This article can be considered independent, or as a continuation of the article on creating a movement.
You see, what is the problem, if a person belongs to a certain sect, he IN PRINCIPLE is not able to understand what exactly is in the sect. It is impossible for him to explain this either by logical arguments, or by emotional attacks, in general. Any sect is arranged in such a way that it is impossible to leave it … but they do. I have a lot of experience in this matter, and now (more precisely, in the second part) I will explain how to leave any sect easily and quickly. This article will not help anyone, because any reader who is in a sect, in principle, will not be able to understand its content, he will think that everything said does not apply to him, although in fact it is 100% to him; and those who are not in the sect … what for him this article at all? Nevertheless, if I write it, then there are reasons for it. I'll make a reservation right away that although I myself took part in many sects, I will give examples,Basically, from the latter, in the fight against it, I collected the most interesting experience, although the plot itself is absolutely identical in content to all previous ones, the only difference is in the form of its manifestation.
Let's define what a sect is. A well-known definition (this can be found on Wikipedia) was written by some stoned sociologists, it is generally useless, if only not to protect their empty scientific works or political games, when you need to declare someone objectionable as a sectarian or a whole movement that does not obey the authorities … Another definition, although more accurate, but still not suitable for me, is proposed in the BER. This definition is inappropriate, it does not catch a whole layer of sects, in which, for example, there is no explicit ritual or hierarchy, as well as dogmas that are not subject to discussion. It happens that there are dogmas, and you can discuss them, only they will not change from this. It even happens that development and personal growth are possible in a sect … up to a certain point. In short, I met somethingwhich could be considered a sect in terms of the consequences of its work, but formally such movements do not fall under the specified definition. Therefore, within the framework of this article, I propose another definition, which will now be expressed in mathematical terms, but then translated into understandable Russian with explanations. This definition is completely consistent with my experience.
A sect is a community of people whose ideas are subject to an incomplete and self-contained single teaching. Their logic of behavior, their conclusions, their thinking in general obey only the methodology of this teaching. Purely mathematically, we can say the following about such a teaching: it is its own limited and closed subset of the comprehensive knowledge of the World. We will call such a teaching sectarian.
The definition is not mathematically precise, because I have not found a good word that would simultaneously reflect all possible thoughts, and knowledge, and experience, and all available information. Therefore, for brevity, I have chosen the word "representation", having put into it the meaning indicated now. Now I will explain the meaning of the rest of the words, but I will do it in everyday language so that everyone understands.
A proper subset is a PART of some set that is NOT empty, but also NOT the same as the original set. In other words, if you bite off a tangible piece of the apple, and this piece does NOT coincide with the whole apple, then such a piece can be considered a proper subset of the apple.
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A limited number … I think everything is clear here. An apple can be covered with a bag on top, it will fit entirely in it, which means it is limited, that is, it can fit in a larger container entirely. In the picture above, we have a set that is not only our own, but also limited.
The closed set is the most important in this definition. In mathematics, a closed set is a set in which any converging sequence has a limit IN THE SAME set. With regard to our definition, this means the following. A person has a certain set of ideas (knowledge, experience, thoughts). Any reasoning of this person can be represented in the form of a sequence of logical inferences that combine his ideas in such a way as to obtain a logical conclusion and act on the basis of this conclusion. This conclusion can be considered the limit of the sequence of inferences. So, this limit is INSIDE the many ideas of this person. He never and in any way can go beyond the boundaries of his ideas, all his conclusions WILL come to the end exclusively within the ALREADY FORMED picture of the world dictated by the teaching.
So, when I talk about teaching with the words “my own limited closed subset,” it means that the teaching contains a PART (usually a SMALL PART) of the all-embracing knowledge of the World. It is limited to certain limits, and - most importantly! - any reasoning of a person DOES NOT go beyond the limits of teaching never. In other words, the teaching is closed on itself and represents a kind of unified environment in which a person walks. Such a doctrine can easily be holistic and consistent, it can contain theories with predictive power, it can generally be "omnipotent" up to a certain point … until the heavy hammer of practice smashes it on the anvil of harsh truth. Such acts of insight are usually given to sectarians very hard, and in especially difficult cases people do not even survive.
Thus, a typical sectarian in my eyes looks like this. A person has a certain picture of the world dictated by sectarian teaching, and no matter what phenomenon he finds, he will interpret it ONLY through the ideas already formed in him, not admitting the possibility that this phenomenon goes beyond those (beyond the scope of teaching). No matter how he reasoned, all his logical conclusions will revolve ONLY within the framework of a certain limited set of options familiar and familiar to him, and he will find a suitable explanation of the phenomenon in the picture of the world he already has, even if this phenomenon does not fit into it. Even in those cases when a person sees something clearly unusual for himself, he will simply expand his existing idea with this new example for himself, adjusting it to his experience. For example,a person is used to considering a certain form of human behavior as unreasonable and knows that this form of behavior reflects the primitiveness of a person's mind or the primitiveness of his way of thinking. When this person sees similar forms of behavior in people (for example, alcoholism), then he can rightly attribute them to a manifestation of unreasonableness. However, if he meets something very unusual, out of the ordinary, but at the same time unpleasant for himself in the behavior of another person, he will not look for the reasons for this behavior, but will only be surprised something like: “This is how unreasonable there is! But I did not know”and will enrich his arsenal of examples of unreasonableness. Although in reality it may not be unreasonable at all, but, say, pampering, a joke, deliberate pretense in order to hide something else, a strategic move that distracts attention, etc. Scouts and spies, for example,can have a whole arsenal of different forms of behavior, with the help of which it is possible to avert the gaze from the hidden reality, and the task of the scout is precisely to make the enemy think something else, and not what is actually happening. Everything that is incomprehensible to such a person in another person, he will not try to understand, but will simply reduce everything to unreasonableness even in cases when such a reduction looks clearly absurd.
By the way, it follows from what has been said that it is very easy to manipulate any sectarian if one realizes his system of ideas (as a rule, it is very primitive) and acts for his own purposes through this system, knowing in advance that the sectarian will never leave it. For example, if a person is a convinced anti-Semite, then he can easily be bred into buying a "super-Aryan Slavic contraption" or a "book of Vedic knowledge" for a lot of money, telling some story about the destruction of the Slavs by the Jews for their great culture and not forgetting to add that now all the Jews of the world hunt for such "things". You can tell him that the Jews add sugar and vinegar to all canned food to destroy the Russians, and therefore you only need to buy "these" Slavic canned food. In parallel, you can do and vice versa, immediately doubling the profit of your business,selling something to Jews under the pretext of opposing the goyim. As a result, everyone is happy, and things are moving … However, this niche is now well occupied, you should not take this example as a guide to action. I just could not resist and share my observation of how EASILY people are bred on the basis of racial and mental differences.
Now an analogy. Imagine that a boat is sailing on a wide lake, but it floats somehow crooked, zigzagging, eventually starting to rotate in one place and stopping in the middle of the lake, while there are no barriers, landmarks and buoys marking the fairway (safe for the vessel path through the water) on the lake no. Just as there are no barriers that prohibit swimming further or forcing to bend the trajectory. This is something like the thinking of a sectarian in the ocean of our entire culture. You look from the outside: there seem to be no obstacles, there seems to be plenty of options for the development of thought - but NO. At first, thinking illogically jumps in those places where there seems to be a direct solution, then it stops rather rigidly as soon as a convenient limiting conclusion is reached within its teaching. There are no even attempts to go ashore and see what is happening there, swim into the bay, inspect the island,dive under the water to look deeper, etc. However, it seems to the captain of the boat that his actions are absolutely logical and justified, and therefore it is simply impossible to swim in any other way. This is the only correct trajectory, and all the others who swim differently are (I quote from life) "stupid inhabitants and sectarians who do not understand anything about life as well as we understand it."
Let's repeat the definition in everyday language.
An example of the simplest self-absorbed thought might look like this: "The Bible is true because God wrote it, and God exists because it is written in the Bible." Unfortunately, although this example fully reflects ALL existing sects (including scientific, and not only religious), it is not informative enough and on its basis it is difficult to disassemble some very long chains that close themselves in real sects.
Here is an example of a chain, which I will explain in more detail later, but now I will only describe its beginning and end: "You are unreasonable because you do not understand the basic principles of an intelligent approach, and you do not understand them because you are unreasonable." As you can see, the logical error here is exactly the same as in the previous paragraph, only there is one difference: in this case I showed only the beginning and end of the chain, but the length of the discussion was such that my interlocutors simply forgot the beginning of their thoughts by the end of the conversation, and therefore due to limited memory, they simply could not control the consistency of their own inferences, demonstrating what I needed from the very beginning: the closure of the doctrine on itself. But why did I manage to find this error? Because I have been training to work with such errors for more than a dozen years.
So, the reality is that, unfortunately, none of the people I know enough to detect even such primitive chains is able to check it. I see two reasons for this. The first is the lack of thinking experience in which you need to try to cover the maximum possible number of factors. A person, for example, is simply too lazy to think that a certain form of behavior of another person can have two or three dozen reasons that are completely unknown to him, he stops at one reason that is obvious to him personally and hammers into it like a woodpecker, immediately drawing far-reaching conclusions, which in general nothing then don't fall for the practice of relationship. However, the ability to pull everything by the ears saves a person from mental trauma, and he lives calmly on, having found a pseudo explanation for any trouble. Or, say, a person is too lazy to thinkwhat will be the bending wind load on the fence post, what he puts for his fence, he does not even know what other forces will act on him and in what capacity, and therefore he simply takes and bury the post to a depth convenient for him. Then he usually fixes the fence after 5 years. And it happens that he does not fix it, because everything turned out well … this gives a person confidence that his practical experience is omnipotent. The lack of this habit of thinking as broadly as possible stems from just such seemingly simple wrong decisions. At a time when one person is just driving a nail, another will check at least three dozen factors before hammering. And it's not a fact that he will score. Maybe he decides to screw in something more powerful. It is possible that in both cases, both will be right and everything will work for both of them correctly with this nail. But then the first person will solve the second, third, hundredth problem in his life in the same way, and half of them, if not more, will be solved incorrectly. The second person will also solve each of his subsequent tasks with the maximum coverage of the circumstances, and therefore ALL of them will be solved correctly. Even those that are solved incorrectly will still be either redone, or the error will be taken into account for the future so as to gain from this error much more than it lost at the beginning. And while the first person continues to live blindly, the second will learn to make the right decisions in almost all cases and will gradually begin to do it even faster than the first scratches the back of his head. The second person will also solve each of his subsequent tasks with the maximum coverage of the circumstances, and therefore ALL of them will be solved correctly. Even those that are solved incorrectly will still be either redone, or the error will be taken into account for the future so as to gain from this error much more than it lost at the beginning. And while the first person continues to live blindly, the second will learn to make the right decisions in almost all cases and will gradually begin to do it even faster than the first scratches the back of his head. The second person will also solve each of his subsequent tasks with the maximum coverage of the circumstances, and therefore ALL of them will be solved correctly. Even those that are solved incorrectly will still be either redone, or the error will be taken into account for the future so as to gain from this error much more than it lost at the beginning. And while the first person continues to live blindly, the second will learn to make the right decisions in almost all cases and will gradually begin to do it even faster than the first scratches the back of his head.the second will learn to make the right decisions in almost all cases and will gradually begin to do it even faster than the first scratches the back of his head.the second will learn to make the right decisions in almost all cases and will gradually begin to do it even faster than the first scratches the back of his head.
An example of the simplest self-absorbed thought might look like this: "The Bible is true because God wrote it, and God exists because it is written in the Bible." Unfortunately, although this example fully reflects ALL existing sects (including scientific, and not only religious), it is not informative enough and on its basis it is difficult to disassemble some very long chains that close themselves in real sects.
Here is an example of a chain, which I will explain in more detail later, but now I will only describe its beginning and end: "You are unreasonable because you do not understand the basic principles of an intelligent approach, and you do not understand them because you are unreasonable." As you can see, the logical error here is exactly the same as in the previous paragraph, only there is one difference: in this case I showed only the beginning and end of the chain, but the length of the discussion was such that my interlocutors simply forgot the beginning of their thoughts by the end of the conversation, and therefore due to limited memory, they simply could not control the consistency of their own inferences, demonstrating what I needed from the very beginning: the closure of the doctrine on itself. But why did I manage to find this error? Because I have been training to work with such errors for more than a dozen years.
So, the reality is that, unfortunately, none of the people I know enough to detect even such primitive chains is able to check it. I see two reasons for this. The first is the lack of thinking experience in which you need to try to cover the maximum possible number of factors. A person, for example, is simply too lazy to think that a certain form of behavior of another person can have two or three dozen reasons that are completely unknown to him, he stops at one reason that is obvious to him personally and hammers into it like a woodpecker, immediately drawing far-reaching conclusions, which in general nothing then don't fall for the practice of relationship. However, the ability to pull everything by the ears saves a person from mental trauma, and he lives calmly on, having found a pseudo explanation for any trouble. Or, say, a person is too lazy to thinkwhat will be the bending wind load on the fence post, what he puts for his fence, he does not even know what other forces will act on him and in what capacity, and therefore he simply takes and bury the post to a depth convenient for him. Then he usually fixes the fence after 5 years. And it happens that he does not fix it, because everything turned out well … this gives a person confidence that his practical experience is omnipotent. The lack of this habit of thinking as broadly as possible stems from just such seemingly simple wrong decisions. At a time when one person is just driving a nail, another will check at least three dozen factors before hammering. And it's not a fact that he will score. Maybe he decides to screw in something more powerful. It is possible that in both cases, both will be right and everything will work for both of them correctly with this nail. But then the first person will solve the second, third, hundredth problem in his life in the same way, and half of them, if not more, will be solved incorrectly. The second person will also solve each of his subsequent tasks with the maximum coverage of the circumstances, and therefore ALL of them will be solved correctly. Even those that are solved incorrectly will still be either redone, or the error will be taken into account for the future so as to gain from this error much more than it lost at the beginning. And while the first person continues to live blindly, the second will learn to make the right decisions in almost all cases and will gradually begin to do it even faster than the first scratches the back of his head. Then, in the course of large-scale provocation number 3, I managed to get rid of the whole gang of sectarians, of which I was once a part, and myself. I hope I don't have to do this kind of thing againI don't want more. This is a gallows demonism, which after minutes of triumph plunges into months of devastation, turning into a desire to take on the sacrifice harder, and then even stronger. So in the end you start to eat yourself up, because you simply don't come across stronger rivals.
The attentive reader will, of course, easily understand why I wrote the last paragraph. It reflects a rather complex situation of closure, which only not everyone can realize. The fact is that a “demon” of this type, which I considered myself to be, can never lose, because even his own defeat in something WILL be interpreted as a victory, having gathered only the elements of the circumstances of defeat convenient for himself. That is why it does not matter here whether you won or lost, you will always think that you won, and then you will start eating yourself, because real internal contradictions remain like larvae of flies, which she deposited into the still living, but already rotting demon meat. The logic of any demon is closed to a limited teaching, which he himself created and within the framework of this teaching he ALWAYS wins, even when he loses. This means that any demon is a sectarian by default. No exceptions: ANY. Think about it, dear reader, before the flies begin to hatch from the larvae in your body. This process can be stopped, and in the next part I will tell you how you can leave the sect easily and quickly, even when it is impossible to do it for the reasons that the very logic of the teaching does not make it possible to see your own boundaries.
Continued: Part 2
Author: Artyom Karavaev