I massively appreciate this post and all that you’re doing for people harmed due to involvement with MAPLE.
Unfortunately, this paints a picture exceeding my worst expectations formed on reading herschel’s post from last year.[1]
I’ve interacted with three people who I know to have been residents at MAPLE. Two of them had their minds … very weirdly shaped in ways that are rather difficult to summarize in one sentence. One of them, when I expressed rather strong disagreement with some of their claims, would counter-claim that my reaction to this is a sign of my discomfort with the truth of what they were claiming or some shit like that. As far as I can tell, those two people are still heavily involved in MAPLE.
The third of my MAPLE resident acquaintances didn’t show any of those signs, but (1) IIRC their visit to MAPLE was quite many years ago; and (2) on their telling of the story, they were exceptionally assertive about giving feedback to Soryu (which, apparently, he actually took into consideration).
This suggests that a few years ago (I don’t remember how many) MAPLE was significantly more sane than it is nowadays.
In addition to those three, last year I also met Soryu himself. The “practitioner of Buddhism” mentioned in my post a few months ago was actually about Soryu:
Last year, I interacted with a practitioner of Buddhism who expressed a strange view to me, which I am now able to only vaguely recall. As far as I remember, the view was that as humans interact with each other, other living beings, and even the rest of the general non-living world around them, they are not passively allowing things to manifest themselves as they are, but rather imposing certain concepts on the Other, fitting the Other into preconceived frames. This is bad, the person said, because it puts us in “conflict” with the world. The right choice is to abandon all our concepts, as they are “violent”. If abandoning all the concepts means annihilation of the mind, so be it.
The bolded part coheres with the following from the OP:
Soryu considers human extinction a noble impulse and an ethically defensible goal. He has repeatedly shared that killing every human on Earth was his explicit life purpose from ages nine to nineteen—with CRISPR (a gene modifying technique that could be used to create a novel bio-weapon) as his best available means—until his vision shifted to awakening all beings as a superior alternative.
Soryu would also often take a term into abstraction: when people said that harm had been done, he and leadership would ask “what even is harm?”.
Reminds me when at some point I asked him about the meaning of some term that seemed load-bearing in his argumentation. To this, he bounced back to me, “What do I mean by that? Yeah, what do I mean by that?”, apparently expecting me to co-argue on his behalf?
You say that
MAPLE’s stated goals include founding the next world religion, leading a “world government” with “teeth” (its own military), opening 500 centers worldwide, and building an artificial superintelligence that will “turn the world into a monastery”
How many of those are publicly stated anywhere?
One final-for-now thing I wonder: What is going on in Soryu’s mind? The post has not speculated about this question, as it seems appropriate for a rather comprehensive, descriptive resource. But the question of what is actually happening in the black box of a ~cult leader and what are the latent factors driving the leader is relevant for understanding how to prevent/mitigate the concerning dynamics.
Insofar as I can accurately remember the impressions I formed upon reading it, but my memory of this impression seems probable on the current re-reading of the post.
I massively appreciate this post and all that you’re doing for people harmed due to involvement with MAPLE.
Unfortunately, this paints a picture exceeding my worst expectations formed on reading herschel’s post from last year.[1]
I’ve interacted with three people who I know to have been residents at MAPLE. Two of them had their minds … very weirdly shaped in ways that are rather difficult to summarize in one sentence. One of them, when I expressed rather strong disagreement with some of their claims, would counter-claim that my reaction to this is a sign of my discomfort with the truth of what they were claiming or some shit like that. As far as I can tell, those two people are still heavily involved in MAPLE.
The third of my MAPLE resident acquaintances didn’t show any of those signs, but (1) IIRC their visit to MAPLE was quite many years ago; and (2) on their telling of the story, they were exceptionally assertive about giving feedback to Soryu (which, apparently, he actually took into consideration).
This suggests that a few years ago (I don’t remember how many) MAPLE was significantly more sane than it is nowadays.
In addition to those three, last year I also met Soryu himself. The “practitioner of Buddhism” mentioned in my post a few months ago was actually about Soryu:
The bolded part coheres with the following from the OP:
Reminds me when at some point I asked him about the meaning of some term that seemed load-bearing in his argumentation. To this, he bounced back to me, “What do I mean by that? Yeah, what do I mean by that?”, apparently expecting me to co-argue on his behalf?
You say that
How many of those are publicly stated anywhere?
One final-for-now thing I wonder: What is going on in Soryu’s mind? The post has not speculated about this question, as it seems appropriate for a rather comprehensive, descriptive resource. But the question of what is actually happening in the black box of a ~cult leader and what are the latent factors driving the leader is relevant for understanding how to prevent/mitigate the concerning dynamics.
Insofar as I can accurately remember the impressions I formed upon reading it, but my memory of this impression seems probable on the current re-reading of the post.