Heat Death of the Internet - takahē
You want to order from a local restaurant, but you need to download a third-party delivery app, even though you plan to pick it up yourself. The prices and menu on the app are different to what you saw in the window. When you download a second app the pric...
Yup. I lived in a residential cult, in Sweden, for three months last year (unintentionally, but no one intends to move into a cult), and I can confirm, 100%, that this is a tactic that they use...
Unfortunately for them, but fortunately for me, I kept leaving. I left every weekend, and every chance I got, to go out and explore the wider world, meet people, have conversations, etc. So I very quickly realized that these people were insane. And so I left.
The others there, who didn't have that same experience of "going outside", regularly, stayed, shunned me, got really, really nasty when I told them I was leaving, and then got duped into giving the cult more money...
A cult which already starves and overworks "participants", and which pulls money from donors and the government, in addition to what we ourselves paid.
It was a very eye-opening experience, I will admit.
And that particular one has been going for 16 years, plus it's not even the only one in that same town, so...
That's a more extreme example of the phenom, obviously, but yeah, this is definitely a thing, in my experience...
Recognizing how the extreme works helps when you see the tactics in more subtle ways.