Bonum Certa Men Certa

Cults Projecting Their Own Behaviour

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Feb 06, 2024

Yellowstone, Wyoming Travel Poster

THE GNU/Linux operating system is rapidly growing in usage and cults try to reverse such trends or alter the operating system and its community (making it more corporate, controlled by the likes of IBM and Microsoft). So they conveniently spin or frame a bunch of programmers, who actually produce a lot of software, as a "cult".

One reader of ours wrote about the phenomenon as follows:

I suppose there might be cults that are mostly harmless.

But I'm sure there are cults built around monstering people.

Once cult targets, whether individuals or groups, are dehumanized, cult members feel entitled and even morally required to destroy them, to hurt them, to make them miserable, to wish them to die, to starve, to suffer.

Others who aren't part of their cult will often perceive their atrocities as truly monstrous.

By the cultists' own standards, anyone else who unilaterally perceives them as monsters should be entitled to dehumanize them, and to set out to commit atrocities against them.

But this would just turn yet another set of people into monsters, whether or not the cult targets were guilty!

Civilized justice doesn't work like that.

Even if suspects are most blatantly guilty, a justice officer shouldn't aim to justice them on the spot, but to bring them to trial.

Due process, presumption of innocence, detailed and individualized charges, trained and objective defense, standards of proof, impartial judging, proportionality, and regeneration rather than retribution as a goal are all key to promote civilized justice.

Monstering cults are not about promoting justice. They're not about finding truth, or even facts, but about finding the accused guilty, and finding ways to punish the cult targets. In their media and witch trials, any attempt at defense is further proof of guilt, if a defense is heard at all.

People are dragged into such cults by emotional manipulation.

Once they're in, they can't see it's a cult, and they can't get out.

As Carl Sagan put it, "One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we've been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We're no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It's simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we've been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back."

"Do your own justice" works just as poorly as "do your own research." Like science, justice is a social and collective endeavor. They have their processes for very good reasons. Taking shortcuts doesn't make for better justice any more than for better science, and their effects extend far beyond the perpetrator's own peril.

Given their shortcuts, when cult members find their target guilty, that brings no certainty on whether or not the target is indeed a monster. But setting out to justice the target on their own makes the cult members themselves monsters, without room for doubt.

If anything, cancellation cult monsters escalate injustice, and become no better, and often much worse, than their target truly is, in stark contrast with their self-image of moral superiority.

Consider this recent example wherein the FSF-EEE, accused of being like nazis, acted like nazis by trying to censor a critic by means of intimidation. German authorities ended up siding with the critic, a former FSF-EEE insider who did not like what he saw.

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