The Two-Stage Exit Strategy

A lot of members can’t leave outright, not because they “still believe,” or may laway pa ni BES, but because leaving would rip their family in half. A spouse might panic. Parents might treat it as betrayal. Children might get caught in the crossfire. That fear isn’t imaginary. In a high-control group, social punishment is a real enforcement tool. So if total exit isn’t practical yet, the Two-Stage Exit Strategy gives you a smarter path. Exit the slave-labor machinery first, then exit the institution when you can.

Albert Hirschman’s model helps explain why this works. When an organization declines, people respond with exit (leave) or voice (complain and demand change), while loyalty delays exit because of attachment and ties. But in high-control settings, “voice” is punished, and “loyalty” is weaponized through guilt and fear—especially fear of family rupture. That leaves many members trapped in the worst position. You can’t safely use voice, and you can’t safely exit. The Two-Stage Exit model is the workaround: you exit in parts.

STAGE 1: When total exit isn’t practical, exit from the slave-labor machinery.

This is the first door. You remain physically inside, but you stop being usable fuel. You pull back from unpaid work. You stop treating endless tasks and quotas as moral emergencies. You protect your weekends, sleep, and budget. You redirect time and money back to your household—children, parents, health, savings, actual life.

This stage matters because it restores agency without forcing a family war. It also exposes a hard truth: a labor-dependent system can tolerate doctrinal criticism, but it struggles when reliable workers quietly stop cooperating. If you want a low-risk way to weaken the machine while protecting your home life, this is it.

Remain, but change your activities to “documentation work.”

If you’re going to remain for now, don’t remain as labor. Remain as a witness.

Sun Tzu’s “On the use of spies” isn’t about drama. It’s about inside knowledge defeating fear and propaganda. In our setting, “documentation work” means paying attention to how pressure is applied, what’s demanded, what’s threatened, and what’s hidden behind religious language. It means keeping safe, lawful, redacted proof—screenshots, internal messages, announcements, patterns of fundraising pressure, labor mobilizations—so the system becomes visible to the people it depends on.

This is where closet members become crucial to the exit community. Public exiters can speak, but closet members can document. They can capture the gap between the public image and the internal reality. Those receipts don’t just persuade outsiders; they reduce fear inside, because they tell doubting members: you’re not imagining it. And when fear drops, more people begin Stage 1 quietly.

A simple rule keeps this ethical: expose systems, not ordinary trapped individuals. Blur names, faces, numbers, and private identifiers. The goal is to protect people while making the machinery legible.

Why today’s MCGI is vulnerable to labor withdrawal and abuloy stoppage

MCGI’s current setup makes it unusually sensitive to two things ordinary members control every day: free labor and abuloy. When a group runs on paid staff and modest expectations, a few tired volunteers don’t change much. But when daily operations, events, “charity” outputs, logistics, and fundraising momentum depend on members donating their bodies and schedules, small refusals stack up fast.

Here’s the basic mechanics. Labor withdrawal creates immediate gaps. Fewer hands means delays, lower output, and more pressure on the remaining “reliable” people. That pressure doesn’t solve the shortage; it often multiplies it. The most dependable workers burn out first, resentment grows, and more people quietly step back. At the same time, abuloy stoppage hits the system where it can’t improvise—cash flow. Fixed costs don’t politely shrink just because morale drops. So leadership responds the way strained systems usually respond: tighter fundraising, heavier guilt, more urgent targets, more “spiritual” framing of compliance. But that response is self-defeating. It raises the emotional tax on members, which accelerates the very withdrawal it’s trying to prevent.

This is why Stage 1 of the Two-Stage Exit Model matters. It targets the organization’s “fuel,” not its slogans. You don’t need a debate to stop being extracted. You don’t need a public confrontation to set a boundary. When enough people do this quietly—especially those who used to be reliable—the organization faces a real constraint: it can’t keep producing the same level of activity with less labor and less giving. It either scales down (which exposes weakness) or squeezes harder (which creates more exit).

If you’ve been feeling powerless because you can’t leave yet, this is the lever you can pull without blowing up your family life. You can reduce free labor. You can stop emergency giving. You can redirect time and money back to your household. That isn’t just self-preservation. In a labor-and-abuloy-dependent system, it has real impact. It forces the institution to confront reality instead of hiding behind religious language, and it lowers the cost of exit for the next person watching you set a boundary and survive it.

STAGE 2: Exit the main door when feasible.

This is the final exit—formal separation, no more obligations, no more attendance, no more identity tied to membership. But you don’t rush it if it will destroy your family stability today. You prepare. You build financial cushion. You strengthen relationships outside. You learn who in your circle respects boundaries and who escalates when you assert them. Then you leave cleanly and calmly, without needing a courtroom-style explanation.

In Hirschman’s terms, this is the moment exit becomes rational because the costs of staying—time drain, money drain, emotional coercion—finally outweigh the costs of leaving. Stage 1 lowers the system’s leverage over you; Stage 2 completes the break when you can survive the social fallout.

That’s the Two-Stage Exit Strategy in its simplest form: If you can’t leave the church yet, leave the extraction first. If you must remain, remain as inside eyes, not as free labor. Then exit the main door when the timing is right.

References

Hirschman, A. O. (1970). Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to decline in firms, organizations, and states. Harvard University Press.

Rosal, R. (2026, January 1). Promote the Two-Stage Exit Strategy. Educate the Laborers. Force the Crisis. Exit the System. Post-MCGI Society / MCGI Exiters.

Sun Tzu (trans. 2009). The Art of War (S. B. Griffith, Trans.). Oxford University Press. (Original work ca. 5th century BCE).