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Comment by crmd | Hacker News Reader

Marijuana (along with multi-lingualism) is a big reason why the Mormon-American community is significantly over-represented in the US intelligence community.

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Mormonism is perfect for raising little worker bees.

Mormonism deeply values work ethic and breeds a strong trust of authority.

You're taught at an early age questioning authority is a sin and doing what your leaders tell you is the right thing to do.

The end result is a group of people who are hard working, don't question leadership, and do what they are told.

That sounds dangerous as hell. No one should live that way.

If you aren't allowed to question leadership and are instead expected to do "what you are told", then all the experiments and horrors studies on group think are a reality at a dangerous level [1][2][3] What if you think an order is dangerous and have good reasons why?

Good leadership needs to know what the ground-level knows, they need good input and questioning. Stalin killed anyone who opposed or questioned him, so all of the input and feedback was only positive feedback/intel to avoid being killed. Even when they were setting up one of the worst famines in recorded history [4].

Healthy societies aren't cults, and that is definitely a description of a cult.

I hate a Godwin-Law argument, but the damn Nazi's "did what they were told" [5], and those 'hard-working'-don't-question-leadership lemmings had a blind-eye to/assisted and/or murdered millions of people because they didn't have to deal with the burden of questioning and thinking for themselves. Fuck that.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_prison_experiment

[2] https://www.prisonexp.org/

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonestown#Deaths_in_Jonestown

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_famine_of_1930%E2%80%93...

[5] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/how-the-nazis-defense-o...

There's a reason the Stanford Prison Experiment was never published in a peer review paper. It was garbage science with a lot of problems.

Wow, is that the only thing you got from my comment? I'm highlighting examples of why it's a serious problem and people need to think for themselves.

We know what group-think does way beyond the experiment. We have a very well-documented history on it. Read Soviet and Nazi history, you'll see what it can do. It's almost universal in big groups of humans.

If a police officer told you to shoot another person, would you do it? If 3 police officers tell you to do it, would you do it? How many police officers will it take to make you shoot the person?

Did you use the bee reference because of the Beehive as a Mormon symbol or is that a coincidence?

Love myself some Babylon Bee.

It wasn't intentional on my part but it was hardly a coincidence.

I also heard that one of the side effects of this is that when you're in a foreign country and offer Americans tea/coffee and of them refuses, you can be assured they're a Mormon working for the CIA.

Missionary work is great training for intelligence operations.

Has been throughout history!

Always stood out to me how Mormon expats in PRC had unusually good mandarin skills. They're mainly there to sell farm equipment, but seems hard for teetotalers to do cover work. Hilariously I think ex CIA mormon got busted for selling secrets to PRC.

There are Mormons outside America?

Yes, in fact a majority of Mormons are outside the USA

They go on missions, very frequently outside of America, as a standard part of their early adult life. Learning the local language is pretty much a requirement.

It’s not spreading though.

I live in a small town in Guatemala and the mormon church here is growing very rapidly. According to Google, they're growing at 1.5% annually, which means 255,036 new Mormons every year. However, a church with even a hundred people can heavily sway a small, remote community.

I agree it's not "spreading" per se, but their numbers are respectable among proselytizing religions today. When Islam reached a 1.8% growth rate in the 2000s we were inundated with proclamations that it was the fastest growing religion in the world (eg: https://foreignpolicy.com/2007/05/14/the-list-the-worlds-fas...).

In some places it is more effective than others; Mormons are very present in the Pacific islands, for example.

I know that they go on missions. My question was regarding the "Mormon-American" framing which suggests that Mormonism exists in other countries, which I was not aware of.

Very much so, in fact, more Mormons live outside of the US than within the US. The church reports a population of 16,663,663 with 6,592,195 of those living within the US. (got those numbers from Wikipedia).

This article from 10 years ago reports that 56% of Mormon live outside the US and Canada at that time- https://www.deseret.com/2013/8/30/20524833/the-majority-of-m...

Yes and no. It's very minor outside of the US except for some island nations in the Pacific.

Mormon membership numbers of actual adherents are likely 20% to 40% of membership claimed based on "inactivity" rates (and people leaving).

I learned about the pacific island nations, after I learned that the Polynesian Cultural Center in Hawaii is owned and operated by the LDS Church.

Samoa is a big one I guess.

It was a jarring experience going to see a luau there and seeing white kids playing the main roles in their show. Pretty terrible place, really.

Big church right in the middle of Paris. On prime, riverside real estate. That can't be cheap and last time I passed by it was missionaries and exchange students coming in and out.

Wealthiest religion in the world, they have massive real estate holdings.

Wait, isn't this the Catholic church, having accumulated wealth for centuries?

Central America is their largest growing sector IIRC.

Most of the Mormons at my (US) high school were Mexican immigrants to the US, anecdotally.

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