Mar 31 • General discussion
Why do all attempts at community seem to follow the same route?
I have seen and partaken in many spiritual groups over the last 40 years, most have systematically followed that same pattern of rise and collapse. I've tried to understand this from many points of view, spiritual, psychological, group dynamics, and others. All were interesting but left me unsatisfied and with the feeling that something was missing.
A few years ago I discovered Complex Systems Theory and had a eureka moment.
Human groups can be understood as Complex Adaptive Systems (CAS), composed of interacting agents whose local behaviors give rise to emergent global structures. Within such systems, certain individuals can become attractors—points around which attention, meaning, and coordination begin to organize.
This dynamic is particularly visible in cult formation. From an initially diverse population, one agent emerges as a central attractor. Attention flows toward this individual in the form of praise, trust, and projection. In return, the leader produces meaning—“wisdom”—which reinforces the followers’ orientation toward them. A positive feedback loop is established: attention generates authority, and authority amplifies attention.
As this loop intensifies, the system begins to close in on itself. Information that contradicts the internal structure is filtered out, while coherence within the system is reinforced. The group evolves toward an increasingly autonomous and self-referential organization, where alignment is rewarded and deviation is either corrected or rejected. What emerges is not merely social cohesion, but a form of dynamic enclosure.
This process can be mapped onto the NSS/SOS landscape of consciousness. NSS (Non-Survival Sensations) correspond to openness, exploration, and the capacity to perceive the full landscape of experience. SOS (Survival-Oriented Sensations), by contrast, narrow the field around threat, control, and stability. In the early stages of group formation, NSS dynamics may dominate—curiosity, inspiration, a sense of shared meaning. But as the system grows in complexity and begins to protect its own structure, SOS dynamics increasingly take over.
The leader, as the central attractor, becomes the focal point through which this shift is mediated. The amplification of attention around a single node creates a distortion in the landscape: the richness of distributed perception collapses into a single interpretive axis. Members no longer explore the landscape directly; they experience it through the structure imposed by the system.
Control mechanisms then emerge as a natural consequence of this shift. As internal complexity increases, so does the need to maintain coherence. The system begins to restrict external inputs, isolate its members, and enforce alignment. From the inside, this often appears as necessity or truth; from the outside, as rigidity and control. The key point is that these behaviors are not merely the result of individual intention, but expressions of the system’s attempt to stabilize itself.
The system approaches Self-Organized Criticality (SOC) when the cost of maintaining this control exceeds the stability it provides. At this threshold, the structure becomes highly sensitive to perturbations. Small deviations—doubt, conflicting information, or internal contradiction—can cascade into large-scale destabilization. Members begin to disengage, factions form, and the system fragments.
The collapse of such systems is often attributed to the ego of the leader. However, within this framework, ego is better understood as a symptom rather than a cause. It is an emergent property of the feedback dynamics that concentrate attention, authority, and interpretive power into a single node. The leader’s ego, like the followers’ dependence, arises from the same underlying structure of the system.
More broadly, this reflects a general principle of consciousness as a dynamic landscape. The “ego” is not a fixed entity, but an indexing function that stabilizes perception by organizing experience around certain attractors. When this indexing becomes overly rigid—whether in an individual or a group—the landscape collapses into a narrow basin of attraction dominated by SOS dynamics.
From this perspective, both individual psychological imbalance and collective phenomena like cults can be seen as different scales of the same underlying process: the contraction of a dynamic landscape into a closed, self-reinforcing loop. Conversely, the restoration of NSS dynamics corresponds to a reopening of the landscape—where multiple attractors can coexist, and perception is no longer monopolized by a single point of control.
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Why do all attempts at community seem to follow the same route?
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