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Comment by samhw | Hacker News Reader

> He felt he'd lost this apprentice to a cult.

I think he was right. My criterion for whether someone's in a cult is that eerie feeling talking to them, where they get angry at any challenge, they can never quite seem to explain why they're as invested (metaphorically and literally) as they are, and so forth. It's that sense that they themselves don't know why they do it, and there's a lot of emotional pathology that goes into shutting off from the outside world and protecting their obsession from reality. That absolutely typifies Bitcoin/crypto obsessives I've met.

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My best friend was in a famous cult half his life. That's nothing like a cult.

He had unlimited money ($25k a month was nothing) and freedom to do anything he wanted for 15 years. He was never harmed. The organization collapsed as the elders passed away partially due to the rule of no proselytizing so no new members.

edit: they had about $50M split between 6 people near the end. I don't really know why more people don't do this: register a religious organization, require all members to assign all assets and money to the organization, work together for the rest of your life building your wealth tax free and watch how quick your wealth amplifies as you acquire properties and make investments.

I don't think your friend's cult experience is the norm.

I believe it is the norm, but nobody talks about the ones that are operating successfully. You only hear about the ones that end in shootouts with the feds.

Your friend was in an organisation which (a) didn't recruit new members, (b) gave its members total freedom to do whatever they wanted, and (c) gave its members money? And you're calling this organisation a cult?

No offence, but is English your first language? This sounds entirely unrelated to the concept of a cult. I think you're just describing a company, an LLP with a religious focus.

I think you believe a "cult" only means a situation where people are held against their will by crazy religious nuts trying to assert their sovereignty. Those are the only examples the media wants you to know about.

Hearing about a group of people who have successfully implemented small scale communism with a religion involved and they thrived for over 100 years isn't something you want to shout from the rooftops as it would encourage more of this behavior.

That's not a cult, then. Its just an odd religious community.

In contemporary English, cult refers specifically to brainwashy abusive practices that attempt to control every aspect of the person's life and tend not to allow you to leave.

Some groups like the Amish and the ultra-Orthodox Jews in North America live in insular communal societies, but most would not describe them as cults. (Though sometimes the more isolationist groups do get called so, maybe with some cause.)

a cult in the pejorative sense is one in which members exhibit what used to be called "snapping," where the confluence of dogma internalization and pressure to resist out-group messaging effectively disables one's ability to question their in-group messaging.

"that's nothing like a cult" describes situation that is clearly fraud and actually nothing like a cult

Honestly it’s not; the legal definition of a religion is so loose in the US that you can literally have a religion based around being rich bringing you closer to happiness. It would be fully legal and sheltered from taxes under the law (you, however, would have to pay taxes on any distribution from the “church”).

There aren't any distributions if you don't personally own any assets or have any bank accounts -- the "church" pays for it all on your behalf. You also don't fit any legal definition of an employee either.

They sued the federal government decades ago for illegally collecting Social Security taxes and won. It's not fraud.

Yeaaaah this isn’t a cult. Though it’s interesting to learn my grandparents’ “home church” could scale that far. @.@

I would like to subscribe to your cult.

> rule of no proselytizing

> had about $50M split between 6 people near the end

.. are you sure that isn't just a tontine?

Sounds exactly like a tontine to me and I should know. (Founder of https://tontine.com)

That does sound similar except you'd have younger employed members making money to add to the pool of equity and also working on self sustainability like farming to feed the members. Not all members in the aforementioned org lived together past the 1970s or whatever; they often were sent to live and maintain on properties the org owned all around the world.

> famous cult

Can you please share the name?

based on description (famous, 100 years old, pooling financial assets but no proselytizing so it amounts to a tontine with a dualist story attached) sounds like the Shakers or some offshoot.

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