How to quit a sect. Part I

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

This article can be considered independent, or as a continuation of the article on creating a movement.

You see, what is the problem, if a person belongs to a certain sect, he IN PRINCIPLE is not able to understand what exactly is in the sect. It is impossible for him to explain this either by logical arguments, or by emotional attacks, in general. Any sect is arranged in such a way that it is impossible to leave it … but they do. I have a lot of experience in this matter, and now (more precisely, in the second part) I will explain how to leave any sect easily and quickly. This article will not help anyone, because any reader who is in a sect, in principle, will not be able to understand its content, he will think that everything said does not apply to him, although in fact it is 100% to him; and those who are not in the sect … what for him this article in general? Nevertheless, if I am writing it, then there are reasons for it. I'll make a reservation right away that although I myself took part in many sects, I will cite examples mainly from the latter, in the fight against it I collected the most interesting experience, although the plot itself is absolutely identical in content to all previous ones, the only difference is in the form of its manifestation.

Let's define what a sect is. A well-known definition (this can be found on Wikipedia) was written by some stoned sociologists, it is generally useless, if only not to protect their empty scientific works or political games, when you need to declare someone objectionable as a sectarian or a whole movement that does not obey the authorities … Another definition, although more accurate, but still not suitable for me, is proposed in the BER. This definition is not suitable, it does not catch a whole layer of sects, in which, for example, there is no explicit ritual or hierarchy, as well as dogmas that are not subject to discussion. It happens that there are dogmas, and you can discuss them, only they will not change from this. It even happens that development and personal growth are possible in a sect … up to a certain point. In short, I have come across what could be considered a sect in terms of the consequences of its work, but formally such movements do not fall under the specified definition. Therefore, within the framework of this article, I propose another definition, which will now be expressed in mathematical terms, but then translated into understandable Russian with explanations. This definition is completely consistent with my experience.

A sect is a community of people whose ideas obey an incomplete and self-contained single teaching.… Their logic of behavior, their conclusions, their thinking as a whole obey only the methodology of this teaching. Purely mathematically, we can say the following about such a teaching: it is its own limited and closed subset of the all-embracing knowledge of the World. We will call this doctrine sectarian.

The definition is not mathematically accurate, because I have not found a good word that would simultaneously reflect all possible thoughts, and knowledge, and experience, and all available information. Therefore, for brevity, I have chosen the word "presentation", having put into it the meaning indicated now. Now I will explain the meaning of the rest of the words, but I will do it in everyday language so that everyone understands.

A proper subset - this is a PART of a set that is NOT empty, but also NOT the same as the original set. In other words, if you have bitten off a tangible piece from the apple, and this piece does NOT coincide with the whole apple, then such a piece can be considered a proper subset of the apple.

Limited set … I think everything is clear here. An apple can be covered with a bag on top, it will fit entirely in it, which means it is limited, that is, it can fit in a larger container entirely. In the picture above, we have a set that is not only our own, but also limited.

Closed set - this is the most important thing in this definition. In mathematics, a closed set is a set in which any converging sequence has a limit IN THE SAME set. With regard to our definition, this means the following. A person has a certain set of ideas (knowledge, experience, thoughts). Any reasoning of this person can be presented in the form of a sequence of logical inferences that combine his ideas in such a way as to obtain a logical conclusion and act on the basis of this conclusion. This conclusion can be considered the limit of the sequence of inferences. So, this limit is INSIDE the many ideas of this person. He never and in any way can go beyond the boundaries of his ideas, all his conclusions WILL end exclusively within the ALREADY FORMED picture of the world dictated by the teaching.

So, when I talk about teaching with the words “my own limited closed subset,” it means that the teaching contains a PART (usually a SMALL PART) of the all-embracing knowledge of the World. It is limited to certain limits, and - the most important thing! - any reasoning of a person DOES NOT go beyond the limits of teaching never. In other words, the teaching is closed on itself and represents a kind of unified environment in which a person walks. Such a teaching can easily be holistic and consistent, it can contain theories with predictive power, it can generally be "omnipotent" up to a certain point … until the heavy hammer of practice smashes it on the anvil of harsh truth. Such acts of insight are usually given to sectarians very hard, and in especially difficult cases people do not even survive.

Thus, a typical sectarian in my eyes looks like this. A person has a certain picture of the world dictated by sectarian teaching, and no matter what phenomenon he finds, he will interpret it ONLY through the ideas already formed in him, not admitting the possibility that this phenomenon goes beyond those (beyond the scope of teaching). No matter how he reasoned, all his logical conclusions will revolve ONLY within the framework of a certain limited set of options familiar and familiar to him, and he will find a suitable explanation of the phenomenon in the picture of the world he already has, even if this phenomenon does not fit into it. Even in those cases when a person sees something clearly unusual for himself, he will simply expand his already existing idea with this new example for himself, adjusting it to his experience. For example, a person is used to considering a certain form of human behavior as unreasonable and knows that this form of behavior reflects the primitiveness of a person's mind or the primitiveness of his way of thinking. When this person sees similar forms of behavior in people (for example, alcoholism), then he can rightly attribute them to a manifestation of unreasonableness. However, if he meets something very unusual, out of the ordinary, but at the same time unpleasant for himself in the behavior of another person, he will not look for the reasons for this behavior, but will only be surprised something like: “This is how unreasonable there is! I didn't know”and will enrich his arsenal of examples of unreasonableness. Although in reality it may not be unreasonable at all, but, say, pampering, a joke, deliberate pretense in order to hide something else, a strategic move that distracts attention, etc. Scouts and spies, for example, can have a whole arsenal of different forms of behavior, with the help of which you can divert your gaze from the hidden reality, and the task of the intelligence officer is to make the enemy think something else, and not what is happening in reality. Everything that is incomprehensible to such a person in another person, he will not try to understand, but will simply reduce everything to unreasonableness, even in those cases when such a reduction looks clearly absurd.

From what has been said, by the way, it follows that it is very easy to manipulate any sectarian if one realizes his system of ideas (as a rule, it is very primitive) and acts for his own purposes through this system, knowing in advance that the sectarian will never leave it. For example, if a person is a convinced anti-Semite, then he can easily be bred into buying a "super-Aryan Slavic contraption" or a "book of Vedic knowledge" for a lot of money, by telling some story about the destruction of the Slavs by Jews for their great culture and not forgetting to add that now all the Jews of the world hunt for such "things". You can tell him that the Jews add sugar and vinegar to all canned food to destroy the Russians, and therefore you only need to buy “these” Slavic canned food. In parallel, you can do and vice versa, immediately doubling the profits of your business, selling something to the Jews under the pretext of opposing the goyim. As a result, everyone is happy, and things are moving … However, this niche is now well occupied, you should not take this example as a guide to action. I just could not resist and share my observation of how EASILY people are bred on the basis of racial and mental differences.

Now an analogy. Imagine that a boat is sailing on a wide lake, but it floats somehow crookedly, zigzags, eventually starting to rotate in one place and stop in the middle of the lake, while there are no barriers, landmarks and buoys marking the fairway (safe for the vessel path through the water) on the lake no. As well as there are no barriers prohibiting swimming further or forcing to bend the trajectory. This is something like the thinking of a sectarian in the ocean of our entire culture. You look from the outside: there seem to be no obstacles, there seems to be plenty of options for the development of thought - but NO. At first, thinking illogically jumps in those places where it would seem that there is a direct solution, then it stops rather rigidly, as soon as a convenient limiting conclusion is reached within its teaching. There are not even attempts to go ashore and see what is happening there, swim into the bay, inspect the island, dive under the water to look deeper, etc. However, it seems to the captain of the boat that his actions are absolutely logical and justified, and therefore simply swim it is forbidden. This is the only correct trajectory, and all the others who swim differently are (I quote from life) "stupid inhabitants and sectarians who do not understand anything about life as well as we understand it."

Let's repeat the definition in everyday language.

A sect is a community of people formed around a certain teaching, which is limited to a small (compared to the whole culture) set of thoughts, knowledge and experience, and the methodology of which allows only such chains of inferences to be generated that never go beyond the teaching

An example of the simplest self-absorbed thought might look like this: "The Bible is true because God wrote it, and God exists because it is written in the Bible." Unfortunately, although this example fully reflects ALL existing sects (including scientific, and not only religious), it is not informative enough and on its basis it is difficult to make out some very long chains that close themselves in real sects.

Here is an example of a chain, which I will explain in more detail later, but now I will only describe its beginning and end: "You are unreasonable because you do not understand the basic principles of an intelligent approach, and you do not understand them because you are unreasonable." As you can see, the logical error here is exactly the same as in the previous paragraph, only there is one difference: in this case I showed only the beginning and end of the chain, but the length of the discussion was such that my interlocutors simply forgot the beginning of their thoughts by the end of the conversation, and therefore due to limited memory, they simply could not control the consistency of their own inferences, demonstrating what I needed from the very beginning: the closure of the teaching on itself. But why did I manage to find this error? Because I have been training to work with such errors for more than a dozen years.

So, the reality is that, unfortunately, none of the people I know enough to detect even such primitive chains is able to check it. I see two reasons for this. The first lies in the lack of experience of thinking, in which you need to try to cover the maximum possible number of factors. A person, for example, is simply too lazy to think that a certain form of behavior of another person can have two or three dozen reasons that are completely unknown to him, he stops at one reason that is obvious to him personally and hammers into it like a woodpecker, immediately drawing far-reaching conclusions, which in general nothing then don't fall for the practice of relationship. However, the ability to pull everything by the ears saves a person from mental trauma, and he lives calmly on, finding a pseudo explanation for any trouble. Or, say, a person is too lazy to think what the bending wind load on the fence post will be, what he puts for his fence, he does not even know what other forces will act on him and in what capacity, and therefore he simply takes and buries the post on a convenient depth for yourself. Then he usually fixes the fence after 5 years. And it happens that he doesn't fix it, because everything turned out well … this gives a person confidence that his practical experience is omnipotent. The lack of this habit of thinking as broadly as possible stems from just such seemingly simple wrong decisions. While one person is simply driving a nail, another will check at least three dozen factors before hammering in. And it's not a fact that he will score. Maybe he decides to screw in something more powerful. It is possible that in both cases, both will be right and everything will work for both of them correctly with this nail. But then the first person will solve the second, third, hundredth problem in his life in the same way, and half of them, if not more, will be solved incorrectly. The second person will also solve each of his subsequent tasks with the maximum coverage of the circumstances, and therefore ALL of them will be solved correctly. Even those that are solved incorrectly will still be either redone, or the error will be taken into account for the future so that you gain much more from this error than you lost at the beginning. And while the first person continues to live blindly, the second will learn to make the right decisions in almost all cases and will gradually begin to do it even faster than the first scratches the back of his head. All this is described in more detail in the article "straightforward logic of thinking", only it does not say that such logic leads to memory impairment and to the inability to see long chains of logical inferences entirely at one glance.

The second the reason for the inability to look for closed chains is that in real life they are very, very long. Anyone will laugh at my example above with the justification of unreasonableness, because the example is laid out in a ready-made form after analysis. In reality, the chain was several tens of intermediate inferences spread over tens of thousands of words. The complete graphical diagram with all the trajectories of my opponents' thoughts was rather confusing, but still, in it, in the end, many chains ended up in loops. I'm not even talking about the fact that in a number of cases the logic was violated altogether. All cycles were the same, but their length was different.

Now I will show in a little more detail how the above closure about unreasonableness developed, so that you understand that even this SIMPLE example is monstrously difficult for most people. Characters: human A - a sectarian, and a man B - was in a sect, but "saw the light" and is already leaving.

Person A took the position that it is impossible to form an opinion about another person according to the stories of other people, because people for the most part are unreasonable and will carry all sorts of nonsense to a much more developed person Bwhose logic is not understood. The position itself, in general, is correct (that “it is impossible to form an opinion” in this way), although its justification (“because people are unreasonable and will talk nonsense”) is almost entirely false. Person A considered a person B smart, decent, in a sense wise, albeit difficult in many ways. He defended him from criticism from the "unreasonable inhabitants" by saying precisely that it is very difficult for them, unreasonable, to understand a smarter person B right. Then A and B had a fight, and quite naturally A began to count B common man, proving it as follows: "I have heard so much about you from other people that this is enough for me to understand that you are an unreasonable man in the street." So, if earlier the opinion of others about B was untenable for A, then, after a quarrel, it became decisive for A in determining his personal opinion about B … Also, different points in behavior were used Bfor which A I didn’t pay attention before. He remembered everything that discredits B, although he had not done this before and considered such memories a sign of unreasonableness. And rightly so, because people change … and even before, generally speaking, everyone was pissing in their pants.

Now we need to supplement this picture with information about A … This man belonged to the sect of reasonably thinking people, and he passed any conclusions he made through a filter called "all the rest are unreasonable, and only we are reasonable." Binary logic: if something goes wrong, as it seems to him to be right, then the reason is unreasonable, and if on the contrary, then it is reasonable. This logic closes in on itself in the following way: from the whole variety of reasons for any phenomenon, two are selected, which are arbitrarily rationalized by a set of suitable indirect signs (either rationality or unreasonableness). Among the whole variety of signs, only those are selected that fall under the option selected in advance within the framework of the doctrine. Further, all other elements of the phenomenon are adjusted to the chosen option, and on the basis of this statistics, it is finally proved that it was chosen from the very beginning. Now I show how it was further in our example.

So when A and B were friends, only signs of good behavior were chosen B and justifying this behavior through rationality. Other opinions that came from outside were ignored, condemned or rejected. When A and B had a fight, the same logic made A to choose only negative signs, and even violating their own logic, in which it was previously believed that the opinion of others does not make sense, but now it has begun to make this sense. And the worst thing is that A violates his own logic by the fact that ITSELF, being unreasonable by its own characteristics, forms an opinion about a person, while ITSELF recently said that it is impossible for unreasonable people to do this. But the trouble is that the teaching cannot allow its bearer to be unreasonable, it is reasonable (or tends to do so) a priori, by default. And if so, then ANY behavior of a reasonable person is justified by the very fact of rationality. Person A by his ambivalence, he showed that, by his own definition, he was unreasonable, and immediately did what, according to his own words, unreasonable people cannot do: formed an opinion about B by a set of external signs, shifting to B their own logical mistakes. Why? Because the doctrine does not allow any other approach: any wrong things should be passed on to the layman, and the right ones should be ascribed to themselves. So the logic A closed on himself, and this contradiction became for him additional evidence of the unreasonableness B … And here a second circle appears, which also closes in on itself: well, once B is unreasonable, it is not surprising that he shows signs of unreasonableness, and therefore ALL OTHER of his actions must be explained through unreasonableness. And since all his other actions occur due to unreasonableness, then they are additional evidence of unreasonableness B … The closure has taken place: unreasonableness B proved by the fact that his actions are unreasonable, and they are unreasonable because he so decided A based on the opinions of other people about B, which in itself is a false logical conclusion, but the truth of this conclusion for A is explained by the fact that he now already sees in B only unreasonableness, and then the number of these examples of unreasonableness "proves" unreasonableness B … Remember, when Dmitry Karamazov, who was innocent in the plot, was tried, the accusations against him individually had zero significance and turned out to be untenable, but their number and combination of amazing coincidences convinced the jury of Dmitry's guilt. Here the same thing: examples of "unreasonableness" were not such, they were simply considered so, and then overwhelmed with numbers and coincidences. In the end, they started with the fact that B unreasonable, because it does not understand the basic principles of a reasonable approach (the conclusion was made simply from the flashlight on the basis of "coincidences" and "evidence"), and then it was said that since there are so many examples of unreasonableness, then B too dumb to understand what he is being told about, that is, he is fundamentally unable to understand the principles of a reasonable approach (in the interpretation of these principles by sectarians)

See how difficult it is? But after a detailed analysis, we see an ordinary closed-off situation, which even a child does not raise questions about: Human A accused B in unreasonableness on the basis of some indirect signs (in general, it does not matter what signs they are, but in our example it was the opinion of the townsfolk about B). Next ALL actions B are considered ONLY from the position of unreasonableness, without trying to understand their real meaning from other positions (the doctrine forces us to think ONLY this way, without going beyond), then these actions, which are called unreasonable, become proof of complete and final unreasonableness B (teaching forces to interpret the actions of unreasonable people only in this way). Now unreasonableness B proved definitively and it can be smoked for it. This is the CLASSIC closure of the logic of ANY sectarian of ANY sect you can ever find. Any, even the longest (hundreds or thousands of elements) chains of inferences WILL have the same property: a person's thought is formed, moves and closes in on itself, remaining within the framework of the teaching at all these stages.

So, once again the same logic, but in a more general form, without being tied to a specific sect: A proved that B possesses the sign X in the following way. And arbitrarily attributed B sign X … Simply because the doctrine so demanded - it requires all those who are unwanted to endow this sign if there is even the slightest hint of it (and the "eye of faith" allows you to ALWAYS see any hint from any person). Then ALL actions B are explained through the sign X (this is what the teaching required). When there were enough such explanations, they all formed the basis of the final convincing proof that B - full X … This is analogous to calling white red, then, seeing white everywhere, say that it is red, and then, when there are 10-20 such “red” objects, say: “you see, I showed you 10-20 red objects that you mistakenly considered white, so many mistakes on your part cannot be accidental, you just do not know the colors, which means I’m right - they are red, and this color is red”(pointing to white).

You see how complicated everything is. And I repeat that this was the simplest example in my arsenal. More complex ones will require at least fifty pages of explanations, because the chains are several tens of inferences spread out over YEARS of communication, when the interlocutor forgot the beginning of his reasoning, and I still remembered them. The last closure that I had to disassemble has a length of about 7 years. Which of the readers can do it? None of those who did not do this on purpose. And I grew up on this, all my life since childhood I only did what I caught adults on contradictions of this type, getting good pi..duli. By the way, I also remembered them perfectly and after years I remembered in detail …

In the example with A and Byou guessed it, in reality B - it was me. Some of those opinions that A collected about me as evidence of my unreasonableness - these were MY own rumors about me, which I myself spread in a certain environment. This was done in order to limit the much harsher truth of life and distract people's attention from it, but it was also just interesting when and how these rumors would come back to me (Oh! I was surprised at the fantasies of people who, when retelling, added something to stories then your own). Person A I ate these tales as if they were objective assessments of my personality.

Well, this is so, simply, by the way. Over man A (as well as on many of my other "students") before that provocation number 4 was perpetrated (Example 4 from the list). Then, in the course of a large-scale provocation number 3, I managed to get rid of the whole gang of sectarians, of which I was once a part, and myself. I hope I don’t have to do this kind of thing again, I don’t want it anymore. This is a mock demonism, which, after minutes of triumph, plunges into months of devastation, turning into a desire to take on the sacrifice harder, and then even stronger. So in the end you start to eat yourself up, because you simply do not come across stronger rivals.

The attentive reader will, of course, easily understand why I wrote the last paragraph. It reflects a rather complex situation of closure, which can only not be realized by everyone. The fact is that a “demon” of this type, which I considered myself to be, can never lose, because even his own defeat in something WILL be interpreted as a victory, having gathered in a heap only elements of the circumstances of defeat convenient for himself. That is why it does not matter here whether you won or lost, you will always think that you won, and then you will start eating yourself, because real internal contradictions remain like the larvae of flies, which she deposited in the still living, but already rotting demon meat. The logic of any demon is closed on a limited teaching, which he himself created and within the framework of this teaching he ALWAYS wins, even when he loses. This means that any demon is a sectarian by default. No exceptions: ANY. Think about it, dear reader, before the flies begin to hatch from the larvae in your body.

This process can be stopped, and in the next part I will tell you how you can leave the sect easily and quickly, even when it is impossible to do it for the reasons that the very logic of the teaching does not make it possible to see your own boundaries.

Continuation.