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I sometimes wonder if it's inevitable for large companies to end up in a kind of cult. Human beings are religious by nature, despite the denial from modern and
by proc0 2y ago
I sometimes wonder if it's inevitable for large companies to end up in a kind of cult. Human beings are religious by nature, despite the denial from modern and Enlightenment theories that derive the nature of humans as reason.
After reading books like Sapiens (Harari) and other evolutionary psychology books, it seems humans will always form religious frameworks in order to collaborate in large numbers. Combine this with the void left behind by the increasing secularization of civilization, and you get a fertile ground for any large organization to sprout their own religion, which in its initial form looks like a cult.
Nietzsche has been proven right in this regard, getting rid of God (or monotheism) just gave way to a void that is now being filled in by pantheism and paganism, in which civilizations become fragmented by a multiplicity of gods. Perhaps the solution is to have explicit religions that are designed with explicit goals in mind... however I feel this is what the ancient civilizations have already done, and the oldest religions that have survived the "natural selection" of history are the ones that have been perfected and do not lead to a cult-like dystopia.
- dartos 2y agoWhat if all religions just lead to cult like dystopias. It’d just be the end state of any human society to be just awful.
- kelseyfrog 2y agoWe can test this by creating an applying religions systematically for a few thousand years
- proc0 2y agoI think they start as that, and then go through various stages throughout its growth until it's squashed by another one or prevails and becomes the default belief system of a civilization.
- vunderba 2y agoI wouldn't say that human beings are religious by nature, I would say they're "tribalistic" by nature, a semantic difference maybe but an important one. And tribalism can be organic or inorganic in terms of the coalesced value system around which the tribe "worships", be it cult of personality, organized religion, YouTube personalities, ethnicity, bands, etc. etc.
- corry 2y agoI think that's 2/3rds of it, but I think you'd need to add the final 1/3rd which is a shared metaphysical set of values. In other words, the tribe needs to be about more than just kinship and belonging - there needs to be a higher purpose or esoteric dimension to the group that comes from beyond the group.
- proc0 2y agoThat's slightly different. Tribes are relatively small and straight forward. I agree there is probably some foundation of tribalism on which religions are built upon, but the religious mental framework is what has allowed civilizations to exist. From the earliest Sumerian civilizations people need myths in order to organize in large numbers effectively.
- corry 2y agoI was writing a similar comment when I read this one. Hard agree. The collapse of religion and its close-knit communities has created a vacuum that gets filled with (checks notes) -- vapid corporate culture BS, identity politics (actually, politics of all kinds), consumerism, and much more. You don't have to believe that religion is good or right (how can they all be right?) to believe that humanity in the West is in the throes of a profound crisis of meaning despite significantly better quality of life than ever before. I can't help but picture our grandparent's generation. Imagine your grandad -- a WW2 vet, provider for his family, guy who tried his best to build his community -- coming home in the 50's from his job at the factory fawning over some pseudo-inspirational new take on management that the plant manager is promoting. One gets the sense that we're unmoored as a people, and will cling to almost anything that provides a meta-narrative and set of values... because we no longer get one from a close-knit community of people joined together with a set of values.