Mason  🏃‍♂️ ✂️

A lot of the same themes and ideas recur in successful spiritual and philosophical cults, because they're generally useful concepts and they speak to confusing and aversive desires that a lot of people feel unable to explore on their own. That's not the problem

The problem is that people experiencing novel insights and breakthroughs are very vulnerable to becoming hooked on that fix, associating it with a single person or small hierarchy, and becoming rapidly uninterested in finding meaning or purpose elsewhere

I don't think this requires brilliant master-planning; it crops up organically amongst people who are living in a perpetual state of low-level panic and uncertainty, who lack achievable cultural milestones and are beholden to norms that make them feel bad about what they want

IMO, 2020 is the year that the *political* cult really metastasized as an organizing force in American life, though it was developing for years prior. All the same elements: gurufication of leadership, separation of friends and families, doctrine above discussion

To be clear, I never got super deep into any particular cult or cult-like org. At one point I began training to become a sort of psychological mapping coach for one lesser-known group, but I dropped off in the second week.

Most of the groups I was involved in were very small and to this day have no real name recognition outside of very niche Californian techie/burner circles. They varied widely wrt the degree to which I felt they were harmless (sometimes even beneficial) or actively manipulative

I don't think people really understand how many little groups like this exist or their mechanisms for growth. The leaders who are successful tend to target the moneyed-but-meaningless, B/C-list celebrities and "social butterfly" nodes in well-connected networks

One thing I want to highlight is that they *do* tend to give people some degree of self-empowerment, and they generally do let people self-select into high-commitment and potentially more manipulative roles. It's not the "brainwashing" a lot of people have come to expect.