X-Message-Number: 1907 Date: 06 Mar 93 13:40:54 EST From: Charles Platt <> Subject: CRYONICS Membership To: Cryonet March 6, 1993 In response to Steve Harris: my question ("Why do we have to speak of cryonics "members"?) was partly rhetorical. I do realize that small groups of unusal people who feel at odds with the world will naturally tend to band together a bit more tightly than, say, people who happen to be buying insurance from the same provider. For emotional reasons, one feels more like a member of Alcor than merely a customer. However, I suggest that these emotional reasons are not all positive. On one hand, people who feel like members may show a greater level of commitment and may all pull together for the "cause." On the other hand, as Michael Riskin says, there is also the tendency for unrealistic expectations, along with impassioned infighting. My bias is that I tend to trust rational interactions more than I trust emotional interactions. Therefore, I would feel more secure if cryonics "membership" became less emotionally charged, and more like an everyday business transaction. To some extent, this is already happening. I think we must have reached the point where the majority of Alcor members are not activists. They are just paying money in exchange for an anticipated service. This is surely a healthy trend, so long as they pay sufficient money to cover the real costs of the service. Right now, this is not the case. Therefore we have the worst of both worlds: activists getting very excited and squabbling with each other (yes, I include myself) because we are struggling to "support" the organization, while the organization is serving a larger group of people who feel no obligation to help out, because they are in it just on a value-for-money basis. I really think we should be clear, in our own heads, about the real nature of cryonics. This is not a trivial matter of semantics, because the mental image that one has of an organization will always tend to influence decisions that are made regarding its future. For instance, if we think of Alcor as a tight-knit fraternity serving its "members," we will feel we are betraying them by raising annual fees. If we think of Alcor in less emotional terms, merely as a service provider, we would assess the market and determine how much we can charge for the service without prompting people to go and get cheaper suspensions elsewhere. I don't think anyone has mentioned this as an important factor, in all the recent postings about raising fees. Therefore, clearly, the emotional, "unbusinesslike" mindset prevails. --Charles Platt Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=1907