A tricksy 1 me thinks

*looks left* * looks right* * looks up* * looks down* and says " um no. No they dont."

no

J'aime les tortues

What if, all your led to believe is not actually true.
And then when you recognize that, and try to talk about it. You are punished in some way.
Could it then be argued that you've met the Spanish Inquisition ( sort of ) for committing some kind of heresy, akin to once saying the earth was round.
And what if also, in doing this, you had broken no oaths.
And are effectively ostracized from society for this heresy
What then?

Do secret societies undermine society?

ONLY IF THEY DO IT SECRETLY.

No.
Only if they're underground.
But eventually, kids find them and turn them mainstream.
Then they're put up on youtube and next thing you know you have cats in sacred robes playing pianos and giving the secret head nod.

Kids undermine society.



Depends on the level of ostracization.
Prison ostracization?
Or just my neighbors won't talk to me and my house is egged on halloween, but the people at wal mart take my money, and I still have my job?

How about being locked up and forcibly drugged.
So yeah they'll still take your money
But getting a job would be very tricky, and you wouldn't be regarded as employable by the vast majority of people, who would swerve you like a dog turd in the street.
But at the same time, deny all existence of said turd.
And frankly if kids are putting cats playing pianos on YouTube, then I'm clearly on the wrong site

The 1960's - 1970's love and peace and flower power movement had to be stopped, because crime can't thrive in a loving harmonic society.

The Vietnam war ended that budding harmonious revolution, with instant opposing sides, and mis-information, and TV ready horror to shock people into taking sides.

Secret societies groomed and trained Stalin and Hitler, and many others.

There are not many places in the world not affected by them in some way.

Hospital - Hospitalers
red Cross - Rosicrucians
red shield - Rothschild
The list goes on.

Just dig deep enough into any of these stories.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=98IJQBAyjIs

Yes. They do. That said, idgaf if someone or many ppl wanna hang out in dark rooms and talk about god knows what go for it. But that's not society. Society is out in the world. To me, the greatest benefit of society is teaching us about things u don't know about. There's a place for ppl wanting to do their own thing and answer to nobody. Its called prison. And Ivi been

I'll try and get them to cut you some slack for starting this thread but no promises k

This is a little tricky to answer directly, because the question is overly simple.

As written, literally, the answer is probably "no," in that the mere EXISTENCE of a secret society doesn't make anything happen.

A secret society only matters, if it happens to gain enough real power behind the scenes, to effect shifts in the overall activities and choices that a society makes.

A critical element, is the matter of loyalties. Even an entirely PUBLIC group, such as a political party, can effectively be horrible for a society, if it's members call for loyalty to the PARTY over loyalty to the nation they are trying to lead.

Oh, and one thing to watch out for: lots of people use the IDEA of Secret Societies operating behind the scenes, as a trick to try to get normally rational people to support or oppose various things that they should take the opposite side on, out of "fear of the hidden."

Fair point Igor, but don't they, or at least some of them use fear as form of coercion too.
Order out of chaos, for example, implies that 'somebody' has placed order on something, to stop, that terrible wicked chaos.
But personally I find that to be Machiavellian, negative suggestion. As it would seem to imply, that any change, to this order, would cause chaos. Which is very self serving and pessimistic

I suspect what you may be getting at, is that it IS inherent to many "secret societies," that the reason they need to BE secret, is that they know that a LOT of people would be very unhappy with their ideas about how to make the world a better place. I would agree with you entirely in that.

What I always worry about when the subject of Secret Societies comes up, are the people who want to claim that all sorts of people who are NOT in such societies, actually are, and should be treated as enemies of the rest of us. Essentially using the fear of "secret societies" to hide what is actually some sort of anti-ism. Trying to make genocide or ethnic oppression into a heroic cause, rather than the vile crime that it always actually is.

Not really.
I'm implying that they've had a significant negative impact on my life.
And as a further point I'm implying that they then make being social, which is surely a fundamental aspect of society, impossible.
As to be social, 1 needs people to share 1s innermost thoughts and feelings with. If you are effectively denied this, then you are effectively marooned.
But what crime has 1 committed , to deserve such a punishment. Thus I make the Spanish Inquisition analogy.
It is bad enough, to punish somebody, just for saying the earth is round.
But surely its worse to punish somebody for saying the earth is round, when the person/people instilling the punishment, know damn well, that the earth is round

Right after I married my ex, he told me that he goes to a meeting once a month and he he was not allowed to tell me what they talk about.

It seems to me that he was trying to hide it from you maybe because he thought you may not be interested any longer. I thought if someone was doing stuff like that they would have told you well before the marriage happened.

Sounds like what I've heard about groups like Alcoholics Anonymous. Doesn't qualify as a Secret Society, even though they require that no members tell non-members about the meetings. Their secrecy is to protect the members from social invective, not to hide their evil plans to overthrow the government.

Oh, you mean delusions?
I work on getting rid of them as soon as I can.

Expectations about life or how others act.
No, not really.
LOL, I don't really care about that anymore, its not important.