A Noble Cause doesn’t need a deep hidden flaw for its adherents to form a cultish in-group. It is sufficient that the adherents be human. Everything else follows naturally, decay by default, like food spoiling in a refrigerator after the electricity goes off.
In the same sense that every thermal differential wants to equalize itself, and every computer program wants to become a collection of ad-hoc patches, every Cause wants to be a cult. It’s a high-entropy state into which the system trends, an attractor in human psychology. It may have nothing to do with whether the Cause is truly Noble. You might think that a Good Cause would rub off its goodness on every aspect of the people associated with it—that the Cause’s followers would also be less susceptible to status games, ingroup-outgroup bias, affective spirals, leader-gods. But believing one true idea won’t switch off the halo effect. A noble cause won’t make its adherents something other than human. There are plenty of bad ideas that can do plenty of damage—but that’s not necessarily what’s going on.
Every group of people with an unusual goal—good, bad, or silly—will trend toward the cult attractor unless they make a constant effort to resist it. You can keep your house cooler than the outdoors, but you have to run the air conditioner constantly, and as soon as you turn off the electricity—give up the fight against entropy—things will go back to “normal”.
I think it’s more that that every cause wants to be become a cult or a habit. The one thing causes don’t want is to became reliable ways of achieving their stated goal.
Part of it is that people need social networks, but at least until the net, it was hard to make those networks happen just because people needed them. Either there had to be a cause, or the networks happened by geographical default.
When the goal of a organization is no longer feasible, the organization may look for another goal rather than dissolve. I’m not cynical about disease-fighting organizations which don’t go away just because the disease has been abolished. It’s simply too hard to build substantial organizations.
Thinking about your original post some more, I’m wondering if perhaps fun groups tend to involve flow on the part of many participants?
If that’s an element of it, it would seem an inherently delicate arrangement, because flow requires people to be challenged, but not too challenged, and practice in those circumstances frequently produces growth in skills and a need to increase the level of challenge. If people grow at different speeds they might need different challenges and no longer find association productive. Or you might have a cohort with an initial common understanding that stays roughly synced who “use up all their challenge” and end up either becoming bored or trying to figure out a new mission that will actually be interesting to work on.
If this is true, then it suggests that really hard games with effective handicapping systems might be a good thing to build into a community? If some people get better fast, the can just aspire to winning with a higher handicap. If the game is really deep, there’s room to improve for a long time. This makes me wonder if maybe golf clubs or go clubs tend to be long lived?
I feel like I’m groping here… Like a better conversation on this topic might have more data points in the form of stories about organizations and their tendencies. Then a good theory (a theory I don’t feel anywhere close to proposing or justifying at the present time) would be able to give some kind of causal/mechanistic summary of all the data, and there would be parts of the theory that spoke to “fun” and how it related to all the rest of what happens in different organizations.
Eliezer’s old post Every Cause Wants To Be A Cult is probably relevant here:
I think it’s more that that every cause wants to be become a cult or a habit. The one thing causes don’t want is to became reliable ways of achieving their stated goal.
Part of it is that people need social networks, but at least until the net, it was hard to make those networks happen just because people needed them. Either there had to be a cause, or the networks happened by geographical default.
When the goal of a organization is no longer feasible, the organization may look for another goal rather than dissolve. I’m not cynical about disease-fighting organizations which don’t go away just because the disease has been abolished. It’s simply too hard to build substantial organizations.
Thinking about your original post some more, I’m wondering if perhaps fun groups tend to involve flow on the part of many participants?
If that’s an element of it, it would seem an inherently delicate arrangement, because flow requires people to be challenged, but not too challenged, and practice in those circumstances frequently produces growth in skills and a need to increase the level of challenge. If people grow at different speeds they might need different challenges and no longer find association productive. Or you might have a cohort with an initial common understanding that stays roughly synced who “use up all their challenge” and end up either becoming bored or trying to figure out a new mission that will actually be interesting to work on.
If this is true, then it suggests that really hard games with effective handicapping systems might be a good thing to build into a community? If some people get better fast, the can just aspire to winning with a higher handicap. If the game is really deep, there’s room to improve for a long time. This makes me wonder if maybe golf clubs or go clubs tend to be long lived?
I feel like I’m groping here… Like a better conversation on this topic might have more data points in the form of stories about organizations and their tendencies. Then a good theory (a theory I don’t feel anywhere close to proposing or justifying at the present time) would be able to give some kind of causal/mechanistic summary of all the data, and there would be parts of the theory that spoke to “fun” and how it related to all the rest of what happens in different organizations.