Cults, communities, ideologies, and belief systems

“You’re in a cult.”

What a shocking thing to hear when you invite someone to take a look at your home business.

If you’re someone who cares about building residual income, understanding the details of this stuff matters more than you think.

Communities hold people together. And when people stay together, income stays together.

So building community is absolutely something you should care about as you grow your home business.

But how do you make sure you’re building a healthy community and not a cult.

How do you give yourself the rock-solid knowledge, that when someone says you’re in a cult, you can rest easy inside and know they’re flat out wrong?

The answer to this question matters more to your freedom than you might think. I’ll come back to that, but first...

A community is a group of people that organize around a shared belief or value system.

Basically, here’s a group of ideas or principles, and yo, I jive with these.

Is there anything wrong with that idea?

If your answer to that question is no, you’ve just identified the healthy aspect of being in or building a community.

Where it goes off the rails

An ideology takes that belief system, puts it in stone, makes it unquestionable, makes it the be-all, end all answer to every question, cause of every problem or solution to all future problems.

Congratulations, you now have the beginnings of a cult.

An ideologue is actually more dangerous than a religious zealot. Think about that for a second.

Even a hardcore fundamentalist, if you push him, will admit that God is mysterious, above and beyond his full understanding.

That admission puts a boundary on what he can claim to know.

The ideologue has no such boundary. He claims to have the whole thing figured out, all of it, no mystery left. And a person who believes he’s mastered the entire truth is a person who can justify almost anything.

This brings out another key point between healthy communities and cult-like ideological systems.

Pride versus humility. Ego versus open-mindedness. Period versus question mark.

Intolerance closes the book of Knowledge and writes on the cover, “Finis! I have learned it all!” -Napoleon Hill

The next step in a cult-like system would be to demonize dissent. If you challenge an aspect of the system, you’re shamed, criticized and excommunicated.

In short, get in line, obey the orders, or get out.

No thinking allowed.

An ideology is a tool used by cults. A few more steps are required to make it a real cult, but ideology is the seed.

Here’s another simple way to think about it.

An ideology attempts to take a very complex story, and to turn it into a very simple story.

Ideologies are attractive, because they pretend to answer all of life’s questions, which makes you feel good because it answers the questions, so you don’t have to think about them anymore, and at the same time, it gives you a sense of pride because it makes you feel like you know something.

Ideologies are attractive in politics, religion, and home business, for these reasons.

One other aspect of an ideology is to pick an enemy, and blame it for everything.

Some home business examples:

• Jobs are evil.
• Your employers are out to exploit you
• The system is designed to enslave you.

There may even be some truth, contained within aspects of an ideology, and that’s another thing that make’s them attractive.

But let me repeat. An ideology attempts to take a complex story and compress it into a simple one.

“Intelligence is the ability to make finer distinctions.” -Robert Kiyosaki

Thinking is in the details.

Whenever you take something complicated and put it into a simple bucket, you lose details.

Now great communicators use metaphors, which is an example of taking something complex and putting it into a simple word that people can relate to, and understand.

Similar idea.

A good metaphor preserves as much of the truth as possible, and loses as little of the details as possible.

But even with a metaphor, you’re fooling yourself if you think you understand something, just because it’s related to a concept you do understand.

In the series Reacher, the main character has a phrase.

In building freedom, details matter too, because as Jesus said “The truth shall set you free.”

And truth, the full truth, is found in the details.

Here’s where it matters

To hold groups of people together, you need a shared belief system.

As long as this shared belief system is both true and useful, it is good.

If however, it’s passed off, as a be-all, end-all solution, where you pretend that thought is not required, you’re hurting yourself, and stunting the people around you.

Take a done-for-you system, for example.

We have a done-for-you sales system in our company, that works very well.

It makes a lot of the hard parts, of building a business from home, systematized, and easier.

But what if we told people to just use the system, never learn any aspects about it, never question it, never learn how to put themselves within the process as they learn more parts of the process…

We’d be stunting their growth, and limiting their freedom.

Because in building freedom, details matter.

It takes time to learn details, and that’s why a shared belief system, or a system can be very useful and helpful.

Just don’t make it the be all and end all, holy answer to all of life’s problems.

If you’re a leader in home business, here are some simple things to keep in mind.

• Have a vision, that you and others can rally around
• Create a list of shared values (beliefs) which might include things you are for and things you are against
• Stay humble.
• Encourage questions and thought.
• Make room for differing opinions and discussion
• Encourage growth.
• Have an open-door policy. (People can leave, and you’ll still love them.).

These are aspects of healthy leadership and healthy community building.

If you’re new to home business, here’s what you can do.

• Use the system.
• Learn the system.
• Learn the principles (the why) behind the system and each part of it.
• Ask yourself how you can begin to insert yourself into more aspects of the system.
• Learn and grow every day.
• Make it a goal to, learn the system so well and produce so many results, that you could eventually create your own version of the system.

This is how you set yourself up for success now and success in the future.

And always be on the lookout for ideologues (in and outside of home business). People who pretend that simple answers solve all of life’s complex problems.

If only life and business were that simple. 😊

There’s a reason the book’s called “Think and Grow Rich.”

Thanks for reading. Whatever you do, always go for your dreams.

Paul