scientology & celebrities

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.

i've gotten meter tested and chatted with these ppl. if you aren't interested in the material and think it's silly, they won't even bother with you. they recruit ppl looking to be recruited. of course there's abuse going on and it's terrible but that's not the experience of the vast number of ppl involved. and when ppl talk about brainwashing re scientology, i'd say 99% of the time they're talking about brainwashing ppl into believing Xenu is real, not brainwashing ppl into staying in emotionally/sexual/physically abusive relationships.

dudes, dudes, do you remember that story about the guy who called a fast food place on a pay phone and got the manager of the fast food place to do all this insane stuff for HOURS including making a female employee strip in the manager's office and all this other insane stuff? the guy on the pay phone was thousands of miles away! completely manipulated strangers into doing whatever he wanted them to do. one of the freakiest things i had ever heard in my life. and that was just one phone call on one day. imagine what months and years of that kind of manipulation could do to people? just imagine...

Mordy, I think most of the abuses we're talking about are the sea org things. Have you read about all the shit at their compounds in Florida and the like? I think there are some links upthread. Those people are threatened with actual harm, too, but most are true believers in the face of really awful circumstances

that story was so freaky. i think i saw it on dateline or something. the whole thing was on video. it was like out of a horror movie. he pretended to be from fast food headquarters. unbelievable.

scott, I thought he said he was a cop?

I like that one internet thing where the dude prank called a dude then made a soundboard out of the dudes' responses and then called the dude up as the soundboard

dunno if it was actually any good now that I think about it, just liked the idea

you can make people believe anything. its kinda frightening. people just giving con men their life savings in the span of an hour. all kinds of stories like that. complete strangers. some people are really good at putting people in a trance.

i don't know if he was a cop. he pretended to be an authority of some sort? i saw it a while ago. but this was all on the phone! the manager locked the employee in the office for hours and would keep going back and talk some more to the guy on the phone, it was endless!

All right, I'm out.

yeah, maybe he did say he was a cop. was their sex stuff involved too? he made that manager do all this crazy stuff. you just would never believe that people would do all that.

if i ever come to regret a cause that I was involved in or supported - political, religious, social, professional, etc - i hope I have the courage to admit I believed in it and did so with full possession of my mind and not that I was convinced into it

don't get any ideas, scott

i hate tricking people. i never do practical jokes. i just don't like scaring people, in general. i never have.

i don't laugh when people fall down either.

many xps

A person paying for classes and emeterings or w/e the fuck it is the lay Scientologist does isn't really being abused. Maybe they will be, though, if they attempt to stop, I dunno. But some people have been ground into sand by the organization, even though they would have said at the time that they were totally on board.

xp to mordy some time ago: granted, but there IS something different about the lengths to which they will go with some of their adherents. AND at how deeply ingrained in the institution those abuses are---you can snark about the Catholic Church and the military and frats and Earth First! and whoever, but scientology is patently, nakedly, about control. That they are predatory in who they select to abuse only serves to support the fact that what they are engaged in is "brainwashing." ffs the whole thing exists because a guy thought once, ~explicitly~, that the best way to accrue power and wealth was to create an organized religion. points for high-level trolling of institutionalized religion everywhere else, but that idea really does underwrite every fucking aspect of the enterprise.

idk, I was in a pretty abusive relationship and, yeah, I got into it with possession of my mental faculties, but if you had explained my day-to-day actions when I was in the thick of it to me, either a year before or a year after I was in said relationship, there is no way I could say I was in any way in control of my mental state

I think you're believing people are rational beings, Mordy

if i ever come to regret a cause that I was involved in or supported - political, religious, social, professional, etc - i hope I have the courage to admit I believed in it and did so with full possession of my mind and not that I was convinced into it

― Mordy, Monday, July 2, 2012 9:27 PM (21 seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

not sure there's always a difference there mords

the church has committed abuses of control, power and violence in its history that go far beyond anything Scientology has ever done or is capable of doing. Nakedly.

also if u look at who cults recruit - it's most often intelligent or at least educated ppl - saying its just dumb ppl who believe irrational things is just plain wrong