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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
Published on 1 year, 8 months ago