In this episode, we explore the other side of paediarchy - the cult of followers, without whom that ‘rule by the childish’ would not be possible…
What is a cult? How does it form? What is it that underpins that cult? What are the dangers of a cult? From where do cults gain their power? And how do the same principles apply within families, organisations and elsewhere?
The reason we need to ask these questions is because if we’re to have any chance to achieve a viable world for everyone, we’re going to need some way to make sense of things like this…
…because yeah, this one was a cult that, even by then was already way out of control in any sane sense of the term…
Anyway, over on Twitter, a few years back now, Mel Conway (of ‘Conway’s Law‘) asked this question:
We all need an explanation, with minimum psychobabble, how and why cults are so powerful. It seems to me that a cult could be described as an emergent phenomenon that derives from some kind of coupling between the needs of the leader and the followers.
Any help out there?
It seemed an important question - to me, at least. So the following is my Twitter-thread reply, cleaned up a bit to make it more readable and less technical. The main paragraphs are based on the individual tweets, whilst paragraphs in ‘(..)’ parentheses are notes that I added later.
(If you’re interested in the technical stuff behind this, I based my reply below on the research behind my SEMPER power-model, and on the types of work implied by the ‘asset-dimensions‘ used in my tools and techniques for enterprise-architectures. Yeah, I’ll admit that a lot of that is heavy-theory stuff, but it may be useful to some folks anyway.)
A cult is a mutual responsibility-avoiding device, typically operating as a form of pyramid-game or Ponzi scheme. To work as a device for avoiding responsibility, it also needs the existence and availability of a blameable scapegoat or ‘Other’.
The core of a cult is a belief about power. In physics, power can be described as ‘the ability to do work’. In a cult, though - and in many other social contexts too - power is defined more as ‘the ability to avoid work’. We’ll often see this framed as an ‘entitlement’ or ‘right’ to avoid some form of work.
In physics, ‘work’ is ‘the rate at which energy is expended’. In a human context, ‘work’ is anything on which humans expend energy. Hence here, ‘work’ may be physical, mental, emotional/relational, spiritual - meaning and purpose - and/or various other forms.
In a cult, some crucial form of work is being avoided. Instead, the work is offloaded onto an Other, who is then blamed and denigrated for doing that work. A slave-culture is a cult that entraps denigrated Others - slaves or suchlike - to do that undesirable work (often but not always physical-work).
(Note: Most so-called ‘advanced’ cultures are actually still slave-cults: the only difference is that we rely on machines rather than other people to do the undesired ‘slave-work’.)
The cult is thus dependent on the existence of the Other to do the work that is being avoided. Yet the cult must also maintain separation from the Other, in case the work being avoided might return - as in the story of ‘the return of the scapegoat’.
Maintaining that separation requires work by the cult – in fact becomes a core part of the work of the cult. The driver for that work is the fear that the offloaded-work will somehow return to the members of the cult - as it in fact must do so, if the work is of a type that can only be done by the Self, such as building and maintaining relationships with self and others within the cult and beyond.
In a cult, the role of the Leader is to give permission to blame the Other - in other words, affirm the cult-members’ ‘right’ to offload that work onto the Other. For the cult to ‘succeed’ in this, the Leader must seem to be infallible, perfect – a ‘god’, or seen as ‘godlike’, such as a narcissist.
(Note: For a cult, the existence of a Leader is useful but not always essential. A cult can still work as such, as long as there is some mutual means – such as clubs or internet-chat-rooms – to agree that the ‘right’ does exist to blame and offload responsibility for work onto the Other. A Leader is merely a useful figurehead to whom the responsibility for that item of work – providing the ‘permission to abuse the Other’ – is offloaded by the bulk of the cult. A figurehead who fails in that role risks facing much of the abuse that would otherwise be heaped on the Other – hence, in a very real sense, only imaginary gods or rabid narcissists can safely apply for that Leader role.)
Since essential work is being avoided, the cult is inherently fragile – literally built on mutual reinforcement of self-delusions. The longer the work is avoided, the more that tension will increase – and likewise the fear of ‘the return of the scapegoat’.
A cult will break down – implode, often with a level of violence that reflects the scale of work that has been previously avoided – whenever at least one of several crucial conditions are met. These include:
— Condition A: Any breakdown in the illusion of the Leader’s supposed perfection or infallibility - and hence the loss of the perceived ‘permission to blame’, the ‘right’ to abuse and offload the work onto the Other.
(Note: The need to prevent Condition A from occurring will often create a drive within the cult to ignore or reject any information that might raise any doubt about the perfection of the Leader. This is the trade-off that makes the role of cult-Leader so desirable for a narcissist: in return for providing and maintaining that ‘permission to abuse the Other’, the reward is an unending source of unquestioned praise.)
— Condition B: The cult becomes universal, encompasses everyone and everything. If that happens, there is no-one left to blame and treat as Other - hence there is no-one or no-thing onto whom the work can be ‘legitimately’ offloaded.
(Note: This is one of the fundamental dangers for monopolistic religions and extreme narcissists: when they eventually succeed in dragging everyone into their cult, there are no ‘outsiders’ still left to blame, at which point the cult can collapse into extreme infighting. This is one reason why castes or class-systems arise, because they still enable a hierarchy of blame to exist within the fully-filled cult.)
— Condition C: The Other refuses to accept the responsibility or blame that is being offloaded onto them: for example, a ‘Peasants’ Revolt’, or a ‘Terminator’ scenario in which Boston Dynamics’ robots start to fight back.
— Condition D: The Other becomes unable to accept responsibility for the work that is being offloaded: for example, slaves starve or die out, or machines run out of energy.
— Condition E: Changes in the external-reality force a breakdown of the illusion that the work can be offloaded or avoided forever: for example, crop-failure, epidemic, resource-depletion, or inability to block out external sources of information.
(Note: The need to prevent Condition E from occurring is both a source for the creation and maintenance of information-bubbles, and a major driver behind why such bubbles can be so fiercely maintained and defended, and so hard to break.)
For the cult, each of those conditions is literally an existential threat, and hence must be resisted and fought-against at all costs. This is where a cult of any kind can easily turn violent, especially towards any perceived ‘Other’.
Those who want or need to dismantle the cult will need to bring about at least one of those conditions – though need also to be wary of the spiralling violence that the cult must bring to bear against any such perceived threat.
Cults can occur in many different forms, at many different scales: for example, some types of business-organisations and business-cultures can often show strong cult-type characteristics. Where that occurs, external contractors or consultants can unintentionally find themselves playing either the role of a Leader, deemed to have given ‘permission’ to offload work onto some other team or department as ‘Other’, yet sometimes also the role of Other, onto whom the responsibility or blame for decision-work and suchlike is being offloaded. Neither of these are safe situations for the respective ‘outsider’.
And finally, if you need to know whether some kind of cult is potentially at play in some context, look for these conditions: first, there’s some form of work that’s being avoided, by some group as a whole; second, there’s some blameable Other onto whom the work can be or is being offloaded, often with denigration, mockery or even violence; and, third, often, there’s some purported-infallible Leader who gives permission to the cult-members to blame or abuse that Other.
The other classic clue of this is a well-known warning: “There is an in-group whom the law protects but does not bind, and an out-group whom the law binds but does not protect.” If ever you see that happening in an organisation or elsewhere, then first, get away from there as fast you can - and then do what you can to break the ‘game’ before a full-blown paediarchy drags everyone there down into oblivion.
(This episode was adapted from my 2020 post on the Tetradian weblog, ‘On cults’ )
Thanks for the post
I suppose Agile, and the total disregard for any form of governance would fit the bill. I have often wondered why Agilests are so governance adverse, but Condition A would truly fit this scenario.
Thank you for the post.