Wikipedia Culture : How Like A Cult, Single Mad Belief? Mental Cul-De-Sac? Options Rating

[Jon Awbrey]

There is indeed a Single Mad Belief, but it's hardly unique to Wikipedia.

I have another name for it.

I call it Humankind's Original Logic Error (HOLE), because it dates all the way back to the Dawn of Civilization.

This is a particularly stubborn misconception to flush down the toilet, as it's an error in mathematical reasoning.

I estimate that 95% of Homo Schleppians still have a HOLE in their head.

You've said as much before, in pretty much the same words, and it's still not making much sense to me.

Jon

[emesee]

I did not see this. I must admit I am bit surprised, or just... uhh... lazy...

http://www.wikicult.org/index.html

Found that at: http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/is-something...sses/2008/01/07 (there)

This post has been edited by emesee: Tue 11th November 2008, 2:57am

[Jon Awbrey]

I found this thread where we already had a fairly good discussion of cults and their characters, and it looked like a fine and proper place to continue my own current thoughts about them.

Peter Damian expressed a thought-provoking theory as to what makes a cult a cult — that each one is marked by a Single Mad Belief (SMB) peculiar to itself.

All cults have a single belief which is completely mad. Everything is they believe is quite logical and rational, except for the single mad belief. Marxists have the thing about the explanation of history. Scientologists have the 'Thetan' theory of the origin of evil.

All the evil things that a cult does can be explained by their belief in this single mad thing.

Faced with the manifold of senseless impressions that the typical cult unfolds to boggle our brains, it would certainly be useful if we could reduce those manifestations to the unity of single concept — and yet my sense of the matter balks at the assertion that "everything they believe is quite logical and rational, except for the single mad belief." Perhaps Peter Damian expressed that last part more to create a rhetorical contrast than to state a literal truth.

So I will take up another perspective on the origin and nature of cults.

Jon Awbrey

[Moulton]

My single mad belief is that humans are capable of rational thought.

[Jon Awbrey]

My single mad belief is that humans are capable of rational thought.

In order make a cult of HACORT, you would have to convince another person of that, or find another person who is already convinced of it.

Good luck with that …

Jon

[Jon Awbrey]

Cults have periodically erupted into public notice for as long as I can recall, and I remember being amazed at the behavior of a few casual acquaintances who fell prey to cults in the 60's and 70's, but I don't think I put much serious thought into the psychosocial dynamics of cult phenomena until the time of the Heaven's Gate Mass Suicide on March 26, 1997.

The research that I had long been pursuing into the subject of Inquiry in general had in those days begun to link up with the literature on Critical Thinking, and so it seemed to me that one of the factors involved in this Cultist Act was a kind of Cul-De-Sac, a cognitive blind alley or mental dead end — literally — that diminished the capacity for Critical Reflective Thinking (CRT) on the part of the members of the group.

That is the gist of the guess that I still find suggestive today.

Jon Awbrey

[GlassBeadGame]

I think the central aspect of a cult is that it is hostile to members developing independent spheres of influence and support. A healthy well adjusted person will have a number of places they can turn for psychological and social sustenance. They have marriages, families, work, school, churches, community activities, social life, political parties, sports etc. They are not only numerous but independent in the sense of not have complete or extensive overlap of the persons involved. If any one or two of these independent spheres fail the healthy person can rebound because many other aspects of there life and identity remain intact.

This pluralism of support has the effect of providing sources of new information and "reality checks." As Jon indicated, a cult will not provide these sources and bizarre ideas may be accepted for lack alternatives or testing.

I believe that best indicator of a cult is hostility toward other spheres. Does Wikipedia evidence this hostility? To the extent it does "cult" may be a productive model. Otherwise "addiction" or "game" might have more value.

[Milton Roe]

The research that I had long been pursuing into the subject of Inquiry in general had in those days begun to link up with the literature on Critical Thinking, and so it seemed to me that one of the factors involved in this Cultist Act was a kind of Cul-De-Sac, a cognitive blind alley or mental dead end — literally — that diminished the capacity for Critical Reflective Thinking (CRT) on the part of the members of the group.

Critical thinking needs to be encouraged, and there are all kinds of mad beliefs of various groups (call them whatever you like) which would not survive relentless application of {{fact}} = "citation needed here." And of course that gets you into epistemological arguments, but they're inescapable anyway, and we may as well start on them immediately.

Too many groups are lazy and rely on "scripture" or some "revealed and unquestionable truths" from some Master, and they encourage a type of damaged thinking. Naturally this is one reason why so many of these groups are religious, since the "I have a pipeline to God Almighty" idea is a very convenient way to shut off debate (if you can get anybody to believe you on that, plus believe in God or Gods, plus believe these God or Gods are always Correct, Truthful, and Perfectly Understood....).

Every group has Masters, but you rarely find the worst pathology in those where people seriously ask themselves "Say, do you suppose the Master Himself is Full of Shit (WP:MHFOS) on this issue?" Essay needed.

But our problems don't end there, because there are beliefs which are not based on prediction or future observation, which aren't subject to epistemology as commonly understood. A lot of ethics and aesthetics goes here, and there are lots of not-necessarily-pragmatic political ideologies which go here, and a lot of special interest private clubs, too. Music appreciation. LEGO clubs. Scouting.

Time for one example. You join a chess club. It has rules, and chess itself has rules. But you don't want to play by the rules, but new rules that you like better, and which you think makes a faster and more exciting and creative game. You say "Look, do it my way. Pretty soon everybody will be playing the new chess and like it better, and old chess, which dragged ass, will be forgotten."

Members of the Chess Club are outraged. Mighty fights begin. Schisms are in the works! And by the way, this crazy scenario has already happened in chess. The game we play now is not the same as the one of 500 years ago. The new rules for how the Queen should move did take over, and are now the only ones most people know and use.

Wikipedia is a maddening collection of all these kinds of debates. There are epistemological ones. There are meta-epistemological ones. There are political ones about aesthetics and ethics. And there are completely arbitrary ones like what card game we're going to play now, or how the Queen should move. But on those, we have to come to some agreement before we play.

For me the key ingredient in not getting trapped in this stuff is a meta-rule which says that you have to be very careful about how tightly you believe ANY propositions. Hopefully, if you mature, you'll get to the point where you are less conservative and start to wonder if anything is up for grabs. (This rarely happens, though-- often the arc of a life finds people less likely to think this way the older they get). But perhaps the Master is full of shit, and so is his Little Red Book, or the Torah or Qur'an or Book of Mormon he supposedly wrote down. Perhaps this or that scientiific "law" will be disproven, or (at best) found to be only a limiting special case of a more general law. We may change our minds about abortion, the death penalty, euthanasia, gun ownership, gay marriage, or (God help us) Indian Casinos. Perhaps we're tired of Texas Hold 'Em and want to play straight stud or even blackjack. Maybe we like the Mad Queen chess, and maybe not. The ticket is always in remembering how we got here, and the fact that we won't be here forever. So experiment. Change your mind. Try something new. I am starting to sound like a graduation speaker again.

But think like that, and spend too much time talking about it, and nearly any Club (your church, your political party, your interactive encyclopedia) will eventually decide that you should leave, due to being a disruptive influence and possible evil, too. But that is the price for avoiding the kind of pathology we're talking about here. A shame, but there it is.

-- Emerson

[EricBarbour]

It only takes one aggressive, bipolar personality to create a cult. If he (and make no mistake, 90+% of cult leaders are men) manages to find a weakness in the logical substructure of an average person's personality, he will screw his toxic ego into that crack until it splits wide open.
Since there are always plenty of people with weak personalities, there are always opportunities for cultmakers.

I'm reading this book right now. Make no mistake--Bill Gates would have gone nowhere, if he had not hired a crazed, amoral screaming asshole like Ballmer to run the company.

This is a guy who says things like

"Fucking Eric Schmidt is a fucking pussy. I'm going to fucking bury that guy, I have done it before, and I will do it again. I'm going to fucking kill Google."

and gets away with it, because Microsoft has thousands of dedicated drones who have fallen into their ego-cracks, whereupon Ballmer jumped in on top of them.

I bet you didn't know the following:

Ballmer's father Fritz was a fascinating (demented) character in his own right. He was Swiss, a translator at the Nuremberg war trials, skipped out on paying an ex-wife and kid alimony and child support, had a criminal record AND was fired by the US tribunal for "misconduct". Bullshit must run in that family.

Steve Ballmer's second cousin was the late comedienne Gilda Radner.

Both his parents died of lung cancer after a lifetime of chain-smoking.

He dropped out of Stanford to join Microsoft.
(so, does a college degree mean a lifetime of wealth and joy? Apparently not.)

He speaks perfect French because his family spent 2 years in Brussels.

He went to the same school and had the same teacher as Robin Williams.

Ballmer is a VERY smart man. But he's also an obvious bipolar personalty, and uncontrollably aggressive. That's why he's one of the world's richest people. His brains and his education had very little to do with it. Right place, right time, insanely aggressive, manipulative and sleazy.

Despite his complex personality and history, he's mostly famous for his sweaty tantrums and screaming matches.
Don't believe me? Go to YouTube and type "Steve Ballmer" into the search box.

Sounds like L. Ron Hubbard to me. Or Jim Jones, or Adi Da, or Marshall Applewhite, or any number of others. The framework of the cult's beliefs are apparently of secondary concern. What is most important is the aggressive manipulation of weak personalities by a con-man leader.

Scientology was doubly blessed. After Hubbard died, his Poodle Boy took over.

Think such con-men are easy to oppose? Think their half-baked policies can be reversed in a twinkling? Read about what happened to the Cult Awareness Network.

How do you "encourage critical thinking", when you're confronted with a Steve Ballmer?
Screaming threats, sweating profusely, and throwing chairs, like he does?

This post has been edited by EricBarbour: Sat 7th March 2009, 10:25pm

[Kato]

Make no mistake--Bill Gates would have gone nowhere, if he had not hired a crazed, amoral screaming asshole like Ballmer to run the company.

Was Ballmer a pioneer in the IT Leader as Cult-Leader motif?

I've seen a few extracts of Microsoft and Apple presentations over the years, and they give off a wholly unusual stench. Unlike normal corporate gatherings.

The cult around Jimbo seemed similar in style.

This is something Kelly Martin probably knows most about.

[GlassBeadGame]

Make no mistake--Bill Gates would have gone nowhere, if he had not hired a crazed, amoral screaming asshole like Ballmer to run the company.

Was Ballmer a pioneer in the IT Leader as Cult-Leader motif?

I've seen a few extracts of Microsoft and Apple presentations over the years, and they give off a wholly unusual stench. Unlike normal corporate gatherings.

The cult around Jimbo seemed similar in style.

This is something Kelly Martin probably knows most about.

Read Fire in the Valley. Cult influence was rife in the first round of IT development. Lots of TM, EST, Scientology. I suppose even some more reasonable threads such as GNU, PARC and The Well could be seen as having some cult aspects.

[emesee]

It seems a bit to secular to be labeled a cult, or "new religious movement".

Group think seems a bit more apt, perhaps. Certainly, this is something that would certainly seem likely to be present within a "cult".

But then again, is atheism and secularism just another form of theological belief/faith?

So maybe...

[EricBarbour]

Read Fire in the Valley. Cult influence was rife in the first round of IT development. Lots of TM, EST, Scientology.

That reminds me---everywhere you looked in Silicon Valley around 1980, you'd find new companies....run by graduates of Werner Erhard's various self-help courses, or one of the innumerable offshoots thereof (Lifespring, Landmark, Hoffman, etc. etc.)

Most of which have been criticized for, if not sued for, cultlike behaviour.....

[Herschelkrustofsky]

But then again, is atheism and secularism just another form of theological belief/faith?

Atheism si, secularism no.

I have a suggestion for how to answer the ever-popular question of "what is a cult?" I think many of the typical definitions are inadequate because they would make Mahatma Gandhi or Martin Luther King into cult leaders. Obviously, we assume that a cult is harmful to its adherents, which makes it different than a "movement." Presumably it is harmful because it involves regimentation of thinking that is harmful to cognition. Therefore, a good test of whether a movement is a cult would be whether or not its adherents have a sense of humor. If the sense of humor is gone, that indicates cognitive damage, because humor is typical of the higher cognitive (i.e., non-logical) functions of the mind. (Moulton, feel free to jump in an argue that computers can tell good jokes.)

[Jon Awbrey]

I have a suggestion for how to answer the ever-popular question of "what is a cult?" I think many of the typical definitions are inadequate because they would make Mahatma Gandhi or Martin Luther King into cult leaders. Obviously, we assume that a cult is harmful to its adherents, which makes it different than a "movement". Presumably it is harmful because it involves regimentation of thinking that is harmful to cognition. Therefore, a good test of whether a movement is a cult would be whether or not its adherents have a sense of humor. If the sense of humor is gone, that indicates cognitive damage, because humor is typical of the higher cognitive (i.e., non-logical) functions of the mind. (Moulton, feel free to jump in an argue that computers can tell good jokes.)

Maybe, but not sure-fire, since there remains the ever-poopular rationalization, "I Believe It Because It's Absurd" (IBIBIA).

Still, comedy is classically said to depend on aesthetic distance, and the ability to stand back and look at the passing show in comparative context from multiple perspectives is one of the cognitive skills or intellectual virtues that is necessary to CRT.

Jon Awbrey

[Herschelkrustofsky]

Therefore, a good test of whether a movement is a cult would be whether or not its adherents have a sense of humor. If the sense of humor is gone, that indicates cognitive damage, because humor is typical of the higher cognitive (i.e., non-logical) functions of the mind.

Maybe, but not sure-fire, since there remains the ever-poopular rationalization, "I Believe It Because It's Absurd" (IBIBIA).

Things that are absurd are not automatically funny. If that were the case, many Monty Python skits would be funny to non-stoners. Real humor involves an element of truth.

[Jon Awbrey]

Therefore, a good test of whether a movement is a cult would be whether or not its adherents have a sense of humor. If the sense of humor is gone, that indicates cognitive damage, because humor is typical of the higher cognitive (i.e., non-logical) functions of the mind.

Maybe, but not sure-fire, since there remains the ever-poopular rationalization, "I Believe It Because It's Absurd" (IBIBIA).

Things that are absurd are not automatically funny. If that were the case, many Monty Python skits would be funny to non-stoners. Real humor involves an element of truth.

Well, I hardly said that.

Absurdity, Comedy, Humor — these words point to complex phenomena, and it hardly pays to pretend any varieties of facile equations among them without a searching examination of their complexions.

Humor is sometimes turned to the purposes of defense. "Sometimes" is "frequently" in the viscous vicinity of Wikipedia. There are of course times when we need our defenses, but sooner or later we usually have to face the emotions we're defending against — or risk a turn to tragedy.

Jon

[Moulton]

Eugène Ionesco: Theatre and Anti-Theatre

The technical inventiveness Eugène Ionesco displays in trying to achieve his end [The Theatre of the Absurd] is truly astonishing. In The Bald Prima Donna alone, his first and in many ways simplest play, Alain Bosquet has isolated no fewer than thirty-six "recipes of the comic," ranging from the negation of action (i.e. scenes in which nothing happens), loss of identity of characters, the misleading title, mechanical surprise, repetition, pseudo-exoticism, pseudo-logic, abolition of chronological sequence, the proliferation of doubles (i.e. a whole family all called Bobby Watson), loss of memory, melodramatic surprise (the maid says, "I am Sherlock Holmes"), coexistence of opposing explanations for the same thing, discontinuity of dialogue, and the raising of false expectations, to purely stylistic devices like cliché, truism, onomatopoeia, Surrealist proverbs, nonsense use of foreign languages, and complete loss of sense, the degeneration of language into pure assonance and sound patterns.

Sound familiar, Jon?

[Jon Awbrey]

Eugène Ionesco: Theatre and Anti-Theatre

The technical inventiveness Eugène Ionesco displays in trying to achieve his end [The Theatre of the Absurd] is truly astonishing. In The Bald Prima Donna alone, his first and in many ways simplest play, Alain Bosquet has isolated no fewer than thirty-six "recipes of the comic", ranging from the negation of action (i.e. scenes in which nothing happens), loss of identity of characters, the misleading title, mechanical surprise, repetition, pseudo-exoticism, pseudo-logic, abolition of chronological sequence, the proliferation of doubles (i.e. a whole family all called Bobby Watson), loss of memory, melodramatic surprise (the maid says, "I am Sherlock Holmes"), coexistence of opposing explanations for the same thing, discontinuity of dialogue, and the raising of false expectations, to purely stylistic devices like cliché, truism, onomatopoeia, Surrealist proverbs, nonsense use of foreign languages, and complete loss of sense, the degeneration of language into pure assonance and sound patterns.

Sound familiar, Jon?

I started to write a response to this, but got the nagging feeling I'd written it already several times before. So I searched the site instead, and sure enough, here it is:

Life/Art
Lie/Fart

Parsing Is All In Reeding Bardology

The mechanics of selling tickets to mass quantities of theatre goers will frequently dictate our plays to imitate life but only up to point — typically a point near the end, where The Muse-Ick Man gets the Muse and escapes his deserted justice by the breadth of a feather on the breath of a theos ek mechanes, magically placating even the most stub-born Iowanischer to save his tar-and-feathering for another day.

But everyone knows how it really goes, so the cautionary tale is not wholly obscured by its cheerful wrap-up.

Jon Awbrey

[emesee]

You all know. I think we all have seen that poster about how wikis are about LOVE and people giving eachother high fives, and SHARING. So then why is there all this talk about CULTS. zomg