Academic publication - Magna Carta Lawful Rebellion

[DNetolitzky]

Hi folks,

I thought the UK group might be interested in an academic article I just published in the International Journal of Coercion, Abuse, and Manipulation. (Mentally I almost always swap out the last word with "Mind Control" ... but that's just me.) The article is a retrospective on the MCLR and its leaders, with a focus on social structure and control:

Ten Seconds to Implosion: The Magna Carta Lawful Rebellion - https://www.researchgate.net/publicatio ... _Rebellion

Quatloos and its UK users were so helpful in preparing this article. Without your careful documentation of the MCLR and its leadership, including identifying and preserving information that was rapidly deleted, this article would have been a much thinner and less interesting product.

Comments and observations are very welcome.

Donald

[JohnPCapitalist]

I'm enjoying the article. I fell into the pseudolaw rabbit hole years ago after engaging in a lot of study of cults like Scientology. It seemed obvious to me that some of these organizations could be matched up against cult control analysis frameworks like Steve Hassan's "BITE" model, like any other cultic group. I know Steven Kent would agree, but I found some extremism researchers who I communicated with to be unwilling to go there.

I laughed at the Canadian level of dry politeness in your description of David Robinson's Magna Carta magnum opus: "The Laymans Guide is a poorly drafted and cryptic document primarily composed of example and template MCLR documents. MCLR adherents frequently complain the Laymans Guide is obscure, and seek other, simpler guidance. Those complaints are well-founded."

Equally fun is the tip of the hat to the Quatloos community: "study targets are addressed in a dry, dark, and sardonic manner." I'm delighted that the community managed to hit the Ironic Trifecta, though I am only a minor member and wouldn't attempt to bask in the respect deserved by those who have contributed far more time and talent to chronicling this movement than I have.

You did a neat job of tying Jacquie Phoenix's information control strategies to Hassan's BITE model, even though you didn't iterate through each mechanism he proposes and show it operating in the MCLR group. When you discuss the social control mechanisms, I think you can strongly make the case that Phoenix's techniques are consistent with a broad range of internet-founded cultic groups. If you think about those groups economically, as if they're a business enterprise, I think it's possible to create some well-founded generalizations that give you predictive power over these groups in the future.

At one point, I considered submitting a paper to IJCAM on how the Internet changes the economics of cults but I got sidetracked and never completed the work. Essentially, what you're describing is a business with low initial customer acquisition cost but a low hit rate. In other words, social media allows you to sign up new members without 1-to-1 personal effort, but you have to get your message in front of hundreds or thousands of prospective members to convert one. That's very different from an old-school cult like Scientology or the Moonies, which took a lot of 1-on-1 labor to acquire a new recruit. The only way for those groups to survive was to have staff who were paid little for long hours of work. Even at pennies per hour the recruiting cost does add up.

The Internet cult model involves a challenging repeat business model. One way to suck recent recruits in further is to create sunk costs that recruits will be hard-pressed to walk away from. Multi-level marketing schemes like Amway, Herbalife or LuLaRoe quickly saddle new members with tons of inventory that they will see many times per day to motivate them to stay engaged, buying ever more sales seminars to sell the stuff piling up in their garage. Software companies (which aren't cults) have enviable customer lock-in because of the cost of converting all your data and retraining your programmers to use a new system. That's a stick to bludgeon people into not leaving. But software companies also work hard on offering carrots, with add-on modules that deliver positive value for money. Phoenix's group, and indeed the whole FOTL universe, doesn't really have much repeat business opportunity. Once you've paid up for the magic documents that allow you to "declare your status" and escape the matrix, there's not much to sell, because the first tranche of documents is almost by definition sufficient to grant you all possible freedoms.

Scientology, as an example of an old-school "big tent" cult, has huge advantages over Phoenix. Their vast archipelago of expensive "ideal org" buildings globally (in addition to impressing potential recruits by their expensive renovations and furniture) allow them to get people in and employ high-pressure sales tactics, which have been well documented by many journalists, former members and book authors. Phoenix has no organizational structure to do this, even if she had the product portfolio or the talent to do so. So she's got no mechanism to drive repeat business.

Finally, you're correct in pointing out that, at the end of the day, Phoenix's members' barrier to exit is low. All people are giving up when they leave her group is the fantasy of being able to avoid car taxes, municipal taxes and parking tickets. Religious groups like Scientology promise many things that people will be far more invested in chasing -- eternal life, super powers, telepathy, and many others. That, plus an organization that knows where you live and will devote considerable time and money to reeling you back in, mean that the decline in a group like Scientology will take eons.

Phoenix's group will soon implode when better competitors emerge with more interesting sounding dogma or a more charismatic leader. You point out that people like her more than David Robinson because she appears to be "one of them." But cults often sell an inflated image of the leader as an aspirational being (typically as long as you don't spend time with him). Ultimately, the "just folks" image won't carry the day with a major segment of potential recruits.

So her group is very much like uncounted thousands of internet cults: they emerge quickly because the cost to start the enterprise is almost zero, they never reach a level of organizational sophistication to enable development of a rich suite of follow-on products, they are run by people and joined by people without the organizational skills to scale up and to finance growth to a meaningful size, and they quickly sink back into the swamp, casting members loose to join other cults. In aggregate, cults are a growing business, but the days of new groups that can grow to large size with global office locations seems to be over.

You note that "Other pseudolaw groups have collapsed when promised outcomes did not appear (Netolitzky, 2016; Netolitzky, 2023a). The same endgame is almost certain for the MCLR." Indeed, it is, because Phoenix hasn't adapted. In particular, she may have stayed too long with selling outcomes that are verifiable and notions that are testable and falsifiable.

Phoenix hasn't adapted well to failure the way that pretend queen of Canada Romana Didulo has. Most recently, pretend queen Romana has started to morph away from making promises of real-world financial benefit like free utilities to more abstract and less falsifiable claims of new age enlightenment, dredging up old "Ascended Masters" dogma and iconography. She talked about issuing "royal decrees" to make those sneaky ol' aliens release the magical "med beds" that cure all ailments in minutes. But after enough desperately ill followers kept bugging her, she recently pivoted to telling followers that "med beds" are all in their minds, not actual physical objects that they could use.

Romana's pivot to the idea of med beds as a mental model to avoid the failed predictions trap may be too little too late, just as Phoenix's pivot to Christian millenarianism may be too late. It's certainly wading into a crowded market since there's already tons of apocalyptic "prophets" out there. She had a differentiated "product" and blew it.

I like your synopsis of her target audience, a brutally frank temporary break from stereotypical Canadian politeness and diplomacy: "they are natural victims, drawn from a disadvantaged social stratum, ill-informed, if not intentionally ignorant, and prone to magical rather than reasoned thinking. These are P.T. Barnum’s proverbial suckers."

However, with this delightfully dramatic image, you may be giving Phoenix and the MCLR too much credit: "The MCLR, as a candidate social movement, is now probably in its end form: a streak of flame
and wreckage smeared across the sky." I don't think they climbed so high that they are a celestial event, tinged with the brilliant hubris of Icarus, coming close to touching the face of the gods. A flying-related image that might fit better is: "For a brief moment, the MCLR floated on the surface of the vast ocean like a gelatinous albatross turd, lingering for a moment in dappled sunlight before sinking beneath the waves and being recycled into its component nutrients to fertilize more lower life forms."

As always, thanks for a fun and provocative read.

[The Observer]

...and Quatloos, that morgue of pseudolaw, will probably be the only substantive public record of
what the MCLR was, who were its leaders, and what they believed and did.

I want to be insulted by this and yet have to admit that is an apt description of Quatloos. We probably need to get new uniforms. Here is my suggestion:

https://thumbs.gfycat.com/MagnificentHa ... mobile.mp4

[John Uskglass]

Interesting article, thanks for pointing us to it.

Pleasing to see that Quatloos does fulfil the function one would hope, of being a repository of information about FMOTl type cults preventing it from being lost to future researchers.

[hucknallred]

Honoured to get a credit in this fine piece, even if it's just for ripping this tirade to YouTube.

[The Observer]

Wow, history lessons with the Phoenix are certainly mouth-dropping:

England is the birthplace of democracy

Not sure how to reconcile that with the common wisdom that ancient Greece was the birthplace of democracy.

[CrankyBoomer]

Honoured to get a credit in this fine piece, even if it's just for ripping this tirade to YouTube.

I thought it was Jeanette Archer for a moment. No, it's Jacqui Phoenix.

I received a letter from the Optician's I attend (usually every two years but have let it go rather longer because of the pandemic) saying I was due to make an appointment with them. Too true but I "did my back in" in January (carrying my elderly cat home from the vet's) and improvement is incremental so I'm not booking an appointment until I feel my back is closer to 'normal'.

[Hercule Parrot]

If you think about those groups economically, as if they're a business enterprise, I think it's possible to create some well-founded generalizations that give you predictive power over these groups in the future.

That's a really interesting and illuminating model of analysis. Thank you.