Cults and true believers have always been cheap to create. But, in the world of Web3 and an attention economy, these groups aren’t just cheap to create, they also provide means for asymmetrical returns on cost, effort, time, and more. For better or worse, the rulebook for creating cults and true believers is well-established and easy to understand – both cults and believers all “look” the same and persist because of hope on one hand, and frustration on the other.
As said by Robert Finkelstein: “Equality without freedom creates a more stable social pattern than freedom without equality. A rising mass movement attracts and holds a following not by its doctrine and promises, but by the refuge it offers from the anxieties, barrenness, and meaninglessness of an individual existence.”
“Cult” is not a label to be applied to a group we don’t like or that has “weird” habits. Rather, the word “cult” describes a pattern of social relations within a group. At the core of these relations is dependency. In a cult, members are dependent on the group and its leaders for most, if not all, resources, including money, food and clothing, information, decision making, and perhaps, most importantly, self-esteem and social identity. This member dependency results in a specific pattern of relations:
- Communication is highly centralized, with little information available from outside the group.
- The agenda, objectives, and work tasks are set by the elite.
- Given the importance of the group to the individual, all influence and persuasion is directed toward maintaining the group.
- Persuasion is based on simple images and plays on emotions and prejudices.
While the success of a mass movement is typically ascribed to its faith, doctrine, propaganda, leadership, or ruthlessness, a cult’s vigor – in all cases – actually stems from the propensity of its followers for united action and self-sacrifice, and all true-believer mass movements, or “cults”, are taxonomically equivalent. As such, when people are ripe for a mass movement and cult engagement, they are usually ripe for any effective movement, not solely for one with a particular doctrine or program.
Since all cults draw their adherents from the same types of humanity and appeal to the same types of mind, it follows:
- All cults are competitive, and the gain of one in adherents is a loss of all the others.
- All cults are interchangeable and transformable.
- It is rare for a cult to be wholly of one character; it usually displays some facets of other types of movement, and sometimes it is two or three movements in one (such as religious, social, and nationalistic).
- The problem of stopping a cult is often a matter of substituting one movement for another (for example, a religious revolution can be stopped by promoting a social or nationalistic movement).
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