How Online Echo Chambers Can Turn into Cults & How to Protect Kids

In this thought-provoking episode, Malcolm and Simone Collins dive deep into the dangers of online echo chambers and how they can morph into cult-like environments. They explore the consequences of growing up in a secular society without strong moral frameworks and discuss how this leaves young people vulnerable to being sucked into radical online communities. Malcolm and Simone also examine the role of religion in providing moral guidance and the challenges of raising children with strong values in today's digital age. Join them as they share insights on protecting kids from internet radicalization and the importance of instilling a robust moral compass.

Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] just fascinating to watch cults organically form within online spaces, or if you want to use a word other than cults self replicating mimetic clusters was negative psychological effects. When the deconvert from religious systems, they don't realize that all they did was stop believing in God, but they

Simone Collins: were still raised with those values. So they assume that what their, their morality is, is. just their morality when in fact they spent their entire lives being raised either within their church community or in a community very colored by their church community.

And then they don't realize that if they raise their children in an absence of that, they assume that they're just going to come to the same conclusions that they have, but no, they're not being raised in that religious way.

Malcolm Collins: This is a natural human inclination to develop some model that they personally aspire to. And when you don't have something like a religious framework that has a level of authority for you, you can [00:01:00] begin. I thinking, okay, well then who am I? And if you don't know who you are, then you're like the most important part of me is a man or a woman

Would you like to know more?

Malcolm Collins: Hello, Simone. I am so excited about our episode today.

This is a really interesting one because recently I have been going down a rabbit hole of the different ways people go crazy on the internet.

Simone Collins: It's so depressing. It's so depressing. I can't, how can you manage this?

Malcolm Collins: Oh, well, you know, I grew up loving cults, right? The, the, and it was something that I studied in, in like a lot of detail.

I was very interested in how groups of people could come to believe things about the world that obviously weren't true, but that these things could have huge sort of psychological effects on them. Huge physiological effects on them because you know, , the power of suggestion is incredibly strong and as I've gotten older, I have become less interested in, Intentionally created malevolent [00:02:00] cults because, you know, you can learn a lot about those and they're interesting, but more related in if all of these techniques can be utilized by a specific individual with malevolent or even positive means.

Like, I tried to take some of these techniques and use them on myself to. Actually improve mental health like if they can be used to control an individual, then if you have the full rule book in front of you, can you use them to control yourself to an extent? Yeah. And can these techniques then accidentally get picked up by mimetic clusters and create sort of organically formed.

Cults, and this is something we've talked about in a few of our episodes, like, you know, and psychology become a cult has the in which we argue that the modern practice of psychology today is actually more similar in structure to. What people called Scientology in the eighties and what called clinical psychology [00:03:00] in the eighties techniques and stuff like that.

And I don't think there was any malevolent intent. I think that just techniques that were did a better job building dependency ended up competing. The ones that didn't, or was in, like, is a trans movement, hiding a call, you know, that episode where we talk about that, which is to say that if you create a, a group of people where was in large portions of society, you cannot.

in any way question them. Then it creates, and this is also, I think, what happened with psychology. Like it was like, Oh, how dare you question that person for seeing a psychologist because you created this group that you couldn't question. Just from the medically speaking, it's very likely that toxic memes that build dependency will begin to cluster and create sort of organically formed cults within these contexts.

Well, this all gets very interesting. So you're like, why do I find it fascinating? Why do I study these people who have lost themselves? Yeah.

Simone Collins: Despite how depressing and one is,

Malcolm Collins: it just fascinating to watch cults organically form within online spaces, or if you want to use a word other than [00:04:00] cults self replicating mimetic clusters was negative psychological effects.

Oh, so that's why they

Simone Collins: call them cults.

Malcolm Collins: Right. Yeah. Oh, actually. Yeah. Okay. Okay. And to think about it from a utility perspective in regards to our kids, how do we protect our kids from the internet driving them crazy?

Simone Collins: Yes. And this becomes, I just don't want them on really.

Malcolm Collins: So, so the first thing I want to note here is it's something that I've been reflecting on a lot recently is Historically, if you are a religious person, like, like the, the lowest IQ, or at least what I would have thought historically, like the lowest IQ religious attack on Atheist communities was if you don't have God, then you don't have morality.

Right? And then the atheist community would flip back and say, Oh, well, if you're only doing what's right, like if you're not out there murdering [00:05:00] people just because you're afraid of punishments after death or for rewards after death, then you don't actually have morality at all. Then I have meaningful morality because I'm not killing people because I'm a good person, right?

You. And this sounded really well and good, I think, for the first generation of atheists. The problem is the society is becoming so secular now that I think what I'm beginning to see is a lot of even growing up secular. You know, I was raised atheist in an atheist family. Growing up secular I didn't fully appreciate how many of the moral subsets I assumed were just sort of convergent and obvious moral systems are not convergent and obvious moral systems.

Simone Collins: Well, but here's the thing is, I think if they were, we would not need culture and religion. If all that stuff came naturally to us, we wouldn't need this additional software running on top of our hardware, as you point out in the pragmatist guide to [00:06:00] crafting religion.

Malcolm Collins: So yeah, so there's two illusions which create the belief that they are convergent and obvious systems.

One is, is that they are, there are convergent. Cultural strategies that lead to success when you're talking about competition between communities. That could sound very complicated, but I'll expand on this concept a bit.

If you look at the successful cultural slash religious books, we would call the pragmatist kind of crafting religion cultivars. These are sort of mimetic clusters, which positively augment the fitness of the individuals who hold them. I eat a number of surviving offspring that they have. And that that is how they compete with other clusters.

And that they have outcompeted other clusters. There's obviously going to be some level of convergent evolution among