What is the word “rationally” doing in the title? What does it add to
How to talk about cults
If it adds nothing, perhaps it would be better gone.
And what is “talk” doing in the title? The article is mainly about cults on the object level. It is a little bit about the difficulties of language and categories, but that applies just as much to thought as to speech. And a little bit of the article is about the adversarial nature of some conversations, which is what I expected from the title. This relates back to the conflicting uses of “rational” — belief and action.
I guess a better title would be something like: “Towards a gears model of ‘cults’”.
The idea is that when people talk about ‘cults’, there is a legitimate substance they want to address (some kinds of abuse happen in some groups, in ways similar enough to suggest that there is an important cluster in the thingspace that deserves our attention), but they typically pick some accidental attribute and blame it for the whole outcome.
For example, people can use “they talk about religion/spirituality (outside of the mainstream religious framework)” or simply “they are weird, and they meet in private” as a predictor for that kind of abuse. Which is wrong in two ways:
First, various non-abusive groups get accused of being “cults” (which connotationally means: “if they are not abusing their members already, it is just a question of time”) merely for being weird, meeting in private, and talking about something outside of mainstream; such as Dungeons and Dragons players. That creates additional social pressure against doing anything out of ordinary. Also, see the paranoid reactions to the proposals of Dragon Army project, or even the Solstice celebrations.
Second, various truly abusive groups can use the wrong model to deflect a legitimate suspicion. If they are not religious—or if they can relatively plausibly deny being religious—they can say “we are not religious, therefore by definition we can’t be a cult” (and then the attention turns to debating definitions, which is useful, because it turns away from the actual evidence of abuse), or they can spend some money on PR to stop being “weird”. Or they can point to the former category and say: “some people call Dungeons and Dragons a cult, but that is crazy; people also call Scientology a cult, and obviously, that is the same kind of crazy.”
So why do people use the wrong models? Because they don’t have a better model, duh. (Most people don’t have an experience of being a cult leader, or talking with former members of various different cults, to get the full picture of how it works when you abstract away all the accidental details.) More meta, people usually don’t understand the difference between better and worse models. Is “cult” a mysterious answer, or is there an actual mechanism proposed?
This article is an attempt to describe the mechanism. To answer your question, the mechanism itself, that’s the “mainly about cults on the object level”. But the idea of using a mechanism at all, that is the “rational” part of talking about the cults.
What is the word “rationally” doing in the title? What does it add to
If it adds nothing, perhaps it would be better gone.
And what is “talk” doing in the title? The article is mainly about cults on the object level. It is a little bit about the difficulties of language and categories, but that applies just as much to thought as to speech. And a little bit of the article is about the adversarial nature of some conversations, which is what I expected from the title. This relates back to the conflicting uses of “rational” — belief and action.
I guess a better title would be something like: “Towards a gears model of ‘cults’”.
The idea is that when people talk about ‘cults’, there is a legitimate substance they want to address (some kinds of abuse happen in some groups, in ways similar enough to suggest that there is an important cluster in the thingspace that deserves our attention), but they typically pick some accidental attribute and blame it for the whole outcome.
For example, people can use “they talk about religion/spirituality (outside of the mainstream religious framework)” or simply “they are weird, and they meet in private” as a predictor for that kind of abuse. Which is wrong in two ways:
First, various non-abusive groups get accused of being “cults” (which connotationally means: “if they are not abusing their members already, it is just a question of time”) merely for being weird, meeting in private, and talking about something outside of mainstream; such as Dungeons and Dragons players. That creates additional social pressure against doing anything out of ordinary. Also, see the paranoid reactions to the proposals of Dragon Army project, or even the Solstice celebrations.
Second, various truly abusive groups can use the wrong model to deflect a legitimate suspicion. If they are not religious—or if they can relatively plausibly deny being religious—they can say “we are not religious, therefore by definition we can’t be a cult” (and then the attention turns to debating definitions, which is useful, because it turns away from the actual evidence of abuse), or they can spend some money on PR to stop being “weird”. Or they can point to the former category and say: “some people call Dungeons and Dragons a cult, but that is crazy; people also call Scientology a cult, and obviously, that is the same kind of crazy.”
So why do people use the wrong models? Because they don’t have a better model, duh. (Most people don’t have an experience of being a cult leader, or talking with former members of various different cults, to get the full picture of how it works when you abstract away all the accidental details.) More meta, people usually don’t understand the difference between better and worse models. Is “cult” a mysterious answer, or is there an actual mechanism proposed?
This article is an attempt to describe the mechanism. To answer your question, the mechanism itself, that’s the “mainly about cults on the object level”. But the idea of using a mechanism at all, that is the “rational” part of talking about the cults.
So call it, “what behaviour people worry about when they are worried about cults”