You’re here, immersed in the SDMB, right?
ISTR that many of the Branch Davidians were basically born into it. That wasn’t the case with Heaven’s Gate or Jonestown.
Found this article pretty interesting:
Didn’t realize there were multiple Rationalist cults. Black Lotus and Leverage Research are two others.
They do actually seem similar to Scientology in many ways. Many people now know about all the absurd stuff that’s “revealed” to Scientologists at high levels, like the thetans and DC-8 spacecraft dumping them into volcanoes with hydrogen bombs and all that, but none of that was apparent to the early inductees, particularly several decades ago with no internet or South Park. Instead, it was presented as a “scientific” approach to mental health with their e-meters and such. And airport self-help books.
But Leverage at least has “debugging sessions” which sound like almost the same thing as the Scientology e-meter sessions, which are presented as some kind of self-actualization procedure but in fact are just a cult indoctrination technique where they work to reduce your defenses.
Probably all cults have something equivalent but the window dressing in these cases isn’t religious but rather rational/scientific.
This Yudkowsky seems to have stirred up a lot of high weirdness. His name keeps coming up at the root of these things.
Interesting. I did not know that. Thank you.
Very interesting article. Definitely fits the ‘vulnerable people’ angle. But also, Rationalists were/are idealists who believe they can become better people and change the world. Those are noble goals, but can also be dangerous when they go wrong.
I think probably a lot of cults do genuine good in the beginning, whether or not the means is nonsense. They provide a “family”, some kind of rigid structure, and at least the rudiments of mental health care. It just very quickly goes wrong after that, in part because the cult has to retain members to survive, but that’s at odds with lifting people up and then letting them go. So just as the situation of the new members starts to improve, they are coerced into not leaving.
I hadn’t thought about it like that. But is it really too much to expect people who’ve been helped by some organisation to ‘pay it forward’ by sticking around and helping others for a while?
Nothing wrong with that as such, unless the guilt/obligation is used as a form of social coercion. Especially when combined with “By the way, we’re the only people you need now. Your old friends and family were the ones holding you back. Time to cut them out of your life.”
That describes Synanon, which started out doing some good for alcoholics and drug addicts, before degenerating into a violent cult.
Thanks for that reminder, my partner is a bit of a cult watcher, having been very close to EST (Warner Erhard and similar business improvement ones. (they did get involved, but “escaped”)
Looks like they have made a series on the Synanon story.
My dad worked with Synanon in the late 1960s. He was college student at the time (class of 1970), and as he later told me, he felt he was doing a lot of good, working with troubled people. According to him, he stopped working with them “before they became a cult”, and while what I’ve read about them shows that they actually were skating close to culthood by then, he might not have been fully aware of it. He mainly just liked arguing with people.
He claims he left because he was too busy with school, the antiwar movement, and my mom - not necessarily in that order.
The newspaper that exposed Synanon was a rural paper that was published 2 or 3 times a week, and had a circulation of something like 1,500. IIRC, Synanon had moved their headquarters into their community and were basically taking over.
In 1965, a feature film was made about them, called “Synanon.” I saw it on Turner Classic Movies a few years ago. Looks like the title has since been changed. It was OK.
Maybe? Mostly it’s just that his website got popular in the mainstream. He published a bunch of articles on how to be his idea of perfectly rational, and had a forum.
And then there was his (early) interest in the Friendly AI problem, which, when combined with his form of rationalism, turned into a more cultic idea, which led to Roko’s Baslisk mentioned earlier, which depended on his own set of (transhumanist) rationalist ethics.
Basically, the guy became internet famous and thus got a bigger following than most. It’s not surprising that other groups splintered off.
Here is an interesting article on Ophelia Bauckholt who was the passenger who was killed in the Vermont border patrol shooting. Perhaps someone can provide a gift link:
Ophelia Disappeared: A Wall Street Analyst and a Deadly Shootout: The group was passionately vegan, mostly transgender and highly educated. Seven of them are now in jail. This is the story of one who did not survive.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/02/us/zizians-group-disappearance.html
I take it you are not a subscriber (since it’s not a gift link)?
Correct. And the mods here frown upon discussions of how to get around newspaper paywalls.