, pressure from other cults: direct retaliation (like the legal system endorsing your kidnapping), opportunity costs, lack of subsidies, regulatory capture being used against you, the risk of joining a small new organization… Many of the reasons that apply to not joining a startup and instead working at Microsoft can be tweaked to apply to small cults vs big cults.
Well, I know of one cult that provides value in form of the nice fuzzy feeling of being able—through a very little effort—to see various things that, say, top physicists can not see. Except this feeling is attained entirely through self deception, unbeknown to the individuals, and arguing that it is providing value is akin to arguing that a scam which sells fake gold for the cheap is providing value.
You know what’s even more awesome than self-deception? Sliming people you don’t like as cults, when your ideas about what a cult is aren’t even right in the first place. Sweet delicious meta-contrarianism.
True, it’s not as good a racket as Singer getting paid tons of money to testify about how awful cults are and how powerful their deceptions are—but it’s a lot less work and more convenient.
Exactly as I said, pressure from other cults: direct retaliation (like the legal system endorsing your kidnapping), opportunity costs, lack of subsidies, regulatory capture being used against you, the risk of joining a small new organization… Many of the reasons that apply to not joining a startup and instead working at Microsoft can be tweaked to apply to small cults vs big cults.
I said, joining a cult. I didn’t say, joining a small cult, I didn’t say, joining a big cult, I said, joining a cult.
You know what’s even more awesome than self-deception? Sliming people you don’t like as cults, when your ideas about what a cult is aren’t even right in the first place. Sweet delicious meta-contrarianism.
Well, a scam then, if you don’t like me to call it a cult. It is my honest opinion that the value arises through the self deception, which goes against the intent of individual, and is of lesser value compared to what the individual is expecting to get.
I said, joining a cult. I didn’t say, joining a small cult, I didn’t say, joining a big cult, I said, joining a cult.
I’m sorry, I didn’t realize I was supposed to interpret that as meaninglessly general as possible, rather than, you know, be about the topic of my post or the topic of the previous comments.
Why do all organizations and religions in particular exist? That’s a tough question which I’m afraid I have no quick answer to, but the right answer looks like ‘all sorts of reasons’.
Your barrage of non-sequiturs posed as “counterarguments” is incredibly annoying. Your post clearly doesn’t deal with specifically the small cults, nor anything else does.
Krishnas, scientology, moonies, etc. how are those examples of small cults?
/sigh
You know, I suspected that you hadn’t actually read what I posted and jumped straight to the comment section to vomit your preconceptions out, but that assertion pretty much confirms it. Here, from the quotes:
These groups are actually very small in numbers (the Hare Krishna and the Unification Church each have no more than two to three thousand members nationwide), which puts the lie to brainwashing claims. If “brainwashing” practiced by new religions is so powerful, why are the groups experiencing so much voluntary attrition, and why are they so small?
Two of the most famous cults together have like a third of the people the university I went to did? That sounds pretty darn small to me!
Or do you count every major religion as a cult?
I don’t think there’s any meaningful difference aside from things like the size or social acceptability, as I think I’ve been pretty clear all along.
You are arguing by definition here; please consider what could falsify your mental model of cults. If my local gym discovers only 1% of the people joining after New Years will stick around for more than a year, does that necessarily imply that the gym is ruled by a charismatic leader driving people away so as to maximize the proportion of unthinkingly loyal subordinates?
Low rate of retention is simply low rate of retention. This can be for a great many reasons, such as persecution, more attractive rival organizations, members solving their problems and leaving, or (way down the list) extreme filtering for loyalty which drives away otherwise acceptable members. How often do you see a cult leader going ‘well, sure, we could have thousands more members if we wanted (people are pounding down the doors to convert), and majorly increase our donations and financial holdings, but gosh, we wouldn’t want to sell out like that!’
Of course, like any organization, there’s concerns about freeriding and wasting club goods and it’ll seek to strike a balance between inclusiveness and parasite load; but a cult which has ‘successfully’ shed all but a few fanatics is a cult which is about to become history.
Recruiting through family and friends is a major strategy of cults—indeed, perhaps the only strategy which does not have abysmally low success rates.
Low rate of retention is a product of many reasons simultaneously, including the extreme weird stuff creeping people out. If your local gym is creepy, it will have lower retention rate, than same gym that is not creepy.
My mental model of failed retention includes the general low retention rate, in combination with the weird things that cult does creeping people out, on top of that.
I rarely see people reflect on their motives or goal structure. You often see a cult leader abusing a cultist, which leads insufficiently dedicated cultists to leave. Such actions sacrifice quantity for “quality”.
Yes, and a lot of the time that fails, and the family members start actively denouncing the cult, and the member has to choose between the family and friends, and the cult, at which point, well, few choose the cult.
As pointed out in the OP by one author, the cults in question have in many ways been assimilated by the mainstream and so are far less ‘weird’ than ever before. Has that helped their retention rates? Environmentalism and meditation are completely mainstream now, have the Hare Krishnas staged a comeback?
The counterfactual is not available or producible, and so this is meaningless to point out. If the Hare Krishnas did not hold ‘creepy’ beliefs, in what sense is this counterfactual organization similar to the Hare Krishnas? If Transcendental Meditators did not do as weird a thing as meditate, how are they Transcendental Meditators? Defining away all the unique characteristics does not add any insight.
“You often see a boss abusing a subordinate, which leads insufficiently dedicated employees to leave. This is because bosses wish to sacrifice quantity and being able to handle work for ‘quality’ of subordinates.”
No, there is nothing unique about cults in this respect. Monkeys gonna monkey. And for the exact same reason businesses do not casually seek to alienate 99% of their employees in order to retain a fanatical 1%, you don’t see cults systematically organization-wide try to alienate everyone. You see a few people in close proximity to elites being abused. Just like countless other organizations.
Which explains the success of deprogrammers, amirite?
I would suggest that if beliefs believed by cults becoime mainstream, that certainly decreases one barrier to such a cult’s expansion, but because there are additional factors (such as creepiness) that alone is not enough to lead the cult to expand much. It may be that people’s resistance to joining a group drastically increases if the group fails any one of several criteria. Just decrementing the number of criteria that the group fails isn’t going to be enough, if even one such criterion is left.
The level of abuse done by bosses and cult leaders is different, so although the statement is literally true for both bosses and cult leaders, it really doesn’t imply that the two situations are similar.
Maybe, but I don’t know how we’d know the difference.
Is it really? Remember how many thousands of NRMs there are over the decades, and how people tend to discuss repeatedly a few salient examples like Scientology. Can we really compare that favorably regular bosses with religious figures? Aside from the Catholic Church scandal (with its counterparts among other closemouthed groups like Jewish and Amish communities), we see plenty of sexual scandals in other places like the military (the Tailhook scandal as the classic example, but there’s plenty of recent statistics on sexual assault in the military, often enabled by the hierarchy).
I don’t see how environmentalism or for that matter meditation itself is creepy.
What’s creepy about Hare Krishnas is the zoned out sleep deprived look on the faces (edit: I am speaking of the local ones, from experience), and the whole obsession with the writings of the leader thing, and weirdly specific rituals. Now that environmentalism and meditation are fairly mainstream, you don’t have to put up with the creepy stuff if you want to be around people who share your interests in environmentalism and meditation. You have less creepy alternatives. You can go to a local Yoga class, that manages to have same number of people attending as the local Khrishna hangout, despite not trying nearly as hard to find new recruits. You can join a normal environmentalist group.
The difference is, of course, in extent. For example, putting up a portrait of the founder at every workplace (or perhaps in a handbook, or the like) would be something that a cult leader would do in a cult, but what a corporation would seldom ever do because doing so would be counter-productive.
edit: actually. What do you think makes joining a cult worse than joining a club, getting a job, and so on? Now, what ever that is, it makes it harder to get new recruits, and requires more dedication.
Which goes to show how far into the zeitgeist they’ve penetrated. Go back to the 1960s when the cult panic and popular image of cults was being set, and things were quite different. One of the papers discusses a major lawsuit accusing the Hare Krishnas of ‘brainwashing’ a teen girl when she ran away from home and stayed with some Krishnas; the precipitating event was her parents getting angry about her meditating in front of a little shrine, and ripping it out and burning it (and then chaining her to the toilet for a while). To people back then, ‘tune in, turn on, drop out’ sounds less like a life choice than a threat...
Well, I can hardly argue against your anecdotal experiences.
Supreme Court—jurists or cultists? Film at 11. We report, you decide.
I don’t even know what ‘weirdly specific’ would mean. Rituals are generally followed in precise detail, right down to the exact repetitive wording and special garments like Mormon underpants; that’s pretty much what distinguishes rituals from normal activities. Accepting Eucharist at mass? Ritual. Filling out a form at the DMV? Not ritual.
Hmm, where was one to find yoga back then… Ah yes, also in cults. Ashrams in particular did a lot of yoga. Interesting that you no longer have to go to an ashram or fly to India if you want to do yoga. It’s almost like… these cult activities have been somehow normalized or assimilated into the mainstream...
And where did these environmentalist groups come from?
Really? That seems incredibly common. Aside from the obvious examples of many (all?) government offices like post offices including portraits of their supreme leader—I mean, President—you can also go into places like Walmart and see the manager’s portrait up on the wall.
Personally? I think it’s mostly competition from the bigger cults. Just like it’s hard to start up a business or nonprofit.
I wasn’t around in the 60s and wasn’t aware for any of the 70s, but… Environmentalism seems qualitatively different from everything else here. Is there some baggage to this beyond, say, conservation, or assigning plants and animals some moral weight, that is intended here?
Something may have seemed weirder in the past because it was weirder back then.
I suspect few modern Christians would sign up for AD 200 Christianity.
Not really, aside from the standard observation that you can just as easily play the ‘find cult markers’ game with environmental groups like Greenpeace or ELF. Cleansing rituals like recycling, intense devotion to charismatic leaders, studies of founding texts like Silent Spring, self-abnegating life choices, donating funds to the movement, sacralization of unusual objects like owls or bugs, food taboos (‘GMOs’), and so on and so forth.
That doesn’t even make sense as an answer. Rest likewise doesn’t seem in any way contradictory to the point I am making, but is posed as such.
Of course it makes sense. As I’ve already claimed, cults are not engaged in some sort of predatory ‘brainwashing’ where they exploit cognitive flaws to just moneypump people with their ultra-advanced psychological techniques: they offer value in return for value received, just like businesses need to offer value to their customers, and nonprofits need to offer some sort of value to their funders. And these cults have plenty of established competition, so it makes sense that they’d usually fail. Just like businesses and nonprofits have huge mortality rates.
I’ve given counter-examples and criticized your claims. Seems contradictory to me.
The question was, “What do you think makes joining a cult worse than joining a club, getting a job, and so on?” . How is competition from other cults impacting the decision to join a cult—any cult?
Well, I know of one cult that provides value in form of the nice fuzzy feeling of being able—through a very little effort—to see various things that, say, top physicists can not see. Except this feeling is attained entirely through self deception, unbeknown to the individuals, and arguing that it is providing value is akin to arguing that a scam which sells fake gold for the cheap is providing value.
(Then there’s of course Janestown, and so on and so forth)
Exactly as I said, pressure from other cults: direct retaliation (like the legal system endorsing your kidnapping), opportunity costs, lack of subsidies, regulatory capture being used against you, the risk of joining a small new organization… Many of the reasons that apply to not joining a startup and instead working at Microsoft can be tweaked to apply to small cults vs big cults.
You know what’s even more awesome than self-deception? Sliming people you don’t like as cults, when your ideas about what a cult is aren’t even right in the first place. Sweet delicious meta-contrarianism.
True, it’s not as good a racket as Singer getting paid tons of money to testify about how awful cults are and how powerful their deceptions are—but it’s a lot less work and more convenient.
I said, joining a cult. I didn’t say, joining a small cult, I didn’t say, joining a big cult, I said, joining a cult.
Well, a scam then, if you don’t like me to call it a cult. It is my honest opinion that the value arises through the self deception, which goes against the intent of individual, and is of lesser value compared to what the individual is expecting to get.
I’m sorry, I didn’t realize I was supposed to interpret that as meaninglessly general as possible, rather than, you know, be about the topic of my post or the topic of the previous comments.
Why do all organizations and religions in particular exist? That’s a tough question which I’m afraid I have no quick answer to, but the right answer looks like ‘all sorts of reasons’.
Your barrage of non-sequiturs posed as “counterarguments” is incredibly annoying. Your post clearly doesn’t deal with specifically the small cults, nor anything else does.
Failure to engage noted.
You’re right, it’s not like all the cites deal with small organizations or anything like that.
Krishnas, scientology, moonies, etc. how are those examples of small cults? Or do you count every major religion as a cult?
/sigh
You know, I suspected that you hadn’t actually read what I posted and jumped straight to the comment section to vomit your preconceptions out, but that assertion pretty much confirms it. Here, from the quotes:
Two of the most famous cults together have like a third of the people the university I went to did? That sounds pretty darn small to me!
I don’t think there’s any meaningful difference aside from things like the size or social acceptability, as I think I’ve been pretty clear all along.