> If you go that route, at least change the password to some random string to lock yourself out.
I do that once in a while when I find myself wasting too much time participating here. It increases the friction quite a bit, but eventually I cave and recover the password.
If you really want to be serious about it, have to change the email address first, then toss the keys to that.
> Cults are social groups which have unusual, and often extreme, religious, spiritual, or philosophical beliefs and rituals.
HN is definitely a social group with unusual and often extreme philosophical beliefs that often aren't mainstream. (And that's why I keep coming back!)
Interesting read. Framing things as a "cultic relationship" makes a lot of sense to me. The part about using your experience as a basis of truth determination being flawed and a source of vulnerability also was pretty insightful.
I'm a little surprised by mention of pushback and accusations of being cult apologists, only because what they're describing as their method is pretty similar in principle to some widespread and empirically validated therapies for more common things. It's just much more invasive, to understate things. I guess at some point there are probably basic immediate safety issues that arise, where taking time has its own risks.
The piece left me thinking that the reasons people become involved with and attached to cults might not be different at some fundamental level from a lot of other psychological problems they get themselves in — just a matter of degree or pervasiveness.
> The piece left me thinking that the reasons people become involved with and attached to cults might not be different at some fundamental level from a lot of other psychological problems they get themselves in — just a matter of degree or pervasiveness.
It's kind of hard to articulate but the thing with cult and cult-like movements, and also somewhat cons & scams, is the "vulnerability" they exploit is the raw material of human connection.
A person who is immune to cult recruitment is a person who never feels isolation, desire, loneliness, grief, hope, fear of loss or lack of control, a person who never wants a hug or someone to talk to, who feels nothing at a smile from a stranger or the giggle of a baby.
Is that a person worth trying to be? I don't think so. To the degree you're open to human connection you're proportionally vulnerable to malicious connection too. Everyone, no matter how resilient, will go through periods of relative need, want, and weakness and at those times they are vulnerable. There are risk factors for getting involved, just like with say addiction, but no one is completely immune. If the wrong person is around you at the wrong time in your life you're in danger.
A person immune to a cult is not someone who doesn’t feel those things, but rather a person who can tell when someone is pushing those buttons/feelings in a context that is not in their best interests - and has the strength to remove themselves or fight back.
Arguably, the ones who are most sensitive to cults are those who have the biggest buttons for these things AND refuse to/are unable to acknowledge when those buttons are being pressed (because they ‘don’t feel it’ - but they do, and either don’t have the tools, or have been trained to not use them, to stop them from being pressed.
This comes up really frequently for unhealed past trauma, because that is basically what PTSD or bad childhoods do to you. Make it so you can’t see what’s happening clearly, or use the wrong tools to deal with what is happening, because you’ve either been overwhelmed with those emotions in the past to the point you’re relatively numb to them, or you’ve been raised/trained to not respond in a healthy way to them.
Notably, there is a very high correlation with unhealed trauma and PTSD with a lot of the conservative voting base (but certainly not all!).
> A person who is immune to cult recruitment is a person who never feels isolation, desire, loneliness, grief, hope, fear of loss or lack of control, a person who never wants a hug or someone to talk to, who feels nothing at a smile from a stranger or the giggle of a baby.
You're describing a cult leader BTW. I've met one. Scary person underneath that mask he was wearing.
Also I now know what a degree in business management is good for.
>A person who is immune to cult recruitment is a person who never feels isolation, desire, loneliness, grief, hope, fear of loss or lack of control, a person who never wants a hug or someone to talk to, who feels nothing at a smile from a stranger or the giggle of a baby.
Is it? Surely you can feel all those things and also be cynical enough to think no group can really provide a satisfying alternative.
A satisfying alternative to what? Some of these things can only be provided or alleviated by relationship and community.
A cult recruiter (or MLM or whatever) is offering what you need, it's just not a sincere offer. Your ability to assess that, to judge which relationships can safely meet these needs, is exactly what is compromised by having those experiences.
A satisfying alternative to legitimate connections, formed organically.
>A cult recruiter (or MLM or whatever) is offering what you need
No, it's offering a shallow facsimile of it, with the intent of exploiting you.
>Your ability to assess that, to judge which relationships can safely meet these needs, is exactly what is compromised by having those experiences.
Yes, that is what I'm saying. You can be able to enjoy all those things you said, and also have the ability to judge when someone just wants to manipulate you, or exploit you, or when the offer is too good to be true.
It's rather like romantic relationships. We do have a drive to and benefit from connections with other people, but in various circumstances can end up with a "cult of two" (folie a deux) mutually destructive situation or a one-sided exploitation situation.
The best thing I have ever read on this subject is https://harpers.org/archive/2013/11/the-man-who-saves-you-fr... - it is a truly wild ride, profiling David Sullivan, a private investigator who specialized in helping people get their loved ones out of cults and was based in the San Francisco Bay Area for many years.
Same, I would love this as a quirky detective-type series. There's something very adorable about the man buying himself a bright green parrot to comfort himself that he must not be very good at his job if he can't convince someone to leave an enema-cult (I swear, that reads like something out of some author I love but I can't think of the name). But also the amount of love and empathy it'd take to do this kind of work, and also almost private-investigator-type scheming (taking the tour through the religious library and passing by the eastern spirituality section to establish a common ground and level of trust) just adds so many layers
I recently read the book "Combatting Cult Mind Control" by Steven Hassan, a professional who also helps people leave cults. His approach isn't as much of a "long game" as Ryan and Kelly's approach. One thing that Hassan explains is that MLMs are often very similar to cults, and he also explains the difference between cults and religion.
Another book to read is The Running Grave by Robert Galabraith (pen name for J.K. Rownling.) One of the detectives joins a cult to try and get someone out. The book is well researched and gives an insider's view of a cult.
Either that or you lack the life experience, maturity and wisdom to accept that people can disagree with you without there being a conspiracy involved.
Are you saying that after reading the book? Isn’t it pretty straightforward to review which methods are used, and discriminate based on these methods, without taking a position on the content/beliefs/political goals? My understanding is that cults share methods of manipulation and coercion.
You specifically may not be in the Trump/MAGA cult, and there are others who simply do disagree, as you say. But there is undoubtedly a cult wing of MAGA. My mother is a member, and it checks every single box of cult behavior.
Sure just as is the case for the Democrat party and any other sufficiently large political organisation. There are elements of the Democrat party that think it's rational to mutilate children for example. I'm not aware of any MAGA supporters with this level of brain-washing.
Megyn Kelly Suddenly Finds Pedophilia Very Hard to Define
When a 16-year-old accused Russell Brand of rape, Kelly begged conservatives to condemn him. Now she’s splitting hairs about men “into the barely legal type.”
Maybe I'm too much of a left-winger and don't get enough right-wing content, but this would be news to me, unless you and I also have very different notions of what "a lot of republicans" means.
Megyn Kelly Suddenly Finds Pedophilia Very Hard to Define
When a 16-year-old accused Russell Brand of rape, Kelly begged conservatives to condemn him. Now she’s splitting hairs about men “into the barely legal type.”
So that works if it's possible to actually reach the person and the family agrees that they need help to get out. What if the family is part of the problem or is tricked? (I recently read https://elan.school/ about this unimaginably horrible Kids for Cash-like scheme/cult. The only thing I can think of to prevent such things would be to get parents, teachers, lawmakers and social workers to read those stories too.)
Dude you can't just drop a link like that without warning how deep the rabbit hole goes.
You posted this 5 hours ago. It's 2am here and I'm still reading from just a few minutes after you posted. This is a horrifying train wreck of a story, I can't look away. It's unbelievable these things went on for so long!
Ouf, yeah, maybe should have given more warning.. "Can't look away" indeed – I also got completely sucked into it after seeing a random link to it with no warning.
Some pull quotes, since people seem to be struggling with page loading:
> his client, a woman who had recently finished her master’s at a prestigious university, had been drawn into a scam job. It was essentially a pyramid scheme built around a health regimen. Before you could sell it, you had to try it, so you knew what you were selling.
> The regimen? Multiple enemas a day. “It escalated to 40 to 60 enemas a day,”
> All groups have a rhythm, like a pulse across the calendar year. We have holidays, and we have tax season. There are highs and lows.
> Furthermore, Kelly and Ryan urge their clients not to speak with the media. The firmest “no” I ever got was when I asked Ryan if I could speak to a former client.
> One of their cases in the 90s involved a cult leader who was systematically sexually assaulting the group’s members. [NB: do you have any idea how little that narrows it down]
> the girl’s uncle, their client, had a very difficult time finding anything positive about the group or the leader who had allegedly raped his niece
> What Kelly and Ryan mean when they say these groups are “offering something” to people, it is exactly that. There is a hole a group fills: alienation from community, family, sexuality; pressure to follow a certain life plan, addiction, unrealized spirituality, economic catastrophe – all reasons to join a group
I knew one person--shared a flat with them--who was heavily into that sort of spiritual-esque alternative health, the sort you'd connect to the so-called Woo-to-Q pipeline these days, who would subject themselves to that kind of thing. It was all about the 'cleanse':
1. Fast on water for a week
2. Drink a cup of olive oil, straight
3. Multiple enemas several times a week
4. Maintain a raw vegan diet in between
Throw in the occasional ayahuasca weekend (another cleaning ritual involving a rather extreme amount of, uh, purging). And for good measure dose yourself on some kind of poisonous frog venom for more of the same.
If I didn't know any better I would say there was some cult mentality going on, the gateway to manipulation being past childhood trauma and a borderline eating disorder. None of it seemed particularly healthy.
Although with 40+ enemas a day I don't know how you'd have time to do anything else.
Maybe "giving yourself enemas for 2 hours straight every day" is what they're referring to as "giving yourself 40-60 enemas a day". At 2-3 minutes per enema, that's plausible. It's also crazy but I think it's supposed to be crazy.
> Throw in the occasional ayahuasca weekend (another cleaning ritual involving a rather extreme amount of, uh, purging).
Ayahuasca is a psychdelic substance. sure, there is vomiting, but that isn't the main part of it just like drinking alcohol isn't centered around getting a hangover or destroying your brain cells
I misrepresented it, yes, but learning from my then-time friend, the purging aspect was a key aspect of it for them. More or less a way of getting ‘all that shit’ out of your system.
That is obviously a perversion of the social act of taking ayahuasca in the context of a cult-like situation, when you also combine it with the ritual of deep and frequent cleansing.
I think a good characterisation of it is Vera in Mr Robot, who basically does this and comes back as if he’s fully enlightened.
I think that's doable, it likely wasnt a traditional enema, they most likely just had to put some fluid in which consequently got absorbed by their column. Like 5 ml or so.
Definitely mind boggling people are willing to do such, but it's within my expectations for people that fall to such obvious scams/cults.
>That's roughly one per 20 minutes?
>I think that's doable,
I'm thinking of this for someone working in an office situation. Depending on how long it takes to perform the enema, this is about the same schedule as smokers. So maybe it's not so far off??
Then again, I'm guessing you divided that by 24 hours rather than a work day. Once per 20 minutes would me no sleep which would have worse health effects
No, I dividend between 16 waking hours - it's a pretty easy calculation: 16x3=48, which is within the range of 40-60.
If the person did it every 15 minutes it'd be 64 times during waking hours, but I felt that "roughly 20 minutes" suffices for a time range of 16-20 minutes •́ ‿ , •̀
It is! It's completely insane, and apparently at that level significantly harmful. That's why it was deemed to be a cult.
.. but you can also see a lot of slightly less intense grassroots health marketing or MLMs that also look very culty. Health in particular is a fertile ground for microcults.
Why did the original post for which these are the discussions disappear from HN?
I cannot even find it with a word search and it should not have been displaced from the top 30 yet.
I posit that those podcasters and streamers in the modern media environment are like cult leaders. It's a spectrum from journalist to entertainer to cult leader and we're tilting more towards the latter. The market finds a way.
I’d strongly recommend the documentary “Behind the Curve”. The close look at people in (not quite a cult) gave me a visceral appreciation for what draws people to it (it provides acceptance for people who sorely lack it) and why it can be so hard to leave (one’s identity becomes so tied up in it).
I went down the rabbit hole of researching both cults and deprogramming groups a few years ago and one of the things which I found remarkable was how much overlap in methods there was between the two. Different groups go to different extremes, but the overlap between the two is such that in many cases they can only be distinguished using social context, and in some cases I am pretty sure the deprogramming groups are in fact cults masquerading as groups to help former cult members because those make the best members for new cults.
Interesting space. I'm glad I don't have any personal reason to be involved.
Trying to read this to the end feels impossible - the Guardian keeps flicking the page to show ads and the page refreshes for no reason and I’m sure their ads impressions numbers are going through the roof. Feels like ad fraud.
I remember reading The Guardian back in the oughts when they were winning awards for their UX and they were my go-to answer to the front-end interview question of "Which websites do you admire?"
Ha, they even have their "Website of the year" award linked on their top banner
The Guardian from a desktop browser started confronting me with a paywall about two weeks ago. Can’t even see the front page, and uBlock Origin doesn’t help. Far from encouraging me to subscribe, I think this might actually finally cure my news addiction.
I hate ads as much as everyone, but I think you need to at least take a modicum of steps to block ads before posting to HN that you hate seeing all the ads.
(Perhaps your point though is to broadcast to everyone—who presumably are in fact blocking ads—that the site is pure awfulness without any ad-blocking. Of course you're preaching to the choir at that point anyway.)
The Guardian attempts to stop you accessing its articles if you are using an ad-blocker and don't have a paid subscription. (They didn't always do this. I don't know whether they do it uniformly to everyone or whether e.g. it's different based on their guess of your location.)
Yeah, which is a reasonable statement to make on the website TrainHackersAndPassAvoiders.com. I think its appropriate if you consider yourself in the culture to be reminded of the norms everyone in that culture typically follows.
If jumping the turnstile were legal, yeah. So far anyway, Reader Mode, and various ad-blockers are still legal.
I see your point generally though: accessing content that the publisher has attempted to force you to pay for. My general thought though is that it appears to be a failed (failing?) business model. I just don't know what the solution is. Perhaps if the ads avoided obscuring the content (like newspapers and magazines) I would probably just ignore them and not actively try to suppress them.
Fantastic article. And their "light touch" approach seems very correct.
Now --
What counts as a cult?
One sufficient condition, in my opinion, would be ritualized sexual abuse, especially of children.
But this is baked even into several mainstream religions, if you only open your eyes.
What is good, at least, is that, like viruses, cults/religions generally evolve to be less harmful to their hosts over time. (This is over time scales of multiple human generations. Within a single generation, a cult may do just the opposite, as it becomes marginalized from society and increasingly normalizes deviance, e.g. Aum reacting to humiliation in Japanese elections by releasing Sarin.)
Examples of this "taming" process: Flayed prisoners of the Aztecs are now dancing skeletons, "local color", used in America to sell tacos. Likewise the Abrahamic religions are an evolution of animal sacrifice cults, themselves echoing earlier human sacrifice cults; they are still shaking off frankly-insane practices, but could be worse. The history of LDS provides a less dramatic example, but one recent-enough that early stages are still well-documented in the historical record.
And if all this sounds New Atheistic, note that I am actually quite sympathetic to (almost apologetic for) certain aspects of religion (though I increasingly do wonder whether it is religions that teach goodness, or whether it is goodness that religions must attach themselves to for legitimacy, mixing it with other content). (For example I have pushed back, here, against characterizations of Christianity as "right wing", as that is not at all the content of the New Testament.)
One thing is certain: If a religious identity has bound itself to a person, then attacking the person will only strengthen the identity. The memetic parasite and the human victim must be clearly distinguished. Failure to do this results in violence against people which only strengths the meme. Blood for the blood god.
I suspect many of these memes can be tamed to the point of decency over multiple generations. Though they always carry the risk of reversion to older forms. Somehow the "DNA" is still there. So I'm not sure. They have to be stabilized to their nondestructive manifestations.
I also wonder about "non-religious" cult dynamics, e.g. those attached to political movements (both MAGA and woke), or financial/moral/credit systems, e.g. crypto.
One of my concerns also is the way that Silicon Valley leaders may study these methods not to defend against them but to exercise them in the formation of totalizing company cultures. Theil and Karp have been explicit about this. It distresses me: You should read about the scapegoat mechanism to destroy it, not to start using it.
This could also be a guide for how to win elections. But it's a huge undertaking. Learning their mythology and being dispassionately conversant in it is not easy. To completely erase your ego and work only in pursuit of manipulation... Well, it's no surprise to me that it's a job, and that they aren't trying to do it on their own families. It's not clear you should try to do that to your own family.
But to win elections, we do have to reach across to people who are conditioned a certain way, and to do that you'll need to know yourself very well, especially your relationship to the forces that condition you
I would be curious how these conversations with maga families would go if one truly adopted the methodology of the men mentioned in the article.
I liked they philosophy of basically engaging in deep, true good faith understanding of the person's view and group, as well as for the deprogrammer, leaving as much of your personal beliefs at the door, and accepting that you can't really know truth, that truth is more a feeling.
For the MAGA folks, there are many things about their ideology that are easy to agree with in isolation, and easy to understand if you comprehend their misunderstanding of reality. Suspicion of government? Makes sense! Desire for greater affordability? Of course! Nationalism, anti-globalism? Once you strip away the antisemitic tropes of anti globalism and the racist tropes of nationalism, it's perfectly understandable to ask why billions of your tax dollars are being spent in other countries on things that don't affect you in the slightest.
What I wonder moreso though is the ability of the somewhat neutered American liberal to check their own beliefs at the door. American liberalism seems hyper focused on aesthetics and strongly opposed to practical leftism, or really anything that challenges neoliberal dogma around Statism or Capitalism. I see American liberals shoot themselves in the foot with this all the time, and I fear they don't have the strength to make it through the first five seconds of the weird bits of a Trump supporter's beliefs without immediately fighting on aesthetic grounds.
I'm by no means an expert in this and in fact I hunger for these conversations so I can learn more about how to bridge the gap, so I can dig to the material conditions issues underlying the vast majority of most Trump supporter's concerns. The whole "drain the swamp thing," I mean, was it wrong? The entire government seems to have been cozied up with Israel at best and Epstein at worst! So how do you get to talking about that with them to where you get them to understand that their favorite republican politicians fall right into that pool, without first acknowledging the reality that the same is true for politicians "on your side?" At least to some extent. I fear "vote blue no matter who" ideology has short circuited the ability of American liberals to have genuine conversations with oppositional points of view.
> I'm by no means an expert in this and in fact I hunger for these conversations so I can learn more about how to bridge the gap, so I can dig to the material conditions issues underlying the vast majority of most Trump supporter's concerns. The whole "drain the swamp thing," I mean, was it wrong? The entire government seems to have been cozied up with Israel at best and Epstein at worst! So how do you get to talking about that with them to where you get them to understand that their favorite republican politicians fall right into that pool, without first acknowledging the reality that the same is true for politicians "on your side?"
Something I've noticed is that a lot of conspiracy theory is "exactly wrong": people will identify something which does have a real true problem to it, usually to do with elite unaccountability or widespread public lying, and then - without evidence, or using one extremely flimsy link - attach it to someone who least represents that problem. Thereby effectively covering up for all the other crimes.
I don't really try with family Fidesz members (Hungarian MAGA). I know why my relative believes what he does and I can't change that. I'm there for him as a friend, will share my conflicting views carefully but avoid getting dragged into a full on argument with emotions.
Could you please help me understand where you're coming from by describing what cultural Marxism means to you, and which American politicians are Marxists?
What's crazy to me is people like blitz_skull exist, who think that excessive identity politics in the democratic party is worth literally destroying the country. They call identity politics, a small subset of the liberal coalition platform (alongside rule of law, climate change acknowledgement, sustainable energy and better social safety nets) a virus, and authoritarianism and the destruction of the rule of law in the United States as the cure.
Someone who is presumably not a bot, on a forum like this, thinks that. If only they would dive deeper so I could attempt to understand.
I'm not even left or right but just pointing out that MAGA, who worships hypermasculinity and claims to be the party of God, seems to rile some folks up who can't come to terms with reality.
They make a demigod out of a fat lifelong Democrat in makeup who wrote in a book that if he ever ran for office he'd run as a Republican because they lack independent thought and effectively fall in line. They literally worshipped and prayed to a golden statue of him, which makes the whole story about the golden calf somewhat ironic.
I've seen a lot of Antifa things. They're into anti-MAGA things, have some kind of uniforms and merch and are actually quite violent. In certain places they are very visible, and aggressive. They are a good fit for a discussion about cults. I agree with the authors of the article. By being nice to them I broke some of them a little bit out of their loop.
I'm anti-fascist. I have a sticker on my laptop, and have hosted a BLM protest. No flags, no hats, and maybe 1% of my friends are involved in the way I am. If there's an antifa cult, I want to know about it, bcause I wouldn't mind some more friends in the scene.
Again, can we please just be for real and stop playing a "both sides" game? There's a difference between dogmatism, and cultism.
You disrespect the person you're responding to with your sarcasm, ignoring their points in order to make your own. You try to recover further down, which is nice, but please try to debate in good faith.
Maybe you got some things about me wrong. I'm very much anti-fascist, but around here anything labelled antifa is quite fascist. I don't care about anything Trump.
The only connection I have to Trump is that I sometimes heard old grumpy Nazis from the German military complain that he doesn't support them enough in attacking Russia. But trusting him to be a man of peace is most likely a mistake.
At the moment I'm neutral and observe the situation. I sometimes hang out with guys from peace movements, and also go to some events of the guys they protest against.
Antifa never shows up when there's a protest against real bad guys (politics, weapon industry, human rights...). And they're far more likely to harass the people of peace and human rights movements. There have been events of actual violence in the past, but most harassment nowadays is online.
For the cult:
- they label others as fascists a lot (even if it makes no sense in that context) so their brain has a short and allows violence.
- there are uniforms. They wear black with mask. Masking is still a thing today - it's a solid cargo-cult.
I don't often hear trans people say cis people literally shouldn't exist. I don't often see them celebrating official public corruption and the destruction of our country. I don't see them deliberately trolling and lying to themselves and the world for the purpose of facilitating hypocrisy and lawbreaking daily.
"Having a flag" is the only common theme they share, any other comparison is a stretch.
I just recently happened to attend a community meeting which took place in a room of a trans-centric housing project. Several of the houses residents also attended. I was schocked to witness a casual chat escalating to a point where several people agreed that they should forcefully storm the parliament building of the capital, if politicians can not be made to fullfil their wishes. So there you have your Jan6 story, from the other side. I decided to distance myself from these people. I know, its just an anecdote, and therefore, according to HN, not worth a dime. But it showed to me that there is really no difference between the sides. If frustrated enough, they end up going for, or at least playing with the thought of, violence. Remember RAF? But I digress...
I've thought about J6 a lot, and what bothers me isn't so much the violence, but the lies and pathetic worldview that drove it.
The idea that violence is necessary if an election is stolen - if political forces actually manipulated the results of the democratic process - is not absurd to me, and is not inherently immoral.
What made J6 wrong was not that it was violent, but that it was based on the obvious lies of a narcissistic compulsive gaslighter with no evidence, so they could further destroy the government and take rights away from people.
I guess my point is, values matter.
---
edit, since I hit the "dang" limit on discussing things with people:
Violence has always been part of societies, when rights are taken away violently by the ruling class or when nonviolent protest fails to secure fundamental rights.
Violence because an election was lost isn't just. Violence because the government is committing genocide is just. Violence because a stupid man told me to go attack the capitol because, against all evidence, he says the election was rigged is wrong. Violence because there is massive evidence of a rigged election (Tanzania, Russia) is not wrong.
Of course, all of this is a distraction from thrust of your argument "MAGA and Trans people are equal because they both have flags and I heard someone say something violent once".
MAGA is more violent, anti-democratic and oppressive than anything you can ever say about any left-wing identity political movement, period.
---
edit2: If one is willing to ignore the history of the world and the conditions I set for when violence seems just (while we diverge from the core discussion around the false equivalence between a gender rights movement and an anti-democracy movement) then I agree, we don't have a lot to talk through.
If you are willing to support--or at least not be bothered by--violence in a democratic process, I guess we can not find any common ground to talk about.
Some commentary added in my prior comment due to HN throttling.
In short, equating a minority group that has a flag and some banter spoken on private, to a massive ongoing movement-in-power in the US to literally destroy the federal government and erode civil liberties... Is a wild take.
This is confusing because transgenderism describes a psychological reality - you are born trans or not, the same as if you're born straight or not - whereas cult membership or political ideology aren't inherent, unchangeable parts of your self.
How are you managing to compare these unrelated things?
Evidence shows that it is not as inherent and built-in from birth as many people think, but is better characterised as a self-belief that can change over time.
Detransitioners are probably the best-known example. There are others, like males with autogynephilia who eventually end up believing they are women, sometimes even in middle-age or later. Also, there are medical case reports about transsexuals with dementia forgetting they identify as the opposite sex, and being shocked and horrified at what has been done to their body. As well as that, there are the "gender-fluid" people whose identity fluctuates rapidly rather than being fixed.
> Evidence shows that it is not as inherent and built-in from birth as many people think, but is better characterised as a self-belief that can change over time.
I have a lot of evidence in front of me that shows the opposite. What are you reading to lead you to the opposite conclusion?
> Detransitioners are probably the best-known example.
Transgenderism is incredibly rare in populations: .1% to .6% of the population. Of that, detransitioners are also incredibly rare: about 1%, and it's not clear yet what percentage of those stop taking puberty blockers or hormones because of financial reasons. Doesn't exactly make the case...
> As well as that, there are the "gender-fluid" people whose identity fluctuates rapidly rather than being fixed.
Correct, because gender is indeed a spectrum. Again that just seems to be making my case for me...
Otherwise intelligent people think software is sentient now. People believe weird things. We need to have compassion rather than write them off as idiots.
In addition to people believing weird things, such views are often highly tied to an environment.
Levitation is pure non-sense for people "in-doctrinated" (literally: ~ to have a doctrine within) by the contemporary, science-oriented environment.
Similarly, dismissing the existence of God(s) − or thinking about it, of levitation[0] − would have been unthinkable for people genuinely "in-doctrinated" by many (all?) historical religions.
Amusingly, contemporary science, which is often defined in opposition to blind religious ways, essentially operates like your garden-variety religion: faith practically required (among others, who can reproduce/prove (beyond a doubt) well-established results), hierarchy(ies)/rating system(s), esteemed texts, key public figures, etc.
Usually, the deeper people understand their own in-doctrination, the more prudent they are regarding what they may consider true or not.
fun fact: if you get some chronic illness, you have good chances to become an idiot. Every time your body stops working in some major way, your thinking is also affected (you become a de facto idiot).
cult (noun): A religion or religious sect generally considered to be extremist or false, with its followers often living in an unconventional manner under the guidance of an authoritarian, charismatic leader -- American Heritage Dictionary
Without the "generally considered to be extremist or false" it would be quite hard to even identify a cult. It's mostly used as way to slur a disfavored group. It's an element of a Russell conjugation, like I am part of a spiritual awakening, you belong to a religious sect, they are in a mind-control cult.
I was raised as a Jew. I consider that to be a cult, if one of the milder religious ones. My peewee football team was a cult. I belonged to a cultic political party, and worked for a startup that closely met the definition.
So getting someone to leave a cult is going to be the same as getting them to forsake any other community, just with the added coercion of social acceptability. There's no magic, no brain unwashing, it's the same kind of persuasion used to sell a vacuum cleaner.
To my mind that definition lacks any accuracy because it doesn't speak about control. It's difficult to leave cults, and not because of belief (apostasy). It's difficult to leave cults because they destroy your outward connections, as a principle of operation.
This is not a useful definition of a cult, though it is a short one.
The primary characteristic of a cult is that adherents find it difficult to leave, not because of the specific beliefs of the religion (e.g. Islam) but because of the mechanism of control.
"Unconventional manner" doesn't really cut it.
The key definition of a contemporary cult from the perspective of someone who has seen people join one is that the cult turns people inward to the cult and encourages them to cut off not just friends who question their belief but ultimately all non-cult friends and family.
In fact you could argue that the primary quality of a mainstream religion is that it points itself outwards towards non-believers and does not condition receiving its care on belief itself.
For example, the Unification Church is on a slow trajectory towards mainstream religion. The University Bible Fellowship, absolutely a cult and quite a scary one, is not on that trajectory.
Minor thing, but I prefer ‘cultish’ to ‘cultic’ for your usage. In academia, ‘cultic’ means anything to do with worship and lacks the association with cults as discussed in this thread, whereas ‘cultish’ is how I usually see people adjectivize ‘cult’ in the way you are doing.
> Without the "generally considered to be extremist or false" it would be quite hard to even identify a cult.
The extremism is an integral part of what makes folks regard something a cult. Would anyone have cared that NXIVM was running dodgy self-improvement seminars upstate, if they hadn't also been coercing and branding women?
> I consider that to be a cult, if one of the milder religious ones
Various sects within the various organised religions certainly qualify as cults. I think a fair case could be made for many of the milder ones as well, on the basis of how they tend to treat women/children/etc (restrictive rules about clothing/education/personal-freedom/etc)
Extremism is separate from coercion. It's entirely possible to have a coercive cult that has non-extreme beliefs.
Jonestown was, in several ways, a cult with non-extreme beliefs. They did have a charismatic and dangerously mentally ill leader (who did not start out by any means as an awful person).
But they collectively isolated themselves, rather than cutting off ties. And they did initially because of quite radical small-L liberal beliefs as well as politically socialist beliefs. Things that non-cult people think now.
It did not become truly coercive as a power structure until quite late on, mostly when they had isolated themselves and in many cases become physically ill, and in part it was still a collective delusion.
Even then, in many ways, Jonestown beliefs were not particularly extreme in a broad evangelical sense (rather than a US white evangelical sense, which is now a culture that could be defined largely non-religiously) if you specifically put aside their individually extreme devotion to Jones.
> It's mostly used as way to slur a disfavored group.
I generally agree. The divide between religion and cult is just a distinction between what's deemed acceptable behavior by society. Obsessing over a person who died thousands of years ago? Totally "normal." Obsessing over a single living person? Totally a cult.
> The divide between religion and cult is just a distinction between what's deemed acceptable behavior by society.
This is misconception. It's not about the extremism of the belief. It's about the mechanism of control.
Take the "cults" of the moment: Qanon/MAGA, for example, operate like a personality cult in many identifiable ways, but are not actually cults, because you can leave without much difficulty if you set your mind to it.
On the fringes US politics encourages ostracising family members who do not agree, but these movements do not have a mechanism of control (financial control combined with a commitment to cutting off family members).
There may be cult sects within MAGA/QAnon that get close, perhaps (just as there are at the fringes of all strange and mainstream religious beliefs)
> It's not about the extremism of the belief. It's about the mechanism of control.
> but are not actually cults, because you can leave without much difficulty if you set your mind to it.
By that definition Islam should be considered a cult as it calls for severe consequences for apostasy, ranging from social ostracism to the death penalty. However it's not a cult, it's a mainstream religion.
Same with Judaism; interfaith marriages are highly discouraged (re: prohibited) by Orthodox Jews, which is another mechanism of control. But again, not a cult. Why is that?
My argument is it has nothing to do with the beliefs or mechanisms of control or anything, really. It's purely what's normalized by society vs what is considered aberrant behavior.
> By that definition Islam should be considered a cult as it calls for severe consequences for apostasy, ranging from social ostracism to the death penalty. However it's not a cult, it's a mainstream religion.
I make the distinction elsewhere that it is not the belief structure (e.g. apostasy) that I am talking about.
I am talking about how a cult cuts you off from non-believers entirely, and that is combined with financial control.
Islam, Judaism, they do neither of these things, at an individual level. And Islam really lacks "cult control" mechanisms because it has such a limited concept of hierarchy of faith or obedience to any non-family authority.
Cults work at the deeply personal, individual level.
That is an interesting concept. But actually, even in this extreme situation, relatively few Trumper officials have no friends on the other side of the aisle; that will change over time as things become even more impossible to defend, but the "it's just a gig" aspect of it has not entirely faded.
There is definitely more "control" at the executive branch level: FBI people have literally been told they will be fired if they don't cut off contact with former FBI Trump critics.
But even so, being told you will be fired is small beer compared to how proper cults deal with dissent, and the level of control (you won't get a job in this town) is different to the level of psychological control a proper cult wields.
I think most definitions of cults are too brief. To truly be a cult I reflect on the cults I've read about.
For example, cults have a tendency to make members feel safer as members of the cult, which can be done by making "outsiders" seem hostile and "insiders" seem safe: see for example Mormons and Jehovah's witnesses sending people out to bother people door to door, which results in them getting yelled at by non Mormons.
Cults often require one's entire social circle to be cult members. This comes with the threat of total social isolation from friends and loved ones if you fall out of the cult and are made incommunicado. Thus while I like to cheekily refer to religions as cults, most major religions these days don't fall into this category in this highly diversified world.
wait a minute here..
HN:
- asks you to self-assign a new name upon joining
- has a leader
- has a hierarchy (rating system)
- esteemed texts which promise by adopting a strange method (Lisp) that you can achieve higher levels of wealth and self actualization
should I be worried?
> should I be worried?
No, you can (ok, I admit: try) to leave any time.
/etc/hosts 127.0.0.1 news.ycombinator.com
If you go that route, at least change the password to some random string to lock yourself out.
But that's not leaving either. Your posts are still out there, and so is your account. In fact, no one except you would know you left.
There is a reason why the EU mandated the right to deletion.
> If you go that route, at least change the password to some random string to lock yourself out.
I do that once in a while when I find myself wasting too much time participating here. It increases the friction quite a bit, but eventually I cave and recover the password.
If you really want to be serious about it, have to change the email address first, then toss the keys to that.
What if there's a forward proxy listening on 127.0.0.1
I don't run mine on 127.0.0.1 but that address is a very popular default
You're supposed to use 0.0.0.0 for site blocks. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/0.0.0.0
127.0.0.2
Good old "how to stop smoking?" "just stop smoking"
i think it would be useful to distinguish between addiction and coercion.
if you can't leave a cult, it's coercion. if you can't leave hackernews, it's addiction.
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>should I be worried?
If you read Hackers and Painters without realizing you're getting conned, yes. Very much so.
First sentence of the wikipedia page for "Cult":
> Cults are social groups which have unusual, and often extreme, religious, spiritual, or philosophical beliefs and rituals.
HN is definitely a social group with unusual and often extreme philosophical beliefs that often aren't mainstream. (And that's why I keep coming back!)
People want to belong. If you do not belong to anything that looks like a cult you operate outside of society.
for several years now my resume has labeled me a "Software Cultist"
Interesting read. Framing things as a "cultic relationship" makes a lot of sense to me. The part about using your experience as a basis of truth determination being flawed and a source of vulnerability also was pretty insightful.
I'm a little surprised by mention of pushback and accusations of being cult apologists, only because what they're describing as their method is pretty similar in principle to some widespread and empirically validated therapies for more common things. It's just much more invasive, to understate things. I guess at some point there are probably basic immediate safety issues that arise, where taking time has its own risks.
The piece left me thinking that the reasons people become involved with and attached to cults might not be different at some fundamental level from a lot of other psychological problems they get themselves in — just a matter of degree or pervasiveness.
> The piece left me thinking that the reasons people become involved with and attached to cults might not be different at some fundamental level from a lot of other psychological problems they get themselves in — just a matter of degree or pervasiveness.
It's kind of hard to articulate but the thing with cult and cult-like movements, and also somewhat cons & scams, is the "vulnerability" they exploit is the raw material of human connection.
A person who is immune to cult recruitment is a person who never feels isolation, desire, loneliness, grief, hope, fear of loss or lack of control, a person who never wants a hug or someone to talk to, who feels nothing at a smile from a stranger or the giggle of a baby.
Is that a person worth trying to be? I don't think so. To the degree you're open to human connection you're proportionally vulnerable to malicious connection too. Everyone, no matter how resilient, will go through periods of relative need, want, and weakness and at those times they are vulnerable. There are risk factors for getting involved, just like with say addiction, but no one is completely immune. If the wrong person is around you at the wrong time in your life you're in danger.
Eh, not really.
A person immune to a cult is not someone who doesn’t feel those things, but rather a person who can tell when someone is pushing those buttons/feelings in a context that is not in their best interests - and has the strength to remove themselves or fight back.
Arguably, the ones who are most sensitive to cults are those who have the biggest buttons for these things AND refuse to/are unable to acknowledge when those buttons are being pressed (because they ‘don’t feel it’ - but they do, and either don’t have the tools, or have been trained to not use them, to stop them from being pressed.
This comes up really frequently for unhealed past trauma, because that is basically what PTSD or bad childhoods do to you. Make it so you can’t see what’s happening clearly, or use the wrong tools to deal with what is happening, because you’ve either been overwhelmed with those emotions in the past to the point you’re relatively numb to them, or you’ve been raised/trained to not respond in a healthy way to them.
Notably, there is a very high correlation with unhealed trauma and PTSD with a lot of the conservative voting base (but certainly not all!).
> A person who is immune to cult recruitment is a person who never feels isolation, desire, loneliness, grief, hope, fear of loss or lack of control, a person who never wants a hug or someone to talk to, who feels nothing at a smile from a stranger or the giggle of a baby.
You're describing a cult leader BTW. I've met one. Scary person underneath that mask he was wearing.
Also I now know what a degree in business management is good for.
>A person who is immune to cult recruitment is a person who never feels isolation, desire, loneliness, grief, hope, fear of loss or lack of control, a person who never wants a hug or someone to talk to, who feels nothing at a smile from a stranger or the giggle of a baby.
Is it? Surely you can feel all those things and also be cynical enough to think no group can really provide a satisfying alternative.
A satisfying alternative to what? Some of these things can only be provided or alleviated by relationship and community.
A cult recruiter (or MLM or whatever) is offering what you need, it's just not a sincere offer. Your ability to assess that, to judge which relationships can safely meet these needs, is exactly what is compromised by having those experiences.
>A satisfying alternative to what?
A satisfying alternative to legitimate connections, formed organically.
>A cult recruiter (or MLM or whatever) is offering what you need
No, it's offering a shallow facsimile of it, with the intent of exploiting you.
>Your ability to assess that, to judge which relationships can safely meet these needs, is exactly what is compromised by having those experiences.
Yes, that is what I'm saying. You can be able to enjoy all those things you said, and also have the ability to judge when someone just wants to manipulate you, or exploit you, or when the offer is too good to be true.
It's rather like romantic relationships. We do have a drive to and benefit from connections with other people, but in various circumstances can end up with a "cult of two" (folie a deux) mutually destructive situation or a one-sided exploitation situation.
The best thing I have ever read on this subject is https://harpers.org/archive/2013/11/the-man-who-saves-you-fr... - it is a truly wild ride, profiling David Sullivan, a private investigator who specialized in helping people get their loved ones out of cults and was based in the San Francisco Bay Area for many years.
Discussed once on HN here:
The Man Who Saves You from Yourself (2013) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7903938 - June 2014 (139 comments)
Agree with the other reply. Great read, although very disturbing. Very.
Thank you for sharing -- that was a great read!
Fascinating. I would totally watch a TV series on this.
Same, I would love this as a quirky detective-type series. There's something very adorable about the man buying himself a bright green parrot to comfort himself that he must not be very good at his job if he can't convince someone to leave an enema-cult (I swear, that reads like something out of some author I love but I can't think of the name). But also the amount of love and empathy it'd take to do this kind of work, and also almost private-investigator-type scheming (taking the tour through the religious library and passing by the eastern spirituality section to establish a common ground and level of trust) just adds so many layers
For those who are interested:
I recently read the book "Combatting Cult Mind Control" by Steven Hassan, a professional who also helps people leave cults. His approach isn't as much of a "long game" as Ryan and Kelly's approach. One thing that Hassan explains is that MLMs are often very similar to cults, and he also explains the difference between cults and religion.
Another book to read is The Running Grave by Robert Galabraith (pen name for J.K. Rownling.) One of the detectives joins a cult to try and get someone out. The book is well researched and gives an insider's view of a cult.
> the difference between cults and religion
sounds interesting, can you please summarize it, if possible?
Steven Hassan also wrote "The Cult of Trump: A Leading Cult Expert Explains How the President Uses Mind Control", which is very relevant today.
Either that or you lack the life experience, maturity and wisdom to accept that people can disagree with you without there being a conspiracy involved.
Are you saying that after reading the book? Isn’t it pretty straightforward to review which methods are used, and discriminate based on these methods, without taking a position on the content/beliefs/political goals? My understanding is that cults share methods of manipulation and coercion.
You specifically may not be in the Trump/MAGA cult, and there are others who simply do disagree, as you say. But there is undoubtedly a cult wing of MAGA. My mother is a member, and it checks every single box of cult behavior.
Sure just as is the case for the Democrat party and any other sufficiently large political organisation. There are elements of the Democrat party that think it's rational to mutilate children for example. I'm not aware of any MAGA supporters with this level of brain-washing.
> . . . mutilate children for example. I'm not aware of any MAGA supporters with this level of brain-washing.
Really? I’m sure a large portion of the MAGA base supports circumcision.
Yet you watch Trump and his cabinet members lie every day.
Aren't a lot of Republicans now saying it is ok to have sex with 15 year old girls?
EDIT: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/11/megyn-kelly-eps...
Megyn Kelly Suddenly Finds Pedophilia Very Hard to Define When a 16-year-old accused Russell Brand of rape, Kelly begged conservatives to condemn him. Now she’s splitting hairs about men “into the barely legal type.”
Maybe I'm too much of a left-winger and don't get enough right-wing content, but this would be news to me, unless you and I also have very different notions of what "a lot of republicans" means.
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/11/megyn-kelly-eps...
Megyn Kelly Suddenly Finds Pedophilia Very Hard to Define When a 16-year-old accused Russell Brand of rape, Kelly begged conservatives to condemn him. Now she’s splitting hairs about men “into the barely legal type.”
The author correctly asserts that you don't have to be in the cult to support Trump.
So that works if it's possible to actually reach the person and the family agrees that they need help to get out. What if the family is part of the problem or is tricked? (I recently read https://elan.school/ about this unimaginably horrible Kids for Cash-like scheme/cult. The only thing I can think of to prevent such things would be to get parents, teachers, lawmakers and social workers to read those stories too.)
I'm at chapter 74, haven't wrote a single line of code since yesterday, and will probably have to work over the weekend to catch up :(
haven't bothered reading it all, but it's just plain awful… such coldness is highly disturbing
Dude you can't just drop a link like that without warning how deep the rabbit hole goes.
You posted this 5 hours ago. It's 2am here and I'm still reading from just a few minutes after you posted. This is a horrifying train wreck of a story, I can't look away. It's unbelievable these things went on for so long!
Ouf, yeah, maybe should have given more warning.. "Can't look away" indeed – I also got completely sucked into it after seeing a random link to it with no warning.
See https://www.deccanherald.com/world/china-woman-counsels-mist...
Some pull quotes, since people seem to be struggling with page loading:
> his client, a woman who had recently finished her master’s at a prestigious university, had been drawn into a scam job. It was essentially a pyramid scheme built around a health regimen. Before you could sell it, you had to try it, so you knew what you were selling.
> The regimen? Multiple enemas a day. “It escalated to 40 to 60 enemas a day,”
> All groups have a rhythm, like a pulse across the calendar year. We have holidays, and we have tax season. There are highs and lows.
> Furthermore, Kelly and Ryan urge their clients not to speak with the media. The firmest “no” I ever got was when I asked Ryan if I could speak to a former client.
> One of their cases in the 90s involved a cult leader who was systematically sexually assaulting the group’s members. [NB: do you have any idea how little that narrows it down]
> the girl’s uncle, their client, had a very difficult time finding anything positive about the group or the leader who had allegedly raped his niece
> What Kelly and Ryan mean when they say these groups are “offering something” to people, it is exactly that. There is a hole a group fills: alienation from community, family, sexuality; pressure to follow a certain life plan, addiction, unrealized spirituality, economic catastrophe – all reasons to join a group
40 to 60 enemas a day? Per person? Even for hyperbole, that sounds like a lot.
Seems like a pure logistics issue to me.
I knew one person--shared a flat with them--who was heavily into that sort of spiritual-esque alternative health, the sort you'd connect to the so-called Woo-to-Q pipeline these days, who would subject themselves to that kind of thing. It was all about the 'cleanse':
1. Fast on water for a week 2. Drink a cup of olive oil, straight 3. Multiple enemas several times a week 4. Maintain a raw vegan diet in between
Throw in the occasional ayahuasca weekend (another cleaning ritual involving a rather extreme amount of, uh, purging). And for good measure dose yourself on some kind of poisonous frog venom for more of the same.
If I didn't know any better I would say there was some cult mentality going on, the gateway to manipulation being past childhood trauma and a borderline eating disorder. None of it seemed particularly healthy.
Although with 40+ enemas a day I don't know how you'd have time to do anything else.
> Although with 40+ enemas a day I don't know how you'd have time to do anything else
This is what triggered me to questioning even allowing for hyperbole. At what point does it become kink/fetish/addiction?
Maybe "giving yourself enemas for 2 hours straight every day" is what they're referring to as "giving yourself 40-60 enemas a day". At 2-3 minutes per enema, that's plausible. It's also crazy but I think it's supposed to be crazy.
> Throw in the occasional ayahuasca weekend (another cleaning ritual involving a rather extreme amount of, uh, purging).
Ayahuasca is a psychdelic substance. sure, there is vomiting, but that isn't the main part of it just like drinking alcohol isn't centered around getting a hangover or destroying your brain cells
I misrepresented it, yes, but learning from my then-time friend, the purging aspect was a key aspect of it for them. More or less a way of getting ‘all that shit’ out of your system.
That is obviously a perversion of the social act of taking ayahuasca in the context of a cult-like situation, when you also combine it with the ritual of deep and frequent cleansing.
I think a good characterisation of it is Vera in Mr Robot, who basically does this and comes back as if he’s fully enlightened.
That's roughly one per 20 minutes?
I think that's doable, it likely wasnt a traditional enema, they most likely just had to put some fluid in which consequently got absorbed by their column. Like 5 ml or so.
Definitely mind boggling people are willing to do such, but it's within my expectations for people that fall to such obvious scams/cults.
>That's roughly one per 20 minutes? >I think that's doable,
I'm thinking of this for someone working in an office situation. Depending on how long it takes to perform the enema, this is about the same schedule as smokers. So maybe it's not so far off??
Then again, I'm guessing you divided that by 24 hours rather than a work day. Once per 20 minutes would me no sleep which would have worse health effects
No, I dividend between 16 waking hours - it's a pretty easy calculation: 16x3=48, which is within the range of 40-60.
If the person did it every 15 minutes it'd be 64 times during waking hours, but I felt that "roughly 20 minutes" suffices for a time range of 16-20 minutes •́ ‿ , •̀
It is! It's completely insane, and apparently at that level significantly harmful. That's why it was deemed to be a cult.
.. but you can also see a lot of slightly less intense grassroots health marketing or MLMs that also look very culty. Health in particular is a fertile ground for microcults.
The article specifies that it was enough to cause hallucinations
it's called "ass tripping" and many have found it to be a epiphany-provoking spiritual journey. Jim Morrison was big on ass tripping for example.
Why did the original post for which these are the discussions disappear from HN? I cannot even find it with a word search and it should not have been displaced from the top 30 yet.
It's #36 right now. That's on page 2.
https://news.ycombinator.com/news?p=2
This search also shows it:
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=last24h&page=0&prefix=fals...
I posit that those podcasters and streamers in the modern media environment are like cult leaders. It's a spectrum from journalist to entertainer to cult leader and we're tilting more towards the latter. The market finds a way.
I’d strongly recommend the documentary “Behind the Curve”. The close look at people in (not quite a cult) gave me a visceral appreciation for what draws people to it (it provides acceptance for people who sorely lack it) and why it can be so hard to leave (one’s identity becomes so tied up in it).
Okay I'm going to ask. Is anybody else here playing Living Colour's "Cult of Personality" while they read this? [1]
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7xxgRUyzgs0
I went down the rabbit hole of researching both cults and deprogramming groups a few years ago and one of the things which I found remarkable was how much overlap in methods there was between the two. Different groups go to different extremes, but the overlap between the two is such that in many cases they can only be distinguished using social context, and in some cases I am pretty sure the deprogramming groups are in fact cults masquerading as groups to help former cult members because those make the best members for new cults.
Interesting space. I'm glad I don't have any personal reason to be involved.
Trying to read this to the end feels impossible - the Guardian keeps flicking the page to show ads and the page refreshes for no reason and I’m sure their ads impressions numbers are going through the roof. Feels like ad fraud.
Ublock origin -- blocking the javascript, and the article is readable with no page flicking, and no ads at all.
I remember reading The Guardian back in the oughts when they were winning awards for their UX and they were my go-to answer to the front-end interview question of "Which websites do you admire?"
Ha, they even have their "Website of the year" award linked on their top banner
https://web.archive.org/web/20080704050905/http://theguardia...
Worked fine in Firefox incognito.
Reader mode. No ads, just text.
I'm not seeing page refreshes on chrome. It's just a lot of fixed sized ad boxes.
The Guardian from a desktop browser started confronting me with a paywall about two weeks ago. Can’t even see the front page, and uBlock Origin doesn’t help. Far from encouraging me to subscribe, I think this might actually finally cure my news addiction.
I hate ads as much as everyone, but I think you need to at least take a modicum of steps to block ads before posting to HN that you hate seeing all the ads.
(Perhaps your point though is to broadcast to everyone—who presumably are in fact blocking ads—that the site is pure awfulness without any ad-blocking. Of course you're preaching to the choir at that point anyway.)
The Guardian attempts to stop you accessing its articles if you are using an ad-blocker and don't have a paid subscription. (They didn't always do this. I don't know whether they do it uniformly to everyone or whether e.g. it's different based on their guess of your location.)
This is like saying "if you don't like train prices then don't complain until you've tried jumping the turnstile".
Yeah, which is a reasonable statement to make on the website TrainHackersAndPassAvoiders.com. I think its appropriate if you consider yourself in the culture to be reminded of the norms everyone in that culture typically follows.
That definitely isn't the topic of this website, though.
If jumping the turnstile were legal, yeah. So far anyway, Reader Mode, and various ad-blockers are still legal.
I see your point generally though: accessing content that the publisher has attempted to force you to pay for. My general thought though is that it appears to be a failed (failing?) business model. I just don't know what the solution is. Perhaps if the ads avoided obscuring the content (like newspapers and magazines) I would probably just ignore them and not actively try to suppress them.
Fantastic article. And their "light touch" approach seems very correct.
Now --
What counts as a cult?
One sufficient condition, in my opinion, would be ritualized sexual abuse, especially of children.
But this is baked even into several mainstream religions, if you only open your eyes.
What is good, at least, is that, like viruses, cults/religions generally evolve to be less harmful to their hosts over time. (This is over time scales of multiple human generations. Within a single generation, a cult may do just the opposite, as it becomes marginalized from society and increasingly normalizes deviance, e.g. Aum reacting to humiliation in Japanese elections by releasing Sarin.)
Examples of this "taming" process: Flayed prisoners of the Aztecs are now dancing skeletons, "local color", used in America to sell tacos. Likewise the Abrahamic religions are an evolution of animal sacrifice cults, themselves echoing earlier human sacrifice cults; they are still shaking off frankly-insane practices, but could be worse. The history of LDS provides a less dramatic example, but one recent-enough that early stages are still well-documented in the historical record.
And if all this sounds New Atheistic, note that I am actually quite sympathetic to (almost apologetic for) certain aspects of religion (though I increasingly do wonder whether it is religions that teach goodness, or whether it is goodness that religions must attach themselves to for legitimacy, mixing it with other content). (For example I have pushed back, here, against characterizations of Christianity as "right wing", as that is not at all the content of the New Testament.)
One thing is certain: If a religious identity has bound itself to a person, then attacking the person will only strengthen the identity. The memetic parasite and the human victim must be clearly distinguished. Failure to do this results in violence against people which only strengths the meme. Blood for the blood god.
I suspect many of these memes can be tamed to the point of decency over multiple generations. Though they always carry the risk of reversion to older forms. Somehow the "DNA" is still there. So I'm not sure. They have to be stabilized to their nondestructive manifestations.
I also wonder about "non-religious" cult dynamics, e.g. those attached to political movements (both MAGA and woke), or financial/moral/credit systems, e.g. crypto.
One of my concerns also is the way that Silicon Valley leaders may study these methods not to defend against them but to exercise them in the formation of totalizing company cultures. Theil and Karp have been explicit about this. It distresses me: You should read about the scapegoat mechanism to destroy it, not to start using it.
Religion and Cult are obviously very similar things, if not in some cases just different names for exactly the same thing.
Yep
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Well, you should!
This could also be a guide for how to win elections. But it's a huge undertaking. Learning their mythology and being dispassionately conversant in it is not easy. To completely erase your ego and work only in pursuit of manipulation... Well, it's no surprise to me that it's a job, and that they aren't trying to do it on their own families. It's not clear you should try to do that to your own family.
But to win elections, we do have to reach across to people who are conditioned a certain way, and to do that you'll need to know yourself very well, especially your relationship to the forces that condition you
I would be curious how these conversations with maga families would go if one truly adopted the methodology of the men mentioned in the article.
I liked they philosophy of basically engaging in deep, true good faith understanding of the person's view and group, as well as for the deprogrammer, leaving as much of your personal beliefs at the door, and accepting that you can't really know truth, that truth is more a feeling.
For the MAGA folks, there are many things about their ideology that are easy to agree with in isolation, and easy to understand if you comprehend their misunderstanding of reality. Suspicion of government? Makes sense! Desire for greater affordability? Of course! Nationalism, anti-globalism? Once you strip away the antisemitic tropes of anti globalism and the racist tropes of nationalism, it's perfectly understandable to ask why billions of your tax dollars are being spent in other countries on things that don't affect you in the slightest.
What I wonder moreso though is the ability of the somewhat neutered American liberal to check their own beliefs at the door. American liberalism seems hyper focused on aesthetics and strongly opposed to practical leftism, or really anything that challenges neoliberal dogma around Statism or Capitalism. I see American liberals shoot themselves in the foot with this all the time, and I fear they don't have the strength to make it through the first five seconds of the weird bits of a Trump supporter's beliefs without immediately fighting on aesthetic grounds.
I'm by no means an expert in this and in fact I hunger for these conversations so I can learn more about how to bridge the gap, so I can dig to the material conditions issues underlying the vast majority of most Trump supporter's concerns. The whole "drain the swamp thing," I mean, was it wrong? The entire government seems to have been cozied up with Israel at best and Epstein at worst! So how do you get to talking about that with them to where you get them to understand that their favorite republican politicians fall right into that pool, without first acknowledging the reality that the same is true for politicians "on your side?" At least to some extent. I fear "vote blue no matter who" ideology has short circuited the ability of American liberals to have genuine conversations with oppositional points of view.
> I'm by no means an expert in this and in fact I hunger for these conversations so I can learn more about how to bridge the gap, so I can dig to the material conditions issues underlying the vast majority of most Trump supporter's concerns. The whole "drain the swamp thing," I mean, was it wrong? The entire government seems to have been cozied up with Israel at best and Epstein at worst! So how do you get to talking about that with them to where you get them to understand that their favorite republican politicians fall right into that pool, without first acknowledging the reality that the same is true for politicians "on your side?"
Something I've noticed is that a lot of conspiracy theory is "exactly wrong": people will identify something which does have a real true problem to it, usually to do with elite unaccountability or widespread public lying, and then - without evidence, or using one extremely flimsy link - attach it to someone who least represents that problem. Thereby effectively covering up for all the other crimes.
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I don't really try with family Fidesz members (Hungarian MAGA). I know why my relative believes what he does and I can't change that. I'm there for him as a friend, will share my conflicting views carefully but avoid getting dragged into a full on argument with emotions.
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forgive me if the rise of autocracy and death of civil liberties in my country occupies my thoughts nowadays.
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I'm curious to learn more.
Could you please help me understand where you're coming from by describing what cultural Marxism means to you, and which American politicians are Marxists?
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What's crazy to me is people like blitz_skull exist, who think that excessive identity politics in the democratic party is worth literally destroying the country. They call identity politics, a small subset of the liberal coalition platform (alongside rule of law, climate change acknowledgement, sustainable energy and better social safety nets) a virus, and authoritarianism and the destruction of the rule of law in the United States as the cure.
Someone who is presumably not a bot, on a forum like this, thinks that. If only they would dive deeper so I could attempt to understand.
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I'm not even left or right but just pointing out that MAGA, who worships hypermasculinity and claims to be the party of God, seems to rile some folks up who can't come to terms with reality.
They make a demigod out of a fat lifelong Democrat in makeup who wrote in a book that if he ever ran for office he'd run as a Republican because they lack independent thought and effectively fall in line. They literally worshipped and prayed to a golden statue of him, which makes the whole story about the golden calf somewhat ironic.
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I've seen a lot of Antifa things. They're into anti-MAGA things, have some kind of uniforms and merch and are actually quite violent. In certain places they are very visible, and aggressive. They are a good fit for a discussion about cults. I agree with the authors of the article. By being nice to them I broke some of them a little bit out of their loop.
I'm anti-fascist. I have a sticker on my laptop, and have hosted a BLM protest. No flags, no hats, and maybe 1% of my friends are involved in the way I am. If there's an antifa cult, I want to know about it, bcause I wouldn't mind some more friends in the scene.
Again, can we please just be for real and stop playing a "both sides" game? There's a difference between dogmatism, and cultism.
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You disrespect the person you're responding to with your sarcasm, ignoring their points in order to make your own. You try to recover further down, which is nice, but please try to debate in good faith.
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Maybe you got some things about me wrong. I'm very much anti-fascist, but around here anything labelled antifa is quite fascist. I don't care about anything Trump. The only connection I have to Trump is that I sometimes heard old grumpy Nazis from the German military complain that he doesn't support them enough in attacking Russia. But trusting him to be a man of peace is most likely a mistake.
At the moment I'm neutral and observe the situation. I sometimes hang out with guys from peace movements, and also go to some events of the guys they protest against.
Antifa never shows up when there's a protest against real bad guys (politics, weapon industry, human rights...). And they're far more likely to harass the people of peace and human rights movements. There have been events of actual violence in the past, but most harassment nowadays is online.
For the cult:
- they label others as fascists a lot (even if it makes no sense in that context) so their brain has a short and allows violence.
- there are uniforms. They wear black with mask. Masking is still a thing today - it's a solid cargo-cult.
- they have flags - lots of flags
- no hats, but masks - like real cultists
Ahem, you might as well just have described the trans movement. The flag, the drag, the self victimisation and combative behaviour...
I don't often hear trans people say cis people literally shouldn't exist. I don't often see them celebrating official public corruption and the destruction of our country. I don't see them deliberately trolling and lying to themselves and the world for the purpose of facilitating hypocrisy and lawbreaking daily.
"Having a flag" is the only common theme they share, any other comparison is a stretch.
I just recently happened to attend a community meeting which took place in a room of a trans-centric housing project. Several of the houses residents also attended. I was schocked to witness a casual chat escalating to a point where several people agreed that they should forcefully storm the parliament building of the capital, if politicians can not be made to fullfil their wishes. So there you have your Jan6 story, from the other side. I decided to distance myself from these people. I know, its just an anecdote, and therefore, according to HN, not worth a dime. But it showed to me that there is really no difference between the sides. If frustrated enough, they end up going for, or at least playing with the thought of, violence. Remember RAF? But I digress...
I've thought about J6 a lot, and what bothers me isn't so much the violence, but the lies and pathetic worldview that drove it.
The idea that violence is necessary if an election is stolen - if political forces actually manipulated the results of the democratic process - is not absurd to me, and is not inherently immoral.
What made J6 wrong was not that it was violent, but that it was based on the obvious lies of a narcissistic compulsive gaslighter with no evidence, so they could further destroy the government and take rights away from people.
I guess my point is, values matter.
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edit, since I hit the "dang" limit on discussing things with people:
Violence has always been part of societies, when rights are taken away violently by the ruling class or when nonviolent protest fails to secure fundamental rights.
Violence because an election was lost isn't just. Violence because the government is committing genocide is just. Violence because a stupid man told me to go attack the capitol because, against all evidence, he says the election was rigged is wrong. Violence because there is massive evidence of a rigged election (Tanzania, Russia) is not wrong.
Of course, all of this is a distraction from thrust of your argument "MAGA and Trans people are equal because they both have flags and I heard someone say something violent once".
MAGA is more violent, anti-democratic and oppressive than anything you can ever say about any left-wing identity political movement, period.
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edit2: If one is willing to ignore the history of the world and the conditions I set for when violence seems just (while we diverge from the core discussion around the false equivalence between a gender rights movement and an anti-democracy movement) then I agree, we don't have a lot to talk through.
If you are willing to support--or at least not be bothered by--violence in a democratic process, I guess we can not find any common ground to talk about.
Some commentary added in my prior comment due to HN throttling.
In short, equating a minority group that has a flag and some banter spoken on private, to a massive ongoing movement-in-power in the US to literally destroy the federal government and erode civil liberties... Is a wild take.
This is confusing because transgenderism describes a psychological reality - you are born trans or not, the same as if you're born straight or not - whereas cult membership or political ideology aren't inherent, unchangeable parts of your self.
How are you managing to compare these unrelated things?
Evidence shows that it is not as inherent and built-in from birth as many people think, but is better characterised as a self-belief that can change over time.
Detransitioners are probably the best-known example. There are others, like males with autogynephilia who eventually end up believing they are women, sometimes even in middle-age or later. Also, there are medical case reports about transsexuals with dementia forgetting they identify as the opposite sex, and being shocked and horrified at what has been done to their body. As well as that, there are the "gender-fluid" people whose identity fluctuates rapidly rather than being fixed.
> Evidence shows that it is not as inherent and built-in from birth as many people think, but is better characterised as a self-belief that can change over time.
I have a lot of evidence in front of me that shows the opposite. What are you reading to lead you to the opposite conclusion?
> Detransitioners are probably the best-known example.
Transgenderism is incredibly rare in populations: .1% to .6% of the population. Of that, detransitioners are also incredibly rare: about 1%, and it's not clear yet what percentage of those stop taking puberty blockers or hormones because of financial reasons. Doesn't exactly make the case...
> As well as that, there are the "gender-fluid" people whose identity fluctuates rapidly rather than being fixed.
Correct, because gender is indeed a spectrum. Again that just seems to be making my case for me...
You shame someone for talking about a cult....in a thread about people in a cult.
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i stopped after reading these two were taken in by promises of levitation. i dont care how attractive the cult is, youre an idiot to believe it
Otherwise intelligent people think software is sentient now. People believe weird things. We need to have compassion rather than write them off as idiots.
In addition to people believing weird things, such views are often highly tied to an environment.
Levitation is pure non-sense for people "in-doctrinated" (literally: ~ to have a doctrine within) by the contemporary, science-oriented environment.
Similarly, dismissing the existence of God(s) − or thinking about it, of levitation[0] − would have been unthinkable for people genuinely "in-doctrinated" by many (all?) historical religions.
Amusingly, contemporary science, which is often defined in opposition to blind religious ways, essentially operates like your garden-variety religion: faith practically required (among others, who can reproduce/prove (beyond a doubt) well-established results), hierarchy(ies)/rating system(s), esteemed texts, key public figures, etc.
Usually, the deeper people understand their own in-doctrination, the more prudent they are regarding what they may consider true or not.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levitation_(paranormal)#Religi...
fun fact: if you get some chronic illness, you have good chances to become an idiot. Every time your body stops working in some major way, your thinking is also affected (you become a de facto idiot).
Even the most intelligent people in the world are susceptible to the mind control techniques that eventually make you believe the unbelievable.
You're simply uninformed if you believe otherwise.
I was raised as a Jew. I consider that to be a cult, if one of the milder religious ones. My peewee football team was a cult. I belonged to a cultic political party, and worked for a startup that closely met the definition.
So getting someone to leave a cult is going to be the same as getting them to forsake any other community, just with the added coercion of social acceptability. There's no magic, no brain unwashing, it's the same kind of persuasion used to sell a vacuum cleaner.
I quite like the term "high-control group", though interestingly it doesn't have a Wikipedia page.
> Without the "generally considered to be extremist or false" it would be quite hard to even identify a cult.
Well, yes, if you remove the thing that distinguishes a cult from those other things, then it is hard to distinguish them.
To my mind that definition lacks any accuracy because it doesn't speak about control. It's difficult to leave cults, and not because of belief (apostasy). It's difficult to leave cults because they destroy your outward connections, as a principle of operation.
This is not a useful definition of a cult, though it is a short one.
The primary characteristic of a cult is that adherents find it difficult to leave, not because of the specific beliefs of the religion (e.g. Islam) but because of the mechanism of control.
"Unconventional manner" doesn't really cut it.
The key definition of a contemporary cult from the perspective of someone who has seen people join one is that the cult turns people inward to the cult and encourages them to cut off not just friends who question their belief but ultimately all non-cult friends and family.
In fact you could argue that the primary quality of a mainstream religion is that it points itself outwards towards non-believers and does not condition receiving its care on belief itself.
For example, the Unification Church is on a slow trajectory towards mainstream religion. The University Bible Fellowship, absolutely a cult and quite a scary one, is not on that trajectory.
> I belonged to a cultic political party
Minor thing, but I prefer ‘cultish’ to ‘cultic’ for your usage. In academia, ‘cultic’ means anything to do with worship and lacks the association with cults as discussed in this thread, whereas ‘cultish’ is how I usually see people adjectivize ‘cult’ in the way you are doing.
> Without the "generally considered to be extremist or false" it would be quite hard to even identify a cult.
The extremism is an integral part of what makes folks regard something a cult. Would anyone have cared that NXIVM was running dodgy self-improvement seminars upstate, if they hadn't also been coercing and branding women?
> I consider that to be a cult, if one of the milder religious ones
Various sects within the various organised religions certainly qualify as cults. I think a fair case could be made for many of the milder ones as well, on the basis of how they tend to treat women/children/etc (restrictive rules about clothing/education/personal-freedom/etc)
Extremism is separate from coercion. It's entirely possible to have a coercive cult that has non-extreme beliefs.
Jonestown was, in several ways, a cult with non-extreme beliefs. They did have a charismatic and dangerously mentally ill leader (who did not start out by any means as an awful person).
But they collectively isolated themselves, rather than cutting off ties. And they did initially because of quite radical small-L liberal beliefs as well as politically socialist beliefs. Things that non-cult people think now.
It did not become truly coercive as a power structure until quite late on, mostly when they had isolated themselves and in many cases become physically ill, and in part it was still a collective delusion.
Even then, in many ways, Jonestown beliefs were not particularly extreme in a broad evangelical sense (rather than a US white evangelical sense, which is now a culture that could be defined largely non-religiously) if you specifically put aside their individually extreme devotion to Jones.
> It's mostly used as way to slur a disfavored group.
I generally agree. The divide between religion and cult is just a distinction between what's deemed acceptable behavior by society. Obsessing over a person who died thousands of years ago? Totally "normal." Obsessing over a single living person? Totally a cult.
> The divide between religion and cult is just a distinction between what's deemed acceptable behavior by society.
This is misconception. It's not about the extremism of the belief. It's about the mechanism of control.
Take the "cults" of the moment: Qanon/MAGA, for example, operate like a personality cult in many identifiable ways, but are not actually cults, because you can leave without much difficulty if you set your mind to it.
On the fringes US politics encourages ostracising family members who do not agree, but these movements do not have a mechanism of control (financial control combined with a commitment to cutting off family members).
There may be cult sects within MAGA/QAnon that get close, perhaps (just as there are at the fringes of all strange and mainstream religious beliefs)
> It's not about the extremism of the belief. It's about the mechanism of control.
> but are not actually cults, because you can leave without much difficulty if you set your mind to it.
By that definition Islam should be considered a cult as it calls for severe consequences for apostasy, ranging from social ostracism to the death penalty. However it's not a cult, it's a mainstream religion.
Same with Judaism; interfaith marriages are highly discouraged (re: prohibited) by Orthodox Jews, which is another mechanism of control. But again, not a cult. Why is that?
My argument is it has nothing to do with the beliefs or mechanisms of control or anything, really. It's purely what's normalized by society vs what is considered aberrant behavior.
> By that definition Islam should be considered a cult as it calls for severe consequences for apostasy, ranging from social ostracism to the death penalty. However it's not a cult, it's a mainstream religion.
I make the distinction elsewhere that it is not the belief structure (e.g. apostasy) that I am talking about.
I am talking about how a cult cuts you off from non-believers entirely, and that is combined with financial control.
Islam, Judaism, they do neither of these things, at an individual level. And Islam really lacks "cult control" mechanisms because it has such a limited concept of hierarchy of faith or obedience to any non-family authority.
Cults work at the deeply personal, individual level.
It's definitely a cult for elected officials who join (according to your discriminating criterion)
That is an interesting concept. But actually, even in this extreme situation, relatively few Trumper officials have no friends on the other side of the aisle; that will change over time as things become even more impossible to defend, but the "it's just a gig" aspect of it has not entirely faded.
There is definitely more "control" at the executive branch level: FBI people have literally been told they will be fired if they don't cut off contact with former FBI Trump critics.
But even so, being told you will be fired is small beer compared to how proper cults deal with dissent, and the level of control (you won't get a job in this town) is different to the level of psychological control a proper cult wields.
They will get there over time, I think.
I think most definitions of cults are too brief. To truly be a cult I reflect on the cults I've read about.
For example, cults have a tendency to make members feel safer as members of the cult, which can be done by making "outsiders" seem hostile and "insiders" seem safe: see for example Mormons and Jehovah's witnesses sending people out to bother people door to door, which results in them getting yelled at by non Mormons.
Cults often require one's entire social circle to be cult members. This comes with the threat of total social isolation from friends and loved ones if you fall out of the cult and are made incommunicado. Thus while I like to cheekily refer to religions as cults, most major religions these days don't fall into this category in this highly diversified world.