From 1998 to 2018, Keith Raniere built one of the most rationally optimized private enterprises in recorded history. NXIVM was a private company that synthesized all of the most powerful and lucrative motifs across the entire history of modern human organizations. It combined the fantastic profitability of pyramid schemes with the perceived pricelessness of “personal development” training, the scientifically valid mechanisms of cognitive behavioral therapy, the aesthetics of Asimovian futurism, and the authentic charisma of a well-read, articulate intellectual leader with patents to prove it.
With these ingredients, Keith Raniere maximized his personal utility more radically than any man in recent memory. At the culmination of all his effort, he did the only thing that a strictly utility-maximizing man can do. He successfully built a harem of female sex slaves. Of course, he slightly overshot the mark, which landed him in prison for the rest of his life. The harem of sex slaves didn’t last forever, so he could have optimized more fully. But he was significantly more intelligent and optimized than your average David Koresh…
Almost all of the people he worked with, at any time in the 20 years of NXIVM’s lifespan, would have sworn that NXIVM was a beneficial, positive-sum game between consenting adults looking to better themselves and the world.
NXIVM’s marquee “self development” protocol was called Rational Inquiry. The internal training curriculum stresses that the founder has one of the highest IQ scores in the world. The founder’s many patents were frequently cited and much admired by members. The HBO documentary The Vow reports that the patent for Rational Inquiry was filed under artificial intelligence.
Rationalism pursued with sufficient fervor can also take on a gnostic hue. As one of their internal documents put it:
“Success is an internal state of clear honest knowledge…”
Everyone’s commitment was to their own success, which includes cooperation with others who are maximizing their own success. If one person is disproportionately supplying the intellectual and organizational horsepower underwriting the circulation of this mutual success promotion, he rightfully deserves a disproportionate share of the respect, deference, money, and power. If commitment to the base-level NXIVM membership demonstrably helps confused or unmotivated people self-actualize— or “integrate” as they call it—then voluntarily submitting to the secret sex-slavery level is perfectly logical. It should only multiply the benefits of the lower level, by raising all the stakes that worked so well at the lower level. This was precisely how Raniere sold it, and how Sarah Edmondson rationalized her own submission in the documentary.
The NXIVM cult isn’t fascinating because it’s evil. The NXIVM cult is fascinating because it’s rational. It’s perfectly consistent with utilitarian or consequentialist ethics.
Modern secular intellectuals generally believe that utility-maximization is intrinsically aligned with the Good, but it’s not. For a consistent rationalist and ethical utilitarian, Keith Raniere did nothing wrong. His only sin is that he handled his slaves with insufficient sophistication, leading some of them to feel unhappy and complain to law enforcement. If he handled them with more perfectly optimized finesse, this collective utopia would be unimpeachable.
Unconstrained rationality leads to evil, if pursued with sufficient intensity. I’m friends with many rationalists who are not evil, but the reason they are not evil is because they—thankfully!—don’t maximize their utility with unconstrained fervor.