Reason & Passion: From Curiosity to Culty

Back in early 2021, Paul (I won't give his last name), a member of the New Zealand Association of Rationalists and Humanists in Auckland - known as the NZARH, or just the Rationalists - was entrusted with managing a Facebook group of around 500 members that was originally used for a University of Auckland group called the Reason and Science society. The group was renamed to SHARP - Student Humanists Agnostics Rationalists and Philosophers, and appears to have been re-purposed for students at Auckland University.

After the takeover, at some point this group's content changed from posts about upcoming meetings to mirroring a lot of content that Paul also posted to his other Facebook group, Reason and Passion. Much of the content in both groups was about futurism, that pseudoscientific discipline where the only prediction that consistently comes true is that futurists will be unable to successfully predict the future. Sadly, although futurism has at times been an interesting topic (along with some silliness from the likes of Alvin Toffler), in recent years the futurist movement seems to have been hijacked by the likes of people like Ray Kurtweil, with his Singularity University and grand pronouncements about how we'll all be uploaded to computers and will live forever. If you want to know more, I'd highly recommend the documentary Transcendent Man to see just how profoundly sad Kurzweil's wishful thinking and desire for eternal life is.

One of the good things that Paul managed to do with this group was to organise a few talks that were hosted at the NZARH's Auckland building, Rationalist House. At a time where we'd all been through a couple of lockdowns, being able to get out and see some rational, science-based talks was an attractive proposition for many. I joined the Facebook group to watch how this progressed, with the hope that maybe if I was in Auckland I'd be able to attend an in-person meeting. After a few talks, the group died down for a while.

Suddenly, in 2022, activity in the group flared up again, with a lot of posting from Paul and an odd name change of the group from “Reason and Science” to “Global Flourishing”. This is something I've seen before. Years ago I was monitoring a group called “Weather Modification NZ”, run by Nigel Anthony Grey. It turned out that Nigel is a Scientologist, and after attracting thousands of members to his group he sneakily renamed it to “Spiritual Awareness NZ”, and tried to push Scientology on the group's members. It goes without saying that this tactic went down like a cup of cold sick for most members.

Seeing Paul try this same tactic with his audience, an audience he had been gifted and was meant to be feeding with science-based content, was too much for me. I'm usually quiet online, preferring to observe rather than participate, but I spoke up in this group saying in response to the name change:

“I don't mean to be rude, but this new name and the website give off real cult vibes to me! I'm sure that's not the intention, but that's just the impression I get.”

A conversation ensued that didn't fill me with confidence, with Paul trying to justify his bait and switch behaviour by claiming that everyone would be supporting of global flourishing (whatever that means), and that a because nobody had responded to a question he'd asked in a conversation thread about renaming the group, he'd assumed it was okay. It felt like Paul was more interested in defending his bad decision than he was in listening to feedback myself and others gave him, so I stopped paying attention and the group activity died down again, until…

A few months ago, Paul started posting furiously in the group again. At least he had renamed the Facebook group back to the Reason and Science Society, although he was still using the group to promote his own personal ideas.

Paul was promoting a new meeting in Rationalist House. Because I'm a council member of the Rationalists, and I hadn't heard anything about this meeting using our premises, I was a little concerned.

Paul's topics of choice, the topics he was using to try to encourage engagement, were somewhat pseudoscientific - not only futurism nonsense, but also things like promoting the anti-vaccine group Voices for Freedom's new “radio” show, Reality Check Radio - saying “This new digital channel has been launched today. I'd be interested to hear what people think of this”. When someone pointed out that this is a horribly biased media outlet, run by people who are anything but science based, Paul simply responded that it “seems like both ends of the left-right political spectrum have got some irrational thinking going on these days”. This is not a great response to being called out for promoting dangerous content online.

In addition to this weirdness, Paul had changed his name on Facebook to Ui Okfab, and had decided that his nascent Global Flourishing movement would be called ∑±. Those cult vibes I'd warned Paul about last year? Now I was really starting to feel like something weird was going on. And so I decided to jump in and see what the hell this was all about, both so that as an NZARH Council member I could be adequately informed, and because the idea of a cult emerging from New Zealand's rational/skeptical movement was intriguing to me.

I checked out the group's online presence, which consisted of two websites that really didn't tell me much, and a MeetUp group for advertising events:

Paul/Ui had chosen to shift his group's conversation from Facebook to Discord, an app originally designed to allow people to text and voice chat while playing computer games together - as many multiplayer games don't come with much, if any, chat functionality. This act of moving conversation from a more open platform to one with less visibility is definitely a red flag, and over the last few years we've seen many conspiratorial groups move from Facebook to places like Signal, Telegram and Discord.

For Discord Paul had chosen the username ∑±78c7e, which just added to my concerns. Here's a conversation where he attempted to explain his decision:

sahyel — 05/04/2023 15:10

@∑±78c7e so what is the story behind how you got your designation 78c7e after the ∑±?

∑±78c7e — 05/04/2023 15:15

oh right, ooops, sorry, I meant to talk about that already 🙃... the story goes that someone was saying I should call myself ∑±01 but I wasn't sure why I didn't like that Idea and then I realized the "no thrones" part of this:


what that's meant to mean is that there is no messiah in the ∑± movement! There's no Putin, or Mussolini or Buddha, this movement should always just be about the central tentpole ideas, not any one person..... and there's totally nothing special about me! ... in fact I'm quite defective in various ways! 🤣

∑±78c7e — 05/04/2023 15:23

So with all that in mind I realized, na, I don't want to be called anything like GloFlo01 or whatever anywhere! So I wrote up a little bit of code that generates random numbers and letters and it spat our ∑±78c7e for me 😅 And then I thought, maybe we could use that for other people as well if they want (again, not in a cult-like ways though @markhoney ! 🙃😂) . And maaaaaybe, there could be something NFT or crypto or whatever that we could use later if things get going big enough etc. to continue to spread the " ∑± super sapien-power story"? 🤔🙂

....and like so many other things to do with my personality, and this whole ∑± thing so far, it's largely just meant as a bit of a joke 😁

sahyel — 05/04/2023 15:56

Cool, and why is ∑± the symbol of max flourishing min suffering? What has sigma got to do with the idea?

∑±78c7e — 05/04/2023 16:05

∑ is just the mathematical symbol for "sum of" 🙂: https://www.mathsisfun.com/algebra/sigma-notation.html

...and ± is just "positive and negative" ... and in the case of ∑± , it's just meant to mean "flourishing and suffering"....

...... and obviously we're trying to maximize the + and minimize the - 🙂

..... now, and for our children, and their children, and for the many multitudes who could come along thereafter .... 🙂

You can see in this conversation that I've been tagged (@markhoney), and my concerns about this group looking cult-like have been mentioned (this happened a lot after I joined the Discord channel, me being tagged in conversations I was not a part of). There are also many emojis, which have been giving me flashbacks to my Eastern Lightning experiences. Mention of starting up an NFT project was also disconcerting. Ignoring these red flags, I ploughed on…

The Tent

Inside the Discord group, I found a few almost empty chat channels, mostly with just a few comments from Paul, along with one or two other people occasionally commenting. This seemed a little odd - where was everyone hiding? As I read the various groups, I realised that there was a secret area, an inner sanctum, that was not visible to me until I accepted (by giving a thumbs up to) the five basic tenets of Paul's new group. These tenets were described by analogy as tent poles, holding up the cloth of a large, open tent in the desert. This image was given as an example of the kind of tent Paul was thinking of:

There are 5 tent poles in Paul's Global Flourishing tent, as can be seen in this explanatory image:

These tent poles are the basic tenets of Paul's movement, and are known as the “immovable poles” in this tent analogy. The “best possible future world” pole is at the centre, and the four surrounding poles are for rationalism/skepticism, storytelling, not having many poles (yeah, I think this one might be deliberately ironic), and a long-winded description of the tent analogy.

If you think this is a little bit too simplistic, there's an expanded version with more details:

And if you think that's not quite enough to push this movement into culty territory, how about this one?

The #rules chat channel explained what I had to do in order to access the inside of the tent, and the conversation that was happening:

_The only rules of this message board (or "∑± tent in the wilderness") are these:

1: In order to get and retain the ability to send messages in this message board (i.e., to "speak in the tent"), you will need to at least put a thumbs up at the end of the following channel, and always act like the kind of "tent person" described there: https://discordapp.com/channels/1077093251825274910/1077125726958014555_

_2: In order to attain and keep the “∑± role” and ability to see all of the channels in the "centre of the tent" category (see here: https://discordapp.com/channels/1077093251825274910/1080263942208770179), and to be able to "speak" in those channels, you need to sign off on all 5 of the "tentpoles", and demonstrate that you continue to clearly understand and agree with what you've signed off on._

_3: Obviously (per rule 1 above) stuff like doxing, being super nasty to anyone, etc. etc. are totally not allowed, and if it's bad enough, the person or persons involved might be banned and/or have whatever was said deleted.... or possibly worse._

Okay, so I needed to read what was written in each of 5 different chat channels: named #storytelling-tentpole, #reasoning-tentpole, #min-poles-tentpole, #tent-people-tentpole, and #∑±-tentpole. I read their contents, which honestly seemed fairly reasonable in the main, if a little kooky, and gave them all a thumbs up. And then I waited.

I didn't have to wait for long, as I received a message from Paul within an hour:

@markhoney , you win the prize for being literally the first person to make it to the "centre of the tent"! 😁 (I guess I didn't realize how fricken complicated and time intensive this whole thing would be for the majority of people to be inclined to bother with or figure out so far 🤣). So I owe you 1 x free t-shirt (worth ~$50!) since I've been promising to buy one for the first 10 people to make it to the centre of the tent 🙂... I'll PM you so we can talk about it.

Yep, although I wasn't the first person to join Paul's Discord channel, I was the first person who had bothered to give a thumbs up to its contents, and here I was, in the centre of the tent, alone. So, hang on, here I was trying to find out if this group was becoming cult-like, and now I'm its first fully fledged-member? This can't be good - I'm meant to be investigating this at arm's length, and now I'm member number one!

There's more to this story, including some decidedly unskeptical conversations amongst the group's members, me joining an online meeting to see what more I can learn about Paul's Big Idea, and a video call I had with Paul where I tried to express my concerns directly to him. Check back in my next newsletter for more!