That’s why groups whose beliefs have been around long enough to seem “normal” don’t inspire the same nervousness as “cults”, though some mainstream religions may also take all your money and send you to a monastery.
You can make some inferences about a belief system that has been around for a thousand years, compared with one that was invented last week. At minimum, the former is not likely to kill off a large portion of its believers, whereas something new could easily turn out to be the People’s Temple or Heaven’s Gate. With a time-tested brand name, you can tell in advance what the likely outcomes are going to be (assuming constant conditions, of course). In fact, if your society and all your ancestors managed to survive by holding on to their particular set of beliefs, it might be quite dangerous to depart from those beliefs. This is the conservative rationality-of-irrationality argument, which goes back to Edmund Burke (at least).
I’m not a conservative, but having reached an age where I should be turning into one I can at least appreciate the argument. Fear of the new, strange, and untried seems like a very useful survival heuristic, which is not lightly tossed aside. Yet nobody with a functioning brain in today’s world wants to be a Burkean conservative. So we are all trying on new ideas for size, often by joining up with others who have commitments to these ideas. Naturally the first thing you want to do when faced with this step is to try and figure out the nature of those commitments.
Asking a member of a group if it’s a cult seems a bit weird to me, but maybe it’s a good probe—they could get indignant; they could patiently explain that no, they simply believe in the Truth; they could get surprised if the thought hadn’t occured to them; or they could laugh and say “well, it has some cultish elements, but...”. I think it’s only the last reaction that would make me comfortable joining up.
I think we can synthesize what Burke was saying into a more comprehensive theory that doesn’t lead us into stasis, simply by saying something like this: “We must come up with new ideas that are better than the old ones—but we must MAKE SURE they are better before we implement them on a large scale.”
That’s why groups whose beliefs have been around long enough to seem “normal” don’t inspire the same nervousness as “cults”, though some mainstream religions may also take all your money and send you to a monastery. You can make some inferences about a belief system that has been around for a thousand years, compared with one that was invented last week. At minimum, the former is not likely to kill off a large portion of its believers, whereas something new could easily turn out to be the People’s Temple or Heaven’s Gate. With a time-tested brand name, you can tell in advance what the likely outcomes are going to be (assuming constant conditions, of course). In fact, if your society and all your ancestors managed to survive by holding on to their particular set of beliefs, it might be quite dangerous to depart from those beliefs. This is the conservative rationality-of-irrationality argument, which goes back to Edmund Burke (at least).
I’m not a conservative, but having reached an age where I should be turning into one I can at least appreciate the argument. Fear of the new, strange, and untried seems like a very useful survival heuristic, which is not lightly tossed aside. Yet nobody with a functioning brain in today’s world wants to be a Burkean conservative. So we are all trying on new ideas for size, often by joining up with others who have commitments to these ideas. Naturally the first thing you want to do when faced with this step is to try and figure out the nature of those commitments.
Asking a member of a group if it’s a cult seems a bit weird to me, but maybe it’s a good probe—they could get indignant; they could patiently explain that no, they simply believe in the Truth; they could get surprised if the thought hadn’t occured to them; or they could laugh and say “well, it has some cultish elements, but...”. I think it’s only the last reaction that would make me comfortable joining up.
I think we can synthesize what Burke was saying into a more comprehensive theory that doesn’t lead us into stasis, simply by saying something like this: “We must come up with new ideas that are better than the old ones—but we must MAKE SURE they are better before we implement them on a large scale.”