{"id":2388,"date":"2026-04-28T10:02:00","date_gmt":"2026-04-28T17:02:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lapis-mercurii.org\/lvx\/?p=2388"},"modified":"2026-06-26T10:05:20","modified_gmt":"2026-06-26T17:05:20","slug":"why-smart-people-stay-in-cults","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lapis-mercurii.org\/lvx\/why-smart-people-stay-in-cults\/","title":{"rendered":"Why Smart People Stay In Cults"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-block-embed-youtube wp-embed-aspect-16-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio\"><div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\n<div class=\"jetpack-video-wrapper\"><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Why Smart People Stay In Cults\" width=\"640\" height=\"360\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/22FExyitnJk?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/div>\n<\/div><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<h1 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Why Smart People Stay in Cults<\/h1>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Opening<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p><em>This is completely unacceptable.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>I am angry.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>I am clear.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>I am done.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>It was 2022. Three years before I left.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Someone who had harmed people was being let back in.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And then\u2014within days\u2014someone swooped in and said, \u201cI believe you. I\u2019m going to fix this.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And just like that\u2026 I wasn\u2019t done anymore.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Suddenly it felt like there was hope.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cMaybe the system works after all.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And I stayed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>That\u2019s the part people don\u2019t understand.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>You don\u2019t stay because you don\u2019t see the problem. You stay because something keeps interrupting your ability to act on it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And it\u2019s not random.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>It follows a pattern.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>A pattern that works especially well on smart, thoughtful people.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And if you don\u2019t understand that pattern\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>you will misdiagnose what\u2019s happening\u2014both in other people\u2026and in yourself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Break the Default Model<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p>When we hear about people trapped in bad systems \u2014cults, toxic workplaces, cult-like political movements, abusive relationships \u2014 we tend to reach for the same explanations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>&#8220;These people are dumb.&#8221; &#8220;They&#8217;ve been brainwashed.&#8221; &#8220;They&#8217;re weak.&#8221;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And look \u2014 I&#8217;m not going to pretend that never happens. There are dumb, credulous people inside nearly all of these systems.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But that&#8217;s not the most common failure mode.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Most of the people I knew inside my group were intelligent. They were reflective. Thoughtful. Morally serious. Many of them were more conscientious than the average person I&#8217;d met outside.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I respected them. I was friends with them. I wanted to spend time with them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I was one of them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So if it&#8217;s not stupidity, and it&#8217;s not malice \u2014 what is it?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Why Smart People Are Actually More Vulnerable<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p>Here&#8217;s the thing that may surprise you:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Intelligence doesn&#8217;t protect you from this.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>In some ways, it makes you more vulnerable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Political scientist Dan Kahan has studied this extensively. He calls it identity-protective cognition. What he found is that the smarter you are, the better you are at generating reasons why the thing that threatens your identity is actually wrong.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The smarter you are, the more tools you have to protect what you don\u2019t want to lose.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>You don\u2019t just believe things.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>You build arguments. You reframe situations. You reinterpret evidence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>You can make almost anything make sense\u2014as long as it protects what matters to you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Two equally intelligent people can look at the same situation and frame it completely differently.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>One person sees someone defending themselves against an aggressor.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The other sees interpersonal drama.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>If it&#8217;s a real boundary violation, the intelligent response is to support the person being attacked \u2014 maybe remove the aggressor.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But if it&#8217;s just petty squabbling, the intelligent response is to remind everyone how small grievances get in the way of the group&#8217;s larger mission.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Both responses are intelligent.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But they depend entirely on what you&#8217;ve already decided is most important about the situation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And that&#8217;s where these systems get you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h1 class=\"wp-block-heading\">The Real Problem<\/h1>\n\n\n\n<p>The problem isn&#8217;t what people believe.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>It&#8217;s what feels important to them in the moment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And that\u2019s not random.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>These systems systematically train what you notice\u2014and what you ignore.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>People in these groups know the principles.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>They know you should think critically. They know you shouldn&#8217;t blindly defer to authority. Many of them have watched the same cult documentaries you have.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I even knew one guy inside whose speciality as an academic researcher was cognitive biases.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But in real, lived situations \u2014 when something is actually happening in front of them \u2014 something else takes priority.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Someone raises a valid concern about leadership overreach into people&#8217;s private lives. The response is deflection and invalidation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Someone points out how a well-connected predator keeps getting protected. Someone comes back with a platitude: &#8220;You are the organization. We need good people like you.&#8221;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>A former member tells their story. People attack their character rather than engage with what they&#8217;re saying.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>These people are not forgetting what&#8217;s right. It&#8217;s just not what feels relevant to them right now.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">The Cognitive Mechanism<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p>Here&#8217;s what&#8217;s actually happening underneath all of that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>There is a massive gap \u2014 for all of us \u2014 between what we can articulate and justify on the one hand, and what we actually do on the other.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>When we see this in other people, we call them hypocrites. And sometimes that&#8217;s right.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But there&#8217;s something else going on that you and I are just as susceptible to.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Right now, in this moment, your brain is drowning in information.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Sounds. Memories. Interpretations. Emotions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>You can\u2019t process all of it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So your mind makes a brutal cut:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>What matters\u2026 and what doesn\u2019t.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>That includes most of what you \u201cknow\u201d\u2014your values, your principles, your beliefs\u2014<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>It doesn\u2019t even get considered.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>This process is called <em>relevance realization<\/em>, and it has enormous consequences, because it determines how you categorize an experience \u2014 and with that, what beliefs and skills get applied.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Which means: if you can shift what someone feels is important, you don&#8217;t need to change what they believe.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>You just change what they think their beliefs are relevant to.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And you can do that without them ever noticing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">How These Systems Exploit It<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p>Every high-control group has some idiosyncratic belief system.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But what makes these systems effective isn&#8217;t what they tell people to believe.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>It&#8217;s what they train people to notice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>In one group, members are trained to constantly identify limiting beliefs. Every setback is a limiting belief. Every criticism is a limiting belief. Conveniently, the organization has coaches who can help you work through them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>In the group I was in, dysfunction was reframed as an opportunity for personal growth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So when someone threatened violence against another member, the response wasn&#8217;t to remove a dangerous person for everyone&#8217;s safety.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>It was to convene a mediation. Because this was a growth opportunity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Meanwhile, when someone from outside criticized the group, that was recategorized differently. Not as a growth opportunity. As a threat. And personal attack became the natural response.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Same person. Same stated values. Completely different behavior \u2014 because the situation had been categorized differently before any conscious reasoning even began.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>This isn&#8217;t just cults. You see the same thing in toxic workplaces, where raising a legitimate concern about safety or ethics gets reframed as &#8220;not being a team player.&#8221; Or in political movements where questioning leadership gets reframed as &#8220;giving ammunition to the enemy.&#8221;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The machinery is the same. The categories just have different names.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">What It Feels Like From the Inside<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p>From inside one of these experiences, you don&#8217;t feel like you&#8217;re ignoring reality.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>You feel like you have a mature, nuanced take on a complex situation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>You feel like someone wise enough to see both sides.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>You feel like the adult in the room.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>You have all the subjective experiences of insight, growth, and even transcendence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And meanwhile, your actual ability to act keeps shrinking.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I know exactly what this feels like.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I was an intellectual and moral leader in my group. I took my capacity for reasoning, my powers of communication, and my ability to stay calm under pressure \u2014 and I put all of it in the service of legitimizing a corrupt and harmful system.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>My self-awareness didn&#8217;t protect me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>My moral compass didn&#8217;t protect me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I could see the problems clearly. I named them. I argued for reform. I defended people who&#8217;d been hurt.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And in doing that, I helped the system continue.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I didn\u2019t just stay.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I made the system work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I took my intelligence, my moral seriousness, my ability to stay calm under pressure\u2014<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>and I used all of it to make a corrupt system look reasonable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>That cost me years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>It cost the people I cared about more than that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Closing<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p>So when you see someone defending something that makes no sense to you\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Don&#8217;t just ask what they believe.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Ask: What has become more important than the truth for them?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And how did that happen?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Because the real influence isn\u2019t what people believe.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>It\u2019s attention.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>It\u2019s salience.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>It\u2019s what you\u2019re even able to see.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And if you think you\u2019re immune to that\u2014<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>that\u2019s exactly when it\u2019s already happening.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Why Smart People Stay in Cults Opening This is completely unacceptable. I am angry. I am clear. I am done. It was 2022. Three years before I left. Someone who had harmed people was being let back in. And then\u2014within days\u2014someone swooped in and said, \u201cI believe you. I\u2019m going to fix this.\u201d And just&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[32,506,505,67,66,488,487,2],"class_list":["post-2388","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-aleister-crowley","tag-cult-recovery","tag-cults","tag-ordo-templi-orientis","tag-oto","tag-oto-high-control-group-2","tag-oto-high-control-group","tag-thelema"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapis-mercurii.org\/lvx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2388","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapis-mercurii.org\/lvx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapis-mercurii.org\/lvx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapis-mercurii.org\/lvx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapis-mercurii.org\/lvx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2388"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lapis-mercurii.org\/lvx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2388\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2389,"href":"https:\/\/lapis-mercurii.org\/lvx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2388\/revisions\/2389"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapis-mercurii.org\/lvx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2388"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapis-mercurii.org\/lvx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2388"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapis-mercurii.org\/lvx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2388"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}