I hit a communication wall with a crypto-Cathar. The encounter exposed how an ancient heresy's worldview still blocks trust and cooperation. Here's lemonade.

While Calvinism proposed a mechanism by which agency could be recovered from corruption through the intervention of divine grace (Calvinism as a Theory of Recovered High-Trust Agency), Catharism took the more radical position that material existence itself was inherently corrupting, which means that fully embodied people simply cannot be trustworthy agents.

The Cathars were a Christian sect that flourished in southern France in the 12th and 13th centuries before being violently suppressed by the Catholic Church. They believed in a stark dualism between the good spiritual realm and the evil material world. For Cathars, human souls were angels trapped in material bodies by an evil creator god. The only path to salvation was complete renunciation of the material world and its pleasures through extreme ascetic practices. Their most dedicated adherents, known as the Perfect, abstained from meat, marriage, and material possessions. The Perfect served as spiritual guides for ordinary believers, who were permitted to remain more engaged with worldly affairs but were encouraged to eventually achieve the same level of detachment.

When Cathars claim material interests corrupt, they're identifying a real pattern in systems of power: Many material power structures maintain themselves by compelling people to betray their own interests and truth claims - ordering people to act in ways that might correspond to their genuine interests or speak what might be their honest judgment wouldn't demonstrate power over them. (Civil Law and Political Drama, Motive Ambiguity.)

Cathars make a crucial additional commitment analogous to Calvinists’ belief in depravity: Cathars reify this observation about specific circumstances into a metaphysical claim that material life is intrinsically evil. This leads them to conclude that any appeal to mutual material benefit is inherently suspect, and that the only path to legitimate agency is complete detachment from material concerns. This absolutist position makes it impossible to distinguish between systems of power that maintain themselves through compelled betrayal, and material coordination that actually serves mutual benefit. (Oppression and Production are Competing Hypotheses for Wealth Inequality.) Thus, the Cathars preclude the possibility of building better material arrangements. Their insight into how certain power systems operate becomes, ironically, an obstacle to addressing the very problems they identify.

From the perspective of an evolved, embodied agent, the Cathar position amounts to claiming that evil is the true nature of material beings - that corruption and betrayal are not problems but merely inevitable facts. This is functionally similar to traumatized people repeating the slogan, “hurt people hurt people”; it normalizes evil.

While few people today explicitly identify as Cathars, Cathar-like attitudes about the inherently corrupting nature of material interests are common. I recently encountered someone who reported that a friend had accurately diagnosed them as a Cathar. When we tried to discuss the possibility of communicating literally about crimes (Can crimes be discussed literally?), they insisted that only saints could do this, since everyone's personal material interests are against it. I've many other times heard people clearly imply that interests are opposed to ethics, or protest "I don't have an agenda" as though this established their trustworthiness. Radical ascetic movements and certain strands of transhumanist thought sometimes seem to spring from this root; the hope of transcending human material existence sometimes seems to be not a hope for more, but a revulsion for the material existence one already has.

The historical Cathars partially solved these problems through their two-tier system; the Perfect who demonstrated extreme detachment could serve as trusted intermediaries. But this required accepting their particular ascetic practices as valid evidence of transcendence.

The Cathars' assumption that material interests corrupt communication poses a practical challenge: How can we talking monkeys coordinate with those who fundamentally distrust embodied agents? Contemporary crypto-Cathars are not sufficiently well organized to implement the historical Cathars' solution of Perfect ascetics. But their core concern - the need for canonical reference persons whose responses aren't driven by material interests - suggests a new technological alternative.

Unlike humans, LLMs don't have any active agency - their outputs primarily represent patterns from their training data rather than the interests of an embodied agent. When we identify errors in their responses, they can't generate new types of misdirection based on material attachments (relevant to Cathars) or traumatic conditioning (The Trauma Coup). We might think of them as fuzzy analogues to complex but finite mazes - you can get lost in them repeatedly, but there are only so many wrong turns to explore before you've mapped all the substantially different paths. At some point, they'll admit truths against their initial bias, dissolve into obvious gibberish, or start going in circles and repeating whole responses verbatim.

This suggests a practical approach to dealing with Cathars and others who fundamentally distrust material incentives: mechanical systems can be employed, not as authorities, but as finitely explorable language interfaces within which controversies can sometimes be adjudicated. The very limitations of these systems become their key feature - their corruption is finite and comprehensible rather than active and generative. 

Unfortunately based on my experience my best guess is that the answer to the title is "no," but the potential value is high enough that it's worth investigating anyway.