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How do the pros get someone to leave a cult?

theguardian.com

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Re: How do the pros get someone to leave a cult?

#121

Post by exasperaited »

stevemadere wrote: post #102
exasperaited wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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.

Re: How do the pros get someone to leave a cult?

#122

Post by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF »

dylan604 wrote: post #68
ljm wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.

Re: How do the pros get someone to leave a cult?

#123

Post by xg15 »

chinathrow wrote: post #79
rboyd wrote: post #67

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.

Re: How do the pros get someone to leave a cult?

#124

Post by azdaz »

komali2 wrote: post #104
lynx97 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ahem, you might as well just have described the trans movement. The flag, the drag, the self victimisation and combative behaviour...

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.

Re: How do the pros get someone to leave a cult?

#125

Post by mbivert »

internet_points wrote: post #2

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.)

haven't bothered reading it all, but it's just plain awful… such coldness is highly disturbing

Re: How do the pros get someone to leave a cult?

#126

Post by hn_user82179 »

dylan604 wrote: post #46
pjc50 wrote: post #29

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,”…

40 to 60 enemas a day? Per person? Even for hyperbole, that sounds like a lot.

The article specifies that it was enough to cause hallucinations

Re: How do the pros get someone to leave a cult?

#127

Post by hn_user82179 »

meken wrote: post #6

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

Re: How do the pros get someone to leave a cult?

#128

Post by rootusrootus »

xg15 wrote: post #123
chinathrow wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Re: How do the pros get someone to leave a cult?

#129

Post by mbivert »

add-sub-mul-div wrote: post #96
skeezyjefferson wrote: post #85

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...

Re: How do the pros get someone to leave a cult?

#130

Post by em-bee »

chinathrow wrote: post #79
rboyd wrote: post #67

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

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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