How Do You Rebuild Your Life After Leaving a Polygamous Sect? | Hacker News Reader

How Do You Rebuild Your Life After Leaving a Polygamous Sect?

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30 pointsjohnny31311 comments

This article seems to me like a prime example of part of why these communities have these sorts of problems. People outside the communities look in with an attitude like "look at this poor people, it's such a shame that they have to live like this" and imply that a lot of the negatives are enabled by their culture, beliefs and how they live their lives.

That kind of thinking is exactly why these sorts of communities become so closed to outsiders. When communities are more closed they must rely more on each other internally which means they must work harder to keep the peace and can't challenge abuses of power within their community. That paves the way for more abuse. More abuse paves the way for more contempt from outsiders. If your ancestors were all arrested by the state police for living the way they believed they should live and outsiders generally looked down on you you wouldn't exactly be in a hurry to rock the boat by calling attention to the community's problems either.

What a wonderful feedback loop it is. Society really sucks at not isolating groups with non-mainstream belief structures.

It's nice to see that this particular group mostly broke its way out of the downward spiral before it got too bad.

The excess males are going to be treated poorly regardless of the opinion of the outside, which should have a problem with the behavior, especially because the males are usually jettisoned as an externality like CO2 exhaust. A stunning majority of the migrants to Europe are men because they are refugees first and foremost from polygamy.

[citation needed]

https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-08-09/europe-s-...

Dave Chapelle pointed out the same thing with why in the black community black women don't seek help from the authorities. Because they know that the punishment for the men is going to be unjust.

> That kind of thinking is exactly why these sorts of communities become so closed to outsiders.

Which cause is first and which effect second?

Sometimes the leaders of these WANT to isolate and close off. This is a standard mechanism of psychological control.

However, things do change with time. I suspect most people in the US now regard polygamy as silly and stupid rather than an offense against society. Polygamy has been shown to have particularly bad destabilizing effects on a society overall; however, I suspect that a place like the US could actually weather polygamy now given that women have much more power and mobility.

One point of view is that the U.S. is currently running under semi-polygamous norms. A stunning proportion of U.S. adults are "single," but that doesn't necessarily mean they're not having sex.

Of course---partners are not evenly distributed, leading to numerical outcomes more akin to polygamy than polite society might pretend.

Most people would not equate "serially monogamous" with "semi-polygamous".

I don't know that many people who are having sex with multiple partners simultaneously in spite of Tinder and the hookup culture.

> Which cause is first and which effect second?

The nature of a positive feedback loop is that it doesn't matter much in practice; it is a never-ending cycle where each step leads back to what preceded it.

The same way everybody else does after a traumatic event: One day at a time. Not sure how the article fits with HN....

HN likes to social commentary on different societal norms. Think of it as different programming paradigms or architectural styles. It's interesting to see how a system not setup like ours functions.

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