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.)
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.)