🙂

Hey there… I knew i had seen you somewhere before.

Thanks 🙂 No, I lurk around from time to time…just dont have too much to contribute, but support you all <3

Me too…I fell down on the way out, suddenly my legs wouldnt support me… he picked me up and put me in the car….I was mortified but going numb, folks around us assumed I was drunk…

Yikes! I think its more prevalent as the drugs become easier to get…and honestly the utter shame keeps you from reporting…I never did…I didn’t get out of bed for days…

Good for you! we should all move there 😉

Their eyes would shrivel up and fall out from lack of moisture replacement…and the shriveled eyes on the ground would keep staring at each other.

Victim C’s story rings even more true now that I think of it. “Drink that wine!” etc. – WTF that’s so stupidly scientological that nobody could make up a story like that. I mean seriously? It’s so puke-inducing I wanna puke.

Zimbardo’s ideas have no scientific evidence to back them. They are opinions.

That’s completely relevant.

Milgram found about 65% of subjects consistently obeyed and shocked a man to death as long as an authority ordered it directly and took responsibility for the outcome. That is obedience.

But being a leader that has a group harm people in your own decisions is different than complying with authority. Morgan is likely correct that most people are so obedient and willing to obey authority that it is a severe social weakness.

We as a species long survived in groups and right or wrong have evolved evolved to follow confidedent leaders. The most confident leaders unfortunately are narcissists.

It’s a serious flaw in our psychology.

I think the lynchpin often with harmful groups is the leader. Take away the predators from those positions and groups can soften over time and possibly even become neutral or beneficial.

The weaknesses in cult members are the same as society. I know men who go to kill people for the military. That’s a bizarre position to take. I know people that support corporations polluting everything if it generates profits.

People are almost blindly obedient to many harmful things. Our economy rewards greed, selfishness and cruelty and denies food, shelter and medical care to hundreds of millions of people – mostly children – despite more than enough resources to elevate everyone out of poverty. We just go along with it.

I think language, core values and deeply held assumptions play a role in supporting authority and poor decisions that establish and maintain structures of immoral cruelty.

I think Zimbado’s ideas survive the flaws in his experiment, which are not as serious as you present them However, let’s consider the implications of Milgram’s experiment, instead.

Placing too much emphasis on individual pathology requires us to believe that people with severe personality disorders (who are rare) and others with sociopathic conditions (who are very, very, rare indeed) are over-represented in Scientology – it almost requires there to be a ‘personality type’ vulnerable to the appeal of group like Scientology. It also requires us to explain why.

There is no evidence that this is the case. Scientology recruits are pretty much representative of the general population, caught at a vulnerable period of their lives, and here is good evidence that ‘cultists’ are disturbingly normal – just like the representative cross-section of people who took part in Milgram’s experiment.

Milgram’s experiment demonstrated that is was not individual pathology that motivated fully 70% of his well-balanced, sane, subjects to obey orders that could have killed another person, just because they were told to by a minor authority figure. They did not suffer from narcissistic personality disorders.They were
not psychopaths.

Milgram explains this shocking result with the concept of the ‘agentic state’ which fits Scientology very well.

I don’t think the insight of the Milgram experiment is fully appreciated, because everyone likes to believe that they would be the exception. However, we have to face it – if >70% of ordinary people were prepared to kill, who needs psychopaths? You just require the right, toxic, social situation.

That’s what makes it so scary, and so important.

Scientology places far more pressure on it’s members than Milgram did, it’s amplified by social isolation and typically expects things that fall short of what Milgram’s subjects were prepared to do.

It’s hardly surprising that the CofS can obtain compliance from ordinary, sane, people.

There are dangerously crazy people in Scientology -but only in the same (small) proportions as there are in the general population. Explaining their behaviour is not the problem. The problem is explaining the bizarre behaviour of the overwhelming majority who are perfectly sane and not under their direct influence.