Ideological Abuse, Busyness, and the Importance of Rest

ONE WEIRD TRICK to protect yourself against cults

I.

I have a special interest in ideologically abusive communities.¹

My Kindle burgeons with memoirs about abusive communities.² I drag my feet about most movies, but eagerly watch anything with a title like Breaking the Silence: Unveiling the Secrets of the Christian Church of Krishna-Buddha.³ I keep having to remind myself that child sexual abuse coverups are not a suitable topic for parties.

People come up with all kinds of theories about why people stay in abusive communities: brainwashing, mind control, spooky master manipulator abilities, whatever Steven Hassan is going on about these days. But most cults are boring. If you read about the experiences of members of abusive communities, you’ll discover that about 90% of the reason people who can leave⁴ stay in abusive communities comes down to five things:

• An important mission that might fail if you leave.

• Sleep deprivation, hunger, and deprivation of other physical needs.

• More work than any person could reasonably do.

• Complete isolation from people outside the community.

• Punishment for leaving: shunning, losing child custody, lawsuits, harassment by private investigators, torture in Hell.

It’s pretty obvious why having an important mission and being threatened with punishment for leaving would make people reluctant to leave. Complete isolation has several effects: it shifts the Overton window in the direction of the cult; it deprives the victim of the opportunity to get an outside view on whether she’s being mistreated; the victim has no one who will put her up or buy her groceries or help her adjust to life outside the community; sometimes, especially if someone grew up in an abusive community, the entire outside world is unfamiliar and frightening.

But the factors I find particularly interesting are busyness and deprivation of needs. What these two have in common is that they keep you from thinking.

Thought is the enemy of ideologically abusive communities. If you have a moment to catch your breath, when you’re not so tired and hungry that your brain feels like sludge, you might realize that the leader keeps saying things that turn out to be false, that you are being treated cruelly and unfairly, that you are being cruel and unfair to others, and that for you to become wealthy off this multilevel marketing scheme everyone on the planet would have to be full-time selling essential oils. A stupid, evil belief system can only hide that it’s stupid and evil for so long. If you’d notice your community is stupid and evil if you had a clear-headed hour to think it through, the trick is to make sure you only ever have a sleep-deprived five minutes.

Busyness comes in many forms. Lengthy prayer or meditation sessions are popular. Some ideologically abusive communities have an actual schedule that fills up every moment of your day. Sometimes there’s no schedule, but you’re assigned so much work that you’re always behind. Sometimes the mission is so overwhelmingly important that it’s practically murder to ever take a break. Sometimes you have to do an impossible number of tasks to become wealthy, successful, physically or emotionally healthy, or happy; of course, if the promised wealth, success, health, or happiness never materalizes, it’s your fault for not doing the tasks properly. Abusive communities are particularly likely to trap women through making them have more children than they can handle; not only does this keep the women busy, it gives the abusive community leverage if the woman wants to leave.

Sometimes, abusive communities literally ask you to deprive yourself of food or sleep or comfort. But sometimes there’s plausible deniability. Busyness can lead to chronic sleep deprivation, if you’re always staying up late to get work done. Sometimes the community saves money by giving people inadequate living or working conditions. Sometimes people go hungry or don’t have a safe place to live because of the community’s unreasonable donation expectations. Children, too, can leave parents sleep-deprived and poor.

Many missions are genuinely important, but it is almost never the case that only one community is making real progress towards any given goal;⁵ avoid communities that claim otherwise. It’s common and normal to draw most of your friends from a particular community, but avoid any community that puts significant burdens in the way of you having relationships with outsiders; run away and don’t look back if they tell you to not be friends with those outside the community. If you are ever threatened with any punishment for leaving more serious than “only feminists are invited to the feminist science fiction convention,” run away and don’t look back.

And if a community or institution wants to take away your rest and your ability to think, then it is scared of you having a clear-headed hour, and you need to think about why.⁶ A week or two of fasting (if your health allows) or limited sleep or extreme busyness is almost certainly fine. If you know what you’re getting into, have a goal that can only be reached a particular way, and have friends who can tell you when to get out, it’s all right to be unreasonably busy and tired for a known and limited period of time.⁷ But indefinite busyness, indefinite hunger, indefinite tiredness—run.

Every effective altruist has to have a take about how the FTX fraud was caused by something they hated anyway. Here’s mine. If FTX employees had some quiet time to think through what they were doing, they would realize that there was obviously no way replacing their insurance fund with a random number generator would end well for them. But they didn’t, because the culture valorized obsessive work, because putting in long hours made you high-status, because they thought every break lost them millions of dollars and so cost thousands of lives. Don’t be FTX. Rest.

II.

So. In the past year, I’ve become a Quaker. Embarrassing thing to have happen if you’re an atheist.

In the Anglosphere, most Quaker Meetings for Worship (i.e. Quaker church services) are unprogrammed. To the uninitiated, unprogrammed Meetings seem more like meditation sessions. Everyone enters a room at a particular time and sits in silence. Occasionally, someone will stand up and speak extemperaneously for a few minutes about some spiritual or ethical topic (a “vocal ministry”). After an hour, everyone stands up and goes to get coffee.

Quakers have written a lot of guides to getting the most out of Meeting.⁸ But the basic activity is simple. You steady and quiet your mind however works for you: a prayer, a mantra, watching your breath, paying mindful attention to your physical experience. Eventually, you find the Inner Light: from a religious perspective, God; from a secular perspective, the wise, compassionate part of you, the part of you that comes out if you set a timer and spend five minutes by the clock actually trying to solve your problem. And then by magic things are better.

I’m mad about how much “sit quietly not doing anything for an hour every week” makes my life better. I’m so mad about it that I know exactly how much it makes my life better, because I keep not going and then I’m miserable and grouchy and unproductive all week, and then I unhappily drag myself to Do The Sit and suddenly all my problems are solvable and I’m taking pleasure in the simple joys of the world. I hate it.⁹

Sometimes, especially if I have been regularly doing my Weekly Sit And Be Quiet and thus cleared out the backlog, I just rest in the Inner Light: I feel replenished and restored by the experience of imagining wise, compassionate, loving me. But very often, thirty minutes in, I notice something about my life that’s completely obvious, and yet that I’d missed for weeks or months:

• “I can stop doing a recreational activity I don’t like doing.”

• “That person keeps trying to hang out with me because they like me and want to spend time with me.”

• “If I want to improve my relationship with someone, a good first step is not being mean to them on purpose.”

• “It is possible to want something without all the woe and angst about how evil I am for wanting it.”

• “I’m really annoying when I try to appease people, and they’d be much happier if I cut it out.”

• “It is necessary to promote my writing if I want people to read it. Self-promotion benefits people who have never heard of my writing but would like it if they tried it.”¹⁰

• “If I want to write more, I need to write more.”¹¹

None of these are exactly unprecedented genius insights. But I’ve found that, if I don’t give myself some time and space and quiet to think of the obvious, I won’t.

Quaker Meetings are a microcosm of one of the things Quakers care about most: simplicity. I’m not an expert on simplicity, which is a concept that many people much wiser than me have studied and written about for centuries. But as I understand it, simplicity is about avoiding too much so you can focus on what matters. Spend less money, so you have money to spare. Do fewer things, so you have time for what you need to do. Be silent, so that your words matter. Take your time, so you can be sure to do it right. Set yourself three goals for the day and do them well; don’t set sixteen that you half-ass and leave incomplete.

Cal Newport: a secret Quaker theologian?

Quakers have a striking track record of being right on moral issues before anyone else was: from equality of women to abolitionism, from civil rights to peace, from farmed animal welfare to price tags. I think simplicity in general and unprogrammed Meetings in specific are much of why. Good judgment comes from silence and rest and time to think. The same way I notice the obvious fact that being mean on purpose is a bad way to make friends, previous Quakers noticed the obvious facts that war causes unimaginable suffering… that women have understanding they can contribute… that slaves are people.

I don’t think everyone should become a Quaker. But I do think, if you’re trying to achieve great things or make the world better or even just be happy, you should build in times of quiet and nothing-to-do and rest. Go on a walk (and leave the phone at home). Learn to knit or bake or go rockclimbing (and don’t listen to a podcast while you do). Set aside one day a week when you don’t check work emails. Stare out more windows.

1. Everyone who reads this blog: Wow! We never would have guessed!

2. I stopped buying hard copies because I didn’t want to admit to people exactly how many ghostwritten FLDS memoirs I’ve read.

3. Not a real religion as far as I know.

4. Children, prisoners, and members of other vulnerable groups sometimes have the problem “you can’t leave because if you try to the government will drag you back,” which simplifies things tremendously for abusive communities.

5. Yes, this includes effective altruism. Anyone who tells you that only the effective altruist movement can deal with pressing world problems (a) is wrong and (b) does not have your best interests at heart.

6. A community or institution being scared is different from a person being scared. Some bad actors deliberately start abusive communities in order to take advantage of people. But there’s also a selective pressure for institutions and communities to have traits that make people stay, even if no one involved is deliberately trying to be exploitative. Some of the worst abusive communities are nothing but hundreds of miserable people hurting each other.

7. I am not suggesting you not become a junior banker or a medical resident.

8. In fact, if you look for introductory texts about Quakerism, they will mostly cover how to behave in Meeting for Worship and Meeting for Business, with a bit of ethics for flavor. This is confusing if you’re used to religions having theology.

9. I don’t know if a Weekly Sit by yourself would have the same positive effects. Most Quaker writings insist it doesn’t and the community is necessary. It’s a moot point for me because I know myself and I would definitely take my phone out fifteen minutes in if not for all the other people who might judge me.

10. Did you like my thoughts on abusive communities up there? Read my novella, Her Voice Is A Backwards Record! I have received many compliments on how sharply observed the troubled teen camp is.

11. My non-writer readers are going “what?” and my writer readers are cringing.