9 ms·

How do the pros get someone to leave a cult?

139 points by n1b0m 11mo ago

internet_points 11mo ago
So that works if it's possible to actually reach the person and the family agrees that they need help to get out. What if the family is part of the problem or is tricked? (I recently read https://elan.school/ https://elan.school/ about this unimaginably horrible Kids for Cash-like scheme/cult. The only thing I can think of to prevent such things would be to get parents, teachers, lawmakers and social workers to read those stories too.)
- komali2 11mo ago
  Dude you can't just drop a link like that without warning how deep the rabbit hole goes. You posted this 5 hours ago. It's 2am here and I'm still reading from just a few minutes after you posted. This is a horrifying train wreck of a story, I can't look away. It's unbelievable these things went on for so long!
  - internet_points 11mo ago
    Ouf, yeah, maybe should have given more warning.. "Can't look away" indeed – I also got completely sucked into it after seeing a random link to it with no warning.
- mbivert 11mo ago
  haven't bothered reading it all, but it's just plain awful… such coldness is highly disturbing
- meindnoch 11mo ago
  I'm at chapter 74, haven't wrote a single line of code since yesterday, and will probably have to work over the weekend to catch up :(
postflopclarity 11mo ago
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- jumpman_miya 11mo ago
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- aaaskkggdddd 11mo ago
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- conartist6 11mo ago
  Well, you should! This could also be a guide for how to win elections. But it's a huge undertaking. Learning their mythology and being dispassionately conversant in it is not easy. To completely erase your ego and work only in pursuit of manipulation... Well, it's no surprise to me that it's a job, and that they aren't trying to do it on their own families. It's not clear you should try to do that to your own family. But to win elections, we do have to reach across to people who are conditioned a certain way, and to do that you'll need to know yourself very well, especially your relationship to the forces that condition you
  - komali2 11mo ago
    I would be curious how these conversations with maga families would go if one truly adopted the methodology of the men mentioned in the article. I liked they philosophy of basically engaging in deep, true good faith understanding of the person's view and group, as well as for the deprogrammer, leaving as much of your personal beliefs at the door, and accepting that you can't really know truth, that truth is more a feeling. For the MAGA folks, there are many things about their ideology that are easy to agree with in isolation, and easy to understand if you comprehend their misunderstanding of reality. Suspicion of government? Makes sense! Desire for greater affordability? Of course! Nationalism, anti-globalism? Once you strip away the antisemitic tropes of anti globalism and the racist tropes of nationalism, it's perfectly understandable to ask why billions of your tax dollars are being spent in other countries on things that don't affect you in the slightest. What I wonder moreso though is the ability of the somewhat neutered American liberal to check their own beliefs at the door. American liberalism seems hyper focused on aesthetics and strongly opposed to practical leftism, or really anything that challenges neoliberal dogma around Statism or Capitalism. I see American liberals shoot themselves in the foot with this all the time, and I fear they don't have the strength to make it through the first five seconds of the weird bits of a Trump supporter's beliefs without immediately fighting on aesthetic grounds. I'm by no means an expert in this and in fact I hunger for these conversations so I can learn more about how to bridge the gap, so I can dig to the material conditions issues underlying the vast majority of most Trump supporter's concerns. The whole "drain the swamp thing," I mean, was it wrong? The entire government seems to have been cozied up with Israel at best and Epstein at worst! So how do you get to talking about that with them to where you get them to understand that their favorite republican politicians fall right into that pool, without first acknowledging the reality that the same is true for politicians "on your side?" At least to some extent. I fear "vote blue no matter who" ideology has short circuited the ability of American liberals to have genuine conversations with oppositional points of view.
meken 11mo ago
Fascinating. I would totally watch a TV series on this.
- hn_user82179 11mo ago
  Same, I would love this as a quirky detective-type series. There's something very adorable about the man buying himself a bright green parrot to comfort himself that he must not be very good at his job if he can't convince someone to leave an enema-cult (I swear, that reads like something out of some author I love but I can't think of the name). But also the amount of love and empathy it'd take to do this kind of work, and also almost private-investigator-type scheming (taking the tour through the religious library and passing by the eastern spirituality section to establish a common ground and level of trust) just adds so many layers
dzink 11mo ago
Trying to read this to the end feels impossible - the Guardian keeps flicking the page to show ads and the page refreshes for no reason and I’m sure their ads impressions numbers are going through the roof. Feels like ad fraud.
- munchler 11mo ago
  Reader mode. No ads, just text.
  - deleted 11mo ago
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- actionfromafar 11mo ago
  Worked fine in Firefox incognito.
- esseph 11mo ago
  I'm not seeing page refreshes on chrome. It's just a lot of fixed sized ad boxes.
- JKCalhoun 11mo ago
  I hate ads as much as everyone, but I think you need to at least take a modicum of steps to block ads before posting to HN that you hate seeing all the ads. (Perhaps your point though is to broadcast to everyone—who presumably are in fact blocking ads—that the site is pure awfulness without any ad-blocking. Of course you're preaching to the choir at that point anyway.)
  - gjm11 11mo ago
    The Guardian attempts to stop you accessing its articles if you are using an ad-blocker and don't have a paid subscription. (They didn't always do this. I don't know whether they do it uniformly to everyone or whether e.g. it's different based on their guess of your location.)
  - philipallstar 11mo ago
PaulHoule 11mo ago
See https://www.deccanherald.com/world/china-woman-counsels-mistresses-to-leave-married-men-in-extra-marital-affairs-3177817 https://www.deccanherald.com/world/china-woman-counsels-mist...
deleted 11mo ago
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nine_zeros 11mo ago
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deleted 11mo ago
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pjc50 11mo ago
Some pull quotes, since people seem to be struggling with page loading: > his client, a woman who had recently finished her master’s at a prestigious university, had been drawn into a scam job. It was essentially a pyramid scheme built around a health regimen. Before you could sell it, you had to try it, so you knew what you were selling. > The regimen? Multiple enemas a day. “It escalated to 40 to 60 enemas a day,” > All groups have a rhythm, like a pulse across the calendar year. We have holidays, and we have tax season. There are highs and lows. > Furthermore, Kelly and Ryan urge their clients not to speak with the media. The firmest “no” I ever got was when I asked Ryan if I could speak to a former client. > One of their cases in the 90s involved a cult leader who was systematically sexually assaulting the group’s members. [NB: do you have any idea how little that narrows it down] > the girl’s uncle, their client, had a very difficult time finding anything positive about the group or the leader who had allegedly raped his niece > What Kelly and Ryan mean when they say these groups are “offering something” to people, it is exactly that. There is a hole a group fills: alienation from community, family, sexuality; pressure to follow a certain life plan, addiction, unrealized spirituality, economic catastrophe – all reasons to join a group
- dylan604 11mo ago
  40 to 60 enemas a day? Per person? Even for hyperbole, that sounds like a lot.
  - pjc50 11mo ago
    It is! It's completely insane, and apparently at that level significantly harmful. That's why it was deemed to be a cult. .. but you can also see a lot of slightly less intense grassroots health marketing or MLMs that also look very culty. Health in particular is a fertile ground for microcults.
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  - ljm 11mo ago
    I knew one person--shared a flat with them--who was heavily into that sort of spiritual-esque alternative health, the sort you'd connect to the so-called Woo-to-Q pipeline these days, who would subject themselves to that kind of thing. It was all about the 'cleanse': 1. Fast on water for a week 2. Drink a cup of olive oil, straight 3. Multiple enemas several times a week 4. Maintain a raw vegan diet in between Throw in the occasional ayahuasca weekend (another cleaning ritual involving a rather extreme amount of, uh, purging). And for good measure dose yourself on some kind of poisonous frog venom for more of the same. If I didn't know any better I would say there was some cult mentality going on, the gateway to manipulation being past childhood trauma and a borderline eating disorder. None of it seemed particularly healthy. Although with 40+ enemas a day I don't know how you'd have time to do anything else.
derbOac 11mo ago
Interesting read. Framing things as a "cultic relationship" makes a lot of sense to me. The part about using your experience as a basis of truth determination being flawed and a source of vulnerability also was pretty insightful. I'm a little surprised by mention of pushback and accusations of being cult apologists, only because what they're describing as their method is pretty similar in principle to some widespread and empirically validated therapies for more common things. It's just much more invasive, to understate things. I guess at some point there are probably basic immediate safety issues that arise, where taking time has its own risks. The piece left me thinking that the reasons people become involved with and attached to cults might not be different at some fundamental level from a lot of other psychological problems they get themselves in — just a matter of degree or pervasiveness.
- giraffe_lady 11mo ago
  > The piece left me thinking that the reasons people become involved with and attached to cults might not be different at some fundamental level from a lot of other psychological problems they get themselves in — just a matter of degree or pervasiveness. It's kind of hard to articulate but the thing with cult and cult-like movements, and also somewhat cons & scams, is the "vulnerability" they exploit is the raw material of human connection. A person who is immune to cult recruitment is a person who never feels isolation, desire, loneliness, grief, hope, fear of loss or lack of control, a person who never wants a hug or someone to talk to, who feels nothing at a smile from a stranger or the giggle of a baby. Is that a person worth trying to be? I don't think so. To the degree you're open to human connection you're proportionally vulnerable to malicious connection too. Everyone, no matter how resilient, will go through periods of relative need, want, and weakness and at those times they are vulnerable. There are risk factors for getting involved, just like with say addiction, but no one is completely immune. If the wrong person is around you at the wrong time in your life you're in danger.
  - pjc50 11mo ago
    It's rather like romantic relationships. We do have a drive to and benefit from connections with other people, but in various circumstances can end up with a "cult of two" (folie a deux) mutually destructive situation or a one-sided exploitation situation.
dap 11mo ago
I’d strongly recommend the documentary “Behind the Curve”. The close look at people in (not quite a cult) gave me a visceral appreciation for what draws people to it (it provides acceptance for people who sorely lack it) and why it can be so hard to leave (one’s identity becomes so tied up in it).
mikkupikku 11mo ago
I went down the rabbit hole of researching both cults and deprogramming groups a few years ago and one of the things which I found remarkable was how much overlap in methods there was between the two. Different groups go to different extremes, but the overlap between the two is such that in many cases they can only be distinguished using social context, and in some cases I am pretty sure the deprogramming groups are in fact cults masquerading as groups to help former cult members because those make the best members for new cults. Interesting space. I'm glad I don't have any personal reason to be involved.
gwbas1c 11mo ago
For those who are interested: I recently read the book "Combatting Cult Mind Control" by Steven Hassan, a professional who also helps people leave cults. His approach isn't as much of a "long game" as Ryan and Kelly's approach. One thing that Hassan explains is that MLMs are often very similar to cults, and he also explains the difference between cults and religion. Another book to read is The Running Grave by Robert Galabraith (pen name for J.K. Rownling.) One of the detectives joins a cult to try and get someone out. The book is well researched and gives an insider's view of a cult.
- lawn 11mo ago
  Steven Hassan also wrote "The Cult of Trump: A Leading Cult Expert Explains How the President Uses Mind Control", which is very relevant today.
  - lazyeye 11mo ago
    Either that or you lack the life experience, maturity and wisdom to accept that people can disagree with you without there being a conspiracy involved.
    - 47282847 11mo ago
      Are you saying that after reading the book? Isn’t it pretty straightforward to review which methods are used, and discriminate based on these methods, without taking a position on the content/beliefs/political goals? My understanding is that cults share methods of manipulation and coercion.
    - Refreeze5224 11mo ago
      You specifically may not be in the Trump/MAGA cult, and there are others who simply do disagree, as you say. But there is undoubtedly a cult wing of MAGA. My mother is a member, and it checks every single box of cult behavior.
      - lazyeye 11mo ago
simonw 11mo ago
The best thing I have ever read on this subject is https://harpers.org/archive/2013/11/the-man-who-saves-you-from-yourself/ https://harpers.org/archive/2013/11/the-man-who-saves-you-fr... - it is a truly wild ride, profiling David Sullivan, a private investigator who specialized in helping people get their loved ones out of cults and was based in the San Francisco Bay Area for many years.
- vishkk 11mo ago
  Thank you for sharing -- that was a great read!
- ruralfam 11mo ago
  Agree with the other reply. Great read, although very disturbing. Very.
- dang 11mo ago
  Discussed once on HN here: The Man Who Saves You from Yourself (2013) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7903938 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7903938 - June 2014 (139 comments)
FooBarBizBazz 11mo ago
Fantastic article. And their "light touch" approach seems very correct. Now -- What counts as a cult? One sufficient condition, in my opinion, would be ritualized sexual abuse, especially of children. But this is baked even into several mainstream religions, if you only open your eyes. What is good, at least, is that, like viruses, cults/religions generally evolve to be less harmful to their hosts over time. (This is over time scales of multiple human generations. Within a single generation, a cult may do just the opposite, as it becomes marginalized from society and increasingly normalizes deviance, e.g. Aum reacting to humiliation in Japanese elections by releasing Sarin.) Examples of this "taming" process: Flayed prisoners of the Aztecs are now dancing skeletons, "local color", used in America to sell tacos. Likewise the Abrahamic religions are an evolution of animal sacrifice cults, themselves echoing earlier human sacrifice cults; they are still shaking off frankly-insane practices, but could be worse. The history of LDS provides a less dramatic example, but one recent-enough that early stages are still well-documented in the historical record. And if all this sounds New Atheistic, note that I am actually quite sympathetic to (almost apologetic for) certain aspects of religion (though I increasingly do wonder whether it is religions that teach goodness, or whether it is goodness that religions must attach themselves to for legitimacy, mixing it with other content). (For example I have pushed back, here, against characterizations of Christianity as "right wing", as that is not at all the content of the New Testament.) One thing is certain: If a religious identity has bound itself to a person, then attacking the person will only strengthen the identity. The memetic parasite and the human victim must be clearly distinguished. Failure to do this results in violence against people which only strengths the meme. Blood for the blood god. I suspect many of these memes can be tamed to the point of decency over multiple generations. Though they always carry the risk of reversion to older forms. Somehow the "DNA" is still there. So I'm not sure. They have to be stabilized to their nondestructive manifestations. I also wonder about "non-religious" cult dynamics, e.g. those attached to political movements (both MAGA and woke), or financial/moral/credit systems, e.g. crypto. One of my concerns also is the way that Silicon Valley leaders may study these methods not to defend against them but to exercise them in the formation of totalizing company cultures. Theil and Karp have been explicit about this. It distresses me: You should read about the scapegoat mechanism to destroy it, not to start using it.
- 11mo ago
delichon 11mo ago
cult (noun): A religion or religious sect generally considered to be extremist or false, with its followers often living in an unconventional manner under the guidance of an authoritarian, charismatic leader -- American Heritage Dictionary Without the "generally considered to be extremist or false" it would be quite hard to even identify a cult. It's mostly used as way to slur a disfavored group. It's an element of a Russell conjugation, like I am part of a spiritual awakening, you belong to a religious sect, they are in a mind-control cult. I was raised as a Jew. I consider that to be a cult, if one of the milder religious ones. My peewee football team was a cult. I belonged to a cultic political party, and worked for a startup that closely met the definition. So getting someone to leave a cult is going to be the same as getting them to forsake any other community, just with the added coercion of social acceptability. There's no magic, no brain unwashing, it's the same kind of persuasion used to sell a vacuum cleaner.
- nkrisc 11mo ago
  > Without the "generally considered to be extremist or false" it would be quite hard to even identify a cult. Well, yes, if you remove the thing that distinguishes a cult from those other things, then it is hard to distinguish them.
  - exasperaited 11mo ago
    To my mind that definition lacks any accuracy because it doesn't speak about control. It's difficult to leave cults, and not because of belief (apostasy). It's difficult to leave cults because they destroy your outward connections, as a principle of operation.
- simonw 11mo ago
  I quite like the term "high-control group", though interestingly it doesn't have a Wikipedia page.
- swiftcoder 11mo ago
  > Without the "generally considered to be extremist or false" it would be quite hard to even identify a cult. The extremism is an integral part of what makes folks regard something a cult. Would anyone have cared that NXIVM was running dodgy self-improvement seminars upstate, if they hadn't also been coercing and branding women? > I consider that to be a cult, if one of the milder religious ones Various sects within the various organised religions certainly qualify as cults. I think a fair case could be made for many of the milder ones as well, on the basis of how they tend to treat women/children/etc (restrictive rules about clothing/education/personal-freedom/etc)
rboyd 11mo ago
wait a minute here.. HN: - asks you to self-assign a new name upon joining - has a leader - has a hierarchy (rating system) - esteemed texts which promise by adopting a strange method (Lisp) that you can achieve higher levels of wealth and self actualization should I be worried?
- TrainedMonkey 11mo ago
  People want to belong. If you do not belong to anything that looks like a cult you operate outside of society.
- cj 11mo ago
  First sentence of the wikipedia page for "Cult": > Cults are social groups which have unusual, and often extreme, religious, spiritual, or philosophical beliefs and rituals. HN is definitely a social group with unusual and often extreme philosophical beliefs that often aren't mainstream. (And that's why I keep coming back!)
- chinathrow 11mo ago
  > should I be worried? No, you can (ok, I admit: try) to leave any time. /etc/hosts 127.0.0.1 news.ycombinator.com
  - TiredOfLife 11mo ago
    Good old "how to stop smoking?" "just stop smoking"
  - 1vuio0pswjnm7 11mo ago
    What if there's a forward proxy listening on 127.0.0.1 I don't run mine on 127.0.0.1 but that address is a very popular default
    - hexaga 11mo ago
      127.0.0.2
    - 11mo ago
stevenjgarner 11mo ago
Okay I'm going to ask. Is anybody else here playing Living Colour's "Cult of Personality" while they read this? [1] [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7xxgRUyzgs0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7xxgRUyzgs0
stevemadere 11mo ago
Why did the original post for which these are the discussions disappear from HN? I cannot even find it with a word search and it should not have been displaced from the top 30 yet.
- Thorrez 11mo ago
  It's #36 right now. That's on page 2. https://news.ycombinator.com/news?p=2 https://news.ycombinator.com/news?p=2 This search also shows it: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=last24h&page=0&prefix=false&query=cult&sort=byPopularity&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=last24h&page=0&prefix=fals...
skeezyjefferson 11mo ago
i stopped after reading these two were taken in by promises of levitation. i dont care how attractive the cult is, youre an idiot to believe it
- GoToRO 11mo ago
  fun fact: if you get some chronic illness, you have good chances to become an idiot. Every time your body stops working in some major way, your thinking is also affected (you become a de facto idiot).
- add-sub-mul-div 11mo ago
  Otherwise intelligent people think software is sentient now. People believe weird things. We need to have compassion rather than write them off as idiots.
  - mbivert 11mo ago
    In addition to people believing weird things, such views are often highly tied to an environment. Levitation is pure non-sense for people "in-doctrinated" (literally: ~ to have a doctrine within) by the contemporary, science-oriented environment. Similarly, dismissing the existence of God(s) − or thinking about it, of levitation[0] − would have been unthinkable for people genuinely "in-doctrinated" by many (all?) historical religions. Amusingly, contemporary science, which is often defined in opposition to blind religious ways, essentially operates like your garden-variety religion: faith practically required (among others, who can reproduce/prove (beyond a doubt) well-established results), hierarchy(ies)/rating system(s), esteemed texts, key public figures, etc. Usually, the deeper people understand their own in-doctrination, the more prudent they are regarding what they may consider true or not. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levitation_(paranormal)#Religious_views https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levitation_(paranormal)#Religi...
- lawn 11mo ago
  Even the most intelligent people in the world are susceptible to the mind control techniques that eventually make you believe the unbelievable. You're simply uninformed if you believe otherwise.
energy123 11mo ago
I posit that those podcasters and streamers in the modern media environment are like cult leaders. It's a spectrum from journalist to entertainer to cult leader and we're tilting more towards the latter. The market finds a way.

139 points by n1b0m 11mo ago

So that works if it's possible to actually reach the person and the family agrees that they need help to get out. What if the family is part of the problem or is tricked? (I recently read https://elan.school/ https://elan.school/ about this unimaginably horrible Kids for Cash-like scheme/cult. The only thing I can think of to prevent such things would be to get parents, teachers, lawmakers and social workers to read those stories too.)

komali2 11mo ago
Dude you can't just drop a link like that without warning how deep the rabbit hole goes. You posted this 5 hours ago. It's 2am here and I'm still reading from just a few minutes after you posted. This is a horrifying train wreck of a story, I can't look away. It's unbelievable these things went on for so long!
- internet_points 11mo ago
  Ouf, yeah, maybe should have given more warning.. "Can't look away" indeed – I also got completely sucked into it after seeing a random link to it with no warning.
mbivert 11mo ago
haven't bothered reading it all, but it's just plain awful… such coldness is highly disturbing
meindnoch 11mo ago
I'm at chapter 74, haven't wrote a single line of code since yesterday, and will probably have to work over the weekend to catch up :(

postflopclarity 11mo ago

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jumpman_miya 11mo ago
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aaaskkggdddd 11mo ago
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conartist6 11mo ago
Well, you should! This could also be a guide for how to win elections. But it's a huge undertaking. Learning their mythology and being dispassionately conversant in it is not easy. To completely erase your ego and work only in pursuit of manipulation... Well, it's no surprise to me that it's a job, and that they aren't trying to do it on their own families. It's not clear you should try to do that to your own family. But to win elections, we do have to reach across to people who are conditioned a certain way, and to do that you'll need to know yourself very well, especially your relationship to the forces that condition you
- komali2 11mo ago
  I would be curious how these conversations with maga families would go if one truly adopted the methodology of the men mentioned in the article. I liked they philosophy of basically engaging in deep, true good faith understanding of the person's view and group, as well as for the deprogrammer, leaving as much of your personal beliefs at the door, and accepting that you can't really know truth, that truth is more a feeling. For the MAGA folks, there are many things about their ideology that are easy to agree with in isolation, and easy to understand if you comprehend their misunderstanding of reality. Suspicion of government? Makes sense! Desire for greater affordability? Of course! Nationalism, anti-globalism? Once you strip away the antisemitic tropes of anti globalism and the racist tropes of nationalism, it's perfectly understandable to ask why billions of your tax dollars are being spent in other countries on things that don't affect you in the slightest. What I wonder moreso though is the ability of the somewhat neutered American liberal to check their own beliefs at the door. American liberalism seems hyper focused on aesthetics and strongly opposed to practical leftism, or really anything that challenges neoliberal dogma around Statism or Capitalism. I see American liberals shoot themselves in the foot with this all the time, and I fear they don't have the strength to make it through the first five seconds of the weird bits of a Trump supporter's beliefs without immediately fighting on aesthetic grounds. I'm by no means an expert in this and in fact I hunger for these conversations so I can learn more about how to bridge the gap, so I can dig to the material conditions issues underlying the vast majority of most Trump supporter's concerns. The whole "drain the swamp thing," I mean, was it wrong? The entire government seems to have been cozied up with Israel at best and Epstein at worst! So how do you get to talking about that with them to where you get them to understand that their favorite republican politicians fall right into that pool, without first acknowledging the reality that the same is true for politicians "on your side?" At least to some extent. I fear "vote blue no matter who" ideology has short circuited the ability of American liberals to have genuine conversations with oppositional points of view.

meken 11mo ago

Fascinating. I would totally watch a TV series on this.

hn_user82179 11mo ago
Same, I would love this as a quirky detective-type series. There's something very adorable about the man buying himself a bright green parrot to comfort himself that he must not be very good at his job if he can't convince someone to leave an enema-cult (I swear, that reads like something out of some author I love but I can't think of the name). But also the amount of love and empathy it'd take to do this kind of work, and also almost private-investigator-type scheming (taking the tour through the religious library and passing by the eastern spirituality section to establish a common ground and level of trust) just adds so many layers

dzink 11mo ago

Trying to read this to the end feels impossible - the Guardian keeps flicking the page to show ads and the page refreshes for no reason and I’m sure their ads impressions numbers are going through the roof. Feels like ad fraud.

munchler 11mo ago
Reader mode. No ads, just text.
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actionfromafar 11mo ago
Worked fine in Firefox incognito.
esseph 11mo ago
I'm not seeing page refreshes on chrome. It's just a lot of fixed sized ad boxes.
JKCalhoun 11mo ago
I hate ads as much as everyone, but I think you need to at least take a modicum of steps to block ads before posting to HN that you hate seeing all the ads. (Perhaps your point though is to broadcast to everyone—who presumably are in fact blocking ads—that the site is pure awfulness without any ad-blocking. Of course you're preaching to the choir at that point anyway.)
- gjm11 11mo ago
  The Guardian attempts to stop you accessing its articles if you are using an ad-blocker and don't have a paid subscription. (They didn't always do this. I don't know whether they do it uniformly to everyone or whether e.g. it's different based on their guess of your location.)
- philipallstar 11mo ago

PaulHoule 11mo ago

See https://www.deccanherald.com/world/china-woman-counsels-mistresses-to-leave-married-men-in-extra-marital-affairs-3177817 https://www.deccanherald.com/world/china-woman-counsels-mist...

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nine_zeros 11mo ago

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pjc50 11mo ago

Some pull quotes, since people seem to be struggling with page loading: > his client, a woman who had recently finished her master’s at a prestigious university, had been drawn into a scam job. It was essentially a pyramid scheme built around a health regimen. Before you could sell it, you had to try it, so you knew what you were selling. > The regimen? Multiple enemas a day. “It escalated to 40 to 60 enemas a day,” > All groups have a rhythm, like a pulse across the calendar year. We have holidays, and we have tax season. There are highs and lows. > Furthermore, Kelly and Ryan urge their clients not to speak with the media. The firmest “no” I ever got was when I asked Ryan if I could speak to a former client. > One of their cases in the 90s involved a cult leader who was systematically sexually assaulting the group’s members. [NB: do you have any idea how little that narrows it down] > the girl’s uncle, their client, had a very difficult time finding anything positive about the group or the leader who had allegedly raped his niece > What Kelly and Ryan mean when they say these groups are “offering something” to people, it is exactly that. There is a hole a group fills: alienation from community, family, sexuality; pressure to follow a certain life plan, addiction, unrealized spirituality, economic catastrophe – all reasons to join a group

dylan604 11mo ago
40 to 60 enemas a day? Per person? Even for hyperbole, that sounds like a lot.
- pjc50 11mo ago
  It is! It's completely insane, and apparently at that level significantly harmful. That's why it was deemed to be a cult. .. but you can also see a lot of slightly less intense grassroots health marketing or MLMs that also look very culty. Health in particular is a fertile ground for microcults.
- deleted 11mo ago
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- ljm 11mo ago
  I knew one person--shared a flat with them--who was heavily into that sort of spiritual-esque alternative health, the sort you'd connect to the so-called Woo-to-Q pipeline these days, who would subject themselves to that kind of thing. It was all about the 'cleanse': 1. Fast on water for a week 2. Drink a cup of olive oil, straight 3. Multiple enemas several times a week 4. Maintain a raw vegan diet in between Throw in the occasional ayahuasca weekend (another cleaning ritual involving a rather extreme amount of, uh, purging). And for good measure dose yourself on some kind of poisonous frog venom for more of the same. If I didn't know any better I would say there was some cult mentality going on, the gateway to manipulation being past childhood trauma and a borderline eating disorder. None of it seemed particularly healthy. Although with 40+ enemas a day I don't know how you'd have time to do anything else.

derbOac 11mo ago

Interesting read. Framing things as a "cultic relationship" makes a lot of sense to me. The part about using your experience as a basis of truth determination being flawed and a source of vulnerability also was pretty insightful. I'm a little surprised by mention of pushback and accusations of being cult apologists, only because what they're describing as their method is pretty similar in principle to some widespread and empirically validated therapies for more common things. It's just much more invasive, to understate things. I guess at some point there are probably basic immediate safety issues that arise, where taking time has its own risks. The piece left me thinking that the reasons people become involved with and attached to cults might not be different at some fundamental level from a lot of other psychological problems they get themselves in — just a matter of degree or pervasiveness.

giraffe_lady 11mo ago
> The piece left me thinking that the reasons people become involved with and attached to cults might not be different at some fundamental level from a lot of other psychological problems they get themselves in — just a matter of degree or pervasiveness. It's kind of hard to articulate but the thing with cult and cult-like movements, and also somewhat cons & scams, is the "vulnerability" they exploit is the raw material of human connection. A person who is immune to cult recruitment is a person who never feels isolation, desire, loneliness, grief, hope, fear of loss or lack of control, a person who never wants a hug or someone to talk to, who feels nothing at a smile from a stranger or the giggle of a baby. Is that a person worth trying to be? I don't think so. To the degree you're open to human connection you're proportionally vulnerable to malicious connection too. Everyone, no matter how resilient, will go through periods of relative need, want, and weakness and at those times they are vulnerable. There are risk factors for getting involved, just like with say addiction, but no one is completely immune. If the wrong person is around you at the wrong time in your life you're in danger.
- pjc50 11mo ago
  It's rather like romantic relationships. We do have a drive to and benefit from connections with other people, but in various circumstances can end up with a "cult of two" (folie a deux) mutually destructive situation or a one-sided exploitation situation.

dap 11mo ago

I’d strongly recommend the documentary “Behind the Curve”. The close look at people in (not quite a cult) gave me a visceral appreciation for what draws people to it (it provides acceptance for people who sorely lack it) and why it can be so hard to leave (one’s identity becomes so tied up in it).

mikkupikku 11mo ago

I went down the rabbit hole of researching both cults and deprogramming groups a few years ago and one of the things which I found remarkable was how much overlap in methods there was between the two. Different groups go to different extremes, but the overlap between the two is such that in many cases they can only be distinguished using social context, and in some cases I am pretty sure the deprogramming groups are in fact cults masquerading as groups to help former cult members because those make the best members for new cults. Interesting space. I'm glad I don't have any personal reason to be involved.

gwbas1c 11mo ago

For those who are interested: I recently read the book "Combatting Cult Mind Control" by Steven Hassan, a professional who also helps people leave cults. His approach isn't as much of a "long game" as Ryan and Kelly's approach. One thing that Hassan explains is that MLMs are often very similar to cults, and he also explains the difference between cults and religion. Another book to read is The Running Grave by Robert Galabraith (pen name for J.K. Rownling.) One of the detectives joins a cult to try and get someone out. The book is well researched and gives an insider's view of a cult.

lawn 11mo ago
Steven Hassan also wrote "The Cult of Trump: A Leading Cult Expert Explains How the President Uses Mind Control", which is very relevant today.
- lazyeye 11mo ago
  Either that or you lack the life experience, maturity and wisdom to accept that people can disagree with you without there being a conspiracy involved.
  - 47282847 11mo ago
    Are you saying that after reading the book? Isn’t it pretty straightforward to review which methods are used, and discriminate based on these methods, without taking a position on the content/beliefs/political goals? My understanding is that cults share methods of manipulation and coercion.
  - Refreeze5224 11mo ago
    You specifically may not be in the Trump/MAGA cult, and there are others who simply do disagree, as you say. But there is undoubtedly a cult wing of MAGA. My mother is a member, and it checks every single box of cult behavior.
    - lazyeye 11mo ago

simonw 11mo ago

The best thing I have ever read on this subject is https://harpers.org/archive/2013/11/the-man-who-saves-you-from-yourself/ https://harpers.org/archive/2013/11/the-man-who-saves-you-fr... - it is a truly wild ride, profiling David Sullivan, a private investigator who specialized in helping people get their loved ones out of cults and was based in the San Francisco Bay Area for many years.

vishkk 11mo ago
Thank you for sharing -- that was a great read!
ruralfam 11mo ago
Agree with the other reply. Great read, although very disturbing. Very.
dang 11mo ago
Discussed once on HN here: The Man Who Saves You from Yourself (2013) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7903938 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7903938 - June 2014 (139 comments)

FooBarBizBazz 11mo ago

Fantastic article. And their "light touch" approach seems very correct. Now -- What counts as a cult? One sufficient condition, in my opinion, would be ritualized sexual abuse, especially of children. But this is baked even into several mainstream religions, if you only open your eyes. What is good, at least, is that, like viruses, cults/religions generally evolve to be less harmful to their hosts over time. (This is over time scales of multiple human generations. Within a single generation, a cult may do just the opposite, as it becomes marginalized from society and increasingly normalizes deviance, e.g. Aum reacting to humiliation in Japanese elections by releasing Sarin.) Examples of this "taming" process: Flayed prisoners of the Aztecs are now dancing skeletons, "local color", used in America to sell tacos. Likewise the Abrahamic religions are an evolution of animal sacrifice cults, themselves echoing earlier human sacrifice cults; they are still shaking off frankly-insane practices, but could be worse. The history of LDS provides a less dramatic example, but one recent-enough that early stages are still well-documented in the historical record. And if all this sounds New Atheistic, note that I am actually quite sympathetic to (almost apologetic for) certain aspects of religion (though I increasingly do wonder whether it is religions that teach goodness, or whether it is goodness that religions must attach themselves to for legitimacy, mixing it with other content). (For example I have pushed back, here, against characterizations of Christianity as "right wing", as that is not at all the content of the New Testament.) One thing is certain: If a religious identity has bound itself to a person, then attacking the person will only strengthen the identity. The memetic parasite and the human victim must be clearly distinguished. Failure to do this results in violence against people which only strengths the meme. Blood for the blood god. I suspect many of these memes can be tamed to the point of decency over multiple generations. Though they always carry the risk of reversion to older forms. Somehow the "DNA" is still there. So I'm not sure. They have to be stabilized to their nondestructive manifestations. I also wonder about "non-religious" cult dynamics, e.g. those attached to political movements (both MAGA and woke), or financial/moral/credit systems, e.g. crypto. One of my concerns also is the way that Silicon Valley leaders may study these methods not to defend against them but to exercise them in the formation of totalizing company cultures. Theil and Karp have been explicit about this. It distresses me: You should read about the scapegoat mechanism to destroy it, not to start using it.

11mo ago

delichon 11mo ago

cult (noun): A religion or religious sect generally considered to be extremist or false, with its followers often living in an unconventional manner under the guidance of an authoritarian, charismatic leader -- American Heritage Dictionary Without the "generally considered to be extremist or false" it would be quite hard to even identify a cult. It's mostly used as way to slur a disfavored group. It's an element of a Russell conjugation, like I am part of a spiritual awakening, you belong to a religious sect, they are in a mind-control cult. I was raised as a Jew. I consider that to be a cult, if one of the milder religious ones. My peewee football team was a cult. I belonged to a cultic political party, and worked for a startup that closely met the definition. So getting someone to leave a cult is going to be the same as getting them to forsake any other community, just with the added coercion of social acceptability. There's no magic, no brain unwashing, it's the same kind of persuasion used to sell a vacuum cleaner.

nkrisc 11mo ago
> Without the "generally considered to be extremist or false" it would be quite hard to even identify a cult. Well, yes, if you remove the thing that distinguishes a cult from those other things, then it is hard to distinguish them.
- exasperaited 11mo ago
  To my mind that definition lacks any accuracy because it doesn't speak about control. It's difficult to leave cults, and not because of belief (apostasy). It's difficult to leave cults because they destroy your outward connections, as a principle of operation.
simonw 11mo ago
I quite like the term "high-control group", though interestingly it doesn't have a Wikipedia page.
swiftcoder 11mo ago
> Without the "generally considered to be extremist or false" it would be quite hard to even identify a cult. The extremism is an integral part of what makes folks regard something a cult. Would anyone have cared that NXIVM was running dodgy self-improvement seminars upstate, if they hadn't also been coercing and branding women? > I consider that to be a cult, if one of the milder religious ones Various sects within the various organised religions certainly qualify as cults. I think a fair case could be made for many of the milder ones as well, on the basis of how they tend to treat women/children/etc (restrictive rules about clothing/education/personal-freedom/etc)

rboyd 11mo ago

wait a minute here.. HN: - asks you to self-assign a new name upon joining - has a leader - has a hierarchy (rating system) - esteemed texts which promise by adopting a strange method (Lisp) that you can achieve higher levels of wealth and self actualization should I be worried?

TrainedMonkey 11mo ago
People want to belong. If you do not belong to anything that looks like a cult you operate outside of society.
cj 11mo ago
First sentence of the wikipedia page for "Cult": > Cults are social groups which have unusual, and often extreme, religious, spiritual, or philosophical beliefs and rituals. HN is definitely a social group with unusual and often extreme philosophical beliefs that often aren't mainstream. (And that's why I keep coming back!)
chinathrow 11mo ago
> should I be worried? No, you can (ok, I admit: try) to leave any time. /etc/hosts 127.0.0.1 news.ycombinator.com
- TiredOfLife 11mo ago
  Good old "how to stop smoking?" "just stop smoking"
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 11mo ago
  What if there's a forward proxy listening on 127.0.0.1 I don't run mine on 127.0.0.1 but that address is a very popular default
  - hexaga 11mo ago
    127.0.0.2
  - 11mo ago

stevenjgarner 11mo ago

Okay I'm going to ask. Is anybody else here playing Living Colour's "Cult of Personality" while they read this? [1] [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7xxgRUyzgs0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7xxgRUyzgs0

stevemadere 11mo ago

Why did the original post for which these are the discussions disappear from HN? I cannot even find it with a word search and it should not have been displaced from the top 30 yet.

Thorrez 11mo ago
It's #36 right now. That's on page 2. https://news.ycombinator.com/news?p=2 https://news.ycombinator.com/news?p=2 This search also shows it: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=last24h&page=0&prefix=false&query=cult&sort=byPopularity&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=last24h&page=0&prefix=fals...

skeezyjefferson 11mo ago

i stopped after reading these two were taken in by promises of levitation. i dont care how attractive the cult is, youre an idiot to believe it

GoToRO 11mo ago
fun fact: if you get some chronic illness, you have good chances to become an idiot. Every time your body stops working in some major way, your thinking is also affected (you become a de facto idiot).
add-sub-mul-div 11mo ago
Otherwise intelligent people think software is sentient now. People believe weird things. We need to have compassion rather than write them off as idiots.
- mbivert 11mo ago
  In addition to people believing weird things, such views are often highly tied to an environment. Levitation is pure non-sense for people "in-doctrinated" (literally: ~ to have a doctrine within) by the contemporary, science-oriented environment. Similarly, dismissing the existence of God(s) − or thinking about it, of levitation[0] − would have been unthinkable for people genuinely "in-doctrinated" by many (all?) historical religions. Amusingly, contemporary science, which is often defined in opposition to blind religious ways, essentially operates like your garden-variety religion: faith practically required (among others, who can reproduce/prove (beyond a doubt) well-established results), hierarchy(ies)/rating system(s), esteemed texts, key public figures, etc. Usually, the deeper people understand their own in-doctrination, the more prudent they are regarding what they may consider true or not. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levitation_(paranormal)#Religious_views https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levitation_(paranormal)#Religi...
lawn 11mo ago
Even the most intelligent people in the world are susceptible to the mind control techniques that eventually make you believe the unbelievable. You're simply uninformed if you believe otherwise.

energy123 11mo ago

I posit that those podcasters and streamers in the modern media environment are like cult leaders. It's a spectrum from journalist to entertainer to cult leader and we're tilting more towards the latter. The market finds a way.