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My guess is that these people believe this to be a novel and radical approach when it’s not, it’s a bunch of cobbled ideas from past philosophies.

You sound like a different person in this thread. Here, you’ve identified the very thing we talk about everywhere else, but you don’t seem get. That when people find something that they like and seems somewhat rational and maybe helps them a little, they stop worrying about the details. It’s much easier to accept the community thoughts and support each other. I could go into more detail on parallels with “costly rituals” and “signalling” in religion, but you see it with this group. The hard thing is seeing it in the groups or websites that you like. You have the skepticism, but I think you aren’t doing the work of looking up the  sources of the philosophies. Landmark, or Buddhist meditation centers, or random websites aren’t going to give you sources, they might not even know them, they are going to say, “we figured this out, here’s the master, give him money”. There still might be something good in the data they have, but it’s up to you to sort it out.