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.
Showing posts with label Cult Dynamics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Cult Dynamics. Show all posts
Sunday, January 30, 2011
Cult Pattern: Malestrom
The Maelstrom comes first, because it's the one usually foremost on my mind. I tend to trigger on it fairly hard. And, frankly, it's a pattern that I'm currently rather concerned with because at the moment, I see elements of it seeping into the ADF.
This is a pattern I named myself, and I named it for maelstrom in their original sense as whirlpools. In fact, the word maelstrom actually means grinding stream in Dutch. The word play darkly amused me because as a pattern it's avoidable but nearly inescapable, and it has a tendency to grind people down.
In a Maelstrom pattern, the phrase to look out for is "the real work happens behind the next door."
That's not to say that doors or graduated work are bad, in fact they aren't. A healthy group will often have a "getting to know each other" group and/or a "learning to be a functioning member" group, a "functioning member" group, and an "organizing the functioning members" group. Which is normal and healthy. And not the Maelstrom.
The Maelstrom happens when the definition of the "functioning member" group keeps changing. Most worrisome is if what is described as a "functioning member" changes at the time you arrive at what you were previously told was the level of "functioning member." In a fully-developed Maelstrom, this happens at *every* level.
Again, that's not to say that levels are bad. One of the *healthiest* models I've seen involved grouping people into "consumers," "producers," and "organizers." with a lot of shifting between the groups based on what contributions that individual was capable of making at the time.
Humans are primates (you'll hear that from me a lot.) We like levels. We like attaining things. We like identifying people to emulate and learn from. Those are, frankly, awesome. I've been in the dynamic I call "mess of porridge" and it's no fun either. We *should* recognize the people who have learned the path, the organizers, the volunteers. An organization with a clear map into those roles is *ahead* of the game.
But it shouldn't turn into a "march over the next hill" repeating endlessly. The first time you're told that the level you just obtained is "really" just the free sample for the level after it, think about running. Because, like a maelstrom, the more invested you get, the more you'll be invited to invest to get to the rapidly moving "good parts."
And, in an organizational sense, the Maelstrom is no less seductive, and no less likely to capsize you. Your newest members are going to need training wheels. The people who organize things are going to end up being The People who Organize Things. That's okay. That's healthy. That's, frankly, needful.
But everybody should have the same map. If you tell people that Confirmation makes them a "real" member before confirmation, don't tell them Bible College makes them a "real" member after. Of course "there" has more benefits than "here," or people wouldn't go "there." But be honest about where they're at now, and what "there" really is. Otherwise, you just end up with bitter people on treadmills, and the world has enough gyms.
Sermon over. Gods bless.
This is a pattern I named myself, and I named it for maelstrom in their original sense as whirlpools. In fact, the word maelstrom actually means grinding stream in Dutch. The word play darkly amused me because as a pattern it's avoidable but nearly inescapable, and it has a tendency to grind people down.
In a Maelstrom pattern, the phrase to look out for is "the real work happens behind the next door."
That's not to say that doors or graduated work are bad, in fact they aren't. A healthy group will often have a "getting to know each other" group and/or a "learning to be a functioning member" group, a "functioning member" group, and an "organizing the functioning members" group. Which is normal and healthy. And not the Maelstrom.
The Maelstrom happens when the definition of the "functioning member" group keeps changing. Most worrisome is if what is described as a "functioning member" changes at the time you arrive at what you were previously told was the level of "functioning member." In a fully-developed Maelstrom, this happens at *every* level.
Again, that's not to say that levels are bad. One of the *healthiest* models I've seen involved grouping people into "consumers," "producers," and "organizers." with a lot of shifting between the groups based on what contributions that individual was capable of making at the time.
Humans are primates (you'll hear that from me a lot.) We like levels. We like attaining things. We like identifying people to emulate and learn from. Those are, frankly, awesome. I've been in the dynamic I call "mess of porridge" and it's no fun either. We *should* recognize the people who have learned the path, the organizers, the volunteers. An organization with a clear map into those roles is *ahead* of the game.
But it shouldn't turn into a "march over the next hill" repeating endlessly. The first time you're told that the level you just obtained is "really" just the free sample for the level after it, think about running. Because, like a maelstrom, the more invested you get, the more you'll be invited to invest to get to the rapidly moving "good parts."
And, in an organizational sense, the Maelstrom is no less seductive, and no less likely to capsize you. Your newest members are going to need training wheels. The people who organize things are going to end up being The People who Organize Things. That's okay. That's healthy. That's, frankly, needful.
But everybody should have the same map. If you tell people that Confirmation makes them a "real" member before confirmation, don't tell them Bible College makes them a "real" member after. Of course "there" has more benefits than "here," or people wouldn't go "there." But be honest about where they're at now, and what "there" really is. Otherwise, you just end up with bitter people on treadmills, and the world has enough gyms.
Sermon over. Gods bless.
Working Definition: Cult
Okay, bear with me cause this is gonna get pretty convoluted, but necessary.
By book definition, a cult is a spontaneously originated religious group focused on personal experience, in the sense that it is not a schism of a larger group but a completely new religious movement.
In common parlance, though, we use "New Religious Movement" for tiny, experience-oriented spontaneously arising religious groups that have a positive influence on their members, and "cult" for a group of people being led to make bad choices. In this sense, the group may be religious, political, or financial.
The gap between the two makes getting a single definition for serious discussion difficult.
So here's mine:
To qualify as a "cult" in a pejorative sense, 3 elements must be present:
By book definition, a cult is a spontaneously originated religious group focused on personal experience, in the sense that it is not a schism of a larger group but a completely new religious movement.
In common parlance, though, we use "New Religious Movement" for tiny, experience-oriented spontaneously arising religious groups that have a positive influence on their members, and "cult" for a group of people being led to make bad choices. In this sense, the group may be religious, political, or financial.
The gap between the two makes getting a single definition for serious discussion difficult.
So here's mine:
To qualify as a "cult" in a pejorative sense, 3 elements must be present:
- Recruitment - the group must actively encourage people to become involved
- Retention - the group must actively encourage people to remain involved
- Bad End - the group must as a natural result of its internal and/or external activities have a tendency to cause harm. This doesn't include bad luck or one or two members acting in bad faith, but the actual group dynamics causing the harm. It also applies to all harm: physical, mental, social, spiritual, sexual, and financial.
By this definition, all three criteria must be met. An abusive relationship may have cult-like retention factors, but it isn't a cult until it crosses the line into recruiting others. A con-artist may recruit people to bad end, but he's not running a cult until he starts grooming them for repeat business. And a group that recruits and retains people to good end is just a normally functioning group.
This is not a perfect definition, but it is a functional one, and it does do a decent job of generating room to discuss cult dynamics objectively and without regard to size or history. This can be important for discussing cult dynamics, because most cults aren't aware that they are one, and the dynamics that can create a cult can actually occur unwittingly, like in the next pattern we discuss, which I term the Maelstrom.
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