Why join high demand groups?

I feel alienated by most advice about how to avoid ideologically abusive/spiritually abusive/cultic groups, because it assumes that there’s no cost to a false positive. The advice-givers assume that you don’t want to nonabusively listen to the Grand High Poobah tell you that green onions cleanse your sacral chakra.

But in fact not all high-demand groups—groups which ask a lot from their members— are harmful. I think it’s possible to rationally decide that you want to join a high-demand group. I myself am part of a relatively high-demand group (effective altruists). So I thought I’d write a bit about why someone might want to do this thing.

How much a group demands of you is a spectrum, obviously. The Mormons are higher-demand than the Unitarian Universalists, but lower-demand than Sea Org. You even get a spectrum of levels of demand within a specific group: vaguely identifying as Catholic is lower-demand than attending church once a week, which is lower-demand than not masturbating or using birth control, which is lower-demand than joining a monastery. In this post, I will be ignoring this nuance and writing about “high-demand” groups as if they are a single unified entity. In reality, there’s probably an optimal level of demand that gets you the benefits while minimizing the risks; I don’t recommend joining Sea Org.

So why would someone join a high-demand group?

First, those of us who are mystically inclined probably want to join a high-demand group. I think it’s very difficult to make progress in a mystical path without some guidance. I know solitary pagans, people who meditate occasionally without connecting to a larger meditation community, etc. exist. But I think that doing a serious mystical practice entirely by yourself is unwise. You need more experienced people! They can advise you if something goes pear-shaped. They can help you figure out what is transient badness and what is a sign of a deeper problem. They can teach you to deepen and strengthen your practice. And they can ground you in something vaguely approximating consensus reality.

Communities of mystics tend to be higher-demand than communities of people in other hobbies, like poetry writing or ice skating. My guess is that this is because mystical paths tend to inform people’s views of morality, reality, the ultimate purpose of life, etc., while ice skating mostly informs your views on sensible ways to interact with frozen water. Naturally, the former pervasively affects what you should do throughout your entire life, while the latter mostly affects whether you are one of those barbaric people who go outside during winter instead of staying inside sipping hot chocolate.

Second, high-demand groups tend to produce thicker communities: communities where people spend lots of time together, support you if you get sick or lose your job or have a new baby, and generally watch out for each other.

Mormons, Orthodox Jews, and traditional Catholics have thicker communities than mainline Protestants, Reform Jews, and liberal Catholics. Evangelical Christian communities tend to be thicker to the extent that they demand more of you, and less thick to the extent that they demand nothing but donating to buy the pastor a new car.

I basically agree with the analysis of the economist of religion Lee Iannaconne. Religions (and other communities) face a free-rider problem. It’s very easy to get the benefits of a community without contributing to that community: to get canned food and free diapers when you’re in need but disappear as soon as your life has improved, to get counseling from the pastor without making the donations that pay her salary, or even just to eat at the church potluck without bringing funeral potatoes or strawberry pretzel salad yourself. Communities are also made of a bunch of activities where the benefits mostly accrue to other people: welcoming new people, hosting dinner parties or board game nights or book groups, singing in choir.

High-demand religions are thicker for several reasons. First, a lot of people don’t want to pay the cost in the first place. Even if the canned food and free diapers don’t have a cost in money, they have a cost in having to quit caffeine or stop eating pork or wear funny outfits. So people you help are more likely to be sincere members.

Second, costs tend to make religious activities easier and alternate activities more expensive. If you’re Mormon, you’re required to do all sorts of church activities. If you keep kosher, it’s much harder to eat with people who aren’t Jewish. If you wear a funny outfit, people might distance themselves from you or even make fun of you. So the costs push people to invest more in their religious community, rather than in other communities.

Third, the above two factors mean that people get more returns when they invest in their community. They expect that other people in their community will be carrying their weight regarding hosting social events, welcoming new people, singing loudly during services, bringing canned food and diapers, making donations, and preparing horrifying Midwestern salad abominations. So the community winds up in a virtuous cycle where everyone both provides and benefits from a high level of the goods of the community.

Fourth—Iannaconne doesn't talk about this but I think it's true—people can behave in ways that mean they need more help. For example, they might fail to look for a job, have children without having a plan for making sure those children are taken care of, or become addicted to heroin. If the people around you don't care if you're evicted, your children are neglected, or you overdose, they'll shrug off your bad choices. But if they feel an obligation to help you, they'll try to make sure you don't need help. Any community that lets its members make arbitrary bad choices will be so overrun with needy people that it won't be able to help anyone. (This is a surprisingly common way for communes to fail.) If a community member will let you sleep on their couch indefinitely if you need it, they're going to be pissed at you if you recklessly take actions that mean you might need it.

I don’t mean to say that communities are all good. Communities can certainly have toxic interpersonal dynamics and repressive social norms, not to mention a bizarre propensity to cover up child sexual abuse. But if you want a community, you’re more likely to get what you want from a community that makes demands on you.

Third, sometimes you want to, like, accomplish things in the world?

I want to behave better than the average American. I want to donate 10% of my income to charity; I want to be lacto vegetarian; I want to relentlessly pursue the truth and change my mind in the face of new evidence; I want to have high ambitions at my demanding job. I could, I guess, hope that I could do this all through personal virtue and force of will, but I am actually kind of a schlubby and mediocre person.

So instead I have friends who are also trying to behave better than the average American. This makes my high standards easier in a bunch of ways:

• My social environment is set up to make good behavior easy:

  • Meals by default have a solid lacto vegetarian option, so I don’t have to go hungry to avoid eating meat or eggs.

• The social incentives aren’t perversely misaligned:

  • When I change my mind, people respect me instead of looking down on me for not having the courage of my convictions.

  • When I’m ambitious, people encourage me instead of tearing me down because my ambition makes them feel bad.

• Other people model the kind of behavior I want to have:

  • Observing a friend’s work habits taught me the important principle, “if you are ever doing something you like less than working, you can just skip it and work more.”

  • Probably most people I know are Giving What We Can pledgers.

• When I lack self-awareness in important ways, people point it out:

  • People tell me that I’m unusually talented at writing and it isn’t unreasonable to be a freelance writer.

  • People point out to me bluntly when I’m being a dick, instead of gossiping about it behind my back and never letting me know.

• When I behave well, people approve of me:

  • In my fiction writers’ groups, people talk about how their friends think their writing is at best a charming hobby and at worst a waste of time, and I have to be awkwardly silent because everyone I know is 100% behind my fiction-writing career.

  • When I’ve done something hard, I can demand praise from people around me for my noble self-sacrifice.

• When I behave badly, my friends are disappointed in me:

  • I am regularly told that I am bad at marketing myself and I would earn more money if I marketed more.

  • One time I had to get myself to do something important I was having a panic attack about, so I told my most intimidating friend that he should be disappointed in me if I didn’t do it, and the panic attack about disappointing my most intimidating friend compensated for the other panic attack and I did the important thing.

    • This is a pro-level mental illness strat and I don’t recommend it to people inexperienced in having panic attacks.

All of these make me more effective at achieving my goals.

But look at the last three items. My friends expect a lot from me. Another way of putting it is that my “community” makes a “high” level of “demands.”

I behave according to high standards I endorse because my community expects those high standards of me. I would behave way worse according to my own standards if my community were like “eh, whatever.” As it happens, I’ve chosen a community with standards I agree with; I would have a lot more complaints if my community were trying to hold me to standards I think are stupid.

It is very, very hard to be an exceptionally good person without a community around you trying to push you to be an exceptionally good person. The protagonists of cowboy and Clint Eastwood movies can be heroic loners accountable to no one but themselves; most people need to know that the people around them are holding them to high standards. And holding people to high standards is kinda what a high-demand community is.