So the evidence that there is a connection between Transition Towns and Steiner is that one of the TT founders went to a Steiner school for two years.

The link to Triodos bank is that they are willing to fund these types of projects.

That doesn't prove anything. It's not even suggestive of anything. Going to a Steiner school for two years doesn't make someone a Steiner true believer any more than I remember my high school calculus lessons - and I did well in math. As for Triodos, it's a fact of life that every bank is is on some level advancing a political agenda. Money is always political. None of this makes Transition Towns a cult.

I pulled this definition of a cult off another website:

a) exhibits great or excessive devotion or dedication to some person, idea, or thing,

b) uses a thought-reform program to persuade, control, and socialize members (i.e., to integrate them into the group’s unique pattern of relationships, beliefs, values, and practices),

c) systematically induces states of psychological dependency in members,

d) exploits members to advance the leadership’s goals, and

e) causes psychological harm to members, their families, and the community.

Where is the evidence that Transition Towns is doing any of the above?

"As I have said before on this thread, TT and the Peak Oil people are not the only groups, not the first groups, concerned about the issue of oil dependency, diminishing supplies of oil, etc. Other groups are less concerned about setting a date, they just want to move towards using less oil and thereby reducing the ill effects of using oil, like pollution. "

-Yes, but this is a thread about Transition Towns, which you are defending, so I think it is relevant.

I'm not defending it. I have already said that I don't know whether it is a cult or not, AND that no one else on this thread does either.

"Actually the Red Cross has been heavily criticized for some of its disaster response efforts. Everybody knows how well FEMA handled the Katrina crisis. And so on. "

-Criticized yes. But I don't see anybody calling for an end to the Red Cross or suggesting people don't work with them (other than utter loons).

You may not have seen them, but they are there. And without knowing them, you don't know whether they are utter loons.

FEMA was a mess, but that was mainly due to poor management by a horrible administration. Disbanding or ignoring FEMA isn't going to make the situation improve. In other words, don't toss the baby out with the bath water.

I'm not advocating for the disbanding of FEMA. But with their track record, it's no wonder a group would prefer not to involve them.

"One person's anarchist is another person's visionary. The American revolutionaries were seen as anarchists by some. Isn't democracy about the free exchange of ideas? Can't one of those ideas be "hey, maybe we don't really need government"? If a person holds one idea idea that you (general) don't agree with, does that mean all of their ideas are bad? And Solnit doesn't defend looting - that is a misreading. It's not "looting" when you take supplies for basic survival and health that otherwise you would not have."

-No problem with you being an anarchist, just wanted to put that on the table so people know where you are coming from.

I am not an anarchist. That is an inappropriate remark. I'm defending Solnit's right to free speech, something I believe is highly valued by Americans? Or are you a fascist?

"4) The "duly elected government" that we have now was at one time a revolutionary or "alternative" idea, but it's not the final word on how societies should organize themselves. It's got many flaws, so it's not hard to see why people would look for different models."

-So you are opposed to democracy, or working through democratic structures? Are you proposing a government outside of the government? Clearly, democracy is flawed, but what are the alternatives you propose?

Are you proposing that the current system of government is the best? That it cannot be changed, and anyone who thinks out loud about changing it must be silenced? What about all the varieties of democracy? Are they not valid? Or is there only one true form of democracy?

" Our current system of government has flaws - surely you agree with that. So maybe a group decides to limit their involvement with government. What's the problem with that? If we require govt approval for every new community initiative... it's not a democracy anymore."

-What community initiatives are you talking about? And, yes, sorry to inform you, but part of living in a democracy is abiding by the decisions that are voted on by the people and their reps. If you don't like those decisions, organize and vote the people out of power. It is done all the time in democracies all over the world. Or move to a place where there is no functional government to interfere with your desires... like Somalia.

Uh, that'd be your right to free assembly. Or should we require permits for every group of people who want to get together and discuss ideas for changing their society? And maybe share those ideas with the larger society?

"In a nutshell, to free local communities from the influence of international currency rates, market fluctuations, big banks, maybe taxes too. The idea of using one national currency, or a regional currency like the euro, is just that - an idea. An idea that has been applied very rigorously to economic exchange, to be sure, but not the only way of doing things."

"Again, Heinberg, ASPO et al do not represent the entire movement to reduce oil dependency. It's not one movement anyway, it's all kinds of movements of varying sizes. We are all of us free to ingore Heinberg et al. Just like not everybody built a bomb shelter during the Cold War."

-No, they aren't, and I agree with a movement to reduce oil dependency. However, TT is the movement at discussion in this thread. And they take their data from right-wing nazi mystics like Heinberg and oil drillers like the ASPO.

Sorry, how do you know that every single scientist who is concerned about oil dependency etc is a right-wing nazi mystic? Is there a list, did you research everyone of them?

Oh, one other thing: Transition Towns and groups like it are part of an international movement.

margarets:
"As for Triodos, it's a fact of life that every bank is is on some level advancing a political agenda. Money is always political. None of this makes Transition Towns a cult."
No, it doesnt, but Triodos is a cult, which might work, let's say, by the very powerful technique of offering money to unsuspecting groups who will then of course be indebted to.. a cult. I dont have any proof of this but I am very wary of how Anthroposophy may be gaining ever more influence, and how a group like Transition would be very vulnerable, particularly because there is (almost) a complete lack of awareness about the problems with anthrop. at grassroots (or leadership) level.
Triodos of course has a particular mission to support Steiner schools and projects, or groups that support Anthrop., so clearly Transition will have an interest in supporting those groups as well if it is borrowing from Triodos. I certainly dont see much if any debate from within Transition over the role of cults or Anthrop.;
however, I was told recently that there have been heated debates at Transtion meetings over this very issue. Anthrop. organisations are well-heeled and can offer venues and other facilities to new TTs- an obvious way than can gain influence, but this has apparently proved very controversial;
so this shows both that Anthrops. are influential players in TT and that also there is vigorous opposing views, presumably from those who have been attracted to TT for good reasons of community preparedness, be it for PO and climate change, financial collapse or whatever.
So according to margarets' definitions above, TT is certainly not a cult-yet; it may not even be the unified movement we might assume.
There are worrying trends though, and I dont find dissent along the lines of questioning Anthrop. or homeopathy say, at all welcome in TT circles.
I think these debates should be taking place within Transition, and they probably are, but should be much more prominent.

As I think I said before, many of these trends are prevalent not just in Transition but through the wider enviro movement- as Corboy has pointed out, Permaculture is rife with BD etc, so much so I seriously wonder if it is still a useful concept at all;
scientific illiteracy is a problem for society as a whole, and serves multiple agendas, not just one.

There is an old joke in enviro groups- as soon as a new group forms, watch for the split. This hasnt happened in TT yet but maybe the fault lines are there.

Shakti: you weave into your hypothesis the New Age Anthrops. as an influence on Transition on the one hand and Halliburton, Big Oil and the Far Right on the PO community, but Im not sure you have demonstrated any connection between the two: is Halliburton run by Anthros do you think? The plot thickens! But most likely Colin Campbell, for example, has never even heard of Rudolph Steiner.

(And, again, that ASPO is funded by oil companies is hardly surprising- it was started by retired oil geologists who had spent their entire lives in the industry. Who else are they going to ask funding for conferences from, the local WI?)

The to finish the earlier quote from Campbell:

"...The interest charged represented new money, created out of thin air, which itself gave rise to further debt, with the essential collateral being created by the resulting economic growth. Furthermore, other hidden money flows arose from the control of trading currency: previously the pound sterling and now the dollar , which in effect became the principle artifact and benefit of empire.
"Lastly, it is evident that the system creates ever greater disparity of wealth, which is an invitation to tension. Even I , as a humble pensioner, probably effectively kill one or two Africans everyday, as an indirect result of my minimal demands for goods and services. In short, one man's wealth has to be another's poverty in a world of finite resources".

Colin Campbell, "Oil Crisis" 2005

No wonder Shakti, your ally JD, an EARLY peaker ("I personally think we're at or very near peak production now, on a plateau that will probably not be enough to satisfy the newly industrializing countries while supporting our wasteful usage.") decries the PO "doomers" agenda as "Marxism dressed up in radical environmentalism."

[peakoildebunked.blogspot.com]

all that bleeding heart stuff about inequality and the exploitation of empire...

Full disclosure: I am not part of a TT group, being a back-to-the-lander and not near a town, but was involved at the very start of TT in Kinsale 5 years ago, and I know and meet many who are in TTs through my work as a PC teacher.
I also used to run Deep Ecology workshops, had an interest in Eco-psychology, was heavily into Yoga and Theravada Buddhism for some years;
was influenced in Joanna Macey's work;
before that I believed in Father Christmas, the Tooth fairy and even God for a time.

Right now I'm watching a documentary on the Alberta Tar Sands on CBC Newsworld. One interviewee discussed the issue of depleting supplies of oil worldwide, and the high cost of obtaining oil. It now takes the energy equivalent of one barrel of oil to extract two barrels of oil from the Tar Sands, according to the documentary.

Is the CBC a cult too?

"I dont have any proof of this"

Right. Without proof, or at least very strong evidence, no one should allege that any group is a cult. Not to mention the other terrible things that have been alleged on this thread like nazi sympathizer and child molester.

"here are worrying trends though, and I dont find dissent along the lines of questioning Anthrop. or homeopathy say, at all welcome in TT circles.
I think these debates should be taking place within Transition, and they probably are, but should be much more prominent. "

Why? Why should TT or any group debate Anthroposophy or homeopathy? It's their group, it's a free society, they talk can about whatever they like. We don't expect Republicans to ask themselves "hey, maybe we should think about being Democrats" or cat people to start all of a sudden liking dogs.

Throughout this whole thread, the TT opponents haven't really come up with anything substantial to support their cult allegations. They just don't like the sounds of TT, it's too flakey for them, it doesn't sit well with their worldview. So what? Deal with it. Every day all of us encounter people who think differently than we do. It's part of life.

I wonder: are there any threads on this site where people examined the evidence and concluded that a group was NOT a cult? What is considered appropriate evidence of non-cultishness?

Quote
Graham S
I certainly dont see much if any debate from within Transition over the role of cults or Anthrop.;
however, I was told recently that there have been heated debates at Transtion meetings over this very issue. . . .

There are worrying trends though, and I dont find dissent along the lines of questioning Anthrop. or homeopathy say, at all welcome in TT circles. I think these debates should be taking place within Transition, and they probably are, but should be much more prominent.

These posts are quite helpful to me as an ex-cult member trying to sort out my involvement with groups, like TT, that have goals that make sense to me, like I thought TT did at first. In this case, the goal of strengthening the local community for change. It is confirming my "intuition" that there was something else there. It didn't seem exactly like a cult, but there were some signs in the way people behaved, and some of it was that there seemed to be something secretive and perhaps manipulative going on at "higher levels" of the organization.

One of the people that I know from TT is involved with anthrosop. She sometimes has that air of "I know something special that you don't know" that I associate with cults. She's not pushy about it, like trying to recruit me, but now that I know a bit more about Steiner it makes some sense. Some of the local TT events here do have some ties to the Steiner school in town which always seemed kind of woo-woo to me. Plus the homeopathy thing is just too weird for me. Honest dissent and debate are signs of a healthy community, IMO. Every event I've attended was "pre-planned" in ways that shut off contributions from people who attended. It's so frustrating to attend an event where you think people are going to get together to think of ways to meet a common goal (localization, e.g.) and instead end up doing a guided meditation that takes up most of the time. At the end of this, instead of going with the warm and fuzzy stuff the woman leading it was putting out there, I tried to get some real life, hands-on discussion going and was kind of patronized. I take this to mean that I'm not a member of the in-group or not spiritual enough. Other of the groups did it in a different way with other types of pre-planned agendas. Well, I'm a professional person with some skills to offer, but no way to offer them in this group from what I can tell.

What this is coming around to for me is that I appreciate transparency in organizations, and the TT groups are not transparent enough for me. This is a group with a pre-set agenda that kind of pretends to be soliciting involvement and ideas from others, but mainly wants to stick with quite a bit of woo-woo stuff and some OD (organizational development) techniques.

My complaint about this type of thing is that it's a time waster. Not just my time, but the time of others who were genuinely interested in being part of something useful. Another group to cross off my list. Plus the disappointment of wanting to see some things happen but realizing that it's not happening here for me.

"In case you hadnt noticed, the shit has already hit the fan- in the form of an almighty financial collapse, something predicted for years by many inside (and of course outside) the PO movement.How much the financial collapse is related to PO or imminent resource depletion is of course an important debate, but for our purposes here it is important to acknowledge that Campbell, for example, has always connected the two:"

-Yes, but how can you reconcile an economic collapse which will reduce Oil demand with the notion that PO has caused it or that said collapse won't mitigate Peak Oil?

"...Taking a longer view, it is easy to see why a general financial collapse is inevitable. In short, to explain it yet again, the banks have been lending money in excess of what they had on deposit...

Colin Campbell "Oil Crisis" 2005"

-Solid point obviously, but I ask again, why is it that the PO people rely on the same sources over again, including right-wing racist cranks like Campbell?

"See for example Professor Bill Rees "Is Humanity Sustainable?"

-Also on board of advisors of racist Carrying Capacity Network. You really know how to pick 'em, peakers! Are you on the right, GrahamS, I didn't get that from your previous posts?

[www.carryingcapacity.org]

"But to my mind there is a clear new Age bias in Transition. See for example Rob's first draft of Transition as a Pattern Language:"

-Agree with you on that part, if not the Peaker stuff.

"It is not surprising that some of the first to write about PO were in the oil industry. They are after all in a position to know. TT does not only take their info from ASPO and Heinberg, but from a very wide range of sources. (see above)."

-They also have the most to gain from a perception that oil is running out rapidly, right? After all, Sarah Palin is using the oil leak in the Gulf to argue that this is a symptom of the fact that we have locked out drillers from areas on land in America.

As for "wide range of sources", sorry, I have not found that to be the case. Even in their primer they rely on:

a) ASPO (oil drilling and exploration group that prints neo-fascist arguments)
b) Hirsch report (which argues for more drilling and exploration)
c) Heinberg (Velikovsykian and Nazi mystic)


"you discredit PO by associating it with TT, and TT by association with PO."

-Sure, works for me! Actually, I'm not discrediting PO by associating it with TT, but am definitely skeptical of TT because of its naive endorsement of folks like ASPO, Hirsch, Heinberg, Matt Simmons, who may have tricked people on the eco/liberal side, but in reality stand on the right. The FAR right.

"So the evidence that there is a connection between Transition Towns and Steiner is that one of the TT founders went to a Steiner school for two years."

-Considering that the founder said he just randomly came up with "Head Hearts and Hands", THEN it comes out that he went to a Steiner school, yes it is totally relevant. So you are saying he spent two years at Waldorf, totally ignored all the "Head Heart Hands" stuff, then randomly just came up with the identical phrase himself a few years later? You do realize that is quite a stretch, Margaret?

"As for Triodos, it's a fact of life that every bank is is on some level advancing a political agenda. Money is always political. None of this makes Transition Towns a cult."

-Read my posts carefully. I have not said that TT is a cult, other posters may have. I did not start this thread and did not join in until at least the third page. I am not convinced it is a cult. However, it is undeniable that a) anthroposophy is a cult and that it appears connected to TT through both Hopkins and Triodos b) the main ideological influence on TT in terms of Peak Oil is somebody who was involved with a rather scary cult himself. Add to that the many other strange New Age elements around TT, I can not blame the original poster for asking the question "is Transition Town a cult?" I agree that this thread has not proved "TT is a cult". However, it has certainly established some other very questionable aspects of the movement. While searching for the answer to the "Is TT a cult?" question, we have at least found plenty of other strange details about this group.

"I am not an anarchist. That is an inappropriate remark. I'm defending Solnit's right to free speech, something I believe is highly valued by Americans? Or are you a fascist?"

-OK, fine, you're not an anarchist. Solnit has every right to Free Speech, and I never contradicted that. Please point out to me where I urged the banning of her book or anything like that. And, no, I'm most certainly not a fascist. That is why I fight against FASCISTS like Heinberg, ASPO, etc.

"Are you proposing that the current system of government is the best? That it cannot be changed, and anyone who thinks out loud about changing it must be silenced? What about all the varieties of democracy? Are they not valid? Or is there only one true form of democracy? "

-No, it most certainly is not the best. For example, in America, I feel that we have let corporations corrupt our democratic institutions. However, a "better" system would still be based on voting, representative government, and the American constitution. Where did I say critics should be "silenced"?
What other varieties of democracy are you referring to, so I can address them?

"Uh, that'd be your right to free assembly. Or should we require permits for every group of people who want to get together and discuss ideas for changing their society? And maybe share those ideas with the larger society? "

-What are you talking about? Where did I say people must have permits to discuss ideas? You seem to have an axe to grind with somebody else and are taking it out on me.


"Sorry, how do you know that every single scientist who is concerned about oil dependency etc is a right-wing nazi mystic? Is there a list, did you research everyone of them?"

-Once again, you are confusing me with somebody else and putting words in my mouth. It is a small minority of "scientists concerned about oil dependency" that are on the Far Right. However, they are disproportionally represented within the Peak Oil community. I AM concerned about oil dependency. So are many scientists. However, most of them are not advancing the same numbers put forth by the Peakers (who have been wrong year after year), nor are they attaching a fascist "population reduction" program to their concerns about oil dependency.