It is a deeply human instinct to seek out community and a higher moral purpose. In a highly digital world, it is entirely understandable to look at systemic hypocrisy and corruption and think: "I want to be on the right side of history". For many well-meaning, empathetic individuals, the appeal of modern progressive, socialist, or communist spaces lies precisely in this promise. It offers a clear moral compass and a community that goes beyond general society and creates a new vocabulary to better express its points, expresses their intentions and virtues for others to follow the example.
I am deeply committed to the foundational principles of a free, honest, enlightened society: staunchly pro-science, pro-democracy, and fiercely protective of individual liberties like personal sexuality, freedom of expression, accessible healthcare and education and equal opportunity for every child starting out in life. It is entirely possible to hold a "live and let live" ethos that rejects religious fundamentalism, while simultaneously noticing that something's not cooking right.
Chosen Family
Do you keep in contact with childhood friends? With family?
If you spend any time in left-wing circles, you will frequently hear the phrase "chosen family". Historically, this term carries an immense weight of genuine compassion and necessity. Coined in the early 1990s by anthropologist Kath Weston, and practiced decades before that in the underground ballroom scenes of New York, a "chosen family" was quite literally a survival mechanism. When young people were cast out onto the streets by homophobic families, or when gay men were abandoned by their parents to die in hospital wards during the AIDS crisis, the community stepped in. They provided the shelter and the unconditional love that blood relatives refused to give. It was a beautiful, noble testament to human empathy.
It is entirely natural that modern political movements would want to replicate that profound sense of deep, unshakeable belonging. So, as the term has migrated from the physical realities of survival to the digital spaces of social media, its function has shifted.
Hipocrisy? Where?
Since 2010s it has been used to refer to kinship with people of the same circles as you, usually those who are similarly politically inclined. These are people who understand you, accept you for who you are, who don't reject you and don't judge you. Naturally, to lean into a "chosen family," one often begins to distance themselves from their biological family. After all, what is a biological family? You didn't choose them, so why should you be obligated to tolerate their attitudes?
Why should you tolerate what they think and who they are?
Well, isn't that unconditional acceptance exactly what you are looking for? Paradoxically, many individuals who break contact with the real families who raised them and made sacrifices for them do so over political disagreements. They enter these movements seeking to receive something they are currently making themselves incapable of giving back: unconditional love.
Join us!
In her analysis of modern belief systems, Amanda Montell distinguishes between benign cults and destructive cults. A benign cult might be the fanatical following of a sports team or a pop star - spaces that offer intense community but leave your outside life intact. What makes a cult destructive is a very specific requirement: the expectation that members will systematically break ties with the outside world. Family? Old childhood friends? The group must become your only true family. By severing these relationships, the group ensures that the individual is entirely trapped, leaving the subculture as their sole provider of community, validation, and identity.
This isolation doesn't happen overnight with a dramatic decree. Rather, it happens through the slow, ambient language of the timeline. In Cultish, Montell highlights how destructive groups use loaded language (words spiced with high emotional charge), to redraw the boundaries of reality. In modern online spaces, this manifests as the weaponization of clinical "therapy speak". Ordinary human conflicts, political disagreements, or parental misunderstandings are rapidly re-labeled as "toxic," "harmful," "unsafe," or "abuse". This both belittles genuine human suffering, as experienced by victims and diagnosed by professional doctors, and elevates trivial conflicts to irreconcileable rifts.
When a disagreement with a parent over an economic policy or a social issue is categorized not as a difference of opinion, not something to be discussed over a dinner table, with an analysis of arguments from both sides, but as literal "violence" against your identity, cutting them off doesn't feel like a radical cultic isolation, but rather self-defense.
What happens next?
Well, if I were you, and if I had the chance, I'd hug my mum and kiss my dad on the cheek. To be entirely honest, I sometimes hate spending time with them—but they are the only two people who have been there for me from the exact moment I was born. Well, them and my older sibling, though they aren't big on physical affection.
Do we agree on things? Absolute not. We are worlds apart. I can map out Kepler’s laws on a whiteboard, break down orbital mechanics, calculate the rocket equation, and explain concepts like Max-Q or albedo. But when such topics come up, my sibling might look at me and ask, "Do you actually believe the Moon landing was real?".
In those moments, I don't storm out or cut them off. I look at them calmly and say, "Yes, in fact, I do. And if you have the time and energy, I can answer some of your concerns about it". If they choose not to take me up on it, that’s fine. I would rather have a loving sibling sitting next to me than spend my energy fighting over what other people did or didn't do decades ago in a place far away that neither of us will ever visit.
That dynamic isn't rare or radical. That is normal. The vast majority of people can have that kind of relationship, provided they weren't victims of actual, sustained domestic abuse.
Yet, today, people are actively choosing to throw that away. They are choosing the isolation of the cult over the messy reality of the family.
The Cult of Pavlik Morozov
In the Soviet Union, this subversion of the family was elevated to state-sponsored martyrdom. The most famous example is Pavlik Morozov, a 13-year-old boy who, in 1932, denounced his own father to the Soviet secret police (OGPU) for forging documents and allegedly hoarding grain during the forced collectivization eras. After Pavlik was subsequently killed by his remaining family members, Soviet propaganda turned him into a national hero.
Statues were built in his honor, schools were named after him, and children across the USSR were taught poems urging them to prioritize loyalty to the communist state over loyalty to their own parents. The core lesson of the Morozov myth was clear: biological blood ties mean nothing compared to the ideological purity of the collective.
The Hitler Youth and the Treachery Act
While it is true that fascist regimes, particularly in Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, often preached the aesthetic of traditional family values, their actual practice tells a very different story. In reality, the totalitarian state could tolerate no authority higher than the dictator, meaning the authority of the parent had to be systematically undermined.
Hitlerjugend (The Hitler Youth) Membership became mandatory in 1939. One of the explicit goals of the organization was to take children out of the home, fill their schedules, and deliberately weaken the influence of parents, teachers, and religious figures. Boys and girls were actively encouraged by their youth leaders to report on what was being said at the dinner table.
Heimtückegesetz (The Treachery Act) of 1934 made it a criminal offense to make anti-Nazi statements, even in private conversations. Parents who voiced criticism of the regime or questioned the war effort within the safety of their own homes frequently found themselves arrested by the Gestapo because their own children, deeply brainwashed by the state youth apparatus, had reported them.
The Common pattern
It's a cult.
Historically, communism operated as a cult centered around rigid ideology and infallible party leadership. Fascism operated as a cult centered around a supreme, deified leader. Today, massive swaths of the internet-driven, progressive echo chambers operate as a decentralized cult centered around absolute ideological purity.
At their core, all of these are destructive cults. The ideological packaging changes across eras, but the psychological mechanism remains identical. Any organization, subculture, or digital group that convinces you to abandon normal, healthy relationships with people simply because they do not share your exact views is a destructive cult.
The Good news
If you look in the mirror today and realize you have found yourself inside one of these spaces, remember one crucial thing: it is not your fault.
Many well-meaning, highly empathetic, and exceptionally intelligent people join cults every single day. It doesn't happen overnight with a dramatic pledge of allegiance; it happens gradually, tweet by tweet, meme by meme, until your reality has been completely rewired without you ever noticing.
But you can fix this. You can make it better right now.
All it takes is the courage to reach out and ask for forgiveness. Regardless of what you told your family when you walked away, regardless of how coldly you think you ended it, you can still pick up the phone and call them. Do it today. You don't need to give a grand political speech or defend your past choices. Just be honest, and speak straight from the heart.
If you want to revive that relationship, it will likely work. Why? Because that is exactly what real, healthy families do: they support and love each other despite holding deep, fundamental disagreements. That is the ultimate difference between a political collective and a home. The group demands your compliance; your family demands your presence. That is what real community is.