Religion = Cult + Culture

[listen to the audio version of this article here, courtesy of AskWho]

Cults are not necessarily bad. Cults provide value. People join them to get things they need which aren’t provided elsewhere. Every cult is a spiritual start-up, doing its best to serve a neglected segment of the population.

Start-ups are famous for the intensity of focus and commitment they inspire in their founding cohort. Observations from Paul Graham:

Running a startup is not like having a job or being a student, because it never stops. This is so foreign to most people's experience that they don't get it till it happens.

I didn't realize I would spend almost every waking moment either working or thinking about our startup. You enter a whole different way of life when it's your company vs. working for someone else's company.

It's surprising how much you become consumed by your startup, in that you think about it day and night, but never once does it feel like "work."

Start-ups are unsustainable. The amount of work, focus, and stress they require always brings people to burn-out eventually. The runway of a start-up isn’t just measured in the money it needs to sustain itself and grow, it’s also measured in how many dozens of months its initial cohort can work this intensely before collapsing. The point of every start-up is to create something that can transition into a stable company before those resources run out.

Cults have a start-up culture. Everyone within them is excited and in love with their work and can focus on little else, and it’s great. But it is equally unsustainable. A cult is inspirational and fulfilling, but it doesn’t interface well with the wider world. The demands and pressures of real life stack higher and higher until eventually something breaks.

For a cult to continue to serve its members for many decades (or centuries), providing value to their children and grandchildren and the surrounding community, it mist adopt techniques that allow its members to lead functional lives outside of its confines. It has to interface with the wider world and be shaped by its practicalities.

Phil Goetz described what this looks like in 2009: the culture surrounding a cult turns it into a religion by providing it with memetic antibodies — practices which allow the standard believer to interface normally with the rest of the world.

People who grow up with a religion learn how to cope with its more inconvenient parts by partitioning them off, rationalizing them away, or forgetting about them.  Religious communities actually protect their members from religion in one sense - they develop an unspoken consensus on which parts of their religion members can legitimately ignore.  New converts sometimes try to actually do what their religion tells them to do.

I remember many times growing up when missionaries described the crazy things their new converts in remote areas did on reading the Bible for the first time - they refused to be taught by female missionaries; they insisted on following Old Testament commandments; they decided that everyone in the village had to confess all of their sins against everyone else in the village; they prayed to God and assumed He would do what they asked; they believed the Christian God would cure their diseases.  We would always laugh a little at the naivete of these new converts; I could barely hear the tiny voice in my head saying but they're just believing that the Bible means what it says...

This necessarily means a religion in the start-up phase (or “cult”) will lose some of its edge, but this is healthy. This shift mirrors the “start-up to stable company” transition. This is the defining difference between a cult and a religion — How well it adopts and incorporates the memetic antibodies of the surrounding culture to allow its adherents to live normal, happy, functional lives, while still providing the spiritual services humans need. #SystematizedWinning

This Is About QC

Rationalism isn’t a religion, but it fulfills some of the functions a religion fulfills that everyone needs to some degree. And like a religion, it has memetic antibodies to prevent True Believer Cultist failure modes. Many of these developed through cultural evolution, like all previous religions. Strikingly, many of them were directly injected by Eliezer when he first wrote the Sequences in a deliberate, heroic attempt to prevent a cult forming around his ideas.

Nonetheless, some people fall through the cracks. All the antibodies miss them and they become Zealots, doing lasting damage to their lives, and then burning out spectacularly. QC was a recent example, but isn’t a unique phenomenon. Obviously a very young religion so close to its vital source will see this more often than one established for centuries. In historic terms, we’re doing better than any spiritual movement in any previous century. But via the powers of explicit reasoning perhaps we can do even better. Every case like QCs is tragic and should cause some measure of regret and introspection.

Where were the clergy that could see the warning signs of memetic immunity failure, and could guide QC away from fanaticism and towards greater integration with practical realities? They (we?) barely exist. Who’s even had the time to learn what to look for, or how to handle it, in the dozen+ years rationalism has been around?

What are the community norms for social protocols around such zealots? Goetz’s missionaries knew to laugh at the new converts and correct them. Do we? I think in Denver we’ve lucked into a default culture that puts emphasis on first getting your life in order and functioning in default society, with rationalism complimenting that rather than overriding it. Is this common?

Rationalism is now large enough and old enough that these issues demand addressing. Rationalism has an ethos, it provides inspiration and meaning, it has an internal culture. We’re doing our best to grow communities to serve our people, but there don’t seem to be even an acknowledgement that this comes with some measure of responsibility. One of those responsibilities is to ensure that the wider normie cultural antibodies that prevent cultish death spirals are kept fit.

And, perhaps, a resource that organizers can turn to if they notice someone slipping into fanaticism would be nice. As far as I know, there isn’t a Best Practices Doc for this sort of thing.