scientology & celebrities

i suspect that something like "brainwashing" does exist, but it isn't just the tendency of some people to cling to seemingly irrational belief. cult-like organizations often prey on emotionally fragile people in desperate circumstances. i'd say that ordinary indoctrination begins to cross over into something like "brainwashing" when such individuals are deliberately isolated from friends, family, work, familiar environments and routines, and are thus rendered completely dependent. it continues when the dependent subject is subjected to a sustained program of conditioning techniques, including: sleep deprivation, regimentation of activity, the strategic granting and withdrawl of affection and basic needs, intense and constant group pressure to conform, extremely prolonged ritual observance, deliberate infliction of "cleansing" psychological trauma, punishment for doctrinal deviance, etc.

"cult-like organizations often prey on emotionally fragile people in desperate circumstances."

yeah, they are called churches!

but okay i won't use the word brainwash when talking about most religions. mass psychosis? mass delusion?

Not only is there an element of imposed isolation to Scient - sometimes on boats out at sea, even! - but also an element of blackmail as well; extensive confession is a precept, apparently, and the church is reportedly not afraid to use it as leverage. Also, leaving or disparaging the church typically invites a vindictive reaction, and some in church can be particularly petty, as people in positions of power are wont to me. This stuff is all beyond the pale for a so-called religion, with tax exempt status, no less. The horror stories from escapees -blowers? - are predictably, well, horrific.

"sleep deprivation, regimentation of activity, the strategic granting and withdrawl of affection and basic needs, intense and constant group pressure to conform, extremely prolonged ritual observance, deliberate infliction of "cleansing" psychological trauma, punishment for doctrinal deviance, etc."

church bake sales can be brutal!

Like, imagine the Catholic church requiring confession, but then compiling that info to use against you at a later date. That's awful.

i mean that list could easily describe some regular old religions. hardcore buddhist sects, hardcore xian and islamic sects, etc.

Operative word being "hardcore," which is to say, quite rarified, which is also to say, very cult-like.

as an outsider, most churches and religions seem cult-like to me. they just do. i wish them well. i'm not anti exactly. but they scare me.

Oh, totally. Be afraid. But some are more insidious and/or conniving than others. Like, for example, profit-driven religions such as the so-called religion in question.

Bush and Gore, what's the difference?

scott seward: scared of religion, curious about ghosts

*files away for future reference*

ha! well, scientology is scary, but it also has about another 1000+ years of damage to do before it can compare to some of the old fogeys out there.

In its defense, it's got a pretty small footprint, and as much as I don't like the idea of religions praying on the weak, at a certain point you have to take responsibility for falling for a scheme as baldfaced as this one! Suckers gonna get suckered. I mean, there's a paper record behind this! Most religions require some degree of faith, but this one requires faith that transcends fact.

who hooked Cruise into scientology, anyway?

Mimi Rogers.

oh right. I think I knew that

i do love mimi. i loved the rapture so much. go figure!

Has anyone seen "Tabloid"? Certainly made me look at Mormonism even more cautiously than Scientology. At least nobody takes Scientologists seriously.

i've known people with jehovah's witness family members who were totally cut off from them and/or shunned/ostracized because they weren't witnesses.

Re: Mormonism, once again, beware the contemporary paper trail!

Mormon converts baffle me

tom's lauer interview is like a screen test.

maria's great aunt would have big family dinners on sunday and the witness family members would eat outside. they wouldn't go in her aunt's house. but they would eat her chicken! talk about outside chicken!

Mordy maybe I'm misunderstanding you but it sure seems like you're pretending away the whole field of psychology in yr dismissal of "brainwashing". Which, you know, has some notes of irony to it.

what does the field of psychology have to do with brainwashing?

...

i have no idea what that ellipse means. one can question the validity of brainwashing/deprogramming/exit counseling, etc without repudiating field of psychology.

To my understanding, what people refer to as brainwashing is usually the use of coercive tactics, often subtle, to manipulate someone into passively accepting what you tell them as truth or impel them to do something. The entire thing upthread with eye contact, but with the supervisor of the exercise being able to butt in and say "no, you're doing it wrong, I'm starting over" has shit-all to do with the staring and everything to do with the fact that you are setting pleasing the "instructor" so that they will pass you. Same basis of where the ideas of Stockholm syndrome and the like come from.

We're not talking about that, we're saying that the entire idea of brainwashing being valid or invalid is completely dependent on the field of psychology, otherwise we have no metric

Basically the entire Scientology cult is based on some sort of authority telling you whether you did something correctly or not! They just have a stupid feedback machine to cover for that.

are republicans brainwashed? like, where do you draw the line between being convinced of your opinion and unwilling to listen to alternatives and being brainwashed? i'm just skeptical of the term 'brainwashed' in general bc it assumes certain things about malleability of human mind, and mind control, and power + stuff that i think is a) not scientifically proven, b) kinda philosophically mindless, and c) better explained by other terms we already use all the time to describe the same thing. it's just that brainwashed has a special cache bc i think parents who have kids in cults like to believe that there's some kind of mind control at work, as opposed to normal human stupidity, vapidness, already existing susceptibility to terrible things, etc.

― Mordy, Monday, July 2, 2012 2:18 PM (5 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this post is just...i mean i'm not saying that "brainwashing" is an exact thing that we can point to, but you're really just setting it up in opposition to "stupid people trying to justify their dumb mistakes" which is just kind of astoundingly reductive. and uh yeah, dude, people end up in cults all the time, and not because they're stupid, but because they have been cynically manipulated by others. u challopin

xp mh otm, was totally going to mention stockholm syndrome

still hilarious to me that in a thread about SCIFITOLOGY, a religion that dismisses the field of psychology because it's ~mind control~, we are having an argument about whether or not ppl can be manipulated into believing things they might have previously found weird/offensive/etc

yeah, it's weird bc scientology thinks mind control exists and it is in the hands of psychology, and you think mind control exists and it is in the hands of scientology. it's not weird bc i deny mind control exists.

victims of abuse need to just htfu and admit that they were just sorta being stupid for not leaving

no one is arguing that Actual Mind Control, Maybe With X-Rays exists, stop strawmanning

ppl can be coerced into doing things, and can even wrt Stockholm syndrome find justifications for doing those things. ppl can't sit in a lecture and have their mind magically altered into believing X, Y, and Z bc it was told at them brainwashy enough. or bc they didn't blink in over an hour.

The main reason they are so against psychology is that the majority of it is relies on patient feedback to determine progress or guide the therapy. Scientology is supposedly all about this feedback mechanism and the e-reader crap but... if you can measure "clear" as a state of mind, why can't you be trained to use such a thing yourself? Why need someone else there? It's all about whether or not their hierarchy believes they should let you pass, not about changes in yourself.

Mordy, we don't mean that kind of mind control. Ever talked to anyone who worked in a women's shelter? A lot of those women want to go back to their abusive spouses. That's the psychology and dynamic we're talking about here -- getting validation from an abuser.

are all you guys really stoned right now or something?

don't get me wrong, i like these midnight bull sessions. pass the fiddle faddle.

The blinking has nothing to do with it -- it's all about being manipulated into allowing the scientologists to make decisions for you, or to train you to get your validation from their organization.

Am I yelling into the wind over here

scott: yes.

mh: what you're talking about doesn't explain the many ppl who are involved in scientology and who are not being abused but are paying to do classes and think the religion is a really great thing.

and before you gasp at my suggestion that you would say or think something so horrible about the victims of abuse:

"parents who have kids in cults like to believe that there's some kind of mind control at work"

parents do not think that, like, there's something ~magical~ at work, something supernatural. they think that their kids have been made unwitting victims of people that are purporting to save them.

many xps

people can be manipulated into doing things they don't want to do, i mean some form of brainwashing is why a dozen or more kids kept hanging out with jerry sandusky despite the fact that he was sexually abusing them.

Mordy those people aren't the people I'm talking about, either. Cuz, like, duh.

People are dumb and celebrities are into it so it must be cool? tbf how many people followed Madonna into the kabbalah center?

I've seen tons of these dudes' booths around wherever I've been these past few weeks for some reason and I keep asking them for a t shirt but they won't give me one

I mean, you don't necessarily have to be dumb, just be willing to deny all the bad press in lieu of what they're getting at the entry level -- which could be useful! It's a community, and there are rites and stuff to spend your time doing.

it's that red shirt w/ a volcano and lasers or something and DIANETICS in big ol letters

ok, well i've been talking about the 99% of the people who are involved and believe incredibly stupid shit.

nb i think persuasion and convincing is obv real, but there isn't like something special about the way scientology recruits that is distinguishable from the way numerous other organizations, legit + otherwise, convince ppl to follow their mission and get onboard. whether it's a political party, an environmental organization, an established religious one, a fraternal or communal org, etc.