Self-Blame Farms: A Model of Cults, Corporations, and Extraction

AbstractThis paper proposes a simple, portable framework for analyzing environments in which people are encouraged to treat success and failure as moral verdicts on their worth while their labor primarily sustains someone else’s gains. It introduces two 2×2 grids. The first maps an organization’s “explanatory climate” along axes of outcome moralization (how strongly success and failure are read as evidence of virtue or defect) and suppression of structural and stochastic explanations (how costly it is to name luck, power, or design). The second maps “who benefits from success” along axes of gains to individuals and gains to organizations or leaders, distinguishing mutualistic, extractive, null, and “selfish hustle” configurations. Combining these grids yields a distinctive harm profile: systems that couple highly moralized, structurally silencing climates with benefit structures in which most occasions of success primarily enrich organizations or leaders. Brief case sketches from high-control religious movements, fissured and precarious workplaces, and aspirational creative labor illustrate how this architecture recurs under different institutional guises. The paper then connects the framework to underlying tools—occasion of success, continuous survivorship, personal versus structural bottlenecks, and moralized survivorship error—and argues that the grids are best understood as fallible heuristics: not a comprehensive theory of cults or exploitation, but a developing set of lenses for making one recurring pattern of harm more visible, discussable, and open to change. Keywords: moralization of success, structural suppression, extraction and benefit flows, occasions of success, self-blame farm AI collaborator statementThis work was developed in sustained collaboration with OpenAI’s ChatGPT (GPT-5.1 Thinking), which served as a structural refiner (proposing and revising the overall organization of the framework), a stress-tester (probing for inconsistencies, gaps, and failure modes), and a stylistic drafter (producing initial text later edited and curated by the human author). The human author remains the sole legal and moral author of record, responsible for the selection, acceptance, and modification of all AI-generated material and for all substantive claims made in this document.