Successful People (2013)

Anyone who has worked for a non-profit, charity or political party can attest to how powerful paying workers in their identity can be. At a minimum, it gives you an edge on compensation as part of salary is in belonging, community and self-actualisation.

Allegedly before corporations absolved themselves of any sense of loyalty to employees around the 80s - a regular company could fulfil this role in a person's life. But this sort of naivety is beaten out of employees after the first few betrayals/reorgs/layoffs until they understand the rules of raw capitalism.

But creating a religion is also a double-edged sword - those workers can also be the most bitter and vitriolic about the organisation if they fall out of alignment - just look at the constant drama with OpenAI to see what that looks like. Everyone can understand and integrate the concept of trading their time for money. But there is a cognitive dissonance when your employer has dual roles, that is only revealed when you are instructed to do something that contradicts the identity.

This essentially weeds out anyone who is unable to handle high levels of dissonance on a regular basis, which can explain a lot about why politics is the way it is. The religion creator's success isn't in founding a religion (anybody can do that), it is being able sustain it without the increasing dissonance tearing it apart.

Surely this all depends on how you define 'successful'? If you define success as having the most influence over the largest number of people, then yes, I guess creating a religion would be the right thing to aim for.

(2013) Funny title change over the years, too Successful People create Religions (19 points, 2013, 10 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6062858

From this perspective, success is what you accomplish, and it has nothing to do with why you did it or the effects it has.

He talks like a supervillian.

A religion that has a single ultimate human authority at the helm is called a cult.

I wonder if the writings of Sam Altman will be studied in a similar manner to Mein Kampf some day where people try to understand how someone was so unusually charismatic and driven that they were able to dazzle and charm millions of people to enthusiastically participate in rapid and willful destruction of entire societies to achieve some contrived "greater good".

the world is created by strong willed men(women).

... and the mostest extremest top successfulest people didn't listen to Sam Altman back then and won't start now