This article on how ISIS and the LRA maintain their cultic hold over their followers is fascinating. It’s well worth reading on many levels, and concludes with the fact that we can break cults by getting inforrmation to followers. Cults after all control information, build whole worlds for people to inhabit in their own minds.
However what happens when people create their own echo chambers?
I’ve been contemplating lately how the internet lets us build echo chambers. How we can find narrow communities to tell us just what we want to hear. How we can use a tool to learn anything to experience more of nothing.
I’ve no doubt many of us have encountered people well down the internet echo-chamber. I’ve seen it among game geeks and anti-vaxxers, and of course among many political spheres. The world is at their fingertips and they want to wear gloves.
As we face various terrorist groups that are cultic, we may want to ask how we’re going to deal with people who have decided to become cultic. People with options. People without a gun to their head. People who have a choice?
They just chose to find their own guru or empower one.
Respectfully,
– Steven Savage
http://www.musehack.com/
http://www.informotron.com/
http://www.seventhsanctum.com/