Can't you frame every social organization in this kind of light? Stuff that people spend their lives on - they make it sound simple so other people understand it - this forms a 'social group dynamic' through the action of communication or information transfer. If other people understand it, then they participate and contribute to the growth of 'stuff'.
> Can't you frame every social organization in this kind of light?
This reminds me of the comment I recall from 'patio11's podcast, someone was talking about how their sales pitch uses a lot of spam-associated techniques like suggestive rhetorical questions ("Are you happy with...", etc.), and was asked (in order to give structure to the guest's pitch) something to the effect of, "What separates you from the spammers?" and his answer was, essentially, nothing except I deliver the goods.
I think in general this is the only sane answer to this style of question. Can't you frame every organization as a cult? Probably, if you word it carefully. Not the right question on either end, really.
Does TED deliver the goods... I don't think so. If these people truly have deep knowledge of their fields, <20 minutes is not long enough to really communicate that in general, and from the talks I've seen, while engaging and enjoyable, are not really informative. On a higher level, it's 2015 -- if I really want to change someone's brain so that it _gets_ my field, there will be e.g. interactive elements, which are largely missing from TED talks.
There's no shortcuts in science and knowledge. TED is in the business of presenting shortcuts.
TED seemed interesting from a lightning-talk perspective, but it's clear the goal isn't to whet your appetite, the goal is to deliver the promise of enlightenment before dinner time.
I can not understand or empathize with the intent of 'promising enlightenment'.
Do you think that if 'a given organization' figures out a way to actually offer enlightenment, or the illusion of, and people pay for this, that it is guaranteed successful?
I guess I see social organizations as 'structures that produce things because they are the things that are the easiest or most likely to structure/build'. I do not see this as any different than what the rest of humanity does. It's just a being in that place at that time and doing what humans naturally seem to do to survive, sort of thing.
There's a lot of emotions and hype that conflate the actual mechanics of social production. But most of those labels are ephemeral, some get discarded and others remain. That's just life in general though, I suppose.
I suppose the question I would ask is "why has humanity in general created and supported such cultural machines that prosper from the continual promise of enlightenment?"
Churches are a lot of things. Like most institutions, they have some strengths and failure modes. There are some of both which are arguably peculiar or more common to religious/mythical/magical approaches, but a lot of them come from the general humanity rather than the religion.
