> Cults are social groups which have unusual, and often extreme, religious, spiritual, or philosophical beliefs and rituals.
HN is definitely a social group with unusual and often extreme philosophical beliefs that often aren't mainstream. (And that's why I keep coming back!)
Interesting read. Framing things as a "cultic relationship" makes a lot of sense to me. The part about using your experience as a basis of truth determination being flawed and a source of vulnerability also was pretty insightful.
I'm a little surprised by mention of pushback and accusations of being cult apologists, only because what they're describing as their method is pretty similar in principle to some widespread and empirically validated therapies for more common things. It's just much more invasive, to understate things. I guess at some point there are probably basic immediate safety issues that arise, where taking time has its own risks.
The piece left me thinking that the reasons people become involved with and attached to cults might not be different at some fundamental level from a lot of other psychological problems they get themselves in — just a matter of degree or pervasiveness.
> The piece left me thinking that the reasons people become involved with and attached to cults might not be different at some fundamental level from a lot of other psychological problems they get themselves in — just a matter of degree or pervasiveness.
It's kind of hard to articulate but the thing with cult and cult-like movements, and also somewhat cons & scams, is the "vulnerability" they exploit is the raw material of human connection.
A person who is immune to cult recruitment is a person who never feels isolation, desire, loneliness, grief, hope, fear of loss or lack of control, a person who never wants a hug or someone to talk to, who feels nothing at a smile from a stranger or the giggle of a baby.
Is that a person worth trying to be? I don't think so. To the degree you're open to human connection you're proportionally vulnerable to malicious connection too. Everyone, no matter how resilient, will go through periods of relative need, want, and weakness and at those times they are vulnerable. There are risk factors for getting involved, just like with say addiction, but no one is completely immune. If the wrong person is around you at the wrong time in your life you're in danger.
> A person who is immune to cult recruitment is a person who never feels isolation, desire, loneliness, grief, hope, fear of loss or lack of control, a person who never wants a hug or someone to talk to, who feels nothing at a smile from a stranger or the giggle of a baby.
You're describing a cult leader BTW. I've met one. Scary person underneath that mask he was wearing.
Also I now know what a degree in business management is good for.
>A person who is immune to cult recruitment is a person who never feels isolation, desire, loneliness, grief, hope, fear of loss or lack of control, a person who never wants a hug or someone to talk to, who feels nothing at a smile from a stranger or the giggle of a baby.
Is it? Surely you can feel all those things and also be cynical enough to think no group can really provide a satisfying alternative.
A satisfying alternative to what? Some of these things can only be provided or alleviated by relationship and community.
A cult recruiter (or MLM or whatever) is offering what you need, it's just not a sincere offer. Your ability to assess that, to judge which relationships can safely meet these needs, is exactly what is compromised by having those experiences.
A satisfying alternative to legitimate connections, formed organically.
>A cult recruiter (or MLM or whatever) is offering what you need
No, it's offering a shallow facsimile of it, with the intent of exploiting you.
>Your ability to assess that, to judge which relationships can safely meet these needs, is exactly what is compromised by having those experiences.
Yes, that is what I'm saying. You can be able to enjoy all those things you said, and also have the ability to judge when someone just wants to manipulate you, or exploit you, or when the offer is too good to be true.
It's rather like romantic relationships. We do have a drive to and benefit from connections with other people, but in various circumstances can end up with a "cult of two" (folie a deux) mutually destructive situation or a one-sided exploitation situation.
A person immune to a cult is not someone who doesn’t feel those things, but rather a person who can tell when someone is pushing those buttons/feelings in a context that is not in their best interests - and has the strength to remove themselves or fight back.
Arguably, the ones who are most sensitive to cults are those who have the biggest buttons for these things AND refuse to/are unable to acknowledge when those buttons are being pressed (because they ‘don’t feel it’ - but they do, and either don’t have the tools, or have been trained to not use them, to stop them from being pressed.
This comes up really frequently for unhealed past trauma, because that is basically what PTSD or bad childhoods do to you. Make it so you can’t see what’s happening clearly, or use the wrong tools to deal with what is happening, because you’ve either been overwhelmed with those emotions in the past to the point you’re relatively numb to them, or you’ve been raised/trained to not respond in a healthy way to them.
Notably, there is a very high correlation with unhealed trauma and PTSD with a lot of the conservative voting base (but certainly not all!).
The best thing I have ever read on this subject is https://harpers.org/archive/2013/11/the-man-who-saves-you-fr... - it is a truly wild ride, profiling David Sullivan, a private investigator who specialized in helping people get their loved ones out of cults and was based in the San Francisco Bay Area for many years.
Why did the original post for which these are the discussions disappear from HN?
I cannot even find it with a word search and it should not have been displaced from the top 30 yet.
I recently read the book "Combatting Cult Mind Control" by Steven Hassan, a professional who also helps people leave cults. His approach isn't as much of a "long game" as Ryan and Kelly's approach. One thing that Hassan explains is that MLMs are often very similar to cults, and he also explains the difference between cults and religion.
Another book to read is The Running Grave by Robert Galabraith (pen name for J.K. Rownling.) One of the detectives joins a cult to try and get someone out. The book is well researched and gives an insider's view of a cult.
Some pull quotes, since people seem to be struggling with page loading:
> his client, a woman who had recently finished her master’s at a prestigious university, had been drawn into a scam job. It was essentially a pyramid scheme built around a health regimen. Before you could sell it, you had to try it, so you knew what you were selling.
> The regimen? Multiple enemas a day. “It escalated to 40 to 60 enemas a day,”
> All groups have a rhythm, like a pulse across the calendar year. We have holidays, and we have tax season. There are highs and lows.
> Furthermore, Kelly and Ryan urge their clients not to speak with the media. The firmest “no” I ever got was when I asked Ryan if I could speak to a former client.
> One of their cases in the 90s involved a cult leader who was systematically sexually assaulting the group’s members. [NB: do you have any idea how little that narrows it down]
> the girl’s uncle, their client, had a very difficult time finding anything positive about the group or the leader who had allegedly raped his niece
> What Kelly and Ryan mean when they say these groups are “offering something” to people, it is exactly that. There is a hole a group fills: alienation from community, family, sexuality; pressure to follow a certain life plan, addiction, unrealized spirituality, economic catastrophe – all reasons to join a group
It is! It's completely insane, and apparently at that level significantly harmful. That's why it was deemed to be a cult.
.. but you can also see a lot of slightly less intense grassroots health marketing or MLMs that also look very culty. Health in particular is a fertile ground for microcults.
I knew one person--shared a flat with them--who was heavily into that sort of spiritual-esque alternative health, the sort you'd connect to the so-called Woo-to-Q pipeline these days, who would subject themselves to that kind of thing. It was all about the 'cleanse':
1. Fast on water for a week
2. Drink a cup of olive oil, straight
3. Multiple enemas several times a week
4. Maintain a raw vegan diet in between
Throw in the occasional ayahuasca weekend (another cleaning ritual involving a rather extreme amount of, uh, purging). And for good measure dose yourself on some kind of poisonous frog venom for more of the same.
If I didn't know any better I would say there was some cult mentality going on, the gateway to manipulation being past childhood trauma and a borderline eating disorder. None of it seemed particularly healthy.
Although with 40+ enemas a day I don't know how you'd have time to do anything else.
I think that's doable, it likely wasnt a traditional enema, they most likely just had to put some fluid in which consequently got absorbed by their column. Like 5 ml or so.
Definitely mind boggling people are willing to do such, but it's within my expectations for people that fall to such obvious scams/cults.
>That's roughly one per 20 minutes?
>I think that's doable,
I'm thinking of this for someone working in an office situation. Depending on how long it takes to perform the enema, this is about the same schedule as smokers. So maybe it's not so far off??
Then again, I'm guessing you divided that by 24 hours rather than a work day. Once per 20 minutes would me no sleep which would have worse health effects
> Throw in the occasional ayahuasca weekend (another cleaning ritual involving a rather extreme amount of, uh, purging).
Ayahuasca is a psychdelic substance. sure, there is vomiting, but that isn't the main part of it just like drinking alcohol isn't centered around getting a hangover or destroying your brain cells
I’d strongly recommend the documentary “Behind the Curve”. The close look at people in (not quite a cult) gave me a visceral appreciation for what draws people to it (it provides acceptance for people who sorely lack it) and why it can be so hard to leave (one’s identity becomes so tied up in it).
So that works if it's possible to actually reach the person and the family agrees that they need help to get out. What if the family is part of the problem or is tricked? (I recently read https://elan.school/ about this unimaginably horrible Kids for Cash-like scheme/cult. The only thing I can think of to prevent such things would be to get parents, teachers, lawmakers and social workers to read those stories too.)
I went down the rabbit hole of researching both cults and deprogramming groups a few years ago and one of the things which I found remarkable was how much overlap in methods there was between the two. Different groups go to different extremes, but the overlap between the two is such that in many cases they can only be distinguished using social context, and in some cases I am pretty sure the deprogramming groups are in fact cults masquerading as groups to help former cult members because those make the best members for new cults.
Interesting space. I'm glad I don't have any personal reason to be involved.
Trying to read this to the end feels impossible - the Guardian keeps flicking the page to show ads and the page refreshes for no reason and I’m sure their ads impressions numbers are going through the roof. Feels like ad fraud.
I remember reading The Guardian back in the oughts when they were winning awards for their UX and they were my go-to answer to the front-end interview question of "Which websites do you admire?"
Ha, they even have their "Website of the year" award linked on their top banner
The Guardian from a desktop browser started confronting me with a paywall about two weeks ago. Can’t even see the front page, and uBlock Origin doesn’t help. Far from encouraging me to subscribe, I think this might actually finally cure my news addiction.
I hate ads as much as everyone, but I think you need to at least take a modicum of steps to block ads before posting to HN that you hate seeing all the ads.
(Perhaps your point though is to broadcast to everyone—who presumably are in fact blocking ads—that the site is pure awfulness without any ad-blocking. Of course you're preaching to the choir at that point anyway.)
The Guardian attempts to stop you accessing its articles if you are using an ad-blocker and don't have a paid subscription. (They didn't always do this. I don't know whether they do it uniformly to everyone or whether e.g. it's different based on their guess of your location.)
If jumping the turnstile were legal, yeah. So far anyway, Reader Mode, and various ad-blockers are still legal.
I see your point generally though: accessing content that the publisher has attempted to force you to pay for. My general thought though is that it appears to be a failed (failing?) business model. I just don't know what the solution is. Perhaps if the ads avoided obscuring the content (like newspapers and magazines) I would probably just ignore them and not actively try to suppress them.
Yeah, which is a reasonable statement to make on the website TrainHackersAndPassAvoiders.com. I think its appropriate if you consider yourself in the culture to be reminded of the norms everyone in that culture typically follows.
Fantastic article. And their "light touch" approach seems very correct.
Now --
What counts as a cult?
One sufficient condition, in my opinion, would be ritualized sexual abuse, especially of children.
But this is baked even into several mainstream religions, if you only open your eyes.
What is good, at least, is that, like viruses, cults/religions generally evolve to be less harmful to their hosts over time. (This is over time scales of multiple human generations. Within a single generation, a cult may do just the opposite, as it becomes marginalized from society and increasingly normalizes deviance, e.g. Aum reacting to humiliation in Japanese elections by releasing Sarin.)
Examples of this "taming" process: Flayed prisoners of the Aztecs are now dancing skeletons, "local color", used in America to sell tacos. Likewise the Abrahamic religions are an evolution of animal sacrifice cults, themselves echoing earlier human sacrifice cults; they are still shaking off frankly-insane practices, but could be worse. The history of LDS provides a less dramatic example, but one recent-enough that early stages are still well-documented in the historical record.
And if all this sounds New Atheistic, note that I am actually quite sympathetic to (almost apologetic for) certain aspects of religion (though I increasingly do wonder whether it is religions that teach goodness, or whether it is goodness that religions must attach themselves to for legitimacy, mixing it with other content). (For example I have pushed back, here, against characterizations of Christianity as "right wing", as that is not at all the content of the New Testament.)
One thing is certain: If a religious identity has bound itself to a person, then attacking the person will only strengthen the identity. The memetic parasite and the human victim must be clearly distinguished. Failure to do this results in violence against people which only strengths the meme. Blood for the blood god.
I suspect many of these memes can be tamed to the point of decency over multiple generations. Though they always carry the risk of reversion to older forms. Somehow the "DNA" is still there. So I'm not sure. They have to be stabilized to their nondestructive manifestations.
I also wonder about "non-religious" cult dynamics, e.g. those attached to political movements (both MAGA and woke), or financial/moral/credit systems, e.g. crypto.
One of my concerns also is the way that Silicon Valley leaders may study these methods not to defend against them but to exercise them in the formation of totalizing company cultures. Theil and Karp have been explicit about this. It distresses me: You should read about the scapegoat mechanism to destroy it, not to start using it.
fun fact: if you get some chronic illness, you have good chances to become an idiot. Every time your body stops working in some major way, your thinking is also affected (you become a de facto idiot).
Otherwise intelligent people think software is sentient now. People believe weird things. We need to have compassion rather than write them off as idiots.
cult (noun): A religion or religious sect generally considered to be extremist or false, with its followers often living in an unconventional manner under the guidance of an authoritarian, charismatic leader -- American Heritage Dictionary
Without the "generally considered to be extremist or false" it would be quite hard to even identify a cult. It's mostly used as way to slur a disfavored group. It's an element of a Russell conjugation, like I am part of a spiritual awakening, you belong to a religious sect, they are in a mind-control cult.
I was raised as a Jew. I consider that to be a cult, if one of the milder religious ones. My peewee football team was a cult. I belonged to a cultic political party, and worked for a startup that closely met the definition.
So getting someone to leave a cult is going to be the same as getting them to forsake any other community, just with the added coercion of social acceptability. There's no magic, no brain unwashing, it's the same kind of persuasion used to sell a vacuum cleaner.
To my mind that definition lacks any accuracy because it doesn't speak about control. It's difficult to leave cults, and not because of belief (apostasy). It's difficult to leave cults because they destroy your outward connections, as a principle of operation.
Minor thing, but I prefer ‘cultish’ to ‘cultic’ for your usage. In academia, ‘cultic’ means anything to do with worship and lacks the association with cults as discussed in this thread, whereas ‘cultish’ is how I usually see people adjectivize ‘cult’ in the way you are doing.
> Without the "generally considered to be extremist or false" it would be quite hard to even identify a cult.
The extremism is an integral part of what makes folks regard something a cult. Would anyone have cared that NXIVM was running dodgy self-improvement seminars upstate, if they hadn't also been coercing and branding women?
> I consider that to be a cult, if one of the milder religious ones
Various sects within the various organised religions certainly qualify as cults. I think a fair case could be made for many of the milder ones as well, on the basis of how they tend to treat women/children/etc (restrictive rules about clothing/education/personal-freedom/etc)
Extremism is separate from coercion. It's entirely possible to have a coercive cult that has non-extreme beliefs.
Jonestown was, in several ways, a cult with non-extreme beliefs. They did have a charismatic and dangerously mentally ill leader (who did not start out by any means as an awful person).
But they collectively isolated themselves, rather than cutting off ties. And they did initially because of quite radical small-L liberal beliefs as well as politically socialist beliefs. Things that non-cult people think now.
It did not become truly coercive as a power structure until quite late on, mostly when they had isolated themselves and in many cases become physically ill, and in part it was still a collective delusion.
Even then, in many ways, Jonestown beliefs were not particularly extreme in a broad evangelical sense (rather than a US white evangelical sense, which is now a culture that could be defined largely non-religiously) if you specifically put aside their individually extreme devotion to Jones.
> It's mostly used as way to slur a disfavored group.
I generally agree. The divide between religion and cult is just a distinction between what's deemed acceptable behavior by society. Obsessing over a person who died thousands of years ago? Totally "normal." Obsessing over a single living person? Totally a cult.
> The divide between religion and cult is just a distinction between what's deemed acceptable behavior by society.
This is misconception. It's not about the extremism of the belief. It's about the mechanism of control.
Take the "cults" of the moment: Qanon/MAGA, for example, operate like a personality cult in many identifiable ways, but are not actually cults, because you can leave without much difficulty if you set your mind to it.
On the fringes US politics encourages ostracising family members who do not agree, but these movements do not have a mechanism of control (financial control combined with a commitment to cutting off family members).
There may be cult sects within MAGA/QAnon that get close, perhaps (just as there are at the fringes of all strange and mainstream religious beliefs)
> It's not about the extremism of the belief. It's about the mechanism of control.
> but are not actually cults, because you can leave without much difficulty if you set your mind to it.
By that definition Islam should be considered a cult as it calls for severe consequences for apostasy, ranging from social ostracism to the death penalty. However it's not a cult, it's a mainstream religion.
Same with Judaism; interfaith marriages are highly discouraged (re: prohibited) by Orthodox Jews, which is another mechanism of control. But again, not a cult. Why is that?
My argument is it has nothing to do with the beliefs or mechanisms of control or anything, really. It's purely what's normalized by society vs what is considered aberrant behavior.
This is not a useful definition of a cult, though it is a short one.
The primary characteristic of a cult is that adherents find it difficult to leave, not because of the specific beliefs of the religion (e.g. Islam) but because of the mechanism of control.
"Unconventional manner" doesn't really cut it.
The key definition of a contemporary cult from the perspective of someone who has seen people join one is that the cult turns people inward to the cult and encourages them to cut off not just friends who question their belief but ultimately all non-cult friends and family.
In fact you could argue that the primary quality of a mainstream religion is that it points itself outwards towards non-believers and does not condition receiving its care on belief itself.
For example, the Unification Church is on a slow trajectory towards mainstream religion. The University Bible Fellowship, absolutely a cult and quite a scary one, is not on that trajectory.
wait a minute here..
HN:
- asks you to self-assign a new name upon joining
- has a leader
- has a hierarchy (rating system)
- esteemed texts which promise by adopting a strange method (Lisp) that you can achieve higher levels of wealth and self actualization
should I be worried?
People want to belong. If you do not belong to anything that looks like a cult you operate outside of society.
> should I be worried?
No, you can (ok, I admit: try) to leave any time.
/etc/hosts 127.0.0.1 news.ycombinator.com
for several years now my resume has labeled me a "Software Cultist"
>should I be worried?
If you read Hackers and Painters without realizing you're getting conned, yes. Very much so.
First sentence of the wikipedia page for "Cult":
> Cults are social groups which have unusual, and often extreme, religious, spiritual, or philosophical beliefs and rituals.
HN is definitely a social group with unusual and often extreme philosophical beliefs that often aren't mainstream. (And that's why I keep coming back!)
Interesting read. Framing things as a "cultic relationship" makes a lot of sense to me. The part about using your experience as a basis of truth determination being flawed and a source of vulnerability also was pretty insightful.
I'm a little surprised by mention of pushback and accusations of being cult apologists, only because what they're describing as their method is pretty similar in principle to some widespread and empirically validated therapies for more common things. It's just much more invasive, to understate things. I guess at some point there are probably basic immediate safety issues that arise, where taking time has its own risks.
The piece left me thinking that the reasons people become involved with and attached to cults might not be different at some fundamental level from a lot of other psychological problems they get themselves in — just a matter of degree or pervasiveness.
> The piece left me thinking that the reasons people become involved with and attached to cults might not be different at some fundamental level from a lot of other psychological problems they get themselves in — just a matter of degree or pervasiveness.
It's kind of hard to articulate but the thing with cult and cult-like movements, and also somewhat cons & scams, is the "vulnerability" they exploit is the raw material of human connection.
A person who is immune to cult recruitment is a person who never feels isolation, desire, loneliness, grief, hope, fear of loss or lack of control, a person who never wants a hug or someone to talk to, who feels nothing at a smile from a stranger or the giggle of a baby.
Is that a person worth trying to be? I don't think so. To the degree you're open to human connection you're proportionally vulnerable to malicious connection too. Everyone, no matter how resilient, will go through periods of relative need, want, and weakness and at those times they are vulnerable. There are risk factors for getting involved, just like with say addiction, but no one is completely immune. If the wrong person is around you at the wrong time in your life you're in danger.
> A person who is immune to cult recruitment is a person who never feels isolation, desire, loneliness, grief, hope, fear of loss or lack of control, a person who never wants a hug or someone to talk to, who feels nothing at a smile from a stranger or the giggle of a baby.
You're describing a cult leader BTW. I've met one. Scary person underneath that mask he was wearing.
Also I now know what a degree in business management is good for.
>A person who is immune to cult recruitment is a person who never feels isolation, desire, loneliness, grief, hope, fear of loss or lack of control, a person who never wants a hug or someone to talk to, who feels nothing at a smile from a stranger or the giggle of a baby.
Is it? Surely you can feel all those things and also be cynical enough to think no group can really provide a satisfying alternative.
A satisfying alternative to what? Some of these things can only be provided or alleviated by relationship and community.
A cult recruiter (or MLM or whatever) is offering what you need, it's just not a sincere offer. Your ability to assess that, to judge which relationships can safely meet these needs, is exactly what is compromised by having those experiences.
>A satisfying alternative to what?
A satisfying alternative to legitimate connections, formed organically.
>A cult recruiter (or MLM or whatever) is offering what you need
No, it's offering a shallow facsimile of it, with the intent of exploiting you.
>Your ability to assess that, to judge which relationships can safely meet these needs, is exactly what is compromised by having those experiences.
Yes, that is what I'm saying. You can be able to enjoy all those things you said, and also have the ability to judge when someone just wants to manipulate you, or exploit you, or when the offer is too good to be true.
It's rather like romantic relationships. We do have a drive to and benefit from connections with other people, but in various circumstances can end up with a "cult of two" (folie a deux) mutually destructive situation or a one-sided exploitation situation.
Eh, not really.
A person immune to a cult is not someone who doesn’t feel those things, but rather a person who can tell when someone is pushing those buttons/feelings in a context that is not in their best interests - and has the strength to remove themselves or fight back.
Arguably, the ones who are most sensitive to cults are those who have the biggest buttons for these things AND refuse to/are unable to acknowledge when those buttons are being pressed (because they ‘don’t feel it’ - but they do, and either don’t have the tools, or have been trained to not use them, to stop them from being pressed.
This comes up really frequently for unhealed past trauma, because that is basically what PTSD or bad childhoods do to you. Make it so you can’t see what’s happening clearly, or use the wrong tools to deal with what is happening, because you’ve either been overwhelmed with those emotions in the past to the point you’re relatively numb to them, or you’ve been raised/trained to not respond in a healthy way to them.
Notably, there is a very high correlation with unhealed trauma and PTSD with a lot of the conservative voting base (but certainly not all!).
The best thing I have ever read on this subject is https://harpers.org/archive/2013/11/the-man-who-saves-you-fr... - it is a truly wild ride, profiling David Sullivan, a private investigator who specialized in helping people get their loved ones out of cults and was based in the San Francisco Bay Area for many years.
Discussed once on HN here:
The Man Who Saves You from Yourself (2013) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7903938 - June 2014 (139 comments)
Agree with the other reply. Great read, although very disturbing. Very.
Thank you for sharing -- that was a great read!
I posit that a lot of those podcasters and streamers are like cult leaders in the modern media environment. The market finds a way.
Fascinating. I would totally watch a TV series on this.
Why did the original post for which these are the discussions disappear from HN? I cannot even find it with a word search and it should not have been displaced from the top 30 yet.
See https://www.deccanherald.com/world/china-woman-counsels-mist...
For those who are interested:
I recently read the book "Combatting Cult Mind Control" by Steven Hassan, a professional who also helps people leave cults. His approach isn't as much of a "long game" as Ryan and Kelly's approach. One thing that Hassan explains is that MLMs are often very similar to cults, and he also explains the difference between cults and religion.
Another book to read is The Running Grave by Robert Galabraith (pen name for J.K. Rownling.) One of the detectives joins a cult to try and get someone out. The book is well researched and gives an insider's view of a cult.
Steven Hassan also wrote "The Cult of Trump: A Leading Cult Expert Explains How the President Uses Mind Control", which is very relevant today.
Some pull quotes, since people seem to be struggling with page loading:
> his client, a woman who had recently finished her master’s at a prestigious university, had been drawn into a scam job. It was essentially a pyramid scheme built around a health regimen. Before you could sell it, you had to try it, so you knew what you were selling.
> The regimen? Multiple enemas a day. “It escalated to 40 to 60 enemas a day,”
> All groups have a rhythm, like a pulse across the calendar year. We have holidays, and we have tax season. There are highs and lows.
> Furthermore, Kelly and Ryan urge their clients not to speak with the media. The firmest “no” I ever got was when I asked Ryan if I could speak to a former client.
> One of their cases in the 90s involved a cult leader who was systematically sexually assaulting the group’s members. [NB: do you have any idea how little that narrows it down]
> the girl’s uncle, their client, had a very difficult time finding anything positive about the group or the leader who had allegedly raped his niece
> What Kelly and Ryan mean when they say these groups are “offering something” to people, it is exactly that. There is a hole a group fills: alienation from community, family, sexuality; pressure to follow a certain life plan, addiction, unrealized spirituality, economic catastrophe – all reasons to join a group
40 to 60 enemas a day? Per person? Even for hyperbole, that sounds like a lot.
Seems like a pure logistics issue to me.
It is! It's completely insane, and apparently at that level significantly harmful. That's why it was deemed to be a cult.
.. but you can also see a lot of slightly less intense grassroots health marketing or MLMs that also look very culty. Health in particular is a fertile ground for microcults.
I knew one person--shared a flat with them--who was heavily into that sort of spiritual-esque alternative health, the sort you'd connect to the so-called Woo-to-Q pipeline these days, who would subject themselves to that kind of thing. It was all about the 'cleanse':
1. Fast on water for a week 2. Drink a cup of olive oil, straight 3. Multiple enemas several times a week 4. Maintain a raw vegan diet in between
Throw in the occasional ayahuasca weekend (another cleaning ritual involving a rather extreme amount of, uh, purging). And for good measure dose yourself on some kind of poisonous frog venom for more of the same.
If I didn't know any better I would say there was some cult mentality going on, the gateway to manipulation being past childhood trauma and a borderline eating disorder. None of it seemed particularly healthy.
Although with 40+ enemas a day I don't know how you'd have time to do anything else.
> Although with 40+ enemas a day I don't know how you'd have time to do anything else
This is what triggered me to questioning even allowing for hyperbole. At what point does it become kink/fetish/addiction?
That's roughly one per 20 minutes?
I think that's doable, it likely wasnt a traditional enema, they most likely just had to put some fluid in which consequently got absorbed by their column. Like 5 ml or so.
Definitely mind boggling people are willing to do such, but it's within my expectations for people that fall to such obvious scams/cults.
>That's roughly one per 20 minutes? >I think that's doable,
I'm thinking of this for someone working in an office situation. Depending on how long it takes to perform the enema, this is about the same schedule as smokers. So maybe it's not so far off??
Then again, I'm guessing you divided that by 24 hours rather than a work day. Once per 20 minutes would me no sleep which would have worse health effects
> Throw in the occasional ayahuasca weekend (another cleaning ritual involving a rather extreme amount of, uh, purging).
Ayahuasca is a psychdelic substance. sure, there is vomiting, but that isn't the main part of it just like drinking alcohol isn't centered around getting a hangover or destroying your brain cells
I’d strongly recommend the documentary “Behind the Curve”. The close look at people in (not quite a cult) gave me a visceral appreciation for what draws people to it (it provides acceptance for people who sorely lack it) and why it can be so hard to leave (one’s identity becomes so tied up in it).
Okay I'm going to ask. Is anybody else here playing Living Colour's "Cult of Personality" while they read this? [1]
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7xxgRUyzgs0
So that works if it's possible to actually reach the person and the family agrees that they need help to get out. What if the family is part of the problem or is tricked? (I recently read https://elan.school/ about this unimaginably horrible Kids for Cash-like scheme/cult. The only thing I can think of to prevent such things would be to get parents, teachers, lawmakers and social workers to read those stories too.)
I went down the rabbit hole of researching both cults and deprogramming groups a few years ago and one of the things which I found remarkable was how much overlap in methods there was between the two. Different groups go to different extremes, but the overlap between the two is such that in many cases they can only be distinguished using social context, and in some cases I am pretty sure the deprogramming groups are in fact cults masquerading as groups to help former cult members because those make the best members for new cults.
Interesting space. I'm glad I don't have any personal reason to be involved.
Trying to read this to the end feels impossible - the Guardian keeps flicking the page to show ads and the page refreshes for no reason and I’m sure their ads impressions numbers are going through the roof. Feels like ad fraud.
Ublock origin -- blocking the javascript, and the article is readable with no page flicking, and no ads at all.
I remember reading The Guardian back in the oughts when they were winning awards for their UX and they were my go-to answer to the front-end interview question of "Which websites do you admire?"
Ha, they even have their "Website of the year" award linked on their top banner
https://web.archive.org/web/20080704050905/http://theguardia...
Worked fine in Firefox incognito.
Reader mode. No ads, just text.
The Guardian from a desktop browser started confronting me with a paywall about two weeks ago. Can’t even see the front page, and uBlock Origin doesn’t help. Far from encouraging me to subscribe, I think this might actually finally cure my news addiction.
I'm not seeing page refreshes on chrome. It's just a lot of fixed sized ad boxes.
I hate ads as much as everyone, but I think you need to at least take a modicum of steps to block ads before posting to HN that you hate seeing all the ads.
(Perhaps your point though is to broadcast to everyone—who presumably are in fact blocking ads—that the site is pure awfulness without any ad-blocking. Of course you're preaching to the choir at that point anyway.)
The Guardian attempts to stop you accessing its articles if you are using an ad-blocker and don't have a paid subscription. (They didn't always do this. I don't know whether they do it uniformly to everyone or whether e.g. it's different based on their guess of your location.)
This is like saying "if you don't like train prices then don't complain until you've tried jumping the turnstile".
If jumping the turnstile were legal, yeah. So far anyway, Reader Mode, and various ad-blockers are still legal.
I see your point generally though: accessing content that the publisher has attempted to force you to pay for. My general thought though is that it appears to be a failed (failing?) business model. I just don't know what the solution is. Perhaps if the ads avoided obscuring the content (like newspapers and magazines) I would probably just ignore them and not actively try to suppress them.
Yeah, which is a reasonable statement to make on the website TrainHackersAndPassAvoiders.com. I think its appropriate if you consider yourself in the culture to be reminded of the norms everyone in that culture typically follows.
That definitely isn't the topic of this website, though.
Fantastic article. And their "light touch" approach seems very correct.
Now --
What counts as a cult?
One sufficient condition, in my opinion, would be ritualized sexual abuse, especially of children.
But this is baked even into several mainstream religions, if you only open your eyes.
What is good, at least, is that, like viruses, cults/religions generally evolve to be less harmful to their hosts over time. (This is over time scales of multiple human generations. Within a single generation, a cult may do just the opposite, as it becomes marginalized from society and increasingly normalizes deviance, e.g. Aum reacting to humiliation in Japanese elections by releasing Sarin.)
Examples of this "taming" process: Flayed prisoners of the Aztecs are now dancing skeletons, "local color", used in America to sell tacos. Likewise the Abrahamic religions are an evolution of animal sacrifice cults, themselves echoing earlier human sacrifice cults; they are still shaking off frankly-insane practices, but could be worse. The history of LDS provides a less dramatic example, but one recent-enough that early stages are still well-documented in the historical record.
And if all this sounds New Atheistic, note that I am actually quite sympathetic to (almost apologetic for) certain aspects of religion (though I increasingly do wonder whether it is religions that teach goodness, or whether it is goodness that religions must attach themselves to for legitimacy, mixing it with other content). (For example I have pushed back, here, against characterizations of Christianity as "right wing", as that is not at all the content of the New Testament.)
One thing is certain: If a religious identity has bound itself to a person, then attacking the person will only strengthen the identity. The memetic parasite and the human victim must be clearly distinguished. Failure to do this results in violence against people which only strengths the meme. Blood for the blood god.
I suspect many of these memes can be tamed to the point of decency over multiple generations. Though they always carry the risk of reversion to older forms. Somehow the "DNA" is still there. So I'm not sure. They have to be stabilized to their nondestructive manifestations.
I also wonder about "non-religious" cult dynamics, e.g. those attached to political movements (both MAGA and woke), or financial/moral/credit systems, e.g. crypto.
One of my concerns also is the way that Silicon Valley leaders may study these methods not to defend against them but to exercise them in the formation of totalizing company cultures. Theil and Karp have been explicit about this. It distresses me: You should read about the scapegoat mechanism to destroy it, not to start using it.
Yep
Religion and Cult are obviously very similar things, if not in some cases just different names for exactly the same thing.
i stopped after reading these two were taken in by promises of levitation. i dont care how attractive the cult is, youre an idiot to believe it
fun fact: if you get some chronic illness, you have good chances to become an idiot. Every time your body stops working in some major way, your thinking is also affected (you become a de facto idiot).
Otherwise intelligent people think software is sentient now. People believe weird things. We need to have compassion rather than write them off as idiots.
I was raised as a Jew. I consider that to be a cult, if one of the milder religious ones. My peewee football team was a cult. I belonged to a cultic political party, and worked for a startup that closely met the definition.
So getting someone to leave a cult is going to be the same as getting them to forsake any other community, just with the added coercion of social acceptability. There's no magic, no brain unwashing, it's the same kind of persuasion used to sell a vacuum cleaner.
I quite like the term "high-control group", though interestingly it doesn't have a Wikipedia page.
> Without the "generally considered to be extremist or false" it would be quite hard to even identify a cult.
Well, yes, if you remove the thing that distinguishes a cult from those other things, then it is hard to distinguish them.
To my mind that definition lacks any accuracy because it doesn't speak about control. It's difficult to leave cults, and not because of belief (apostasy). It's difficult to leave cults because they destroy your outward connections, as a principle of operation.
> I belonged to a cultic political party
Minor thing, but I prefer ‘cultish’ to ‘cultic’ for your usage. In academia, ‘cultic’ means anything to do with worship and lacks the association with cults as discussed in this thread, whereas ‘cultish’ is how I usually see people adjectivize ‘cult’ in the way you are doing.
> Without the "generally considered to be extremist or false" it would be quite hard to even identify a cult.
The extremism is an integral part of what makes folks regard something a cult. Would anyone have cared that NXIVM was running dodgy self-improvement seminars upstate, if they hadn't also been coercing and branding women?
> I consider that to be a cult, if one of the milder religious ones
Various sects within the various organised religions certainly qualify as cults. I think a fair case could be made for many of the milder ones as well, on the basis of how they tend to treat women/children/etc (restrictive rules about clothing/education/personal-freedom/etc)
Extremism is separate from coercion. It's entirely possible to have a coercive cult that has non-extreme beliefs.
Jonestown was, in several ways, a cult with non-extreme beliefs. They did have a charismatic and dangerously mentally ill leader (who did not start out by any means as an awful person).
But they collectively isolated themselves, rather than cutting off ties. And they did initially because of quite radical small-L liberal beliefs as well as politically socialist beliefs. Things that non-cult people think now.
It did not become truly coercive as a power structure until quite late on, mostly when they had isolated themselves and in many cases become physically ill, and in part it was still a collective delusion.
Even then, in many ways, Jonestown beliefs were not particularly extreme in a broad evangelical sense (rather than a US white evangelical sense, which is now a culture that could be defined largely non-religiously) if you specifically put aside their individually extreme devotion to Jones.
> It's mostly used as way to slur a disfavored group.
I generally agree. The divide between religion and cult is just a distinction between what's deemed acceptable behavior by society. Obsessing over a person who died thousands of years ago? Totally "normal." Obsessing over a single living person? Totally a cult.
> The divide between religion and cult is just a distinction between what's deemed acceptable behavior by society.
This is misconception. It's not about the extremism of the belief. It's about the mechanism of control.
Take the "cults" of the moment: Qanon/MAGA, for example, operate like a personality cult in many identifiable ways, but are not actually cults, because you can leave without much difficulty if you set your mind to it.
On the fringes US politics encourages ostracising family members who do not agree, but these movements do not have a mechanism of control (financial control combined with a commitment to cutting off family members).
There may be cult sects within MAGA/QAnon that get close, perhaps (just as there are at the fringes of all strange and mainstream religious beliefs)
> It's not about the extremism of the belief. It's about the mechanism of control.
> but are not actually cults, because you can leave without much difficulty if you set your mind to it.
By that definition Islam should be considered a cult as it calls for severe consequences for apostasy, ranging from social ostracism to the death penalty. However it's not a cult, it's a mainstream religion.
Same with Judaism; interfaith marriages are highly discouraged (re: prohibited) by Orthodox Jews, which is another mechanism of control. But again, not a cult. Why is that?
My argument is it has nothing to do with the beliefs or mechanisms of control or anything, really. It's purely what's normalized by society vs what is considered aberrant behavior.
This is not a useful definition of a cult, though it is a short one.
The primary characteristic of a cult is that adherents find it difficult to leave, not because of the specific beliefs of the religion (e.g. Islam) but because of the mechanism of control.
"Unconventional manner" doesn't really cut it.
The key definition of a contemporary cult from the perspective of someone who has seen people join one is that the cult turns people inward to the cult and encourages them to cut off not just friends who question their belief but ultimately all non-cult friends and family.
In fact you could argue that the primary quality of a mainstream religion is that it points itself outwards towards non-believers and does not condition receiving its care on belief itself.
For example, the Unification Church is on a slow trajectory towards mainstream religion. The University Bible Fellowship, absolutely a cult and quite a scary one, is not on that trajectory.