I Thought I Was Too Smart for a Cult 

That’s why it worked.

Intro

The spirituality I was once a part of — Thelema — centered itself on radical individual freedom. 

Freedom of thought.

Freedom of expression.

Freedom from coercion.

The individual was sacred.

Freedom meant answering only to your true self. 

And yet the group I was in that organized around these ideals often rewarded conformity. It blurred boundaries, and it made people easier to manipulate rather than harder. 

Eventually this made me realize something.

The problem wasn’t hypocrisy. 

The problem is that inner alignment is not the same thing as freedom.

And the more people confuse the two, the easier they become to manipulate.

The Seduction of Romantic Freedom 

This wasn’t unique to Thelema. A lot of modern spirituality is built around a deeply romantic idea of the individual.

Truth is found within.
Authenticity is sacred.
Each person has their own path, their own purpose, even their own reality.

Meaning doesn’t come from institutions. You can’t get it from traditions or external authority. It’s generated inwardly through intuition and alignment. Through self-discovery. 

This view is highly attractive. The external world may influence us, but whether we live a meaningful or fulfilled life supposedly depends entirely on our own inward orientation toward it. Anyone can choose to rise above their circumstances.

It’s a worldview that treats the individual as fundamentally self-authoring — as though freedom and meaning come primarily from within us rather than from the environments and relationships that shape us. 

Some versions of spirituality go so far as to claim that if you look deeply enough within yourself, you can discover the whole universe there. 

But hidden inside this worldview is a very dangerous assumption: that inward alignment alone is enough to make a person free. 

The Problem With Purely Inward Freedom

According to this view, freedom starts with knowing your highest values, your personal purpose or mission in life. Only you can know this. You discover it through reflection, intuition, or through some sort of psychospiritual practice — like meditation, ritual, or psychedelics. 

What makes an action good, according to this worldview, is primarily that it’s authentic. It expresses your true values. It’s aligned with your true purpose, your true will. 

And that’s it. Intentions are primary. Outcomes are secondary. 

Meaning is found within.

Goodness is determined inwardly, through intention.

That’s where freedom supposedly lies. 

What this perspective gets right is that our sense of meaning and purpose in life is determined by aligning our intentions and our actions with our values. 

But human beings don’t make decisions in a vacuum. We’re influenced — constantly — by environments that reward some behaviors and punish others. 

Our relationships shape us.

Our upbringing shapes us.

The institutions we participate in shape us.

So do incentives.

We desire status.

We fear loss of position.

Our genetics influence our intelligence and personality, which strongly shape our problem-solving and what we care about.

All of these affect what we value, how clearly we can reflect on those values, and how capable we are of acting in accordance with them over time. 

And no amount of perspective shifting can fully free us from the environments and systems that shape what becomes psychologically possible for us. 

Why Good Intentions Aren’t Enough

A lot of modern spirituality treats the individual as fundamentally sovereign — as though human beings already contain everything necessary to overcome delusion, discover truth, and live well regardless of circumstance.  

It’s understandable why people find this attractive. It’s empowering. It suggests that freedom and wisdom are available to anyone regardless of circumstance. But ancient philosophers were a lot more realistic. Aristotle in particular is instructive.

Goodness is not merely aiming at something good. Doing what’s right often means overcoming motivations that pull us in the opposite direction: fear, status-seeking, dependency, resentment, desire to belong.

Take content creation. I aim to create a video that is honest, fair, and informative. But in order to get this content in front of people, I have to capture their attention: with an exciting title and thumbnail combination, with an emotionally evocative opening, and with a narrative structure that gradually escalates. 

Every video I create has to straddle a line. I have to come as close as possible to the algorithm’s demand for exciting content — without betraying the requirements of honesty, fairness, and truth.

Everyone who has ever lived in a human society has faced the same tension, because every social structure has status, conditions of belonging, reward structures, and entails dependency of some kind.

And here’s the thing: moral strength — like all forms of strength — is finite. Not everyone has it in equal amounts. It runs out. You will violate your own boundaries eventually.

This is why Aristotle placed so much emphasis on developing good character. A person of good character is already motivated to do what’s right, so they require less moral strength. Good habits, good environments, and good communities reduce the amount of moral strain required to act well. Good environments don’t merely make moral action easier. They shape what becomes normal and admirable. 

But there’s no such thing as perfect character. And there’s no way to have only good acquaintances. We’re all vulnerable. And most people are probably extremely vulnerable through no fault of their own.

They intend to do good. They sincerely believe they are aligned with their values. And yet they still become shaped by environments and incentives they barely perceive. 

The Spiritual Blind Spot

This is the problem with the romantic individualism assumed by so much modern spirituality. 

It treats our deepest values and purposes as though they emerge from some pure, timeless inner source rather than from the messy realities that continually shape human beings. 

Your purpose supposedly doesn’t come from culture, biology, institutions, history, or power. It comes from your true self, your true will. Or it comes from the universe itself. 

Freedom becomes a matter of inward alignment rather than understanding the forces shaping your behavior. 

Social pressure gets reduced to ‘the herd’ — something spiritually awakened individuals are supposed to heroically transcend through authenticity and “will”. 

It replaces moral reality — which is normally tragic — with a myth in which the individual is heroic. Which actually deepens the tragedy rather than alleviating it. 

Because when people aren’t realistic about moral agency, they engage in a lot of the behaviors you find among a lot of spiritual but not religious people.

Spiritual bypassing. Instead of developing the difficult skills necessary to live responsibly in the world, people become preoccupied with achieving the right inner state.

My anger will go away once I’m enlightened.
I’ll repair my relationships once I’ve healed.
I’ll learn how to function once I discover my true purpose.

Or weak boundaries. When we mystify what we stand for, and when we systematically ignore or deny power, we become more likely to betray ourselves. You can’t offset the effect of something that’s not even salient for you.

Groups built around these ideals often become strangely conformist. People over-identify with the mission. They lose the ability to recognize harm clearly. And because everything is interpreted through the language of growth and alignment, personal erosion gets mistaken for spiritual development.  

OTO / Personal Realization

I saw this first hand. I was part of a group for 11 years that espoused radical individual freedom.

I wasn’t seduced by titles, occult aesthetics, or robes. I didn’t give a shit whose party I was invited to.

But I was seduced by what I thought was philosophical nuance, and ideals of personal sovereignty and self-authorship. 

I thought I was too sophisticated to be manipulated by a high-control group.

What I didn’t realize was that this belief was part of what made me manipulable in the first place.

What I finally realized — after I left — is that the ideology didn’t contradict the outcome. The ideology is what made people so easy to shape in the first place. Because it systematically underestimates the frailty of the individual and the power of incentive structures. 

Ending

It was actually a huge learning experience for me. You can read ancient philosophy and get an intellectual grasp of the tragedy of the human condition. Living in a high-control system forced me to confront it concretely. 

I know now: our freedom is not entirely under our own control. Human beings require supportive structures and environments to remain capable of freedom over time. 

Not all human beings begin life equally situated for freedom and flourishing. 

Not everyone has equal access to the kinds of environments and relationships that make sustained freedom possible. 

And some people are forced to carry burdens that make flourishing extraordinarily difficult. 

That is a much more difficult truth to face than anything I ever encountered in the religion I was in. 

But I’d rather face that truth — as difficult as it is — than live in a fantasy about freedom. Because as difficult and tragic as the human condition can be, trying to live in a fantasy about it makes it worse.