Notes on Ideological Abuse in EA: Some Terminology

Why I don't talk about cults

So I’m going to write an intermittent series of blog posts about ideological abuse in effective altruism, and I’m going to start by talking about my terminology.

I’m not any sort of expert in ideological abuse. To the extent I have knowledge, it’s because I find the topic fascinating, and so have spent many hundreds of hours in obsessive reading, podcast listening, and annoying all of my friends who have participated in ideologically abusive communities with endless and insensitive questions. (Sorry, guys, and I appreciate your tolerance.)

Ideological Abuse

Ideological abuse is a term I took from the excellent ex-Catholic blogger Melinda Selmys, whose writing on toxic communities I recommend highly. She uses it to refer to something completely different than what I’m using it for—sorry, Ms. Selmys, but I hope you can understand my appropriation of the term.

I’m using “ideological abuse” as an alternative to two commonly used terms, “cult” and “spiritual abuse.” The reason I’m not using “spiritual abuse” is obvious: I’m most interested in preventing abuse within effective altruist communities, since I’m an effective altruist myself, and effective altruism is not a spiritual movement. While I’m drawing a lot on the writings of anti-spiritual-abuse advocates in my thought, I think using the term “spiritual abuse” itself is likely to be more confusing than helpful.

I’m not using the word “cult” because as far as I can tell whenever anyone says the word “cult” their brains turn off.

An extraordinarily annoying and common problem is when someone takes a group they don’t like, compares them to some list of cult red flags, and accuses them of being a cult. I’m going to use this article about trans people as an example because I happened to find it recently, but there is no shortage of cult accusations directed at anti-trans people, Democrats, Republicans, Libertarians, the woke, the anti-woke, literally every possibly religious group, people who like certain kinds of exercise, and people who have different opinions than you about fictional characters kissing.

You may agree or disagree with the claims of the current trans advocacy movement; you might even be gender critical or anti-trans. Certainly, the trans advocacy movement has certain problematic traits. But I think it is quite obvious that both the trans advocacy movement and the gender-critical movement are a different sort of thing than the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints or Scientology. They’re loosely affiliated groups with no official leaders and internal disagreement; there is no Church of Trans you are expected to go to every week, no Gender-Critical Sea Org you can sign up for with your billion-year contract. It’s missing the basic infrastructure.

Nevertheless, many people do claim that such movements “are cults,” and we can see in the linked essay how this poor analysis works. There are two main strategies. First, the author takes genuine tactics of ideological abuse and then badly mutilates things the movement is doing to fit. Sleep deprivation is bad, but staying up late because you’re Extremely Online is not the same thing as forced sleep deprivation in a cult compound. Isolating people from all their friends and family is bad, but telling people it is morally mandatory for them to stop talking to their racist Uncle Joe is not the same thing as requiring them to stop talking to all their loved ones.

As it happens, I think both staying up late on Twitter and requiring people to cut off their racist uncles are bad, but neither is a kind of ideological abuse. You can choose at any time to go to bed, and no one will stop you; in fact, your friends will probably encourage you to go to sleep. And the vast majority of people have many loved ones who are not Racist Uncle Joe and also are not particularly involved in social justice or politics at all, so this instruction doesn’t at all make people dependent on the trans rights movement for all their socialization.

Second, the author takes things that most groups do and presents them as uniquely awful. Most groups believe that science justifies their claims; most groups believe that they’re on the right side of history; most groups use words that other people don’t use; most groups have at least some members with a black-and-white view of people the group is opposed to; in the age of Twitter, most groups have an issue with mobbing, callout culture, and eating their own. I’m not saying these things are necessarily good! I, for one, am opposed to having a black-and-white view of people you disagree with. But the temptation to do so is the human condition. To equate it with being a cult erases the useful distinction between an ordinary political movement and Scientology.

Now, it’s reasonable to worry that people will treat “ideological abuse” the same way, and I am concerned about that. But I think that these problems are inherent to the cult framing, in part because of the origins of the anti-cult movement. The anti-cult movement began as a movement of Christian evangelicals to oppose new religions that they considered heretical; the secular anti-cult movement arose later. In part because of its origins, the anti-cult movement has historically tended not to distinguish between harmless weirdos and organizations which are genuinely harmful. They’ve also tended to ignore harmful tendencies in evangelical Christianity; this is part of the reason that the (in my opinion more helpful) concept of “spiritual abuse” arose from people who lived in abusive evangelical communities.

For this reason, I’m hoping that “ideological abuse” will help my readers think more clearly about the concept.

High-Commitment Communities

I don’t know a term in the literature for this, so I’m coining my own. “High-commitment communities” are communities that demand an unusual amount from their members (in terms of time, energy, money, etc) and tend to affect many aspects of their members’ lives (diet, sexual choices, hobbies, finances, career choice, etc). Members of high-commitment communities often socialize within the community, consume media popular among members of the community, and may do work or volunteering within the community. Many political ideologies and religions are high-commitment; so is effective altruism.

Of course, high-commitment is a spectrum. Catholicism is high-commitment (assuming you’re serious about it), but being a monk or nun is much higher commitment.

You can argue that high-commitment communities are bad, and many people do. But I think it’s worth conceptually distinguishing them from ideologically abusive communities or “cults.” In fact, the conflation of abusive communities and high-commitment communities is one of my problems with the concept of “cult.” The mere fact that a community is asking a lot from its members doesn’t necessarily mean it’s abusing them.

There are two primary good things about high-commitment communities. First, many people like them. There’s a built-in friend group, a sense of purpose and meaning, something to do with your time other than binging Netflix. Easter/Christmas Christians don’t tend to drown you in casseroles after your spouse dies.

Second, it’s very hard to get anything accomplished without one. All activist movements—from abolitionism to feminism to LGBT rights to unionism to libertarianism to civil rights—run on a core of dedicated people putting an unreasonable amount of energy into the movement, making weird choices in their personal lives, and disproportionately socializing with equally dedicated people. (Social conservativism is sort of cheating by running on people in high-commitment religious communities.) Of course they are. Freeing the slaves requires more than a few professionals putting in a forty-hour work week. If you believe weird things like “it is bad to own people” you will make weird decisions like not eating sugar. And you want to talk to other people who get it.

Of course, there are also a lot of risks of high-commitment communities. The Easter/Christmas Christian might get fewer casseroles, but it’s also much more difficult to ideologically abuse them. A high-commitment community mistaken about facts can cause great harm to its members and others. I’m going to talk about the risks later in the series. But I think it’s important to make the distinction clear.