I would love to import the term here but our American dialect is too bland to do it justice – it just wouldn’t fly in the same way.

I pretty much go with your last paragraph.

Once you have established an isolated social situation under the absolute control of an unscrupulous individual, a whole range of social pressures emerge from it to obtain compliance. I have tried to lay some of these out here https://scicrit.wordpress.com/understanding-the-scientology-mindset-series/

This kind of manipulation is far, far more powerful that people suspect, and recruits to Scientology often fall prey to it. Its effect is to persuade them to suspend their critical faculties so as to draw them into the organisation. It takes two to tango.

This is not to suggest that I think the victims are responsible for their own fate. Again: these techniques are far more subtle and powerful than most people suspect. All it takes is a few bad choices.

The brainwashing thesis is based on a model of physical coercion which simply does not apply to the early stages of Scientology membership. Social pressure is a better explanation.

One thing that has kept this idea alive for so many years is the notion that the victim had no choice whatsoever. People are told that their actions were totally irrelevant because they were brainwashed. They are absolved from all responsibility.

That’s very questionable. If ‘brainwashing’ was really as powerful as this, nobody would be able to resist it, and we would not be having this conversation .

The notion that someone was ‘programmed’ against their will also leads logically on to justification of the abusive process of ‘deprogramming’. Deprogrammers argue that, f your mind has been changed by force, it must be morally acceptable to use force to change it back again.

It’s not. In fact, deprogramming often fails, leaving the victim twice victimised and even more committed to the cult having seen the ‘evil’ of the outside world that their guru warned them about, up close.

At best it results in the deprogrammer imposing his worldview on another, making him as bad as the guru.

Absolutely love your analyses on Scientology and Hubbard, many thanks for laying it out so lucidly.

I always found it difficult to square the obvious lack of sophistication in Hubbard’s writing and thinking with the success of his organization, but confronting the complicity of the group as a whole is profoundly clarifying, and makes strong intuitive sense.

Perhaps it’s difficult to accept this interpretation, as it’s more comforting to see the source of so much suffering as an historically singular agent of evil acting upon its victims from the outside than it is to confront those things within ourselves that make the whole nightmare possible to begin with.

The likely reality that charismatic leaders simply provide a pivot point for a bent and radical expression of human beings’ group-building instincts is a difficult one to face, and as such warrants serious consideration.

Shouty Crackers! love love love Alice!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Like “shouty crackers”? Theroux used this term when describing John Sweeney’s shouting meltdown – he went all “shouty crackers.”

I agree. While I wish he would disclose fully, I understand why he doesn’t. I think he fears full disclosure will turn many in the anti- COS community against him. I am not sure that this fear is legitimate, but I am not sure it is wrong either.

It’s a hook, and you come to believe it’s a noble cause. A catholic can go into a church and pray for purely selfish things. They can also come to believe that the church is a noble cause. Both things can exist at the same time.

They may start out for selfish reasons. But are they not soon convinced that this cause is “the cause” and that they must protect it at all costs?