Comment by potatolicious
4 days ago
Yeah, a lot of the comments here are really just addressing cults writ large and opposed to why this one was particularly successful.
A significant part of this is the intersection of the cult with money and status - this stuff really took off once prominent SV personalities became associated with it, and got turbocharged when it started intersecting with the angel/incubator/VC scene, when there was implicit money involved.
It's unusually successful because -- for a time at least -- there was status (and maybe money) in carrying water for it.
Paypal will be traced as the root cause of many of our future troubles.
Wish I could upvote this twice. It's like intersectionality for evil.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barth%C3%A9lemy-Prosper_Enfa...
Sometimes history really does rhyme.
> Enfantin and Amand Bazard were proclaimed Pères Suprêmes ("Supreme Fathers") – a union which was, however, only nominal, as a divergence was already manifest. Bazard, who concentrated on organizing the group, had devoted himself to political reform, while Enfantin, who favoured teaching and preaching, dedicated his time to social and moral change. The antagonism was widened by Enfantin's announcement of his theory of the relation of man and woman, which would substitute for the "tyranny of marriage" a system of "free love".[1]