Directly comparing Scientology-speak to the beliefs and practices of the rationalists and their offshoots seems like it should be a ground-floor understanding of the whole mess, but perhaps that sort of blunt simplicity is what some folks on the margins need to avoid being sucked all the way in.
High-theta in-ethics a+ sneer
Holly nails it.
When the Rationalist Internet Defense Force has commented on my stuff, some of them have done the ‘this is wrong b/c bad epistemics’.
Scientology is a perfect comparison and I really don’t know how anyone can deny these people are cultish.
The rationalist in the comments calling the piece bad epistemics is chefs kiss.
Ms. Elmore has another post that begins “Psychedelics are increasingly a social activity in the rationalist community and a prescription for what ails ye, so I wrote this post on facebook earlier this year expressing my reservations about using psychedelics with the intent or pretense of learning truth.”
She also has a post about meditation and mindfulness. I did not expect the thick Western Buddhist strand in this movement.
We’ve discussed before the influence of David Chapman and his Tibetan Buddhism among TPOT, but it’s worth also noting the fairly big notoriety and footprint that San Francisco Zen Center has in the Bay Area and northern/central California more broadly. Anyone who ends up in the Bay and goes looking for “alternative” spirituality with a relatively rigorous grounding is likely to encounter some aspect of SFZC or its outreach pretty quickly. To say nothing of enduring idol Steve Jobs’ association with the practice. It might seem surprising from the outside, but given the facts on the ground, I’m not surprised that dashes of Buddhism got roped into the techbro stew.
Note, of course, that Chapman’s Tibetan lineage is something notably different from SFZC’s lineage, and that the parent institutions can’t be held totally liable for misinterpretations by lay practitioners and dilettantes. (Myself being one of the dilettantes!)
I’ve mentioned the SFZC in some writings and there’s definitely something there.
I imagine there’s a certain level of generic fringe attraction at work here too. Some people are just particularly drawn to hidden knowledge or forbidden arcane arts or secrets of the universe or whatever you want to call it. Places like SFZC appear to be at the outer edges of the broader cultic milieu.
I think you and the replies are overthinking it, because mindfulness and meditation (not to mention yoga, which she also mentions) have been hugely influential on the entire Western/global middle class for 20-50 years
fwiw her writing here seems to me to comport with some level of undiagnosed OCD or similar as well, which doesn’t strike me as unusual for rationalist circles
