Every Cause Wants To Be A Cult
Every cause, no matter how noble, tends to degenerate into a cult unless sufficient energy is expended on counteracting this tendency, just like matter tends to slide into higher entropy states unless you put more energy into the system. That’s a basic fact of human psychology, at least if we can take Eliezer Yudkowsky’s word for it. I think he may very well be right:
In the same sense that every thermal differential wants to equalize itself, and every computer program wants to become a collection of ad-hoc patches, every Cause wants to be a cult. It’s a high-entropy state into which the system trends, an attractor in human psychology. It may have nothing to do with whether the Cause is truly Noble. You might think that a Good Cause would rub off its goodness on every aspect of the people associated with it — that the Cause’s followers would also be less susceptible to status games, ingroup-outgroup bias, affective spirals, leader-gods. But believing one true idea won’t switch off the halo effect. A noble cause won’t make its adherents something other than human. There are plenty of bad ideas that can do plenty of damage — but that’s not necessarily what’s going on.
Every group of people with an unusual goal — good, bad, or silly — will trend toward the cult attractor unless they make a constant effort to resist it. You can keep your house cooler than the outdoors, but you have to run the air conditioner constantly, and as soon as you turn off the electricity — give up the fight against entropy — things will go back to “normal”.
A corollary to this is that the nobleness of the cause has nothing to do with whether or not the cause spawns a cult. Cultishness isn’t a function of the cause but of the effort spent counteracting the cult tendency. Even if the cause is rationality itself, that alone won’t do anything to ensure that it doesn’t degenerate into a Cult of Rationality. Even an anti-cult cause could become a cult:
On one notable occasion there was a group that went semicultish whose rallying cry was “Rationality! Reason! Objective reality!” (…) Labeling the Great Idea “rationality” won’t protect you any more than putting up a sign over your house that says “Cold!” You still have to run the air conditioner — expend the required energy per unit time to reverse the natural slide into cultishness. Worshipping rationality won’t make you sane any more than worshipping gravity enables you to fly. You can’t talk to thermodynamics and you can’t pray to probability theory. You can use it, but not join it as an in-group.
