TL;DR: Intense things have failure modes that bland things usually lack. Don't let excessive caution make you renounce intensity. (Once you are in a bad intense situation, however, the path towards bland is usually better than trying to fix the badness). The rest of the post hammers this point and can be skipped.
Groups
Groups have a specific failure mode that we can summarize as "loss of autonomy". But low-intensity groups with a high level of loss of autonomy (the yellow quadrant above) are uncommon. If the new manager at your gym starts ordering people around, you can simply leave to a new gym. Even if a close group of friends has formed and leaving the gym breaks it, the manager's authoritarianism is not located inside the friend's group; it's simply an external problem.
Most of the time, asking whether something is a cult is a question of whether it is on the red or blue quadrant. But some advice on how to avoid cults sounds like they want to imprison everyone inside the green quadrant. Some examples:
The real problem is not checking with your feelings
Beware of charismatic leaders! Intense groups rarely survive without charismatic leaders. Better advice: beware of deferring to charismatic leaders without checking how you really feel about their recommendations.
Beware of big money investments! Money is the universal means, so many intense things (mountaineering, painting, chemistry Nobel prizes) require a lot of money. Better advice: Again, beware of not checking how you feel about spending money.
The real problem is only visible at the object level
Beware of suppression of dissent!Time is finite, so every group seriously doing something needs to silence many discussions. Your proposal to play basketball instead of baseball will not get suppressed among your group of friends hanging out, but it will get suppressed at your baseball team, because its members are joined by the serious wish to play baseball. Suppressing dissent against a net of lies is, of course, bad, but you won't be able to tell which is which unless you spend a lot of time thinking at the object level, not at the social level.
Beware of loaded language! Every group doing something new will come up with names for the new things they are doing. They might create words for things or people with a property they like. Once again, only the object level reflection of whether those terms correctly describe the territory, or impose a wrong map on its members, is relevant, and this is often not visible from the outside. Life is not a social deduction game.
Other stuff
Beware of groups recruiting new members! People who have fun want more people to have fun with. If anything, beware of the recruitment not giving the right information about the group.
Beware of exit costs! People build their lives around things they like, and unraveling is costly. And sometimes people tie themselves through Ulysses contracts (see marriage). If anything, beware of unnecessary, evil exit costs, which is so tautological as to be useless.
On the loss of autonomy
It's not even true that the perfect group has zero loss of autonomy. A very intense group can require partial loss of autonomy to enhance an autonomy of a different kind (see democracy).
On broad society as a cult
I remember one Indian friend once casually mentioned, after I had known them for years, that their uncle had been long part of Hare Krisna. "Oh, wow, how was that for your family?", I asked. "What do you mean?", they asked, confused. After some hermeneutical work, they explained that the uncle had to follow some rules: they could only eat vegetarian (like the whole family did anyway most of the time), had to chant some songs very frequently (which the family found charming), and couldn't leave the temple (so the family organized outings to visit him, and see the beautiful temple). After some years, they left, and that part of their lives was remembered as a Scoutmaster phase would be in the life of a Westerner.
Far from me be it to defend Hare Krishna (on most days I tend to think that eclipses are not caused by demons swallowing up the Sun or Moon). But the Hare Krishna experience is very dependent on the surrounding society.[1] And many intense groups in the West that could be considered cults (startups, the army, and for different reasons of course established churches) are free of suspicion simply because they pursue goals like money or status-in-broad-society, which everyone accepts is a good reason to defer to authorities or to make big sacrifices in time and health and love life and friendships and sense of meaning and lack of depression.
Do you defer to social convention? Do you spend a lot of money on e.g. tattoos? Did you sacrifice your youth plan of touring the world on a one-wheel and doing puppet shows in exchange for food and a bed, in order to reach inside your group the rank of "mortgage-eligible"? You might be in a cult!
Beware of cults
As usual, failure modes come in pairs, and this piece is written for people too cautious about their social life, to inform them that there is healthy (but of course susceptible to rotting) intensity. If your life is full of intensity you might want to periodically check whether you are indeed inside a cult.
In an Afro-Caribbean culture where all your friends get attacked by demons at voodoo church every Sunday, then your belief in demon attacks can co-exist with your otherwise being a totally functional individual. ACX
TL;DR: Intense things have failure modes that bland things usually lack. Don't let excessive caution make you renounce intensity. (Once you are in a bad intense situation, however, the path towards bland is usually better than trying to fix the badness). The rest of the post hammers this point and can be skipped.
Groups
Groups have a specific failure mode that we can summarize as "loss of autonomy". But low-intensity groups with a high level of loss of autonomy (the yellow quadrant above) are uncommon. If the new manager at your gym starts ordering people around, you can simply leave to a new gym. Even if a close group of friends has formed and leaving the gym breaks it, the manager's authoritarianism is not located inside the friend's group; it's simply an external problem.
Most of the time, asking whether something is a cult is a question of whether it is on the red or blue quadrant. But some advice on how to avoid cults sounds like they want to imprison everyone inside the green quadrant. Some examples:
The real problem is not checking with your feelings
The real problem is only visible at the object level
Other stuff
On the loss of autonomy
It's not even true that the perfect group has zero loss of autonomy. A very intense group can require partial loss of autonomy to enhance an autonomy of a different kind (see democracy).
On broad society as a cult
I remember one Indian friend once casually mentioned, after I had known them for years, that their uncle had been long part of Hare Krisna. "Oh, wow, how was that for your family?", I asked. "What do you mean?", they asked, confused. After some hermeneutical work, they explained that the uncle had to follow some rules: they could only eat vegetarian (like the whole family did anyway most of the time), had to chant some songs very frequently (which the family found charming), and couldn't leave the temple (so the family organized outings to visit him, and see the beautiful temple). After some years, they left, and that part of their lives was remembered as a Scoutmaster phase would be in the life of a Westerner.
Far from me be it to defend Hare Krishna (on most days I tend to think that eclipses are not caused by demons swallowing up the Sun or Moon). But the Hare Krishna experience is very dependent on the surrounding society.[1] And many intense groups in the West that could be considered cults (startups, the army, and for different reasons of course established churches) are free of suspicion simply because they pursue goals like money or status-in-broad-society, which everyone accepts is a good reason to defer to authorities or to make big sacrifices in time and health and love life and friendships and sense of meaning and lack of depression.
Do you defer to social convention? Do you spend a lot of money on e.g. tattoos? Did you sacrifice your youth plan of touring the world on a one-wheel and doing puppet shows in exchange for food and a bed, in order to reach inside your group the rank of "mortgage-eligible"? You might be in a cult!
Beware of cults
As usual, failure modes come in pairs, and this piece is written for people too cautious about their social life, to inform them that there is healthy (but of course susceptible to rotting) intensity. If your life is full of intensity you might want to periodically check whether you are indeed inside a cult.
Relationships
[after writing this part, I realized you could trivially regenerate it from the first half, so I deleted it]
Written at Inscribe.
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