Cults

Organizations

There exist for-profit organizations where individuals are generally not expected to provide feedback regarding its governance. There exist private companies that impose various work regulations, and people who work there are fine with those regulations because there are people who are in charge, and there are people who follow orders, do their job, and get financial compensations for the job they do (most of the time, otherwise we’re talking about slavery).

There also exist non-profit and not-for-profit organizations. These organizations declare themselves to have open-minded attitude, regardless of experience, culture, without discrimination. Because of this, there exists an expectation that mostly everything can be discussed freely in such organizations, including governance. It would be quite naive to expect anyone to change the way someone works, but people are also free to influence the decision-making process. Everyone who decided to dedicate their time to work on things on a voluntary basis deserve to be treated with respect. Unlike in private companies where people are mostly driven by relationships that involve money, people who participate in non-profit organizations are mostly driven by passion.

IT and Open Source

Open source is a prominent example. Some open-source projects choose to operate under umbrella of non-profit organizations. Open-source community-led projects usually declare principles such as open discussion, and tend to attract people from all around the world.

Participating in an open-source community grants a feeling of belonging, and people can make an impact virtually from any point in the world. You do the right thing and make the world better! And this is totally fine. The problem is that, due to various factors, this can lead to a situation where people get strongly attached to a project and even become addicted to this process, which is certainly a bad thing.

This tends to form an echo chamber, where outside opinion may be seen hostile towards a project, even if such opinion represents constructive criticism. If a project is driven by a group of leaders, and when that group got attached to it on the personal level, the product ceases being a tool and turns into an object to be protected. Any external cause brought in by an outsider that hasn’t been approved into the inner circle can be turned away simply because that person is not a part of the circle.

This defensiveness shows signs of what we call a cult or tribalism. Successful and mature projects rarely if ever have to defend their image (other than protecting trademarks), because strong and sustainable image is built by making good quality products instead. It’s less about words, but more about concrete actions. In the IT industry, this means building robust and useful software.

This is not to say that all cultish organizations out there are literally cults. A lot of communities will have zealous fans and enthusiastic people that would like to see good things that make this world a happier place to live in. If we take IT, then you may have heard things like a “Cult of Mac”, “Cult of Linux” etc. However, there exists cult communities that look great on the surface, but when you go deeper, this is where you may realize that it’s actually a toxic, abusive, or even destructive cult.

The following chapters covers common characteristics of all such toxic cult communities.