Taboo ‘cult’. I’ve found the book Cultishto be helpful for thinking about, well, cultish groups. Here’s alist of the cultish properties described in the book. A big idea in the book is that some things that make you go “that’s a cult” are mostly harmless, like jargon and rituals and slogans, and some are very harmful, like cutting off relationships with people outside the cult and punishing members for doubt.
Point 5 is quite misleading, because the way in which academia and catholic monasteries and armies are cultish are really importantly different from the way the central examples of cults (like Jim Jones’s cult) are cultish. They lack the most dangerous cultish qualities. (Actually Point 5 is just wrong—academia just isn’t really cultish.)
Re point 2: I’m interested in the “significant upsides that the discourse made impossible to discuss in public.” To be clear, I’m interested in why the discourse made discussion impossible.
cutting off relationships with people outside the cult
This is a terrible sign except for the times it’s extremely helpful because the people being cut off were terrible. Queer culture supports/encourages people to cut off hateful, homophobic family. Recovery programs encourage people to cut off their user friends. Whether this is harmful depends on the quality of the people being cut off.
I’m interested in why the discourse made discussion impossible
The vitriol against the leader made people feel socially unsafe to speak out about the good things they’d gotten from him. Mostly they feared the vitriol would be turned on them for “defending” the designated bad guy (who TBC generally was pretty bad, but if they were all bad people wouldn’t have followed them). Even if they somehow felt safe about that, there was no space for the complexity of their experiences. Listeners who didn’t exaggerate the goodness or badness of an experience still flattened complexity.
Even in the cases where cutting off the previous connections is good, it seems likely to have the same control + destabilizing effects. It may be meliorated by the previous connections being even more controlling and destabilizing (and misery-inducing), but it’s still running the risks.
Hell, aren’t the Zizians an example of a cult or cult-like thing that operates in large part by exploiting the effects of leaving previous connections? I don’t know the details, but surely many of them involved had actively shitty family members who they were wise to have left, even if the choice of who to go to was terrible.
This is a terrible sign except for the times it’s extremely helpful because the people being cut off were terrible. Queer culture supports/encourages people to cut off hateful, homophobic family. Recovery programs encourage people to cut off their user friends. Whether this is harmful depends on the quality of the people being cut off.
In neither of these cases are people cut off merely for not being a member of the group.
Jargon, rituals, and slogans are absolutely harmful. Cults do so much more damage to people’s minds that is hard for an external observer to pick up on. After all, they wouldn’t be an external observer if they internalized the cult messaging.
Jargon is a tool, sometimes inevitable—for example math is full of jargon.
But it can also be abused strategically. Renaming things needlessly, to make it more difficult to communicate with the outsiders. Renaming things needlessly, to make members believe that the idea originated in the cult (as opposed to being taken from outside and renamed), so they can’t research the idea independently. Renaming things needlessly, to get rid of associations: for example many would agree that hurting people is wrong, but they have no strong opinion on whether frobnicating people is wrong, so you just need to tell them that what seems like hurting people is actually frobnicating, and then they will be more okay with that.
Taboo ‘cult’. I’ve found the book Cultish to be helpful for thinking about, well, cultish groups. Here’s a list of the cultish properties described in the book. A big idea in the book is that some things that make you go “that’s a cult” are mostly harmless, like jargon and rituals and slogans, and some are very harmful, like cutting off relationships with people outside the cult and punishing members for doubt.
Point 5 is quite misleading, because the way in which academia and catholic monasteries and armies are cultish are really importantly different from the way the central examples of cults (like Jim Jones’s cult) are cultish. They lack the most dangerous cultish qualities. (Actually Point 5 is just wrong—academia just isn’t really cultish.)
Re point 2: I’m interested in the “significant upsides that the discourse made impossible to discuss in public.” To be clear, I’m interested in why the discourse made discussion impossible.
This is a terrible sign except for the times it’s extremely helpful because the people being cut off were terrible. Queer culture supports/encourages people to cut off hateful, homophobic family. Recovery programs encourage people to cut off their user friends. Whether this is harmful depends on the quality of the people being cut off.
The vitriol against the leader made people feel socially unsafe to speak out about the good things they’d gotten from him. Mostly they feared the vitriol would be turned on them for “defending” the designated bad guy (who TBC generally was pretty bad, but if they were all bad people wouldn’t have followed them). Even if they somehow felt safe about that, there was no space for the complexity of their experiences. Listeners who didn’t exaggerate the goodness or badness of an experience still flattened complexity.
Even in the cases where cutting off the previous connections is good, it seems likely to have the same control + destabilizing effects. It may be meliorated by the previous connections being even more controlling and destabilizing (and misery-inducing), but it’s still running the risks.
Hell, aren’t the Zizians an example of a cult or cult-like thing that operates in large part by exploiting the effects of leaving previous connections? I don’t know the details, but surely many of them involved had actively shitty family members who they were wise to have left, even if the choice of who to go to was terrible.
In neither of these cases are people cut off merely for not being a member of the group.
Jargon, rituals, and slogans are absolutely harmful. Cults do so much more damage to people’s minds that is hard for an external observer to pick up on. After all, they wouldn’t be an external observer if they internalized the cult messaging.
You have a point but this requires more nuance.
Jargon is a tool, sometimes inevitable—for example math is full of jargon.
But it can also be abused strategically. Renaming things needlessly, to make it more difficult to communicate with the outsiders. Renaming things needlessly, to make members believe that the idea originated in the cult (as opposed to being taken from outside and renamed), so they can’t research the idea independently. Renaming things needlessly, to get rid of associations: for example many would agree that hurting people is wrong, but they have no strong opinion on whether frobnicating people is wrong, so you just need to tell them that what seems like hurting people is actually frobnicating, and then they will be more okay with that.