Why Do Smart People Do Terrible Things in Groups?
(And Why Aristotle Saw It Coming)
INTRO
My interview about OTO dropped last week.
Within less than 24 hours, two members showed up in the comments.
One showed up to criticize the bureaucratic process I followed when advocating for survivors of sexual abuse in the organization. The other one just called me mentally ill.
I want to talk about why those responses are actually a perfect demonstration of something Aristotle identified two and a half thousand years ago. Because once you see it, you can’t unsee it — and it shows up everywhere.
THE PARADOX
POP QUIZ:
Is it a red flag when a group attacks critics instead of engaging with their ideas?
Almost everyone says yes. People can explain why. They understand the principle.
So let me ask a follow-up: what does it mean when someone alleges an organization protects high-ranking sexual predators — and a person responds by criticizing the bureaucratic process followed when advocating for the survivors?
And what does it mean when someone else’s response to a former member speaking publicly is just: he’s mentally ill?
By the standard almost everyone already agrees on — that’s a red flag. A serious one.
But here’s what’s interesting. The people who do this would also agree with that standard — in the abstract. They’d tell you that ad hominem attacks are wrong. They’d tell you that attacking the person instead of the argument is a sign that something’s broken.
They just don’t apply it to themselves.
You see it in the justifications. “Yeah, but his vibe is wrong.” Or “Sure, but she didn’t need to do it the way she did.” One of my personal favorites, from my time inside: “I would consider his argument, but he threw some bumper stickers I didn’t like on a table in 2010.”
They know the rule. They can articulate it. They just fail to apply it when it hits close to home.
THIS IS NOT A FAILURE OF INTELLIGENCE
When I was inside OTO and when I left and started speaking out, I watched this happen over and over. And at first, I thought — these people must be brainwashed, or just not very smart.
But that’s not it.
The people doing this aren’t stupid. A lot of them are genuinely intelligent. And most of them aren’t malicious either — not in the way we usually picture malice. They’re not sitting around trying to figure out how to cause harm.
Most of them genuinely believe they’re doing the right thing.
And that’s what makes this interesting. Because we tend to think of harmful behavior as something that flows out of bad intentions. If a person intends to harm, they’re bad. If they intend to do good, they’re good — or at least not culpable.
But that doesn’t actually follow.
Aristotle drew a distinction that I think about a lot. He separated what he called wickedness — genuinely intending harm — from moral weakness. Moral weakness is when you understand what’s right, you intend to do what’s right, but you fail to do it anyway. Because something gets in the way.
Most people who cause harm aren’t wicked. They’re morally weak. And that’s actually harder to talk about, because it’s closer to home for all of us.
THE MECHANISM
So what actually happens in the moment?
Here’s how I’d describe it. There’s a principle you hold — something like “attack the argument, not the person.” You’ve internalized it. You’d defend it in conversation. And then someone criticizes your group, or your teacher, or something you’ve built your identity around.
And quietly, almost invisibly, the question shifts.
It’s no longer is this true?
It becomes what does this mean about us? About me?
And once that shift happens, loyalty and threat and identity start to crowd out everything else. Truth stops being the most relevant thing in the room. And the rule you understood perfectly well — the one you would have applied without hesitation five minutes ago — just doesn’t fire.
You don’t experience yourself as abandoning your principles. You experience yourself as responding correctly to a complex situation that happens to be an exception.
I watched this happen to people I respected. And if I’m honest — I felt the pull of it myself, before I left. It’s not something that happens to people who are checked out. It happens to people who are engaged, who care, who have real skin in the game. Which is part of why it’s so effective.
THE UNCOMFORTABLE PART
Here’s what I’ve come to think is the darkest part of this.
We assume that intelligence and good intentions are the things that protect us from foolishness. That smart, sincere people are more resistant to this kind of manipulation and groupthink.
But the reality is almost the opposite.
The most effective high-control groups work precisely by leveraging a person’s intelligence, their capacity for pattern recognition, their sincere desire to grow and contribute — and channeling all of that in a direction that serves the group’s interests rather than the individual’s actual wellbeing.
The smarter and more sincere you are, the more effectively you can be leveraged.
Which means intelligence and good intentions aren’t sufficient. They’re not enough. “I thought I was doing the right thing” is a real and important human experience — but it doesn’t dissolve moral responsibility.
What actually protects you isn’t more intelligence. It’s not even better intentions.
It’s judgment. The capacity to take a principle you understand in the abstract and actually apply it to a specific, messy, emotionally loaded situation — where your identity is at stake, where people you love are involved, where there’s real pressure to fall in line.
That’s what Aristotle called wisdom. And it’s a capacity, not a belief. You can’t get it by learning the right ideas. It has to be trained, practiced, and in a lot of cases — built in community with people who will hold you to it.
CLOSING
This is most of what I’ve been trying to work on since leaving OTO. Not just diagnosing what goes wrong in high-control groups — but understanding what it actually takes to build the kind of judgment that makes you resistant to this (bullshit) in the first place.
Because wisdom is dangerous to groups like this. Not because it makes you hostile or combative. But because it makes you harder to manipulate. You can see through the frame. You notice when the question has shifted from is this true? to what does this mean about us?
And you call it by its name.
So when someone responds to rape allegations by talking about process failures — or responds to public criticism by calling someone mentally ill — the question worth sitting with isn’t are these bad people?
It’s: what was so important to them in that moment that the truth couldn’t compete with it?
Because the answer to that question tells you everything.