I just watched the movie last night (bootleg) and Rathbun was STANDING THERE LOOKING ON when the Miscavige/Hole scene was shot, and yes, he was looking on approvingly. If it was wrong, he had ample opportunity to speak up as it was being shot.

Is it possible that his wife has had enough? Between the court case and many stalking instances? Just wondering if, maybe, his wife said “let’s try to have a somewhat normal life…..get off the stage”. Is that unreasonable? I can’t help but wonder how many people would choose to continue? It’s easy to say you would. How many are really putting there money where their mouth is? How many spouses would tolerate it? It’s one thing to deal with a problem….to find a resolution; quite another to find yourself in a position where so many people want you to fight a fight, seemingly forever. Too many unrealistic and unfair expectations IMHO. Just my two cents

Interesting points, reasonable analysis. I’ll just say this: anyone who’s been in the Hole, from what I’ve read, was tortured and then some, so you get what you got.

I think Marty’s story makes solid sense, in a very predictable way, if looked at from the lens of an extended torture victim who experienced significant amounts of both positive and negative punishment. Positive punishment means: do something bad, we punish you by doing something to you, like smacking you. Negative punishment means: do something bad, we punish you by taking something away, like no more food for you. There is also positive reward: so something good, get a cookie and negative reward: do something good, we stop electroshocking you.

I learned how these were scientifically proved to break animals into un-fixable broken-ness (versus fixable brokenness) from Bob Bailey. For those who don’t know, Bob Bailey was a big dog in behaviorism research, back in the day, and was witness to various government tests that wouldn’t necessarily be allowed today. He spoke about the nature of helping animals to learn to do various ‘impossible’ behaviors, such as cats willinglying lying down in a grass spot, surrounding by jumping crickets. He stated that the surest way to permanently break an animal was to use the positive and negative punishment without any level of predictability.

When you punish someone, when you hurt them, animal or human, the victim tries desperately to figure out what they did ‘wrong’, not just on a rational level, but on an instinctive one. They may link accurately, “I forgot to do my homework!” or “Dad’s mad when he smells of bourbon and chanel #5” or, unfortunately and inevitably, inaccurately, “Dad’s mad when we’re in the living room. Living rooms are BAD”. This is why PTSD sufferers often have deeply random triggers, such as, being complimented on their sweater, a pencil being dropped, the smell of Ivory dish soap, as well as more ‘sensible’ links like the sound of planes overhead, the noise of gunshots, someone red faced and shouting.

When you have a predictable punisher, even someone who is wildly OTT, this does not really cause insanity most of the time. If your dog gets smacked every. single. time. he looks at a bird, he may choose to stop looking at birds or will look at birds only when he’s willing to be smacked, but is probably not going to shake uncontrollably and pee himself all the time. Maybe, but probably not.

OTH, if your dog gets smacked, regardless of what he’s doing, based on a truly random schedule (such as an owner’s mood swings or a random number generator), he’ll basically go crazy trying to figure out what he did wrong and begin to superstitiously believe things, even if it’s not every single time, because UNRELIABLE rewards and punishers are the most effective. I don’t have time to explain this, but Vegas is the textbook example–old dudes sit at slot machines because MAYBE they’ll get the jackpot, even though odds are against it. The old dudes get rewarded JUST ENOUGH to keep ’em playing.

Ok, so what if, instead of being rewarded for slot machines or punished for looking at birds or barking at squirrels, instead we started having truly random superstitious guesses at what’s causing these terrible things to happen or, even more powerfully, to STOP happening? Then you get completely nutbar reactions. If the dog is randomly shocked whenever, wherever, you’ll get a dog who starts thinking that looking at a tree is the problem, or that it’s about men wearing blue baseball caps, or it’s a bad idea to pee squatting or to sniff, and that it’s only safe when you’re doing equally randomly things, like, say, looking at a woman wearing a sweater, or standing on three legs.

Except that now you’re crazy, right, and the emotional reactions have begun happening ON THEIR OWN, because that’s how classical conditioning and anxiety disorders WORK. If every time you see a train and get shocked, pretty soon you’ll start having freakout biological reactions to trains, no shock needed, and you’re basically shocking YOURSELF. So, you start avoiding trains like hell.

But what if you’ve been randomly shocked, and even you yourself don’t know what will set off your internal shock reaction? You become twitchy and you try things, all kinds of things, to get the freakout feeling to stop.

And sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t, but these things are now happening randomly.

Which makes you MORE crazy trying to avoid them!

It becomes a downward spiral where there are no rules of safety, no ways to ‘make it stop’, no ways to be OK, and the crazy gets worse and worse, while you try weirder and weirder things in an attempt to get the shocks in your head to stop fucking with you.

This would be bad enough, and it’s basically why PTSD is so fucking hard to treat. There’s no way to stop a man from hearing ALL plane noises, ever again, or avoid seeing ALL khaki uniforms, or whatever, right? PTSD sufferers get retriggered even while trying to work through their trauma.

BUT, let’s take a random soldier who’s been fucked up by war, and now add him into a cult with a random psychotic who tortures people, uses ‘stress positions’, social isolation, sleep dep, food dep, mind games, to the mess.

YIKES.

Worse, the psycho makes the victims torture EACH OTHER, so they are now GENUINELY complicit in the crimes. It’s no longer just vague ideas that haunt a person, such as, “I’m a terrible man because I was too hard on my kids, maybe kinda, I don’t know” but instead, “I’m a terrible man because I kicked A and I abused B I assaulted C and I shoved D’s head under the water.”

Uh-oh, now you’ve got MORE to overcome.

Let’s get this sad, crazy, troubled PTSD sufferer out of the war zone and plop ‘im in sanity town.

He works on his shit, he gets his act together, he begins to slowly unravel his psyche, but as he does this, weird and utterly random punishments of an extreme (and extremely triggering) nature start to happen. His loved ones are threatened. He’s jailed. He has weird talks with people and these talks go in directions he doesn’t expect. At the same time, the world is not without some rewards, it’s just that the rewards are really confusing. People praise him when he talks about ‘bad’ things he did, but other people get mad about this.

If you add in really weird and further random punishment/reward from people who have his detailed psych file and are GENUINELY OUT TO GET HIM….

And you’re going to wind up with a person who is a lot like the dogs the government randomly shocked back in the day. Bailey said the dogs were so utterly unable to predict what would cause punishment, even after the punishment stopped, that the no longer could notice their behavior would predict GOOD things, such as sit when I say sit and you get a cookie. When an animal cannot control the world around them, they begin sparking further, and it’s “Lady in orange sweater = PANIC STATIONS” and ‘man in red sweater = things are OK maybe’ and then ‘but now man has turned LEFT and we’re at PANIC STATIONS again!!!’ and it just….

It just gets weirder and crazier as the animal flails about, trying to beat a way toward some kind of predictability.

According to Bailey, once the animal’s mind had been broken sufficiently, it was not possible to put it back together. This is a guy who can get cats to sit there while crickets jump on them. CATS. I mean…. CATS. When he says he can’t get a dog to stop shitting itself in genuine terror if X has happened, I believe him. I have also seen this.

It seems to me that Marty was tortured, got out, made a significant break for sanity, and then came under tremendous attack again. It’s no wonder that he’s basically cracked under the strain and is doing utterly weird and random things. He’s almost certainly gotten heavily conditioned, in his backbrain, that ‘Pleasing DM is the only way to survive’ or ‘Making DM less mad is how to keep my family safe’ and so he may be trying to do that.

I realize I’m now comparing dogs who were randomly electroshocked in the 40s to someone who is wandering around one of the richest countries in the freeworld, but…. The Hole seems like pretty classic long term torture to me.

True that !!! Why does it give me a headache … lol

47 x47 perhaps ??? hee hee

Thanks, Dice!
It was quite an experience to be involved in the interviews, etc, and then see the final product while still “in”. Especially since David Koresh was reading the same script as the narcissist who conned me into believing (on some warped level) that he was the Messiah. Barf.
And not long after, also while still “in”, to watch the Waco compound burn.