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Notes -
My mental model of a cult is just "religion, but less popular," so I probably have a lot to learn about how cults work, but this comment and the one to which you are responding made me think about how cults and religions have to adapt to new environments. With respect to the information environment, obviously the 21st century is vastly different from - and more liberal than - anything that came before, which means information control is very difficult and thus will have to look very different from cults in the past in order to achieve similar things. The stuff you point to seem like decent analogues to past censorious technologies; they can't outright control what you have access to, so they manipulate which sources that you actually choose to access.
And this connects to my own observation from about a decade ago when I began to recognize the social justice movement of which I had been a part as a modern incarnation of religion. In this modern world of science, the traditional notions of faith are much more difficult to keep popular, and so religions that rely on that suffer, and religions that find other ways to get people to believe things prosper. The beauty of social justice (aka Critical Race Theory, aka "wokeness," aka "it's just basic human decency," aka "empathy") is that it allows people to enjoy all the beliefs of faith while eschewing most of the leap that's usually required. You still have to leap, but now you have a whole structure built to reassure you that this leap is totally justified because of historical reasons and very smart scholars who have done the Work and published in their peer reviewed journals to prove that simply listening and believing (the Right People) is the correct way. So if you're (like me at the time - whether that has changed now is something I honestly couldn't answer) someone who thinks of himself as non-religious and, in fact, better than those deluded religious people who cling to their faith, this is the perfect religion to latch onto.
However, I've also heard people call social justice a cult, and I would agree with that to the extent that a cult is just a less popular religion. But I also recognize that a cult is often more than just that, because being less popular comes with it many of its own complications, such as the whole recruitment process that can require much more brainwashing and thus much more control than a typical religion. I wonder what other cult-specific patterns we will see 21st century versions of, which route around the additional difficulties of the new environment. Obviously cutting one off from one's friends and family is a big one, but that seems to be just following the standard playbook as best as I can tell.
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