3 Cult Patterns that are opposite to the Maelstrom

Maelstrom's a complicated pattern, but the three of it's most common opposites aren't.

King of the Hill involves, at its simplest, one democratically-elected supreme leader with unquestioned power. That doesn't sound like a cult pattern, but it can be. In such a system, the only way to look after one's own interests is to either take the position, or put a trusted friend in the position. The amount of factioning, back-biting, sabotaging, political gamesmanship, and various other nasty crap that occurs just damages people and pulls attention away from what the group is actually intended to do. Don't play this game.

Mess of Porridge also sounds good on paper. Everybody is exactly equal to everyone else. One nose, one vote. We're all brethren here. So on, so forth. Sounds good, doesn't work. You still have all the same issues, except now they're back-channel and usually nastier. Tyranny of the majority tends to rule here, and schooling to get hooks into new people as soon as possible quickly becomes standard procedure. Stick with representative democracy whenever possible.

Scottish Knights is a sort of deliberate double Maelstrom. Rather than pointing to another group and calling them the "real" members, Maelstrom-style, two different groups are each told they are the true members and the other group is being misled for the good of the organization. Taken from an apocryphal story that Aleister Crowley titled his financial backers who bought their way in as "Scottish Knights" to indicate to his "Inner Circle" that they were cash cows to be fleeced for cash and misled as to the "true" teachings, while boasting to the Knights about sexually exploiting and misleading his Inner Circle as to the "true" teachings. Maelstroms can build up on accident, this one is just fraud.