from https://www.benlandautaylor.com/p/my-moms-rules-for-cults

Then when I was 25 years old I told my parents I was moving to San Francisco to join a new-wave radical movement and a self-development psychology I-swear-we’re-not-a-cult group. And [my mom] sat me down and gave me three things to check before I went:

  1. Are the members of the group in contact with their families?
  2. How does the group react when members are close with friends who don’t share the group’s beliefs and ideology? Is this discouraged? Is it seen as normal and healthy?
  3. How does the group relate to former members who have left? Are they old friends who are welcome at parties, or are they vile traitors, or what?

In my experience this is the best and fastest way to tell the difference between benign cults which will give you valuable insights and comrades in a way you can’t get anywhere else and so make you better at navigating the outside world, vs malignant cults which will fuck up your ability to interact with the world outside the cult itself. Both types of cults are real. No simple checklist is perfect, and you should stay away from any group that smells wrong even if it passes your explicit tests, but I’ve found it very useful.

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