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freedom-of-fanfic · 6 years

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regarding cults and cultlike communities (and how easy it is to get sucked in)

(My authority: born & raised in a very cultlike church of only 20-ish attendees, a lot of research attending the departure from that church)

a person i follow reblogged a post today to respond to the OP’s open question: were they vulnerable to being sucked into a cult? and I wrote up this longass response to send to OP but then felt it was .. well. long. so I’m making it into a separate post instead of flooding a stranger with words they didn’t ask for.

tl;dr: Q: are you vulnerable to being sucked into a cult or cultlike community? A: IMO: almost definitely yes. (we all are.)

cults and cultlike communities suck in vulnerable people looking for safety, camaraderie/a social circle, a meaning for their life, an explanation for their trauma, etc etc by promising to provide the thing they’re looking for.

the insidious thing is that cults actually do provide the intangible desired thing, usually. Friends? a cult is a ready-made social circle. a meaning to life? cults certainly will give you a purpose for living. A reason for your trauma? A cult will tell you who to blame for everything wrong with your life. Safety? well - they’ll convince you that everyone outside the cult is your enemy/untrustworthy down the line, but the good news is you’ll feel safe in your cult space.

Once a cult inducts somebody by filling their emotional or social need, what entangles members isn’t usually an instant, deep loyalty to The Cause or The Leader or whatever. It’s community and the sense of belonging it engenders.

With increasing quickness, the cult community creates the sense of being a member of the ‘in’ group. you and your cult friends are In the Know. people outside your group are ignorant of the truth. And because of this, it doesn’t take long for a new person to feel that they can’t have true friendship with people outside of the cult. they can never be fully honest with them (unless they’re interested in joining).

outside friendships fall away. now you have no meaningful social circle outside the cult, putting you into a social echo chamber of people who all believe the exact same things and raising the stakes of leaving the cult. where would you go? you have no other real friends.

At this point a person is pretty well ‘in’. if it’s a true cult, this is where your investment level means you’re ready to have your loyalty tested: are you willing to take the (economic/social/physical/faith) leap the cult is asking you to take, or will you turn back, be abandoned by everyone you care about*, and left alone and friendless?

(*because as you already know, people In the Know can’t really be friends with people who choose to not be In the Know. they’ll be forced to abandon you.)

basically: the choice about your willingness to bend to authority isn’t asked until the deck is heavily stacked against you. all your chips are on the table. you’ve invested almost everything. will you invest the last bit you’ve got? and if you decide ‘yes’ - which many people do, because where else can they go? - escape becomes nigh impossible.

the only sure(-ish) defense against getting sucked into a cult is satisfaction with your life: having self-assurance about your purpose, your choices, and your social circle, plus a sense of good health and economic security. hardly anyone has all these things at once.

because of this, it’s my opinion that literally everyone on Earth is susceptible to getting sucked into a cult. almost everyone has some emotional weakness, something that makes them feel inadequate or afraid: if a cult happens to hit on that Achilles heel, you’re vulnerable to them. and frankly: if you get sucked into a cult, it’s not your fault. cults are designed to recruit.

regarding cultlike communities specifically:

there are ‘cults’ that aren’t actually cults, just similar to them. true cults glorify and enrich a person, the leader; cultlike groups usually glorify an ideology.

the major commonality between cults and cultlike groups is that both demand/strongly encourage your loyalty above anything else: above your happiness, above existing friendships/social ties, and above human respect or decency towards others, particularly outsiders.

cultlike groups are more common than cults. they’re easier to escape in a strict sense b/c usually there’s no leader controlling the strings, sucking every dollar and moment of your life out of you, but the social investment can get very high and create high stakes to leaving the community anyway:

having been so utterly radicalized by the echo chamber of the cultlike group, their understanding of the world is alien to non-members; it takes a while to deprogram.

people who leave these groups can be sure of being vilified by their old friends & probably harassed, and

they frequently have few friends outside the group to support their departure.

big, well-known examples of cultlike-but-not-strictly-a-cult groups include Radfems/TERFs/SWERFs, Christian Dominionism, & each individual alt-right white supremacist organization.

(the fandom cultlike baby of radfems and dominionism is anti-shipping/kink/’fujoshi’/nsfw, combining purity culture & swerf politics. the aphobic cultlike baby of radfem ideology is REG.)

you can watch your friends groups for warning signs of becoming cultlike* by asking yourself a few questions occasionally:

has my friendsgroup ostracized and turned on a friend when they said they didn’t agree with an opinion the rest of us held? was it a rapid/sudden turn without allowing any discussion or debate? was it so vicious it made me afraid to express a dissenting opinion?

do I feel pushed/goaded to dissociate from friends who don’t hold the same opinions as my main friendsgroup, even if it’s against my wishes? does my friendsgroup talk disdainfully of all people who aren’t in our group or engage in ‘us vs the world’ language frequently?

Realistically, is there anything I wouldn’t do in the name of protecting/advancing the beliefs of my friends? If I think there are limits on what’s okay to do on behalf of our beliefs, would my friends agree? Am I afraid to tell them I think there are limits?

If someone in my friendsgroup hurts me, would I be afraid to confront them? would I feel like I’m betraying my whole friend circle by saying somebody did something harmful? Would I be afraid of severe consequences, like having my friends turn on me, even if I was believed?

If the answer to these questions suggest that loyalty may be more important than being kind or respectful to one another in your friendsgroup, that’s a warning sign of toxicity and potentially cultish dynamics. D:

(*use your discretion, dangit. obviously this isn’t a 1:1 for-sure correlation to your friendsgroup becoming shitty.)

and here’s some good reading on the subject of cults/cultlike groups:

How Good People & Well-Intentioned Groups Can Go Bad - i have some quibbles with language (it shows its age) but there’s a lot of good stuff in this article and these two articles about the cultish thinking that radicalized groups develop.

Dominionism Rising - focus piece on the cultlike ‘Dominionist’ movement that is (quietly) pushing an anti-Christian agenda in US Christian circles. shows how cultlike thinking can deeply influence less cultish circles.

We Need to Talk About the Radicalization of Young White Men and The Alt-Right is Recruiting Depressed People and The radicalization of white Americans on how cultlike alt-right ideologies recruit people into their ranks

Who’s Behind Newsweek? - A focus piece on The Community, a true cult glorifying David Jang as the second coming of Jesus Christ.

#cults #radicalization #how radicalization works #cultlike groups #radfems again #alt-right #christian dominionism #cults are about community #that's why they're successful #unasked for advice

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nomthecatsaid · 7 years

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One of those new social networks, but actually cool

[Updated 2018-12-07]

Mastodon! It’s decentralised and has lots of queers and people are actually using it. Let me try to make a masterpost because I’m excited.

Decentralised means there’s not one site, like tumblr.com, where everyone is, but that people are on loads of different servers (”instances”, at the moment over 2000 of them) that are all running the same software and communicating with each other, so that you can have your account on any of them and interact with people who are on different ones.

What’s cool

It has content warnings (in the form of spoilers/readmores)

You can filter/mute words or phrases

It is open source and many of the people who use it actually help make it, and if you can’t do that by coding, you can still tell others about a thing that would be cool to have, and sometimes that is complicated, but sometimes it leads to really cool features

You can choose the instance you sign up on by how much you like its admin, for example… or by how good the anti harassment policy is.

Everyone uses cringy/awesome URLs. I’m literally on cybre.space and other instances that exist are catgirl.science and toot.cat and anticapitalist.party, how cool is that, finally the aesthetics to fit this cyberpunk dystopia that we live in

Posts are called toots because mastodons are like mammoths and elephants make “toot”

Most (or hopefully all) instances don’t track us and won’t sell our data and don’t display ads, like commercial social media sites do

No full text search, to prevent terfs from harassing everyone who writes about terfs, and authors from harassing everyone who criticizes their work, etc etc well you know what Tumblr and birbsite are like. (You can search for hashtags, accounts, and among toots that you have already interacted with or that are your own.)

Image descriptions!

There is a setting to autopause gifs

What’s not cool (have to be honest, no place is perfect)

The current default theme is not very accessible (low contrast, white text on dark background, not great at high zoom) – there are ways to deal with this, scroll down to “Random Stuff” for possible fixes. But still, could be better.

There are instances in the fediverse (that means: all Mastodon, and also non-Mastodon-but-using-something-similar, instances combined) that allow or even encourage their users to harass others, like on Twitter – you are dependent on your own instance admin to block those instances from connecting with yours. (You can, however, block users, and block instances from your own account, and remove whole instances from your followers.)

Sometimes, things don’t work as one would expect (but usually people are happy to help).

So, that was the honest-ish advertisement, now for resources.

General

User Guide: Explains how Mastodon works, how to use it, important terms. Pay attention to the privacy settings and to the way federation works, those might not be very intuitive. See also the FAQ

Toot How-To : Intro to Mastodon

Mastodon 101: A Queer-Friendly Social Network You’re Gonna Like a Lot on Autostraddle

Resources for Mastodon newbies (I love this one, it has a few links and some info about things that you might find weird when joining Mastodon)

Choosing an instance

So, you are considering signing up, but have no idea which instance to choose?

I’d recommend browsing through http://instances.noct.zone/ and picking whichever sounds nicest to you.

Or if you prefer a thing that recommends an instance based on your answers to a few questions: instances.social

So here are my subjective recommendations (keep in mind, I only know a small part of all the instances in existence):

monsterpit.net I only just discovered this one, but they look great

computerfairi.es is small and queer and has a lot of tech talk. It uses a theme with purple background

elekk.xyz gaming-focused & explicitly feminist

queer.party I have a side account there and it’s nice

tootplanet.space I have another side account there and it’s also great

wandering.shop I don’t know this one well, but it seems to be the good kind of geeky

weirder.earth also

mastodon.art for, well, art

sunbeam.city solarpunk

toot.cat seems super nice

Things to consider

Code of conduct and administration. You’ll want to pick an instance that aligns with your principles and the way you want to use your account, and that you trust to deal with any issues appropriately. Relevant info is on [instance url]/about/more.

Size. Instances have a local timeline, where you see the public toots of everyone on this instance. on a small instance, it can help build community. on the flagship mastodon.social, with more than 100 000 users, it is too fast to even follow.

Community. Use this tool to see the last few public toots from that instance and decide if it’s a place you’d like to be at.

Looks. Is the theme readable for you & do you like it? Unfortunately, there is no built-in way to check this yet, but screenshots are being collected here.

Basics

On Mastodon, because there are loads of different places that are connected, usernames look more like email addresses because they always include your instance as well:

One of my accounts is @[email protected] (but I’m mostly at @[email protected] right now, feel free to follow me there). maunzikation alone would be confusing – in fact, I’m also @[email protected], but these are all different accounts that have little to do with each other (except that I made them – but you can’t tell that from the name, it could be made by someone else). So if you want to mention someone who’s on a different instance, you have to include their instance for it to work. Just like you’d include “@gmail.com” or “@riseup.net” when emailing someone.

Getting involved

You have an account, you feel somewhat at home, and you want to make stuff better? Or there is some accessibility improvement that you need before you sign up?

There is the github thingie https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon

If you want to report a problem or suggest new features, what you want to do is go here specifically. There is a search bar. Use it to see if anyone has already posted about that thing. If yes, you can add your info or comments there. If not, click “New Issue” and make your own post. (If yes, but it’s been months since the last comment, maybe also open a new issue, it might not be great form, but at least people will notice.)

If you want more of an open discussion, or need help in figuring out what you want or need, post to this forum.

Or you can:

Financially support your instance’s Patreon, if it has one, or your instance admin personally.

Give feedback/money/… to any Mastodon apps you use! Most of them are also free and open source, just like Mastodon itself, and very happy about any contribution.

Keep an eye on the federated timeline and try to help people who are having problems figuring out how stuff works.

Look at #introductions and #introduction occasionally and boost some of the toots, to spread the word about newcomers that people might want to follow.

Random Stuff

Solutions to accessibility issues (also interesting if you simply don’t like the way it looks)

How to automatically post your mastodon posts on twitter with IFTTT (would also work with tumblr)

Mastodon-Twitter-Bridge: Sign in with both so your twitter followers can find you on mastodon

On the history of mastodon and some of the things that I implied with “it’s complicated” re people making the software they use

I didn’t want to post it as an actual recommendation, but there is an instance called ephemeral.glitch.social that deletes toots at some time that is determined my the moon phases, and promises to be unstable with lots of feature testing, and people there seem to be nice. Some people use it just for fun, some for self-deleting private accounts. Or you could use Forget on any instance for the latter (also works for Twitter btw).

And joinmastodon.org is like a non-instance-specific page about mastodon, not very detailed, but has a few useful links. If you want to link to Mastodon as a whole, link joinmastodon.

Apps

full list: https://github.com/tootsuite/documentation/blob/master/Using-Mastodon/Apps.md

some popular ones:

Android: Tusky, Mastalab

iOS: Amaroq, Toot!

#mastodon #will ich wiederfinden #fediverse

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