I agree with chaosmage, you repeat an existing narrative about cults. I don’t think asking the binary “Is this a cult? Yes or no” question is a rational way to talk about cults. Your article is also ironic in how it tries to advocate a black white criteria for cults and than accuses cults of trying to use black white criteria of good and evil.
If I look at an organisation like Leverage research I don’t think your list helps me to have an intelligent discussion about the way Leverage research works. I also think that it doesn’t help me with evaluating the group dynamics of a particular startup.
There is no privacy even inside your head. You are supposed to confess your sins to the group. (Note: There is always something to confess. Believing you have nothing to confess is itself a great sin.) Confession is best done publicly, in front of the whole group. If you don’t volunteer enough sins, the group is supposed to call you out. Snitching on each other is a valuable spiritual service to your fellow members.
How do you know that this is common in organisations you would classify as a cult?
They may offer to install a group-sanctioned web filter, or otherwise let you outsource the information filtering to them.
Which cult currently does this? Do you know of any? Have you searched for any empiric evidence before making a claim like this?
It’s also worth noting the context in which the word cult is often used. There are political reasons to judge people who don’t have their prime loyalty to the nation state and it’s institutions negatively.
People who live in an Ashram or in the Leverage group house are likely to feel different loyalties than the average citizen of the nation. As such it’s useful to claim that the inhabitants of either group aren’t allowed to think freely and have their freedoms curtailed by being forced to volunteer private information.
Just like the term terrorist can be used to label a large amount of people negatively, the term cult is also used as a political weapon. It’s the way people get punished in France for having heretical beliefs.
You both say this like it is a wrong thing. Someone else said this before, I repeated it… therefore it is wrong.
If it is wrong, it is wrong regardless of whether it is an “existing narrative”. If it is right, it is right regardless of whether it is an “existing narrative”. So please let’s focus on whether this is right or wrong.
If it helps, I totally plead guilty to repeating things someone else already said. I completely admit that I didn’t invent a new definition of a cult. For a moment, I was deluded into thinking that “scholarship” was a virtue. Now that I admitted that I am repeating existing information, could we please stop talking about whether I am repeating an existing information, and focus on the information itself?
I don’t think asking the binary “Is this a cult? Yes or no” question is a rational way to talk about cults.
Seems like you might prefer an article that would taboo the word “cult”, and replace it with multiple criteria that can be each independently evaluated on a scale. That way we could conclude that e.g. some organizations only have a subset of the traits typically associated with cults.
If I look at an organisation like Leverage research I don’t think your list helps me to have an intelligent discussion about the way Leverage research works. I also think that it doesn’t help me with evaluating the group dynamics of a particular startup.
What prevents you from asking questions like: “Are people in startup X discouraged from interacting with people outside the startup in their free time?” “Are people in startup X daily criticized in front of their colleagues for mistakes that are more or less unavoidable (which means that everyone gets criticized every day)?” “Are people in startup X told that their lives before they joined the startup were completely worthless, and that outside the startup there is no hope for them?” etc.
Which cult currently does this? Do you know of any?
I don’t know if it is used currently, but Scieno Sitter has a Wikipedia page.
There are political reasons to judge people who don’t have their prime loyalty to the nation state and it’s institutions negatively.
I don’t give a fuck about nation states, so I don’t see how this is relevant. My issue with cults is that they disconnect people from their families and former friends.
You both say this like it is a wrong thing. Someone else said this before, I repeated it… therefore it is wrong.
No, the problem is that you repeat something that’s wrong (the old outdated narratives of the 1980′s). And something that’s get’s to used to for persecution.
Seems like you might prefer an article that would taboo the word “cult”, and replace it with multiple criteria that can be each independently evaluated on a scale.
It’s quite easy to say that having group housing is culty, but that doesn’t matter. What matters is the effects. If you move out of your home town to go the soon founded Accelerator Project, than you reduce personal bonds and get new bonds with like-minded people. I don’t think that’s a bad thing and I think it’s worthwhile if that project goes forward.
I also think that it’s worthwhile for it to have a culture where many private thoughts are spoken.
A discussion that’s productive for designing a project like Eric’s project is much more nuanced about the effects than “cults=bad because Boogyman”.
For a moment, I was deluded into thinking that “scholarship” was a virtue.
You didn’t do scholarship.
You didn’t research whether what you are saying is true. This is like saying that because you read somewhere that the Jews are evil, you did scholarship when you bring forward the claim. Maybe they even read a few books about how Jews are evil.
It’s worth noting that Chaosmage (who first voiced the criticism) has an academic background in this area.
Gwern did research in this area and I linked his post here. It suggests that the core narrative is based on many claims that have been shown to be incorrect.
I don’t give a fuck about nation states, so I don’t see how this is relevant. My issue with cults is that they disconnect people from their families and former friends.
The fact that you uncritically pass on a narrative that’s used for persecution.
My issue with cults is that they disconnect people from their families and former friends.
How do you know that’s what cults do? Do you have any more evidence than Trump when he says that rapists come from Mexico?
From a political perspective it’s possible to call any development of a strong loyalty to something besides the existing family and the existing institutions “disconnecting with friends and family”.
If you take a person who went to the Landmark Forum, the leave it with the task of apologizing to their family members to develop good relationships with them. On the other hand they also might alienate their family members by speaking in terms of Landmark vocabulary.
Landmark is a good example, because it’s relatively well known. I have no personal stakes in the particular group.
Any person who decides to leave their hometown and go to Silicon Valley is likely to reduce their existing bonds to family and friends. Simply by virtue of not being present the person is going to have less loyalty to the existing circle of people.
I don’t know if it is used currently, but Scieno Sitter has a Wikipedia page.
A Wikipedia page that suggest this was tried in the times of Windows 95.
I don’t give a fuck about nation states
If that would be true, I don’t think you would be living where you are living. You do have enough loyalty with the nation where you live to not leave it and go to a city in which you would be payed a much better wage for being a programmer.
You might not have an explicit belief of “my nation is important” but when I look at your revealed preferences, they suggest valuing it.
A discussion that’s productive for designing a project like Eric’s project is much more nuanced about the effects than “cults=bad because Boogyman”.
I thought that replacing the black-box word “cult” with eight specific behaviors counts as “more nuanced”. Maybe you missed this part of the article. I even used bold letters for it. Summarizing this article as “bad because Boogyman” feels like you react to… something completely different.
You didn’t research whether what you are saying is true. (...) It’s worth noting that Chaosmage (who first voiced the criticism) has an academic background in this area.
While I don’t have a background specifically in Cult Studies (and I don’t even know if something like that exists), I studied psychology and wrote a bachelor thesis on the topic of manipulation and cults. It used to be my hobby back then. In addition to reading the available literature, talking with former cult members, and talking with local experts on this topic, I also shortly participated in a few shady organizations, got “slain in the Spirit”, got trained how to sell expensive life insurance to naive people (but I never actually sold any), people tried to recruit me into a few MLM schemes (and I cooperated willingly until the moment when I was finally supposed to give them a ton of money), and there is some more stuff I don’t feel comfortable to disclose even now (let’s just say that some people got seriously hurt by some cults for doing similar stuff).
But this all happened more than 10 years ago, and I don’t have time or courage for similar adventures now. So I guess my knowledge is quite rusty, but still felt like not completely worthless. Some details change, some basic facts about human behavior remain.
You are suggesting that in this debate I am the person repeating hoaxes from internet, with zero education or personal experience. Funny that from my point of view, it feels like I studied the existing information and did experiments that confirmed it (which is the reason why I take it seriously), only to be dismissed by some armchair reasoning that people only talk about cults because that’s how the Government tries to suppress all people insufficiently loyal to the State.
But I didn’t want to make this about academic background; I just mentioned it because you started.
Any person who decides to leave their hometown and go to Silicon Valley is likely to reduce their existing bonds to family and friends. Simply by virtue of not being present the person is going to have less loyalty to the existing circle of people.
You insist on not seeing the difference between “a person decides to do X, which has a consequence Y” and “a group strategically pushes their members into doing Y, which makes the members more dependent on the group, by exploiting some known facts about human behavior”. I guess if you insist that there is no difference, I can’t make you see one.
By a similar logic, we could also say that the mass suicide in Jonestown had nothing to do with cults, because sometimes people commit suicide even without being in a cult. Or higher-level members in Amway being told to divorce their partners if they refuse to buy Amway products is also perfectly normal, because people divorce their partners without a cult, too, and problems related to job often play a role in it.
I never said that cults were using special supernatural methods to manipulate people. Actually, my point is that they just strategically exploit existing flaws in human psychology. Which means that the same things are also seen in action outside cults. What cults do is “merely” using these things strategically, not as a random stuff that sometimes happen, but as a group norm. (If I may use an analogy, it’s like a difference between an optical illusion happening randomly, and someone filling the whole house with optical illusions with the goal to make people lose balance and fall off the stairs.)
If this set of criteria classify Leverage as a cult, they are probably correct to do so; they’re seen as cultish already and I don’t think anyone outside Leverage would be too surprised. There are startups that would be classified as such as well; for many that is accurate.
I agree with chaosmage, you repeat an existing narrative about cults. I don’t think asking the binary “Is this a cult? Yes or no” question is a rational way to talk about cults. Your article is also ironic in how it tries to advocate a black white criteria for cults and than accuses cults of trying to use black white criteria of good and evil.
If I look at an organisation like Leverage research I don’t think your list helps me to have an intelligent discussion about the way Leverage research works. I also think that it doesn’t help me with evaluating the group dynamics of a particular startup.
How do you know that this is common in organisations you would classify as a cult?
Which cult currently does this? Do you know of any? Have you searched for any empiric evidence before making a claim like this?
It’s also worth noting the context in which the word cult is often used. There are political reasons to judge people who don’t have their prime loyalty to the nation state and it’s institutions negatively.
People who live in an Ashram or in the Leverage group house are likely to feel different loyalties than the average citizen of the nation. As such it’s useful to claim that the inhabitants of either group aren’t allowed to think freely and have their freedoms curtailed by being forced to volunteer private information.
Just like the term terrorist can be used to label a large amount of people negatively, the term cult is also used as a political weapon. It’s the way people get punished in France for having heretical beliefs.
You both say this like it is a wrong thing. Someone else said this before, I repeated it… therefore it is wrong.
If it is wrong, it is wrong regardless of whether it is an “existing narrative”. If it is right, it is right regardless of whether it is an “existing narrative”. So please let’s focus on whether this is right or wrong.
If it helps, I totally plead guilty to repeating things someone else already said. I completely admit that I didn’t invent a new definition of a cult. For a moment, I was deluded into thinking that “scholarship” was a virtue. Now that I admitted that I am repeating existing information, could we please stop talking about whether I am repeating an existing information, and focus on the information itself?
Seems like you might prefer an article that would taboo the word “cult”, and replace it with multiple criteria that can be each independently evaluated on a scale. That way we could conclude that e.g. some organizations only have a subset of the traits typically associated with cults.
What prevents you from asking questions like: “Are people in startup X discouraged from interacting with people outside the startup in their free time?” “Are people in startup X daily criticized in front of their colleagues for mistakes that are more or less unavoidable (which means that everyone gets criticized every day)?” “Are people in startup X told that their lives before they joined the startup were completely worthless, and that outside the startup there is no hope for them?” etc.
I don’t know if it is used currently, but Scieno Sitter has a Wikipedia page.
I don’t give a fuck about nation states, so I don’t see how this is relevant. My issue with cults is that they disconnect people from their families and former friends.
No, the problem is that you repeat something that’s wrong (the old outdated narratives of the 1980′s). And something that’s get’s to used to for persecution.
It’s quite easy to say that having group housing is culty, but that doesn’t matter. What matters is the effects. If you move out of your home town to go the soon founded Accelerator Project, than you reduce personal bonds and get new bonds with like-minded people. I don’t think that’s a bad thing and I think it’s worthwhile if that project goes forward.
I also think that it’s worthwhile for it to have a culture where many private thoughts are spoken.
A discussion that’s productive for designing a project like Eric’s project is much more nuanced about the effects than “cults=bad because Boogyman”.
You didn’t do scholarship.
You didn’t research whether what you are saying is true. This is like saying that because you read somewhere that the Jews are evil, you did scholarship when you bring forward the claim. Maybe they even read a few books about how Jews are evil.
It’s worth noting that Chaosmage (who first voiced the criticism) has an academic background in this area.
Gwern did research in this area and I linked his post here. It suggests that the core narrative is based on many claims that have been shown to be incorrect.
The fact that you uncritically pass on a narrative that’s used for persecution.
How do you know that’s what cults do? Do you have any more evidence than Trump when he says that rapists come from Mexico?
From a political perspective it’s possible to call any development of a strong loyalty to something besides the existing family and the existing institutions “disconnecting with friends and family”.
If you take a person who went to the Landmark Forum, the leave it with the task of apologizing to their family members to develop good relationships with them. On the other hand they also might alienate their family members by speaking in terms of Landmark vocabulary.
JP Sears has a good discussion about a question of viewer who complains that his family was brainwashed by Landmark (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1OCxGlJ5mzE).
Landmark is a good example, because it’s relatively well known. I have no personal stakes in the particular group.
Any person who decides to leave their hometown and go to Silicon Valley is likely to reduce their existing bonds to family and friends. Simply by virtue of not being present the person is going to have less loyalty to the existing circle of people.
A Wikipedia page that suggest this was tried in the times of Windows 95.
If that would be true, I don’t think you would be living where you are living. You do have enough loyalty with the nation where you live to not leave it and go to a city in which you would be payed a much better wage for being a programmer.
You might not have an explicit belief of “my nation is important” but when I look at your revealed preferences, they suggest valuing it.
I thought that replacing the black-box word “cult” with eight specific behaviors counts as “more nuanced”. Maybe you missed this part of the article. I even used bold letters for it. Summarizing this article as “bad because Boogyman” feels like you react to… something completely different.
While I don’t have a background specifically in Cult Studies (and I don’t even know if something like that exists), I studied psychology and wrote a bachelor thesis on the topic of manipulation and cults. It used to be my hobby back then. In addition to reading the available literature, talking with former cult members, and talking with local experts on this topic, I also shortly participated in a few shady organizations, got “slain in the Spirit”, got trained how to sell expensive life insurance to naive people (but I never actually sold any), people tried to recruit me into a few MLM schemes (and I cooperated willingly until the moment when I was finally supposed to give them a ton of money), and there is some more stuff I don’t feel comfortable to disclose even now (let’s just say that some people got seriously hurt by some cults for doing similar stuff).
But this all happened more than 10 years ago, and I don’t have time or courage for similar adventures now. So I guess my knowledge is quite rusty, but still felt like not completely worthless. Some details change, some basic facts about human behavior remain.
You are suggesting that in this debate I am the person repeating hoaxes from internet, with zero education or personal experience. Funny that from my point of view, it feels like I studied the existing information and did experiments that confirmed it (which is the reason why I take it seriously), only to be dismissed by some armchair reasoning that people only talk about cults because that’s how the Government tries to suppress all people insufficiently loyal to the State.
But I didn’t want to make this about academic background; I just mentioned it because you started.
You insist on not seeing the difference between “a person decides to do X, which has a consequence Y” and “a group strategically pushes their members into doing Y, which makes the members more dependent on the group, by exploiting some known facts about human behavior”. I guess if you insist that there is no difference, I can’t make you see one.
By a similar logic, we could also say that the mass suicide in Jonestown had nothing to do with cults, because sometimes people commit suicide even without being in a cult. Or higher-level members in Amway being told to divorce their partners if they refuse to buy Amway products is also perfectly normal, because people divorce their partners without a cult, too, and problems related to job often play a role in it.
I never said that cults were using special supernatural methods to manipulate people. Actually, my point is that they just strategically exploit existing flaws in human psychology. Which means that the same things are also seen in action outside cults. What cults do is “merely” using these things strategically, not as a random stuff that sometimes happen, but as a group norm. (If I may use an analogy, it’s like a difference between an optical illusion happening randomly, and someone filling the whole house with optical illusions with the goal to make people lose balance and fall off the stairs.)
If this set of criteria classify Leverage as a cult, they are probably correct to do so; they’re seen as cultish already and I don’t think anyone outside Leverage would be too surprised. There are startups that would be classified as such as well; for many that is accurate.
Scientology did this … about two decades ago.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scieno_Sitter
Edited to add: This is presented as an example of how someone might have heard of “cults doing web censorship” as a story, without it being current.