Once you’ve arrived at a constructionist-relativist theoretical position on a subject, you see the prevailing universalist-absolutist theory as merely a particular dominant and monopolistic/exclusive constructivist view of its domain. Ie a cult theory. And you cannot unsee this.
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Basically, *any* collectively coherent response to your presence, in the form of either concerted inclusion/exclusion pressure, is a cult. As in absolutist, universalist theory bubble seeking monopoly. As in a Borg counterprogramming resistance and disconfirmatory variety.
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There is a test for cultiness, but no test for not-a-cult. The best you can hope for is signs that are validating without being determinative. A promising sign: you make one new friend at a time, and they tend to neither validate or challenge your understandings, but expand it.
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You are very unlikely to be so original in your explorations and growing understanding that you’ll be truly alone, meeting nobody. That’s typically psychosis. A cult-of-one past a personal, fragile event-horizon, via a singular red pill that others can’t take.
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The more reliable sign is what I’ve come to think of as “meeting mutual prime numbers along the way”. You meet people who can’t be factored in terms of people/types you’ve met already, and these encounters get rarer as you age. And they ALSO seem to have trouble typecasting *you*
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But unlike the psychotic cult-of-one types, you ARE able to meaningfully connect with, and for a while, grow along with, this kind of mutually prime person. For a while you’ll benefit from triangulating shared encounters with new experiences.
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And each such encounter will take you further away from universal-absolutist cognitive monopolies. You’ll just be on a path of diverging, increasingly infrequent mind-expanding 1:1 encounters with Other Ways of Theorizing life, the universe, and everything. That’s lived pluralism
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Pro-tip: The trick to safe dealings with cults is to treat them as aggregates. Talk to the anthill, not to the ants. If you’re talking to ants, you’re lost inside. Even the queen is just one ant. Or be a normcore neutrino: zip through without either disturbing or being captured.
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Cult theories can be usefully mutually prime to you, but only if you deal with them as a whole. On the inside, they likely run on a different “artificial number theory”, where prime numbers are omitted. They are constructed as irreducible-difference intolerance fields.
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End of conversation
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