Modern Day Cults can Wield Considerable Influence

This is an excellent presentation and blog post reviewing a book that resulted from the psychological study and research of cults and cult-like behaviour. There were a number of times when I felt chills down my spine while listening, as I realised that the behaviour and actions being discussed were descriptive of influential mainstream groups, organisations, and movements in the real world today. Some of which wield considerable cultural and political power.

Also, we’re all a little bit cultish in our behaviour and even if that typically doesn’t manifest to the extent of actual “cult membership” it is more prudent, more necessary, and more important than ever to question one’s beliefs regularly and deeply. Deliberate exposure to ideas and content outside of your typical media consumption and social exposure can make this necessary process easier.

I’ve started to wonder if the dynamics of the Internet and the media consumption behaviours it encourages in all of us actually serve to exploit the idiosyncrasies of human psychology to make the formation of cults and cult-like behaviour much easier, and much more effective than we really appreciate. The filter bubbles. The echo chambers. The self-righteous morally outraged victimhood culture. The politics of the other. The suppression and censorship of dissent. All feedback powerfully one on the other to make modern day cults that much more powerful, invisible, and pervasive.

Groupthink, wrongthink, and doublethink are all endemic to cults.

Selected Excerpts

Here’s a selection of key excerpts if you don’t have time for the entire presentation, which lasts for a bit of 30 minutes, or for the blog post, which is lengthy. But I’d encourage one or the other if you can manage it.

The structure of cults is basically authoritarian; obedience and hierarchical power tend to take precedence over truth and conscience when they conflict, which they often do. Unfortunately, certain psychological benefits can make authoritarian groups very attractive – they provide the opportunity to feel protected and cared for … Intelligent, well-educated people join cults because they simultaneously desire a sense of working for a higher purpose and because they are afraid of being on their own.

What I wish to stress is not that every group is a cult, but that cult thinking is the effect of psychological forces endemic to the human mind, and that these forces operate in the everyday life of each of us; they distort perception, bias thinking, and inculcate belief … and while not all cults require a formal leader as such, the authority figures … empower the group by giving them a source of confidence and righteousness that enables them to delegitimise dissenting points of view through their air of authority.

Projection offers protection from the anxiety of being bad and the punishment of being abandoned. In addition, by making other people bad in our own mind, we can legitimise behaviour toward them that would otherwise be morally unacceptable, even to the point of sanctioning cruel and vicious actions … Projection is is infused with self-righteousness to increase moral security. If the group member represents all that is good and the outsider represents all that is bad, it is natural to feel morally superior. It allows the group member to separate the world into a false dichotomy in which they have chosen the sacred path and the path the outsider has chosen is profane … Perhaps the most important thing to understand about devaluing the outsider is that it is a necessary preliminary to harming others, to doing violence.

Only a lively appreciation of dissent’s vital function at all levels of society can preserve it as a corrective to wishful thinking, self-inflation and unperceived rigidity.

A cult is a group fantasy created and maintained around specific beliefs for the emotional protection of its members. If information or opinions exist that contradicts the dogma or goals of the group, the only protective measure the group can take is suppression. Thus the core philosophy of the group becomes rooted in the distortion, if not outright fabrication, of reality. This censorship does not have to be as overtly authoritarian as one might imagine.

Care to suggest any groups this reminds you of?

Sources

Main video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=htqOIjzi-jE

Blog transcript: https://therationalists.org/2016/08/17/cult-behaviour-an-analysis/

Second video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pxO_UWr43Rw – this covers case studies of actual cults and is also worth a listen.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=htqOIjzi-jE

Plausible.

Originally shared by Singularity Hub

“Technological civilizations — and the Fermi paradox assumes there would be many by now — don’t colonize outer space (and thus flood the cosmos with signatures we could easily find). Instead, they move toward inner space by building vast digital realities on computers much smaller than we can detect.”

http://bit.ly/2b3wk4Q

Via Sarah Rios.

Originally shared by Wayne Radinsky

“In a new automotive application, we have used convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to map the raw pixels from a front-facing camera to the steering commands for a self-driving car. This powerful end-to-end approach means that with minimum training data from humans, the system learns to steer, with or without lane markings, on both local roads and highways. The system can also operate in areas with unclear visual guidance such as parking lots or unpaved roads.”

“We designed the end-to-end learning system using an NVIDIA DevBox running Torch 7 for training. An NVIDIA DRIVETM PX self-driving car computer, also with Torch 7, was used to determine where to drive — while operating at 30 frames per second (FPS). The system is trained to automatically learn the internal representations of necessary processing steps, such as detecting useful road features, with only the human steering angle as the training signal. We never explicitly trained it to detect, for example, the outline of roads. In contrast to methods using explicit decomposition of the problem, such as lane marking detection, path planning, and control, our end-to-end system optimizes all processing steps simultaneously.”

https://devblogs.nvidia.com/parallelforall/deep-learning-self-driving-cars/#.V7mmq63NpGY.twitter

Wide-ranging, and I don’t agree with all of it, but it provokes some thought about how our relationship with knowledge is changing.

Via Larry Panozzo. 

Originally shared by Transition21

Technology and Human Memory

Exploring the effects of offloading memory to technology.

My brain is a port through which details pass, but don’t stay. I’m not alone. Many young people feel our memories have been shot to pieces. It’s the embarrassing secret of my generation.

———-

[ Adapting to the Internet ]

Every day, and increasingly in every way, we are outsourcing our brains to the-internet. But at what cost? As smartphones get smarter, it’s easy to argue that we’re getting thicker. That’s not quite true. Our brains are not necessarily shrivelling; they are adapting.

[ The Adapted Generation ]

Thanks to technology, the need to know has been replaced by the ability to find out. Younger people, especially the ‘digital natives’ who have never known life without the web, are most comfortable in this new environment.

[ Worker Obsolescence ]

In almost every profession, expertise is being made redundant. In my profession, journalism, the sharp kids with fresh IT skills can claim to have the edge over the seasoned hacks (or at least that’s what they want our bosses to think). Or look at the taxi industry, which has been revolutionised by apps such as Uber. London’s black-cabbies have discovered that ‘the Knowledge’ — that impressively encyclopaedic study of the capital’s streets — has become all but-obsolete. With Uber, anyone who can drive and has a smartphone can earn money as a taxi driver.

[ Information Dependence ]

Even in high-pressure fields such as medicine, politics or law, the speed with which information can be found means that professionals rely on technology as much as everyone else. Some doctors-freely admit to searching Google for symptoms as their patients describe them. Lawyers no longer need to remember the intricacies of tort law — at least not parrot fashion.

[ Redundant Education ]

What does that mean for education? University finals, where students rely on memory unaided, seem an anachronism. Once, it was the perfect training for later life: learn a subject, store the information, use it later to your career advantage. But when every fact is just a click or two away, what’s the point?

[ Ephemeral Addiction ]

I can at least still remember what it used to be like to commit a fact to memory. You could take pride in it. It was a delicious, joyful thing, a gentle high. That has now been replaced by addictive short, sharp hits of dopamine mixed with adrenaline. Who can search first? Who has the fastest fingers tap-tapping away on their phone? The pleasure of contemplation has been replaced by the constant buzz of ephemera passing us by: on Instagram, on Facebook, on crack-like news apps. Even language is often bypassed; we increasingly communicate via images to save time. Forget a thousand words; send an emoji. Or a picture via-Snapchat that will self-destruct after a few seconds.

[ Neurological Adaption ]

Neurologists talk about the ‘plasticity’ of the brain — its ability to adapt its-function according to which neural pathways are most employed — and there is evidence to suggest that our brains are changing to meet the demands of this high-octane modern world. It’s reactionary to assume that this is bad news: the idea that technology is ruining our ability to think and communicate properly is as old as technology itself. People blamed the telegram for curtailing speech. Radio was thought to be dangerously-mindless, and everybody has always said that television rots the brain. But, for all these obstacles, humanity has just become more ingenious, so much so that we invented the internet, a medium for being clever without using our intelligence.

[ Erosion of Memory ]

If our brains are changing to the new digital environment, maybe we should feel encouraged by our resourcefulness.-Perhaps memory is something we can afford to sideline, and instead we can focus on skimming off facts and figures while relying on our short-term memory. Ensuring that knowledge is actually remembered requires time and concentration. And in this world of instant notifications and non-stop info, speed is king. Why bother learning ten things when your phone can find out any one of a million things in a few seconds?

[ Offloading Cognitive Function ]

The answer is that the brain requires exercise, and we allow it to atrophy at our peril. While we get better at juggling ideas, our memories are taking a battering. An academic study into the ‘Google effect’ showed that people tend not to bother remembering something if they believe it can be looked up later. People were more likely to index; to remember where information was-located rather than the actual information itself. That study was five years ago and technology has moved on significantly. Want to bet that people’s memories have got better — or worse — since then? Last year, 91 per cent of people surveyed for another study into ‘digital amnesia’ said they used the internet as an ‘online extension’ of their brain and 44 per cent relied on their smartphone. Of 6,000 adults surveyed across Europe, more than a third turned to computers to help recall information. The UK had one of the worst rates: more than half of British adults admitted that they don’t even try to remember answers, they just search online. We are becoming a flabby-brained nation.

[ Cyborg Anxiety ]

Techno-libertarians rejoice at the idea of computers becoming integral to the human experience. The big nerdy fantasy is that we’ll all become hybrids — part human, part computer. And with the advent of wearable tech — Apple watches, Fitbits and so on — that process seems well under way. But if we cease to be fully human, life must become something less. Already, young people depend on technology for peace of mind. When our phone batteries run out, we feel a deep anxiety, not because we desperately want to read our emails, but because our gizmos are now part of who we are.

[ The Cost of Keeping Up ]

Worse still, the machines have an-insatiable appetite for more information, which must come at our expense. My phone keeps telling me it has run out of memory and that I must buy more. Then there is the ‘cloud’, a separate memory bank where the phone also suggests I store things. I assume this cloud brain floats somewhere above California. Keeping it full of my information could become a very expensive habit. But the thought of losing that stuff is-terrifying. I would (and do) pay handsomely to insure against it.

[ Information Loss Anxiety ]

Suppose my cloud and all other clouds vanished, though. What if, instead of a-nuclear strike or tsunami, an-electromagnetic pulse wiped every hard drive, every detail of every bank account, every family photo? Then what? History is littered with examples of knowledge being destroyed or damaged. Details about ancient Roman sanitation were lost for hundreds of years during the medieval period; the destruction of the Great Library of Alexandria — one of the ancient world’s great archives of knowledge — should still serve as a warning for us. We assume that nothing is ever lost online, but that’s not true. A computer-science study from 2012 showed that almost a third of recorded history shared over social media during the ‘Arab Spring’ uprising in Egypt has since been deleted.

[ Institutions for Memory ]

If everything is lost in the digital ether and nobody has bothered to remember anything, then what? The Long Now Foundation hopes to become a ‘long-term cultural institution’ to counter the fact that ‘civilisation is revving itself into a pathologically short attention span’. Its grandiose plan — to help archive digital material in a responsible way for the next 10,000 years — sounds whimsical, but the idea behind it opens up an-interesting discussion: how do we preserve our experiences so that when future civilisations look back at us, they don’t just see another dark age?

[ Consciousness and Identity ]

The problem of digital amnesia is more immediate. John Locke thought that memory and our sense of self were inevitably linked, because personal identity was founded on consciousness. (At least that’s what his Wikipedia page says.) Surely that’s right. When memories fail in old age, we feel we lose a part of us that rests deep within. That is why Alzheimer’s, which afflicted both my paternal grandparents, is such a cruel disease. It may well be that memory is more spiritual than we like to admit. By using our minds, we nourish a part of us that goes beyond the physical. Equally, by storing memory outside of ourselves on a piece of technology, we lose something fundamental.

[ Offsetting Change ]

Ted Hughes recommended memorising poetry not just for its own sake but as a form of exercise — for mind and soul (thanks again, Wiki). My plan now is to try to do just that: remember a few more things each day, rely less on my smartphone and have a go at learning the odd poem or two. Reflection, I hope, can cure this modern affliction.

http://www.spectator.co.uk/2016/08/heads-in-the-cloud-memory-in-the-age-of-google/