analects noun, pl

/ˈan.ə.lɛkts/

a collection of ideas, extracts, or teachings.

Successful Prophets

stuff On how movements form

show:

analects under the categories btrmt. believes in, as set out in the manifesto

analects organised according to the fundamental questions of philosophy

sequences of articles gathered around a more focused idea

  • successful prophets 27 Jun 2026 [audio + edited transcript] The most successful prophet isn’t a person. It’s a shared abstraction the group charges up and pins to a convenient emblem. Charisma is conf...
  • you can catch madness 13 Jun 2026 [audio + edited transcript] Folie à deux isn’t a rare clinical curiosity. It’s one misleading face of social isolation—intimacy plus loneliness, the same machinery runn...
  • successful prophets 5 Jun 2026 [article] We think of cults as the product of dangerously charismatic leaders but on examination this narrative falls apart. Really, the most successf...
  • folie à deux: the madness of two 4 Jun 2026 [article]
  • sages and wisdom 16 May 2026 [audio + edited transcript] The doctor and the guru run on the same authority structure. We just pick which one to trust by its costume. Choose by what sits under the c...
  • mundane cults 29 Nov 2025 [audio + edited transcript] Cults aren’t the fringe. They’re the architecture of ordinary community, and not being in one usually means something’s gone wrong. The ques...
  • sacrificing the self 4 Apr 2025 [article] When we want to identify with a group, we bias ourselves to filter out all theother ways we could be. It helps us cut down all our competing...
  • when groups go bad 3 Jan 2025 [article] Without more tasteful social behaviours to sample from, we’re liable to attach very strongly to the behaviours of our group. Add a hostile e...
  • useful groups are biased groups 27 Dec 2024 [article] The strength of our attraction to a group is a function of how different a group is from other groups in ways that we feel like we are, or l...
  • mob mentality is fine 20 Dec 2024 [article] You could think of a collection of group dynamics like ‘groupthink’ or ‘deindividuation’ or whatever are bad. Or you could consider that our...
  • catastrophic leadership is actually really hard 13 Dec 2024 [article] For group dynamics to produce really bad behaviour, you really need to work at it. You have to train your authority figures to be cruel, pre...
  • leadership consulting is usually more 'feel good' than 'do good' 17 Aug 2023 [article] Leadership consulting proposes to fix leaders, but because we can confuse ‘making leaders feel good’ with ‘making leaders better’ it usually...
  • mundane cults 27 Feb 2023 [article] We’ve been taught that cults are dark and scary things. But we have been fooled. The cult is a prominent building block of modern community....
  • everything is choice architecture 12 Jan 2023 [article] Nudging doesn’t work because people aren’t thinking hard enough. Everything is choice architecture, so look to the way you build things in t...
  • explaining group dynamics 29 Mar 2022 [article] Group dynamics are often thought to be a complicated thing to explore. But a 50-year-old model explains much of it with only three things: a...
  • in praise of the sage 19 Jul 2021 [article] Our culture spurns the ‘guru’ as a charletan and the traditionalist as a relic. Legitimate knowledge comes from reasoned observation, not in...
  • female zealots 19 Oct 2020 [article]
  • the true meaning of family ties 24 Sep 2020 [article]
  • weber's 'charismatic leader' is misleading 24 Aug 2020 [article]
  • the three reasons why everyone is so 'cliquey' 5 Nov 2018 [article]
One email a month: the new essays, lectures, and marginalia.

No spam, once a month, unsubscribe any time.

One email a month. No fuss. Get the newsletter.