I have a theory!
(I have theories about everything)

It's that a cognitive bias toward authority-based rather than evidence-based reasoning is an important check-off on the "are you a potential cult recruit" vs "are you really, really not" https://twitter.com/drvox/status/1321152190744940544

Cults -- and I'm starting to include my own evangelical Protestantism under the "cult" umbrella -- exploit a basic human need for a sense of belonging and identity.

Oh, and purpose. How could I forget purpose. Belonging, identity, and purpose. These are the things cults give you, or at least PROMISE to give you.

But, what makes something a cult?

A cult is a totalistic movement. There's a lot of reading to do on the characteristics of totalistic movements --
https://culteducation.com/brainwashing/26424-thought-reform-and-the-psychology-of-totalism.html

But I have a shorthand, and I'm self-conscious even *saying* it because I've internalized how much evangelical Christians would bristle:

I believe a healthy religion resembles, basically, a hobby or fandom.

Anything that demands MORE of you than that, is a cult.

If you want to see if something is a cult or not -- try to leave and see what happens.

This is why I've retroactively started to identify my childhood evangelical Protestantism as a cult, because of what happened when I tried to leave.

But why did I WANT to leave?

Cults more or less base their entire existence around preventing people from leaving. I was raised in the cult, I didn't know anything else. My whole family was still in it -- leaving the cult, I had nowhere to go.

So, why leave?

A cult offers: belonging, identity, and purpose/meaning in exchange for, basically, your soul. It's a steep price, but if it really delivers on those things, I guess, people are willing to pay it.

But what if it doesn't even offer you those things?

This is where my theory about evidence-based vs authority-based reasoning comes in. I think cults are mostly designed to "work" on people who are naturally biased toward authority-based reasoning.

And I'm really, really the opposite.

Growing up in an authoritarian cult, I was taught to doubt my own perceptions and conclusions, and I do. I recognized that memory is faulty, perceptions imperfect. So I learned to fact-check myself. Take notes. Test things out.

I still don't know to what extent my strong evidence-based reasoning bias is inborn vs. learned as a defense mechanism.

But it means the cult didn't WORK -- it didn't deliver.

I didn't get belonging, identity, and purpose -- instead I got alienation, loneliness, depression, one existential crisis after another, and a sense of doubt and uncertainty that goes all the way down.

But, that's what happened to me being raised in a cult.

As an adult, I could've just not joined, and been vaguely baffled about why anybody would.

Anyway, one of my theories about the authority-vs-evidence bias in human cognition is that people who are strongly in one camp or the other often REALLY don't understand the thinking of people strongly in the opposite camp.

It's a cognitive bias, right? So literally EVERYTHING in your brain is filtered through that bias. It's almost impossible to even imagine what reality looks like to somebody with the opposite cognitive bias.

For example, look at the way creationists talk about "evolutionists" -- as if we "believe in" evolution as a religious precept, the same WAY they believe in creationism.

Or, look at the way Republicans, evangelicals, Qanoners -- authoritarian thinkers, all -- talk about science and scientists. As if a scientist is simply a *competing* authority figure.

I could probably natter about this all day, but lunch is over, so I'll leave you with this: I think evidence-based thinkers CAN comprehend authority-based thinkers, in a way, because we can OBSERVE them --

But authority-based thinking will never *intuitively* make sense to evidence-based thinkers.

It'll always seem absolutely BONKERS to me that somebody could believe in, for example, Qanon.

But I have the evidence that they do.

And I always have to go with the evidence.

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