The Belief System That Can’t Be Wrong

Even Leaving Proves it Right

Intro/Hook

When I publicly broke with my religion, Thelema, I heard I had never been a “real” believer in the first place. 

But I also heard that leaving Thelema was one of the most Thelemic things I could do — because I was following my “true will.”

The second remark was probably intended as a compliment, but I found it more disturbing — and more revealing.

Because what feels like flexibility can easily become a trap. 

And when every contradiction can be reinterpreted, even leaving can become proof the system was right.  

The Price of Blurring Distinctions

One of the patterns I noticed from the 11 years I spent in a high-control group is the blurring of distinctions.

Between stress and distress

Egotism and healthy self-protection

Genuine personal growth and adaptation to dysfunction

This wasn’t just intellectual confusion. It had real consequences. 

People’s normal instincts of self-protection gradually eroded.

They learned to spiritualize dysfunction and abuse. 

And they came to regard leaving as failure and mere survival as success.

And I’ve heard the exact same thing from people who have been in other high-control groups.

You raise a challenge, and instead of being answered, you’re asked: “Who is the ‘I’ asking that question?”

You point out inconsistency, and someone accuses you of “resistance” or suggests you practice “binding” on your trauma.

Every attempt to protect yourself becomes a shadow projection.

Every challenge is a function of your enneagram type.

Every common sense objection is evidence of a “limiting belief”. 

Looking at these groups from the outside, it’s easy to think they’ve lost touch with reality. But that’s not my experience.

People inside these groups are often just as aware of the dysfunction and its effects as people outside are. They’re not trapped because they deny reality.

They’re trapped because reality has lost its power to contradict them. And this doesn’t feel like entrapment. It feels like freedom. 

Structural Analysis

It’s easy to poke fun at the idiosyncratic beliefs of cults, but many of them contain plausible-sounding, even liberating ideas.

It’s up to each person to decide what path to follow.

We can achieve our full potential if we overcome our self-limiting beliefs.

Life is welcoming us in, but we’re stopped by our trauma.

None of these ideas are wacky. Some of them – like the idea that it’s up to a person to figure out their own path in life – seem self-evident. 

But it’s the self-evidence that’s actually the problem. 

Because if something is self-evident, contradicting it can seem illegitimate. 

This isn’t just an intellectual problem. It has consequences for how people act.

If something is just an attack, you defend yourself or leave. But if every difficulty is potentially a growth opportunity, you stay and work on your detachment.

If someone is just justifying abuse, you challenge it. But if all your resistance stems from self-limiting beliefs, you challenge yourself. 

If an organization is corrupt, you get out. But if every experience is a message from your higher self, you stay to “learn the lesson.”

In every case, beliefs function as a magical potion, miraculously transforming everything bad into something good. 

This doesn’t feel like blurring distinctions into nonsense. It feels liberating, because you feel like you’re overcoming limits. 

But when you combine this with power, it’s particularly dangerous. Because not only can you no longer challenge the system. You’ve lost the internal equipment you’d need to want to. The capacity for doubt itself gets dismantled. 

Why Contradiction Matters

Learning to transcend all contradictions or limits feels empowering, but it’s dangerous. Not because you lose touch with reality. But because reality loses its power to guide you. It loses its relevance. 

A lot of spiritual and self-help language is about transcending personal limits. But there’s a fine line between personal limits and personal boundaries.

Personal boundaries aren’t things we just believe in. They’re real. They mark where one person ends and the rest of the world begins. When people repeatedly cross their own boundaries, they gradually cease to be who and what they are.

In some cases this is healthy. I can push against my boundaries to become a more honest, courageous, or fair person over time. 

But in other cases it’s not. If I volunteer my physical or emotional labor to the point of exhaustion, that’s not growth. It’s self-abandonment. I will gradually cease to be the best friend, partner, or community member I can be. 

Limits aren’t just important on a personal or organizational level. They matter for knowledge.

One of the distinctive things about scientific theories is that they define their own limits. Physics doesn’t just say, “Here’s a theory that explains everything.” It precisely specifies where explanation breaks down. 

A lot of systems focused on spirituality and growth don’t do this. They instead attempt to provide frameworks to explain all experiences. But in order to do this, they have to avoid contradiction, or they have to reframe it into something non-contradictory. They survive through reinterpretation of limits rather than acknowledgement of them.

The Role of Thought-Terminating Clichés

In the spiritual group I was in, it was considered taboo to contradict someone else’s opinion on spiritual matters. This was ostensibly done to grant each person freedom of personal interpretation, but the consequence was that people were implicitly discouraged from thinking through the implications of their beliefs. Because the more you think through the implications of something, the more likely you are to run up against some contradictory belief or experience.

What happens inside these groups over time is that the language becomes empty of substance. Rather than serving the function of thinking — drawing inferences and conclusions — language starts to serve a different function: shutting down thinking. 

The group’s language becomes dominated by thought-terminating clichés: things that sound self-evident, even deep, but which ultimately function to stop thought in its tracks and keep people enclosed within the system.

So you challenge someone on some claim they made, and they reply with, “Every person has the right to think what they will.” Or they say, “Well I’m just saying what works for me.” Even if they were making a broader claim a moment ago. 

Claims about the world get translated into feelings, because everyone knows feelings cannot be challenged. 

Every challenge can be met with a question about the questioner, because the system has already taught everyone that the subject-object distinction is suspect. 

Language is used to obliterate limits, shut down questioning, and do it in a way that makes the speaker appear tolerant and wise, not authoritarian. 

Following along doesn’t feel like falling in line. It feels like freedom, discernment, and maturity. That’s what makes it seductive. 

The Dangerous Seduction 

The most dangerous systems aren’t the ones that feel coercive. They’re the ones that preserve the feeling of freedom, growth, and insight while insulating themselves from contradiction.

You find this in online masculinity cults, in therapy groups, in conspirituality, non-dual circles, and even in abusive relationships. And now we’re watching a high-tech version of the same phenomenon emerge in the increasingly reality-insulated relationships people form with AI chatbots. 

The particulars are different, but the underlying structure is the same. These systems present themselves as powerful because they allow participants to transcend limits. But they do this by obliterating the very distinctions that make sovereignty possible in the first place. 

And look, I’m not saying I’ve totally escaped this or become immune to this seduction. I haven’t. I actually don’t think anyone can be completely free of it.

But that’s exactly why it’s so important to recognize and respect our own limitations — and to be suspicious of anyone or anything that promises transcendence without cost. 

Closing

What’s conspicuous about systems like this is that even leaving them is proof they were right.

Resistance becomes ego.

Self-abandonment becomes initiation.

Objections become limiting beliefs. 

When I left Thelema, it was evidence I never understood it in the first place — AND proof I was finally doing my true will and becoming more Thelemic than ever.

I think this is why I reacted so strongly to it after I left. Why I boxed everything up. Why anything spiritual turned my stomach.

Because all these ideas and images no longer looked to me like symbols of self-transcendence. They looked like walls in a funhouse of mirrors. They promised infinity, but the reality was enclosure.

I no longer trust systems that dissolve the distinction between growth and self-erasure in the name of transcendence.

I think real freedom requires the opposite.

It requires limits.

Boundaries.

Contradiction.

The ability to say “no” — and for it to mean something.

Because if nothing can contradict us anymore, we’re not free. We’re enclosed.