[butter999]

Cults are scams designed to entrap and abuse people. Everything else is window dressing; their ideological positions will ultimately be changed or abandoned to consolidate the cult leader's power (ie Synanon spent years espousing a commitment to nonviolence, only to turn on a dime and begin arming themselves and carrying out assaults). They're not the nucleolus of "successful" ideologies any more than pyramid schemes are the nucleolus of successful businesses. Some of them will succeed in that they survive and spread, some of what they preach will be reasonable, common sense stuff. But ultimately they're an engine to abuse people and they will create much more misery than anything else.

[pfannkuchen]

How do you know it’s window dressing though? Like there are some people out there who legitimately believe some pretty crazy things, and they have some framing that convinced themselves so it is convincing to some other crazy adjacent people as well. I accept that some cults are what you say, but I doubt that all are.

Probing question. Do you consider LDS to be a cult? I think you would find its characteristics in the beginning to be abusive in the cult abuse sense. Like the founder is like yeah, Space Jesus said that all these dozens of women should have sex with me exclusively from a young age. But most don’t consider it to be a cult today. Did it transition from bad cult to not a cult? Or is this what the lifecycle of all successful religions looks like?

[butter999]

In every cult I've ever read about, it's pretty clear that the person at the center was creating a structure that enabled them to abuse people. I'm sure there were people involved who were true believers. But the cult leaders were engaged in something closer to cold reading than good faith philosophical inquiry, figuring out what lands with an audience and then leaning into it.

Your question about LDS is fair, I'm just not knowledgeable enough about LDS that I feel qualified to address it. What "successful ideologies" do you believe came out of cults, and why do you believe that?