9 tweets · August 2023 · 114 likes · 2 retweets · read on Twitter
meta-cultiness is the ratio of how culty you are to how culty you admit you are since all groups, even (especially) healthy awesome good ones, are nonzero culty, asserting "we are zero a cult" makes you infinitely meta-culty even if you're less culty than a typical company
when someone says "you're (in) a cult" it's super tempting to take a binary stance to this and say "we're absolutely not a cult" because cult accusations broadly precede threats of social punishment but by doing this you force any issues to eventually escalate to punishment
whereas if you say "I think we're a pretty healthy community, but ofc like all communities we have some groupthink & our share of people trusting too much and getting hurt a bit." …well, on its own, saying this can also just be a more sophisticated nothing-to-see-here defense.
but if you say that then actually engage in conversation about what's happening and how feedback flows... and do your best to open towards whatever blindspots you might have—even tho that is crazy hard...
well, then there's a potential for dialogue and learning, and the possibility of NOT spiralling into guru attractors
but just because something is orbiting a guru attractor doesn't mean it shouldn't exist! or that the people involved should be made to suffer! some cults are almost entirely fuckery but there are high-growth communities that are awesome & worth it despite minor-medium fuckery
better to post some warning flags, talk about dysfunctional dynamics, and give people good exits and then let things continue to do what they're doing it's not your job to destroy such things
in an ideal environment, people would have a lot of support to talk publicly about negative experiences unfortunately in practice this can be read as grounds for cancellation/condemnation by people looking to pick a fight or whiteknighting or whatever
we need to defend the right of weird experiments to exist and even to traumatize people who end up in them a bit and ALSO defend the right of people who have left them to talk about their experiences, including the bad and the ugly simultaneously. that's the aim.