> Only one of the group's members, Rio DiAngelo/Richard Ford, did not kill himself: weeks before the suicides, in December 1996, DiAngelo agreed with Applewhite to leave the group so he could ensure future dissemination of Heaven's Gate videos and literature.
This isn't surprising. The most dangerous viruses and parasites aren't the ones that kill their hosts immediately - they have to ensure their own survival first. If you view suicide cults as a meme (in Dawkin's terminology, not the Reddit usage of the word), then this makes sense.
> The group earned revenues by offering professional website development for paying clients under the name Higher Source.
Wikipedia cites this[0] article which is pretty interesting. There even seems to be what I assume is a mirror of the original site: http://www.religio.de/highersource/server/
Cult membership isn't just for "morons". There have been very intelligent people who, because of perfectly human errors in judgement have found themselves inside cult organisations.
Look at Scientology and lots of other cults like it. The people in it aren't stupid. Brainwashed, perhaps. There are many tricks both seemingly logical/cognitive and emotional that people can be taken in by. The emotional side is important: these people show affection to people who join them, and they often target people who are at uncertain points in their lives. Cult-style groups have often gone after college students precisely because they are at a point in their life where they are unsure about their future and potentially emotionally volatile.
There's a lot of people out there who are living unhappy lives, who find themselves alienated from society, who have a strong but unfulfilled desire to join together in a community with others, who lack self-confidence or enough self-belief to push back.
Cults aren't just stupid people making stupid decisions: sometimes joining a cult is a decision made by an intelligent, educated person in a moment of weakness. And the way the thing is set up makes it not seem cultish when they are joining. Scientology don't tell you about Lord Xenu on day one. They lure you in with promises of making you a better person: reducing your stress and anxiety, helping you with addictions to drugs, tobacco, alcohol etc., helping you succeed in business or education or whatever, helping you have a better relationship with your partner or family. Out of that menu, there's something everyone will want. Those are all the same things advertisers lure people in with. Falling for that kind of pitch doesn't make you stupid, it makes you human.
Whoa whoa whoa. You can't take what I said and then decide I'm lambasting everyone who ever joined a cult. That's your projection, not my comment. I'm sympathetic to people who find themselves in a cult or religion that goes against their self-interest. But... there is a spectrum. Killing yourself to somehow spirit away to an imagined UFO following a comet is at the very far end of that spectrum.
My point was that IQ and/or technical competence are no assurance that you won't make really, really bad choices in life.
> Just because a person does technical work doesn't exclude them from being a moron.
True that. I see it all the time. Though in practice, the most technically brilliant people are unlikely to be morons. It's usually the average and underachieving ones, IME.
While I agree with the characterization of Heaven's Gate as a parasite or virus, I disagree that this is a means of "survival." Suicide cults are an ancient phenomenon, and a key to their success (I think) is ignorance.
I hope the web page stays online. It serves as a monument to how wrong they where. Now that Heaven's Gate has run it's course, I think the biggest threat to the "virus" at this point is sunlight.
And, plus, I think it's an important part of Internet history. The Internet during the '90s was an amazing transformation of society, and this site shows how old ideas embrace new means. It's fascinating from a sociological perspective.
> It serves as a monument to how wrong they where.
Except it doesn't, for two reasons:
People who are inclined to sympathise with them have no way of seeing any "failure". They left their bodies behind, sure. Wannabe believers will assume they've left with the aliens and are now happily enjoying the fruits of their belief.
Secondly, cults does not work the way you'd expect them to: Failure does not diminish the belief of true believers.
On the contrary, what we see time and time again is that while failure may drive away some people, for many cults failure serves as a "do or die" trigger: These people are so incredibly invested already, that they have a deep need to find a way of explaining the failure that can justify their belief to themselves, that many cults after a temporary lull experiences an increase in activity following a failure. E.g. the cult may decide the explanation for the failure of whatever event they are waiting for is that they have not been devout enough, or that more believers are needed, and redouble their efforts to bring about their goal.
Now, I don't think the Heavens Gate site should be taken offline, mostly because there's plenty of worse material online, and unlike most extant cults Heavens Gate is pretty much entirely extinct, so they are not much of a danger to anyone.
But don't assume a "failure" in predictions mean anything to these cults, even if a failure can be objectively proven.
Not sure why this indicates he believed his ideas were bullshit... in my opinion, leaving material behind to spread his ideas after his own death suggests a truly held belief, not a purposeful scam.
It would seem like they got people to believe that The End Was Nigh and that they should commit suicide to avoid said End (Yeah, hold on to your logic there). If he truly believed that it was the end, why would he need to stay behind to tend to other things?
That seems like picking nits, though - these people clearly weren't the best and brightest in the first place.
The earth was being "recycled". That's why they wanted to hitch a ride on a space ship. So, yeah, end of the world is coming so kill yourself so you don't die.
Read their material - that does not appear to be accurate.
While they did appear to believe the world would be "recycled" and potentially that this means a lot of people would/will die, the excerpts on their website does give vague descriptions of ways that people can be "protected and 'saved' from the approaching recycling". The difference would be that these people would still be "stuck" on this world, though they could "one day find them a member in the Level Above Human".
Consider the similarity to the idea in christianity of the Rapture, where some christian sects expects certain sets of "true believers" to be "raptured", while the rest - believers and non-believers and sinners of all kinds alike - are "left behind", with various means of eventually being saved:
The "recycling" or "spading under" of civilisation from Heavens Gate appears to be a form of the Rapture, with the possibility that many good people who have just not advanced far enough can survive, while the "true believers" are raptured. The difference being that in their version, it appears they believe in some sort of cyclic history for the earth, where there will be another opportunity at some point in the future.
> Only one of the group's members, Rio DiAngelo/Richard Ford, did not kill himself: weeks before the suicides, in December 1996, DiAngelo agreed with Applewhite to leave the group so he could ensure future dissemination of Heaven's Gate videos and literature.
This isn't surprising. The most dangerous viruses and parasites aren't the ones that kill their hosts immediately - they have to ensure their own survival first. If you view suicide cults as a meme (in Dawkin's terminology, not the Reddit usage of the word), then this makes sense.