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
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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
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continue to recommend this book:
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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this set of experiences btw is why i think "don't accidentally start an unhealthy cult while trying to change the world" is *the* major problem people trying to change the world face
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the fact that the major american stereotypes about cults are based on things like jonestown is pretty misleading. the typical cult in the 2020s looks a lot more like theranos imo
vanityfair.com/news/2019/02/i
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theranos was like, as far as i can tell from second- and third-hand descriptions, mostly a bunch of people who genuinely thought they were working on some good shit, helmed by an irresponsible but charismatic narcissist
i think it's mostly gonna look like that
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with the caveat that "irresponsible charismatic narcissist" is not like some separate category of human that we can point at and laugh at together. narcissism is a spectrum and we're on it. cult-leadering is a systems phenomenon that emerges under specific social conditions
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i don't think the narcissism is even all that necessary as such. you just need to be really convinced that your way of doing things is the right way, convinced enough to impose it on other people by (social, emotional) force under duress
that describes me sometimes! it's wack
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this tweet from is legitimately one of the best pieces of pushback i've ever gotten on twitter, i thought about it a lot afterwards and hopefully changed a little for the better
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Replying to @QiaochuYuan
You are starting to do that thing where something works for you and you want to enthusiastically apply it to everyone, but... no.
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