Or go here, The Cultic Studies Journal, for academic approach.click here

Two points to remember in evaluating whether a group is a cult in the negative sense of the word - deception and control.

Now, if Max's great experiment was based on deception, if there were "things going on" behind the scenes at Mudcat that were deceptive, and if the motive was to gain some kind of control over people who come to this forum and join... then we could use the term cult in its dangerous sense.

Max's Mudcat project has become an interesting online community, but without the deception or control found in cults that recruit members in order to deceive them and further the power of the leader(s).

Check out The "Not Me" Myth: Orwell and the Mind click here, by Margaret Singer. Margaret Thaler Singer, Ph.D. is a clinical psychologist and emeritus adjunct professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley. An expert on post-traumatic stress, she is one of the world's foremost experts on cults and psychological manipulation.

Is Mudcat a cult in the benign definition of the term? Yes, I'd say there are lots of reasons to say we have a cult of the Mudcat, just as there are other popular culture cult phenomena - like cult movies, Rocky Horror Picture Show, and others. There are many ways to view the term "cult", which is why there is so much debate over the term when applied to high demand, deceptive, thought control groups.