Late add: As a general matter it’s possible, even in IMHO, to offer information about whatever other people or articles are saying / doing without advocating for or against whatever. Sometimes information is just information.
In our polemic-soaked world it’s easy to forget that not everything you see / read is someone pushing a position.
Before I retired, I noticed that some aspects of Agile methodology, or at least its cheerleaders were very cult-like. As I recall, we were forced on day one to learn something called “The Agile Manifesto”, and a set of “Values and Principles.” During this mandatory indoctrination, I objected to our backup/keep-tape team being forced into an Agile framework, as it made no sense. I was immediately pounced on and vilified by the Agile Thought Police who were leading the service. Every. Single. Job. can be improved by applying Agile methodologies, I was informed. The only thing missing was a doxology where the faithful could come down front and kneel.
Mine was AIDET. You never heard anyone reference it except the managers.
Apple (again)
Tesla
It’s worse than I thought. I must pray to our Lord Fagan for guidance.
That is just what we need. An agile backup framework, where the original backups never worked, and we evolve a series of incompatible backups to fix the problem sometime in the future.
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Australia is just going through a war-crimes exposure, involving the Special Forces - a group where the brutal initiation rites include confessing your darkest secrets to the training group, a demanding re-birth qualification hurdle, and learning that your life depends on the team.
At the risk of seeing a cult hiding under every bush, ISTM that the all military and police forces are by these definition classic cults.
I was in the U.S. Army.
Brutal initiation rites: Well, Basic Training was pretty grueling for me, physically and psychologically, but I don’t think it was brutal.
Confessing your darkest secrets to the training group: Nothing even remotely close to this. I’ve never even heard of this happening in real life.
A demanding re-birth qualification hurdle: I mean, sort of? In a sense, Initial Entry Training is one long re-birth process, to make you into a Soldier, but I don’t think that’s really the same thing.
Learning that your life depends on the team: Yes, absolutely, this part is definitely central to just about any military indoctrination.
Looking at the classic cult traits upthread, though, and military forces to tick some boxes, but not others.
The modern U.S. military is institutionalized and bureaucratized almost to the point of self-parody (many would seriously argue it is past that point). It’s about as opposite of a single charismatic leader as one can get.
Sexual abuse does happen in the U.S. military, all too often, but it’s not a core element of it. Sexual abuse as a core element are often attributed to historical military forces and many guerrilla forces, but it’s far from universal, and at least some of those stories are most likely of “that other tribe down the river are the cannibals” variety.
Also, and this is I think a really key point, the modern U.S. military does not try to isolate service members. It does make it hard to have a normal family life, but the leadership generally tries to encourage and facilitate family ties and involvement in the community, which is the opposite of cult behavior.
And you can definitely get out. Enlisted have contracts, but at the end of the contract, if you don’t want to re-up, you just don’t, and you’re free to go. For officers, it isn’t in practical terms as easy as just saying “I resign my commission”, but it’s not all that much more difficult.
Agree about Tesla. Musk is Steve Jobs 2.0. Jobs was the same as most other cult leaders . His fans thought he walked on water. Probably still shocked 9 years later he died.
Right. Melbourne’s reference however is to a specific group that is alleged to have adopted a cultish mentality. Strict discipline and cohesion do not a cult make. But “giving one another your darkest secrets” does lean in the wrong direction.
Yes. I see on re-reading that I might have been interpreted as referring to Special Forces in general. That was not my intention. For all I know all special forces might be cultish – as might my neighbors – or they might not be.
The “confession of darkest secrets” has come up several times in reference to the Australian Special Forces, when ex SF people have been involved in other training exercises, so evidently it’s been a thing.
What it does suggest is an institutionalised mechanism to provide power over members that goes past professional norms. This is very much a cult hallmark. There is an implicit threat that carries over into the rest of your life. From a simple security point of view this is clearly a bad thing. Special forces are going to be operating in classified environments and performing classified activities. Something security agencies are very keen on is that there are not secret levers available to coerce people with clearances. Doesn’t matter who has those levers, it breaks the compartmentalising structure key to security. As we see there are pending criminal actions. The idea that some of those who will be prosecuted could maintain continuing threats over people that may be needed to provide evidence is not good either.
It isn’t exactly new in well known cults. Those that break ranks will often find themselves subject to vicious retribution, and any secrets they had will be sure to be mined.
The best known issue is of course sexuality. Which is why “don’t ask don’t tell” was one of the most stupid ideas imaginable.
Exactly.
The biggest problem is it institutes a parellel command structure to the real one. You now have a fraternity subject to no orders but it’s own.
And betrayal of the fraternity, even when it’s gone off the official rails becomes very difficult. Cue Lord of the Flies.
The actual lawful military hierarchy needs to stomp this stuff out wherever it takes root. cf. “Thin blue line” in policing.
Agile is great for specific things- i.e. development of new solutions, or new functionality that can be iteratively revised through prototyping and getting customer feedback.
But it sucks balls for complicated back end stuff (you can’t really prototype an interface, for example), and it really sucks for diagnostic and maintenance type work- it rarely fits into the nice neat sprint format for example.
But the Agile zealots will tell you that everything is better with Agile, like it’s the MSG of the computing industry or something.
Movements have spawned cults - bowel movements, that is.
Seriously (or not) there have long been cultish aspects to taking a large, satisfying dump and expelling the dreaded Toxins contained therein.
Agile/Scrum is the latest fad in software development. First it was C, then C++, Java, and I think Python is the big thing now.
Oh geez…Java. During my first ever programming class in college (August 2000), the professor rattled off various programming languages, having students raise their hands to indicate if they were familiar with it. Unless you raised your hand for Java, you were mocked…and Og help you if you raised your hand for something like VisualBasic. Java was THE only thing you would need for your career! How dare you set foot on campus not knowing anything about Java!
(I ended up changing my major to mechanical engineering; I was required to take a Fortran class to graduate, but that was actually fun, and the professor had loads of great stories.)
I agree that over-zealous adherence to Agile is definitely a thing, and interferes with rational, objective problem-solving on technology questions. But Agile doesn’t completely take over its followers’ lives — you don’t try to manipulate your spouse according to Agile principles, for example — so it falls short of truly becoming a cult. On the other hand…
I think Facebook is an even better example. If you’re an employee, they indoctrinate you in the Way of the Zuck. True believers at the company are all-in on the mission of Collecting All the Data in order to model and predict people and society at both micro and macro scales. Zuckerberg is a godlike figure who has all the answers and must be followed in all things. Internal criticism is shouted down, and the critics are marginalized and pushed out. Facebook employees are notorious for preferentially dating other Facebook people. And the skeptics and regulatory types outside the company who want to crack open their databases and operational practices are The Enemy who are vilified and must be opposed at all times; Zuck forbid any of them ever get traction on actually breaking up the company to separate the advertising-and-behavioral-modeling part of the business from the social-networking side.
There’s like a VB anti-cult. The differences are just syntactical now and people only dislike it because it looks like something they disliked before. Sort of like anti-cargo cult programming too, instead of “let’s do it the same weird way so it won’t break anything”, it’s “let’s hate on this because it superficially looks like what didn’t work previously.”
