Identifying healthy high-demand groups

[Previously: Why join high-demand groups?]

[I have freelanced for a number of effective altruist organizations, such as the Centre for Effective Altruism and 80,000 Hours. I don’t speak for any of my clients, past or present, and they didn’t look at this post.]

Abuses in the Religious Life and the Path to Healing is a book about spiritual abuse by Dysmas de Lassus, the prior general of the Order of Carthusians. The prior general is the person in charge of a Catholic religious order.

Catholic monks and nuns (the general term is “religious”) inherently give up a lot of control over their lives to the order. The order decides where they live, what they do, whom they spend time with, how they dress, and what they eat. Religious take vows of obedience: they are required to do whatever the abbot says, as long as it isn’t actively sinful. The Carthusians in particular live in isolation from the world, in solitude and silence, to spend their time contemplating God.

And yet some religious are happy, thriving people who live meaningful lives that make the world better; other religious destroy themselves in the service of (at best) an unattainable ideal or (at worst) an evil rapist grifter. The task of Abuses in the Religious Life is to help people predict which orders produce which.

I am in a high-demand group: effective altruists. Effective altruism has a say in my career choices, my spending, my diet, my discourse norms, and even whether I’m a kind and friendly person. I think that me being an effective altruist not only leaves the caged chickens and poor African children better off, it also makes me happier.

But I—like any reasonable person—feel somewhat leery about being part of a high-demand group. How do I continue to have my friends hold me to high standards of behavior, without creating dynamics that destroy our lives and the good we planned to do in the world?

Healthy High-Demand Groups

Before we talk about toxic high-demand groups, I think we should talk about what high-demand groups look like when they’re healthy.

One thing you might think is a good sign, but actually isn’t, is that people are good. There is no general pattern where people in healthy high-demand communities are, compared to people in toxic high-demand communities, more hardworking, generous, loving, self-controlled, courageous, honest, tolerant, clever, helpful, cheerful, or even compassionate (to outsiders).

Toxic high-demand communities often create a culture of competition to be the most ethical. Each person strives to be more generous, uncomplaining, and self-sacrificial than the next. So a toxic high-demand community can have more virtuous members and a greater positive impact on the world than a good high-demand community (at least until its members burn out and its disconnection from reality makes its projects collapse in failures easily predictable by a smart fourteen-year-old).

At the same time, toxic high-demand communities generally pervert genuine virtues (or at least traits considered virtues in the broader community’s cultural context). For Catholics, humility becomes self-hatred; the desire to give of yourself to others becomes complete self-denial; forgiveness becomes forgetting the crimes of unrepentant abusers. For rationalists and effective altruists, consequentialism becomes tolerance of wrongdoing because of some far-off future benefit; agency and taking ideas seriously become hearing a bad argument and doing arbitrary bad stuff because of it; cultivating the art of rationality becomes tense twelve-hour conversations about the deeper psychological implications of you eating the last slice of cake. The members of a toxic Catholic community may well come off as humble, self-sacrificing, and forgiving; the members of a toxic effective altruist community, consequentialist, agentic, and dedicated to self-improvement.

Issendai once wisely said, “people rarely get stuck because of their vices. They’re usually caught by their virtues.” Loyalty, patience, hope, forgiveness... these are admirable qualities, and you are right to admire them. But the members of a toxic high-demand group may well be more patient, loyal, hopeful, and forgiving than average. That’s what’s keeping them there.

So what virtues do you actually expect to see in a healthy high-demand community?

A healthy high-demand community is patient with its members. It doesn’t expect perfection immediately. It doesn’t hold people to unreasonable standards. It accepts that mistakes and failures are part of the human condition.

Relatedly, people in a healthy high-demand community freely admit to getting things wrong and to having flaws. In particular, though de Lassus doesn’t mention this, I’d say that they admit mistakes that aren’t the equivalent of a Soviet criticizing the USSR by saying “You know, people just don’t respect Comrade Stalin enough. There isn’t enough Stalinism in this country! I say we need two Stalins! No, fifty Stalins!” Member admit to errors of judgment, silly goofs, and boring practical mistakes; they don’t just admit to being slow to see the wisdom of our Fearless Leader and our Sacred Doctrine.

Any community has high-status people. Obviously, many groups—from a military unit to your local board-game night—have official leadership; in Catholic religious life, these people are called “superiors.” But even decentralized groups have people whom everyone respects, whose beliefs and wishes are taken seriously, and who have more say in what the group does. In the effective altruist community, high-status people include local group organizers, prominent bloggers and researchers, and the leadership of organizations like 80,000 Hours and Coefficient Giving.

One of the most important green flags in a high-demand community is the personality of the high-status people. High-status people should readily admit that they make mistakes, believe wrong things, and have personality flaws. A culture of admitting mistakes is no good, and may even be harmful, if high-status people are exempt.

High-status people should be aware of the suffering of those around them, particularly suffering that’s related to the beliefs and commandments of the high-demand group. If possible, high-status people should do something to alleviate the suffering of group members; if not possible, they should provide comfort and understanding. Most of all, high-status people should be genuinely kind. Not righteous, not self-sacrificing, not heroic, not good. Kind.

In some rare cases, a community has legitimate goals that are served by some high-status people not being kind: for example, a teacher of a particular skill might be harsh and strict but fair. But these situations should be narrowly circumscribed (e.g. one class, not someone’s entire life) and for a particular purpose. In general, the unkind high-status person should have a boss whose job is to monitor the situation, and who is herself a kind person.

Now, no high-demand community is exclusively lead by saints. Everyone sometimes stubbornly refuses to admit fault, ignores suffering they could easily help with, and generally acts like a jerk. What to look for is that high-status people, overall, as a general rule, tend to be kind, helpful, and humble.

Equally important is that the high-demand community doesn’t want you to be dependent on its high-status members. When determining this, you should consider both the overall culture and the preferences of individual high-status people.

Any high-demand community is going to make a lot of rules about how you live your life—it’s inherent to the enterprise—but a healthy high-demand community limits its rules to those matters which are really important (either because of the ideology of the group or because, say, people are living together and have to have some specific quiet hours). As much as is practicable, a good high-demand community allows you to make your own judgments about how to put rules into practice in your own life. For example, a high-demand community might say that you should stop eating animal products, but people don’t question it if you say you have to eat animal products for health reasons, and the community leaves it up to you whether you’d rather have lentils or Impossible beef for your protein.

In particular, the community and the high-status people should encourage you to take independent initiative—whether that means planting a cabbage garden at the monastery or doing an independent research project as an effective altruist. High-status people should praise you for coming up with your own ideas and projects. They should provide help, especially help that isn’t too costly for them (such as making introductions or publicly announcing your project at a meeting). This isn’t to say that high-demand groups have to endorse projects that are obviously ill-advised. But as a general rule the community should be supportive of new initiatives that aren’t completely controlled by people who are currently high-status.

The community should be rooting for you to outshine the high-status people. Regardless of what the community values—artistic achievement, real-world success, morality, fame, positive impact on the lives of others—it should be clear that it is good, cool, and desirable for you to do better than the people who are currently high-status. A healthy high-demand community doesn’t tear down people who might displace the current elite.

The simplest criterion de Lassus lays out is the most powerful: are you happy?

No one can promise you a life without suffering. Being part of a high-demand group may well make you suffer more. Caring for the sick in Brazil’s favelas is not exactly a barrel of laughs; neither is devoting your life to convincing busy policymakers that it might possibly be a bad idea to drive humanity extinct. But ultimately, most of the time, if you’re part of a healthy high-demand group, you should feel a sense of peace and joy. You should reflect on your life, or at least those parts influenced by the high-demand group, and think you know, I’m glad I’m doing this. When it comes right down to it, I like the way my life is going.

Toxic groups are aware that people prefer to stay in groups that make them happy, so they Goodhart it. Often, a group will teach that not being happy is a sin, or that crying yourself to sleep is real joy, a deep and pure kind of joy that the uninitiated would mistake for misery. But, even if the group is gaslighting you, you can still tell how you feel. Take a few hours by yourself or with a trusted friend and reflect: how do I feel about my life? Is my life okay? Do I feel simple pleasures, such as appreciation of a sunrise or companionship with friends or satisfaction at a job well done? If I look back on the past year or two, do I feel a sense of contentment about how it went?

If you are persistently unhappy, the high-demand group may be toxic or it might be all right. But it is clearly wrong for you.

Suffering is, though sometimes necessary, always bad. You will never win a medal for Excellence in Suffering; you will never get a parade to celebrate how skillfully you endured other people hurting you. You only have one life and it is all too short and you deserve not to waste it tense and exhausted and always on edge awaiting the next tongue-lashing or the next disaster. You deserve pleasure and friendship and rest, and you can have these things and make the world better, and anyone who tells you otherwise is mistaken or lying.