Some brain defects let you perceive social reality in a deeply distorted way while often leaving the rest of your reasoning intact, eg. Capgras illusion: in her last weeks, my grandmother experienced that everyone she knew had been replaced by identically looking impersonators.

If you don't know about the existence of such delusions and how our mind constructs our experience of a reality from models, it can be impossible to compensate for them, even when you are otherwise totally rational.

Our experience of pain, pleasure, suffering, morality and justice does not correspond to physical reality. Instead, it is constructed at the interface between two mental models: the universe and self. Valence is the mind's way of inflicting its model of the universe on the self.

Everything is "in your head", but your mind is not part of the you, it creates you. The mind constructs a simulated universe from sensory patterns, the significance of this universe (valence), and a simulacrum inhabiting that universe and experiencing its significance (you).

If you perceive a contradiction in reality itself, a causal inversion, a divergence between who you are and what you do, a conflict between your body and your body image, a gap between your social identity and what others see in you, you may be experiencing a modeling defect.

Modeling defects can be induced, especially by conditioning you to integrate unprovable or even false opinions below your self: even if you can logically see that such opinions are false, they will become experientially true and control how you interpret reality and act on it.

There is a difference between belief and faith. Belief is held by the self and conditionally informs behavior, and can be changed from within the self. Faith becomes part of the software that is generating the self, controls your experience of reality, and is changed by others.

The human mind has many innate hooks that can be used to induce faith, and that are used by parents, teachers and cults to shape the identity of the self. They include shame, love, compassion, sacredness, affiliation, belonging, desire to protect, status, libido, fear of death.

Important stages in cognitive development are the construction of rational choice (agency) over what you want, over what's important, over what's true, over what you experience as right, over what you experience as real. Most people get only to the second or third stage.

Your stage determines the nature of your opinions, and how you interact with the opinions of others. Are your opinions about evolution or innate gender differences or the middle east conflict or masturbation or your body image or the realness of the self a faith or just beliefs?

Every stage that is missing in your development amounts to a completely defenseless attack surface for parasitic mind viruses, manipulative individuals and cults. Which stage you are at depends on innate traits, developmental age and the stage of the people you interact with.

Cults are driven by complex mind viruses that include infection mechanisms (mission), belief attractor (questioning the faith hurts the self), proof of sacrifice (irrational belief), internal immune response (inquisition, ostracism), external immune response (othering).

It is possible to build an entire society from a cult, but it will exclude everyone who resists the indoctrination. Where an ideological or religious cult becomes state religion, it will purge competing cults and people on higher stages (intellectuals, witches and shamans).

Western societies tend to be tolerant against cults, as long as they submit to secular law and peaceful coexistence. Cults are so widespread and deeply entrenched that they form part of the social ecosystem. Also, there is no clear boundary between a social movement and a cult.

Cults are nevertheless very dangerous to individuals and society itself. Traditionally, secular society curbs the influence of cults by keeping them out of the mandatory education system and academia and limits their share of access to broadcasting infrastructure.

Social media has changed this balance: it offers unlimited broadcasting and feedback channels that hook into every attack surface of the social self of its users. These mechanisms are so powerful that they can spawn cults spontaneously, and give free reign to manipulators.

Part of the concessions of a secular pluralist education system to the legacy cults (traditional religions, evangelical sects etc.) has been the exclusion of cognitive development from the curriculum of schools and colleges (outside of psychology, theology and marketing classes).

Our children do not learn how to recognize cults, understand their consequences, how to recognize that their friends or themselves are part of a cult, and how to facilitate the deprogramming (which is difficult, because it affects how an individual perceives self and reality).

Universities are incubators for ideological cults, because students are mostly at an early stage of cognitive development (without knowing it), seek identity, meaning and belonging, and are removed from their families and grounding in broader social contexts.

Every postwar generation saw various outbreaks of ideological cults among students. They fizzled out when their leaders aged out of academia without getting tenure, and their followers lost touch with their groups and were exposed to experiences that they could not reconcile.

This situation changes when social media allows cults to infect many different institutions simultaneously and at scale. This allows cults to entrench themselves by infiltrating faculty and administration, control hiring decisions, and eventually dominate media and politics.