Humans have a natural tendency to form close-knit ingroups. This can turn into the cult attractor. If the group starts going a bit weird, evaporative cooling makes it weirder. edit: jimrandomh nailed it: it’s isolation from outside social calibration that lets a group go weird.
Predatory infectious memes are mostly not constructed, they evolve. Hence the cult attractor.
Scientology was actually constructed—Hubbard had a keen understanding of human psychology (and no moral compass and no concern as to the difference between truth and falsity, but anyway) and stitched it together entirely from existing components. He started with Dianetics and then he bolted more stuff onto it as he went.
But talking about Scientology is actually not helpful for the question you’re asking, because Scientology is the Godwin example of bad infectious memes—it’s so bad (one of the most damaging, in terms of how long it takes ex-members to recover—I couldn’t quickly find the cite) that it makes lesser nasty cults look really quite benign by comparison. It is literally as if your only example of authoritarianism was Hitler or Pol Pot and casual authoritarianism didn’t look that damaging at all compared to that.
Ayn Rand’s group turned cultish by evaporative cooling. These days, it’s in practice more a case of individual sufferers of memetic infection—someone reads Atlas Shrugged and turns into an annoying crank. It’s an example of how impossible it is to talk someone out of a memetic infection that turns them into a crank—they have to get themselves out of it.
I don’t have a quick comment-length intro to how cults work. Every Cause Wants To Be A Cult will give you some idea.
Humans have a natural tendency to form close-knit ingroups. This can turn into the cult attractor. If the group starts going a bit weird, evaporative cooling makes it weirder. edit: jimrandomh nailed it: it’s isolation from outside social calibration that lets a group go weird.
Predatory infectious memes are mostly not constructed, they evolve. Hence the cult attractor.
Scientology was actually constructed—Hubbard had a keen understanding of human psychology (and no moral compass and no concern as to the difference between truth and falsity, but anyway) and stitched it together entirely from existing components. He started with Dianetics and then he bolted more stuff onto it as he went.
But talking about Scientology is actually not helpful for the question you’re asking, because Scientology is the Godwin example of bad infectious memes—it’s so bad (one of the most damaging, in terms of how long it takes ex-members to recover—I couldn’t quickly find the cite) that it makes lesser nasty cults look really quite benign by comparison. It is literally as if your only example of authoritarianism was Hitler or Pol Pot and casual authoritarianism didn’t look that damaging at all compared to that.
Ayn Rand’s group turned cultish by evaporative cooling. These days, it’s in practice more a case of individual sufferers of memetic infection—someone reads Atlas Shrugged and turns into an annoying crank. It’s an example of how impossible it is to talk someone out of a memetic infection that turns them into a crank—they have to get themselves out of it.
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