High profile sociopaths are extreme outliers, as most sociopaths burn through their social connections well before becoming competent enough at social manipulation and finding enough people that are well-off enough to maintain a parasitic life.

Also as a side note, within Scientology you don't actually learn about the Xenu shit until you're way too deep, financially and/or time commitment-wise, to pull out.

> Also as a side note, within Scientology you don't actually learn about the Xenu shit until you're way too deep, financially and/or time commitment-wise, to pull out.

It seems they’ve taken a page out of Masonry or mystery religions. Only higher level “initiates” receive the real wisdom.

The question is, are the high level initiates plain psychopaths?

Or are they just addicted to the free pussy (or dick), drugs, and money that comes with forcing others to join the cult?

Esoteric religion as an intellectual Ponzi scheme...

Nice. Although I am beginning to suspect that everything is to a greater or lesser degree a Ponzi Scheme in the long run due to thermodynamics. ;-)

Sometimes I wonder if it's better for a religion to have strange beliefs:

1a) It's a better show of commitment to the group if you are willing to stand up and say the absurd on behalf of the group. It's saying that membership in the group matters more to you than the potential loss of face. You could expect to be able to rely on such a person to be loyal to the group.

1b) It's also a better show of group commitment if someone is motivated enough to try to convince themselves of something very difficult to believe.

2) Groups espousing weird beliefs will face ostracism, and that will bind them more to each other. They will spend more time with each other away from outsiders, developing their belief system further with even less sanity checking from the outside.

Yeah. If I were to cast it into this framework, you could look at fundamentalist systems of thought as delivering a supernormal sense of understanding. Which causes supernormal confidence, making their views easier to spread.

An actual universe doesn't pack well into the 3 pounds of meat we use for thinking. A system of thought that lets us discard most natural ambiguity and nuance would be unnaturally comfortable. I think this is true both for obvious fundamentalism (e.g., Bible thumpers) and for single-explanation frameworks of thought. Freudianism, Marxism, and capitalism all have groups that are effectively fundamentalist adherents. And I think there's a species of Bitcoin fanatic that is also effectively fundamentalist.

I guess I shouldn't be surprised that this appears to be on the rise at the same time the Internet has brought us into contact with all the information and all the people.