blow/muratori
How to spot cult leader personalities
31–40 of 63 posts
Re: How to spot cult leader personalities
#32There's lots and lots written about cults and cult leaders, which is worth reading, such as Combatting Cult Mind Control by Steven Hassan, or if you prefer a more traditional take, "Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism" by Robert Jay Lifton. Or any of other dozens of good authoritative takes on the subject by people who have spent their careers formally studying such phenomena, which can draw lines between a…
This post is about "cult leader personalities", not literal "cult leaders".
I imagine we've all had the experience of meeting such magnetic personalities, but probably only a tiny percentage have met an actual cult leader.
Re: How to spot cult leader personalities
#33Is cult leader an extreme version of narcissistic personality? A lot of overlap it seems.
Re: How to spot cult leader personalities
#34I was confused reading this. Is the author talking about literal suicide cult leaders like Jones, Koresh, and Applewhite, or "cult of personality" types like Jobs and Elon?
I have a LOT of problems with Koresh and the Branch Davidians, but he def wasn't leading a "suicide cult." They were actually the opposite...they believed that in the End Times they needed to stick it out on their property as long as possible even if it came to violence. They stockpiled weapons believing that it would come down to a final showdown between them and the antichrist's forces. Obviously they were unbiblical, and the child abuse is absolutely unforgiveable, but I take issue with people calling the Branch Davidians a suicide cult when that was against their beliefs.
That being said, I think the author is talking about cult of personality types. People with a personality that gears towards being the leaders of a cult, or getting a cult-like status. That is how it reads to me anyway.
Re: How to spot cult leader personalities
#35Some related thoughts, sorted by brevity:
(1) All pathos are healthy behaviors "gone wrong" - wrong time, or, wrong place, or (mostly), wrong magnitude.
(2) I wondered for a very long time: what's the difference between being convinced, and being manipulated? Stumbled across something on the 'net that finally gave an answer: Manipulation begins with diminishment, and (bringing it back to cults), "isolation" is one of the powerful forms of manipulation.
(3) Recently been thinking about "responsibility" in terms of the physics of a 'bounce' -
Drop a ball on sand, it goes thud; the force involved is the weight of the ball. Drop a bouncy ball on concrete, the force is ~2x (stopping the downward motion, then enough for the upward motion).
When someone comes to you and says: "This thing you did had this negative impact on [me/them/us]", if someone rejects any possible responsibility for it, that's a "bounce". It ends up looking like any of the forms of "pushing your reality onto others" - "you do this to me", gaslighting, etc etc etc.
Re: How to spot cult leader personalities
#36I was confused reading this. Is the author talking about literal suicide cult leaders like Jones, Koresh, and Applewhite, or "cult of personality" types like Jobs and Elon?
Did you read the part where he said they’re not always a net negative?
Re: How to spot cult leader personalities
#37Some related thoughts, sorted by brevity: (1) All pathos are healthy behaviors "gone wrong" - wrong time, or, wrong place, or (mostly), wrong magnitude. (2) I wondered for a very long time: what's the difference between being convinced, and being manipulated? Stumbled across something on the 'net that finally gave an answer: Manipulation begins with diminishment, and (bringing it back to cults), "isolation" is one of…
> Drop a ball on sand, it goes thud; the force involved is the weight of the ball. Drop a bouncy ball on concrete, the force is ~2x (stopping the downward motion, then enough for the upward motion).
The force in both scenarios is exactly the same. In the first the force goes into displacing the sand while in the second - since the concrete is a rigid lattice - the force goes into deforming the ball, which causes it to bounce back due to its elasticity. Objects with no elasticity (like another piece of concrete) will not bounce.
Beware of physical metaphors.
Re: How to spot cult leader personalities
#38I was confused reading this. Is the author talking about literal suicide cult leaders like Jones, Koresh, and Applewhite, or "cult of personality" types like Jobs and Elon?
It's obviously an n-dimensional space. I know a lot of the people that Sasha knows, so I can guess some of the people he was talking about here, and it's more like Jared Leto and his handful of weird groupies who are in a deeply unhealthy social and intellectual dynamic. So not really suicide cults, but uncomfortably close, not successful or mainstream enough to be Jobs, not really growth oriented or external facing enough to be Scientology. But a dubious social bubble around certain personality types.
Re: How to spot cult leader personalities
#39My impression is this is a common phenomenon in the software engineering community, probably mainly because a significant fraction of the community are young and/or inexperienced (e.g. number of programmers double every 5 years, which means 50% of programmers have less than 5 years experience). There are plenty of examples from streamers to serious programmers but the most common is probably the benevolent dictator f…
> There are plenty of examples from streamers to serious programmers but the most common is probably the benevolent dictator for life personalities for numerous software projects Can you provide any examples from either of these? I feel like you may be confusing "people with strong opinions" with "narcissistic cult leader."
Richard Stallman is a classic example of this. Brilliant man who produced many valuable things while having a strong philosophical basis underpinning them. As a person he has also engaged in concerning behavior that was hard to separate from his contributions to the Open Source community.
Re: How to spot cult leader personalities
#40the author seems to actually be upset by self centered ladder climbers, not actual cult leaders. post is lame