“Cult beliefs look insane from the outside.”
-Tom Murphy, Do the Math
Tom Murphy, a physicist who writes about the hard mathematical limits to infinite growth on a finite planet, recently published a half-joking (and only half) essay in which he argued that a certain set of beliefs about human civilization contain so many obvious fallacies that those who hold them are no less crazy than the members of a cult. It’s a worthwhile read, and I have no objection to the argument. What stuck out to me was a nitpick with the quote at the top of this essay that I think highlights a lot of the problems Murphy discusses, and has implications for human discourse in general.
Nowadays, we use the word “cult” to mean some fringe group of lunatics who have free Kool-Aid at their parties. The origin of the word, though, meant something like worship, or homage, and classically, a cult need not be crazy. Just about any group of people who believed in some set of practices or were especially devoted to a figure could qualify.
I don’t think Murphy set out to formally define the word, but let’s assume that a workable modern definition is, “A set of beliefs that look insane from the outside.” My quibble isn’t a disagreement. In fact, I’ll elaborate on the remark:
Everybody is in a cult. The less-insane a belief looks, the deeper you are within that cult.
That’s a needlessly provocative statement that makes my point. We all have beliefs. When we can’t distinguish between them, we share a similar system. Then differences mount, and at some point, they’re distinct-enough that we say a cult has formed. For example, within the Catholic Church there existed many cults for individual saints. These adherents were still Christians, still Catholics, but some aspect of their devotion differed to the point that they were seen to exist outside the formal church structure.
At first, these differences may be mild. Most of the belief system is recognizable to fellow Catholics, and they probably don’t earn much more than a confused look, or a condescending eye roll. The more the cult diverges from official doctrine, though, the more dangerous and irreconcilable they appear. By the time Saint Francis promises to return on a giant space-osprey and carry his followers to the cold star Xzywygon to avoid the apocalyptic birdshot meteor showers sent by an evil lizard who has replaced the real Ben Bernanke, the differences begin to stand out. Eventually, the Church or the cult may decide that this world ain’t big enough for the both of them.
We don’t think most of our neighbors belong to cults, because we share common beliefs. What we forget is that beliefs exist at many orders of magnitude. When there are small discrepancies, like whether or not we should pass a new bond to fund the local school system, we might get annoyed, maybe even angry, but we do so within a larger framework that we still share. We believe in democratic political processes; the organization of humans into nested groups of cities, counties, states, and nation-states; the English language; Western culture; one of a handful of approved religions, etc.
Even when some of these are shared, key differences can make the neighbor start to look nutty. When I speak English, you understand me, because I’m adhering to a complex system of meaning that includes shared spellings and word definitions and grammar. If I were to suddenly say: “deSIRE in use the to same clouthe is no fyting 1 understand un-other we as from there are the cut,” you might think I’ve lost it. (I just chopped up and revamped the sentence: There is no use fighting the desire to understand one another, as we are cut from the same cloth”). That’s a very small transformation. The words are mostly the same. The order has changed. It’s still English. Imagine if I spoke by mixing and matching words and grammar from a dozen different languages as the mood struck me. This could have a very clear meaning to me, but it would sound insane.
The problem is that anything sufficiently different looks insane from the outside—if you’re far-enough outside. Meaning isn’t objective. We make it, and it relies on the whole system of words, gestures, cultural practices and rituals, underlying assumptions, etc. Nothing makes sense, except from within, or partially within. Nothing at all! A language is entirely coherent if you speak it, and babble if you don’t. That means there is no objective “outside.” No one can claim to hold the absolute truth, to be impartial, all-wise, and fair. Anything a given judge looks at will seem insane if he doesn’t hold those beliefs, and sane to some degree if he holds some of them.
Even the Cult of the Space Oiseau, flying away from lizard Ben Bernanke, probably still wears recognizable clothing (Nikes were popular among Heaven’s Gate), and consumes recognizable food and drink at social gatherings that proceed like most gatherings we would recognize until the grocery-store Kool-Aid turns out to contain cyanide. My fictitious cult even shares the belief that we live on a planet, there is a space with other heavenly bodies, and objects can pass between them, as we do. That’s by no means a requirement of life.
When human discourse, neighborly or international, runs off the rails, it does so to the extent that we hold different beliefs, different assumptions about certain aspects of the world and our lives within it. If I disagree so profoundly that I label someone a “cultist,” I have no way to be sure who is insane. I look just as crazy to them. Our usual metric seems to be popular vote. If most people agree, it’s fine. That, too, is an assumption with more than a little basis in democratic processes, which are not required of space birds or humans and never have been. If that were true, then Murphy is wrong that the beliefs he describe constitute an insane cult, because they’re in the majority and he’s not (for what little it’s worth, I happen to agree with him much more than with the people he describes).
We are all insane to someone. I reckon a lot of people wish we could all just have a summit, bring up the major points of contention, and get on the same program. Besides the fact that that’s impossible, I wouldn’t want it. There is strength in diversity of thought, and there is life on this planet because we don’t have a single uniform species, but millions of them, who arise and go extinct, who compete and ignore one another, so that something is the right fit for any given situation.
Dangerous cults may harm some bystanders, but if they’re truly out of sync with reality, they tend to go the way of Heaven’s Gate and the rest. There will always be small groups that schism violently from the mainstream. There are also times when the beliefs of the mainstream no longer stand up to rigor, or fancy, or the auspices, or whatever most people use to decide. If you’re noticing more than the usual amount of crazies, it might be better to ask yourself if you’ve radically changed your own opinions. If not, it may be a schismatic time, in which some long-held narratives no longer match our experiences, and we are compelled to try new ones on for size.
That doesn’t mean the new ones will serve us. Probably, some of them will, others will fizzle, and a few, burnout spectacularly. We can use this cognitive dissonance to become aware of the things we hold dear, and the ones that seem to make less sense with each passing year. It’s worth remembering that when we share little with another, we will both be insane to the other. There is no higher ground. In that case, we can only be patient and compassionate as we would with one who suffers from mental illness, or avoid them if they’re crazy enough. We can also note that common ground requires common belief, and if we want that, the task becomes to find where we can sway our neighbor, and where we’re willing to compromise in return.