13 VOLUME 6 |ISSUE 2 |2015
out that time has passed (be specific—quantify it), and that she
still speaks in future tense about hopes not yet realized. This
isn’t criticism implying that something should have happened
by now—just interested, supportive, concerned observation, a
checkpoint. As time goes by and real outcomes remain “one day
over the rainbow” (as they invariably do, year after year), you’re
building a track record as you approach a tipping point, if any
change of mind will ever come at all.
These steps outline a peer-oriented persuasion process similar to
those we naturally use in ongoing friendships. This approach avoids
the conflicts and violations mentioned above, endorses the dignity,
integrity, value, and judgment of your friend and your commitment
to the friendship, implying that your dignity, integrity, value, and
judgment are worth affirming, too. Most importantly, it keeps the
relationship from lapsing to an adversarial basis, ensuring that
trust-based avenues of communication remain open. However
you approach it, communality is an organic process, affirmative
and responsive rather than directive, and it offers no guarantees.
Communality leverages some powerful, innate cognitive functions
that engender trust, empathy, and attachment—the very functions
that fringe groups exploit to attract recruits. It enables us to deal
with the group’s influence on the cognitive levels where it actually
occurs, while critical thinking implies a prerequisite change of
venue into what recruits typically regard as a cold, abstract sidebar.
Communality sympathetically aligns our efforts with a recruit’s
intentions and motivations for getting involved in a fringe group,
which might be a big reason that we shy away from it—it feels
like we’re encouraging them! And in a real sense we are, except
not toward group involvement, but toward the real point of
group involvement: genuine hope fulfillment. However,
communality avoids dictating what those hopes should be,
who should evaluate them, and how.
Conclusion
People don’t normally get involved in fringe groups by disciplined
processes of rational thought, but by experiencing attraction to the
order and meaning, imaginative potential, hope fulfillment, and
devoted support and belonging that a cohesive family surrogate
offers. This can be condensed into a word: validation.
All religions and spiritual movements promise validation in one
form or another. Some deliver, more or less, and many don’t—
but all involve costs. Not only does the prospect of securing
religiospiritual validation attract recruits, but the cost of securing
it also attracts them, strangely enough—not unlike how, for many
young recruits to military service, the cost of personal sacrifice
enhances the attraction of becoming a competent, formidable
soldier. These motivations are noble even if misguided. Even in
sincere concern for fringe-group recruits’ welfare, if we minimize
“what it’s all about” in favor of concerns that to them seem
secondary or antipathetic to their aims, we’ll undermine our
efforts to help them, the subversion being a naturally resulting
consequence of the efforts themselves.
By taking analytical, evaluative approaches to fringe-group recruits,
we run afoul of important cognitive functions that tend to bolster,
not mitigate, their attraction to group involvement and, by the
same token, discourage involvement with us. We also aggravate
biases that make recruits prone to regard our approaches as
judgmental, which triggers alarms. By engaging recruits in friendly,
supportive ways, focused on their interests rather than on their
problems, we introduce alternatives to group involvement that
they feel favorably disposed toward, even attracted to. Friendly
relationships evoke cognitive dissonance that arises from multiple
angles as an integral function of recruits’ paradigms rather than as
critique/criticism from without. Friendships can eventually serve
as options to group involvement or even lifelines out of the group
environment if recruits come to feel entrapped. n
Notes
[1] A case in point is creative performing. Creative types know
from experience, and fMRI studies are backing it up, that
creative activity requires suspension of monitoring, evaluating,
and correcting brain functions. This is known among
performers as “getting out of your own way.” Athletes, artists,
writers, and other creative types report similar experiences.
One study of jazz musicians claims that “the innovative,
internally motivated production of novel material… can
apparently occur outside of conscious awareness and
beyond volitional control,” and that brain functions that “are
thought to provide a cognitive framework within which goal-
directed behaviors are consciously monitored, evaluated
and corrected”—i.e., analytical functions—were “deactivated
during improvisation” [emphasis mine]. See Limb C. J.,
and Braun, A. R. (2008), “Neural Substrates of Spontaneous
Musical Performance: An fMRI Study of Jazz Improvisation,”
PLoS ONE 3(2): e1679. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0001679,
available at http://www.plosone.org/article/fetchArticle.
action?articleURI=info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0001679
[2] See a delightful RSA Animate summary of Pinker’s ideas at
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-son3EJTrU
About the Author
Millard J. Melnyk got involved in the Jesus
Movement in Southern California in the early
1970s. After several years in an informal “home
fellowship,” he joined a movement then known
as Smith’s Friends, now Brunstad Christian
Church. He moved to Seattle, Washington in
1980, where he married and raised six boys.
Educated as an information technology (IT)
professional, he worked in various IT capacities in the health-care
and aerospace industries, later ran a small construction business,
and then consulted for small businesses in the Puget Sound,
Washington area. In 1994 he was excommunicated by Smith’s
Friends and lost his marriage in the ensuing fiasco, but retained
custody of his six sons. As a single dad, he raised his sons until
2009 when they went to live nearby with their mother. He then
decided to “stop cutting bait, and go fishing,” inaugurating his long-
anticipated writing career with a short sabbatical to the west coast
of Mexico. He has self-published three books, Bullshit: Common
Methods and Practices (2008), Power (2010), and Traction (2011). He
is drafting his fourth book with the working title Poor Man’s Mystic.
He currently resides in Seattle, but plans to find some sunshine in
the near future! n
out that time has passed (be specific—quantify it), and that she
still speaks in future tense about hopes not yet realized. This
isn’t criticism implying that something should have happened
by now—just interested, supportive, concerned observation, a
checkpoint. As time goes by and real outcomes remain “one day
over the rainbow” (as they invariably do, year after year), you’re
building a track record as you approach a tipping point, if any
change of mind will ever come at all.
These steps outline a peer-oriented persuasion process similar to
those we naturally use in ongoing friendships. This approach avoids
the conflicts and violations mentioned above, endorses the dignity,
integrity, value, and judgment of your friend and your commitment
to the friendship, implying that your dignity, integrity, value, and
judgment are worth affirming, too. Most importantly, it keeps the
relationship from lapsing to an adversarial basis, ensuring that
trust-based avenues of communication remain open. However
you approach it, communality is an organic process, affirmative
and responsive rather than directive, and it offers no guarantees.
Communality leverages some powerful, innate cognitive functions
that engender trust, empathy, and attachment—the very functions
that fringe groups exploit to attract recruits. It enables us to deal
with the group’s influence on the cognitive levels where it actually
occurs, while critical thinking implies a prerequisite change of
venue into what recruits typically regard as a cold, abstract sidebar.
Communality sympathetically aligns our efforts with a recruit’s
intentions and motivations for getting involved in a fringe group,
which might be a big reason that we shy away from it—it feels
like we’re encouraging them! And in a real sense we are, except
not toward group involvement, but toward the real point of
group involvement: genuine hope fulfillment. However,
communality avoids dictating what those hopes should be,
who should evaluate them, and how.
Conclusion
People don’t normally get involved in fringe groups by disciplined
processes of rational thought, but by experiencing attraction to the
order and meaning, imaginative potential, hope fulfillment, and
devoted support and belonging that a cohesive family surrogate
offers. This can be condensed into a word: validation.
All religions and spiritual movements promise validation in one
form or another. Some deliver, more or less, and many don’t—
but all involve costs. Not only does the prospect of securing
religiospiritual validation attract recruits, but the cost of securing
it also attracts them, strangely enough—not unlike how, for many
young recruits to military service, the cost of personal sacrifice
enhances the attraction of becoming a competent, formidable
soldier. These motivations are noble even if misguided. Even in
sincere concern for fringe-group recruits’ welfare, if we minimize
“what it’s all about” in favor of concerns that to them seem
secondary or antipathetic to their aims, we’ll undermine our
efforts to help them, the subversion being a naturally resulting
consequence of the efforts themselves.
By taking analytical, evaluative approaches to fringe-group recruits,
we run afoul of important cognitive functions that tend to bolster,
not mitigate, their attraction to group involvement and, by the
same token, discourage involvement with us. We also aggravate
biases that make recruits prone to regard our approaches as
judgmental, which triggers alarms. By engaging recruits in friendly,
supportive ways, focused on their interests rather than on their
problems, we introduce alternatives to group involvement that
they feel favorably disposed toward, even attracted to. Friendly
relationships evoke cognitive dissonance that arises from multiple
angles as an integral function of recruits’ paradigms rather than as
critique/criticism from without. Friendships can eventually serve
as options to group involvement or even lifelines out of the group
environment if recruits come to feel entrapped. n
Notes
[1] A case in point is creative performing. Creative types know
from experience, and fMRI studies are backing it up, that
creative activity requires suspension of monitoring, evaluating,
and correcting brain functions. This is known among
performers as “getting out of your own way.” Athletes, artists,
writers, and other creative types report similar experiences.
One study of jazz musicians claims that “the innovative,
internally motivated production of novel material… can
apparently occur outside of conscious awareness and
beyond volitional control,” and that brain functions that “are
thought to provide a cognitive framework within which goal-
directed behaviors are consciously monitored, evaluated
and corrected”—i.e., analytical functions—were “deactivated
during improvisation” [emphasis mine]. See Limb C. J.,
and Braun, A. R. (2008), “Neural Substrates of Spontaneous
Musical Performance: An fMRI Study of Jazz Improvisation,”
PLoS ONE 3(2): e1679. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0001679,
available at http://www.plosone.org/article/fetchArticle.
action?articleURI=info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0001679
[2] See a delightful RSA Animate summary of Pinker’s ideas at
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-son3EJTrU
About the Author
Millard J. Melnyk got involved in the Jesus
Movement in Southern California in the early
1970s. After several years in an informal “home
fellowship,” he joined a movement then known
as Smith’s Friends, now Brunstad Christian
Church. He moved to Seattle, Washington in
1980, where he married and raised six boys.
Educated as an information technology (IT)
professional, he worked in various IT capacities in the health-care
and aerospace industries, later ran a small construction business,
and then consulted for small businesses in the Puget Sound,
Washington area. In 1994 he was excommunicated by Smith’s
Friends and lost his marriage in the ensuing fiasco, but retained
custody of his six sons. As a single dad, he raised his sons until
2009 when they went to live nearby with their mother. He then
decided to “stop cutting bait, and go fishing,” inaugurating his long-
anticipated writing career with a short sabbatical to the west coast
of Mexico. He has self-published three books, Bullshit: Common
Methods and Practices (2008), Power (2010), and Traction (2011). He
is drafting his fourth book with the working title Poor Man’s Mystic.
He currently resides in Seattle, but plans to find some sunshine in
the near future! n
