How Is a Cult Defined and How Can People Get Out?

People often say that that members who vote party X or party Y are inside a cult. I think we can all agree that whatever political affiliation, cults are never a good idea. They might even play a role in the ever increasing polarization that we see happening. So out of curiosity, I opened the book Cults Inside Out (2014) by Rick Alan Ross to learn how a cult is defined and how people can get out.

What is a Cult?

According to Robert Jay Lifton in his paper Cult Formation (1981), destructive cults have three primary characteristics:

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The Effect of Language in Propaganda

From Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism: A Study of 'brainwashing' in China by Robert Jay Lifton (1989):

For an individual person, the effect of the language of ideological totalism can be summed up in one word: constriction. He is, so to speak, linguistically deprived; and since language is so central to all human experience, his capacities for thinking and feeling are immensely narrowed. This is what Hu meant when he said, "using the same pattern of words for so long... you feel chained."

Summary of The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity

This is my hand-written (not AI) summary of The madness of crows by Douglas Murray. Throughout the summary, I’ve tried to extract the core of the arguments as well as possible. For more information about the sources and for generally a better written text, I encourage readers to buy the book.

The Madness of Crowds

Every day we see the crowds behave irrational, this book goes into the underlying reasons.

From the nineteenth century onward, many people lost their meaning due to religions falling out of favor. Something new arose to fill the vacuum. This something came from academia into the mainstream since the 2008 financial crash. It isn’t hard to see why a generation that might never own a home is drawn to an ideology that promises to fix inequality.

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Baudet on the Free Market

A strong argument in favor of capitalism is that “power corrupts” and a free market introduces competition to the market, so it distributes power. Based on this video.

Whether Settler Colonialism is Progressive

From On Settler Colonialism: Ideology, Violence, and Justice by Adam Kirsch:

If the definition of a progressive movement is that it believes the future can be better than the past, then the ideology of settler colonialism is not progressive, because it believes the past was better than the future.

Communism in a Nutshell

The idea of communism is that inequality is reduced by getting rid of rich people. Once communism gets under way, everybody is equal. Except the government. Or as Orwell wrote: “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others”. In the DDR, you could recognize a party-member by the fact that they drove a Volvo. Normal people drove a Trabant.

Speech by Frans Timmermans on Europe's Diversity

Transcript of a speech by Frans Timmermans in 2015. Frans Timmermans is the former Executive Vice President of the European Commission for the European Green Deal and European Commissioner for Climate Action:

Diversity is now, in some parts of Europe, seen as a threat. Diversity comes with challenges. But diversity is humanity's destiny. There is not going to be, even in the remotest places of this planet, a nation that will not see diversity in its future. That's where humanity is heading. And those politicians trying to sell to their electorates, a society that is exclusively composed of people from one culture, are trying to portray a future based on a past that never existed. Therefore, that future will never be. Europe will be diverse. Like all other parts of the world, we'd be diverse. The only question is, how do we deal with that diversity? And my answer to that is, by ensuring that our values determine how we deal with diversity and not giving up our values to refuse diversity, that will bring us down as a society. If we don't get this right, I truly believe Europe will not remain the Europe we've built. Europe will not remain a place of peace and freedom for very long.

A Toast to the Simple, Ordinary, Modest People

A quote from Joseph Stalin at the beginning of the book Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization by Stephen Kotkin:

I propose a toast to simple, ordinary, modest people, to the "little cogs" who keep our great state machine in motion. . . . No one writes about them, they have no high titles and few offices, but they are the people who maintain us. . . . I drink to the health of these people.

pathsofstoicism on "mental resets"

From pathsofstoicism:

Best mental reset I’ve learned:

If your mind is loud — Write.

If your mind is empty — Read.

If your mind is racing — Walk.

If your mind is tired — Sleep.

If your mind is sharp — Build.

Most problems are just mismatched energy. Get the inputs right, the rest follows.

How Effective is Russian Subversion?

In a 1983 lecture (transcript), Yuri Bezmenov explains how Russian propaganda typically aims to weaken opposing societies. Here I want to go through his lecture and make some notes comparing it to the situation in the West today. By the West, I mean not a geographical place, but mean the group of countries that have largely joined into the same institutions. For example, the United States, Australia, the Netherlands, England, Japan, and South Korea all belong to the West.

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