skipping over all the details of how that went down, that second smaller cult blew up in 2018 and for awhile after that i was reading a lot about spiritual cults and it turns out they are depressingly similar to each other and to my cult, it's mostly the same shit over and over
Conversation
there's a lot of totalizing narrative stuff going on with spiritual cults too. "AI safety is the most important thing" and "enlightenment is the most important thing" have a lot in common in terms of psychological effect
1
2
62
continue to recommend this book:
Quote Tweet
for further reading about this kind of thing, i got some good stuff out of reading alexandra amor's "cult, a love story" (and as you can tell i find the description of it as a love story very apt), would recommend, h/t @meditationstuff
amazon.com/Cult-Love-Stor
Show this thread
1
31
one of the big things i had to deal with when orienting towards all of this nonsense is that i could not take the easy and tempting path of switching from believing that these things (rationality, my lil cult) were all good to believing that they were all bad
1
41
the way any half-decent cult works is by providing a huge amount of value to the people in it (social belonging, new ideas, new practices, etc.), it is exactly the mixing of that value with all the bad stuff that makes it hard to leave
3
3
63
the same issue plays out in unhealthy relationships. you can have a relationship with someone who has genuinely improved your life in a million ways and who is *also* still hurting you a lot, *and vice versa*; cults are like this but even more so
1
4
60
i'm trying to push the term "unhealthy cults" by analogy with "unhealthy relationship" because we at least have a recognition in the discourse on relationships that they can be more or less healthy. there is a healthy thing that cults want to be and that's worth honoring
2
1
56
cults feel like spillover for a particular kind of person looking for meaning. this heavily coincides with idealism and perfectionism, and in turn trauma. this also means vulnerability. in that frame healthiness & trauma therapy is a similar spillover, which does help ppl
1
6
much like the thing attracting people to unhealthy relationships -- wanting to help, wanting really close connection, being understood even with weird shit, it's not possible to simply suppress. finding ways to engage with this without getting hurt is important
1
4
cults are an emergent answer to the bleakness, confusion, and loss of trust into a grand narrative of a generation who looked at their future and saw instability and poverty.
fighting cults bcuz they're cults is like fighting drugs bcuz they're drugs. need to manage, or change
1
5