The marquee stays: PEOPLE’S TEMPLE, REV. JIM JONES PASTOR. The large, cavernous constructing within the coronary heart of San Francisco’s black ghetto is boarded up now; its furnishings and fixtures had been auctioned off to pay the price of checking out, embalming, delivery and burying over 900 males, girls and youngsters who adopted Jim Jones to loss of life.
First there have been the pictures of brightly clad our bodies, arms clasped round one another, beside a vat of poisoned purple Taste Aide. Later, the tapes of the Reverend Mr. Jones exhorting his followers to drink the potion and “die with dignity” and eerie experiences of the Massive Brother ways—amplified propaganda recordings, medicine, bodily and sexual coercion—that he used to shepherd his flock to doom.
Jonestown was a horrible mess in some ways, however ultimately, it was the specter of thoughts management that actually chilled the hearts of Individuals, probing a lurking concern of vampires and zombies, armies of the residing useless held in thrall within the hypnotic gaze of the grasp operator. It’s a specter that has surfaced repeatedly within the final 30 years, within the thousand-mile stares and exuberant, empty grins of returning Korean Conflict POWs, the key behavior-modification experiments carried out by the CIA, the helter-skelter killing spree of the Manson household, the transformation of Patty Hearst into Tanya, and now within the cult of cults.
Scientists now conclude that the mind processes data not in a technique however in a number of concurrent streams. Neurophysiologists, unlocking the organic codes of the thoughts, have confirmed what Freud predicted almost a century in the past and what LSD had turned thousands and thousands on to—that the aware “self” is barely a small a part of a way more advanced operation and that under the floor is at all times the “different” and one other after that, a collection of alternate realities. In the meantime, throughout the ages the steely eyes of voodoo practitioners and medication males watch the synthesis of their historical arts into behavioral sciences, Madison Avenue mass advertising and marketing, brainwashing, thoughts management, deprogramming.
Shamans and witch medical doctors have been tapping into the hidden “different” for numerous centuries. Nonetheless extant are the Australian aboriginals referred to as “the folks of the Dream Time.” At puberty, the younger male of the tribe is separated from his mom and remoted within the wilderness for a number of days with out meals or water. He’s saved awake and in fixed concern by the sound of the bullroarers, lengthy slender items of wooden that when whirled within the air make a moaning roar. When he’s on the level of collapse, the tribal elders, sporting animal masks and emitting piercing shrieks, emerge from the bushes and circumcise him. The younger native returns in a zomboid state, a prepared slave to tribal authority and taboos. He lives within the Dream Time, between fantasy and actuality, haunted by the presence of animal demons however in any other case blissful and sedate.
Brainwashing, or thoughts management, as most individuals perceive the time period, is one thing akin to the aboriginals’ ceremony of passage up to date by the scientific revolution. It’s a coercive indoctrination course of used to tip folks over into the Dream Time, obedient to tribal taboos or fashionable ideologies.
The phrase brainwashing dates to the Chilly Conflict, when it was exemplified by George Orwell’s Massive Brother in 1984 and by the Chinese language “reeducation” strategies employed with near-perfect effectivity on American prisoners throughout the Korean Conflict. The Chinese language didn’t advance removed from the essential aboriginal idea. Isolation, coercion and indoctrination comprise the crude however efficient components that they modernized by substituting Pavlovian behavior-modification strategies for animal masks. In America, the place the curiosity was not solely targeted on imposing an ideology however on creating monsters, too, thoughts manipulators can be extra inventive.
The CIA vs. the Thoughts
And it appears to me completely within the playing cards that there shall be throughout the subsequent technology or so a pharmacological technique of constructing folks love their servitude, and producing … a type of painless focus camp for whole societies, so that folks the truth is may have their liberties taken away from them however will reasonably get pleasure from it, as a result of they are going to be distracted from any need to insurgent by propaganda, brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological strategies.
—Aldous Huxley, 1959
American contributions to the “science” of thoughts management started with a couple of “fact drug” experiments—principally involving tincture of marijuana—below Workplace of Strategic Providers auspices throughout World Conflict II. Satisfied that Hitler was a closet case, researchers explored methods to putsch der Führer over the gender line. Within the Pacific theater, employees anthropologists reported that the Japanese thought of nothing so shameful as bowel actions, so authorities chemists compounded a components that duplicated the odor of diarrhea and packed it in aerosol cans below the code title “Who Me?” It was distributed to kids in occupied Chinese language cities who would sneak up behind a Japanese officer and spray the seat of his pants with the liquid. The article was to price the Japanese “face.”
Sophomoric frat-house pranks just like the above sufficed till 1949, when CIA officers had been each horrified and intrigued by the glazed eyes and mechanical confessions of Josef Cardinal Mindszenty at his treason trial in Budapest. A memo was circulated speculating “some unknown power” was controlling him, and work was begun in earnest on various tasks geared toward “controlling a person to the purpose the place he’ll do our bidding in opposition to his will and even in opposition to such elementary legal guidelines of nature as self-preservation.’’
The general public first heard about “brainwashing” in 1950, when CIA propaganda operative Edward Hunter coined the time period in a broadly learn article for the Miami Information headlined BRAINWASHING TACTICS FORCE CHINESE INTO RANKS OF COMMUNIST PARTY. In it, Hunter alleged that the Chinese language possessed strategies “to place a person’s thoughts right into a fog in order that he’ll mistake what’s true for what’s unfaithful, what is true for what’s improper, and are available to imagine that what didn’t occur truly occurred, till he in the end turns into a robotic for the Communist manipulator.”
Two years later, such allegations appeared to be substantiated when Individuals noticed the primary movie clips of downed U.S. pilots calmly confessing to warfare crimes. The end result: additional escalation of CIA behaviorcontrol analysis.
Lately, materials launched by means of the Freedom of Info Act and compiled in John Mark’s e-book The Seek for the Manchurian Candidate particulars the CIA’s secret warfare on the thoughts. In all, the company sponsored 149 tasks between 1950 and 1973 specializing in medicine, hypnosis and electroshock. In a single experiment—the “A”-forArtichoke remedy—a suspected Soviet agent was injected with sufficient sodium pentothal to knock him out after which 20 minutes later was shocked again to consciousness with a shot of Benzedrine. This process, brokers reported, induced a Dream Time impact by which they may make the topic “imagine any fantasy”—that he was speaking to his spouse, mom or commander—with 70-percent effectivity.
One other mind-control venture, the “depatterning” method developed for the CIA by Dr. D. Ewen Cameron on the Allan Memorial Institute in Toronto, mixed extended sleep with electroshock. The method, which one agent described as “the creation of a vegetable,” might utterly obliterate a topic’s feelings and reminiscence in 15 to 30 days.
Within the 100 years since Freud, psychology had made nice strides towards therapeutic the troubled thoughts and unraveling its secrets and techniques. Now it appeared that the science could possibly be used with devastating power as a weapon to imprison folks. The discoveries of Pavlov and later Skinner urged that new behaviors could possibly be formed just by urgent the fitting buttons, however the CIA was dissatisfied. The Skinnerian behaviorists, who dominated college psychology departments within the late ’50s, had been too rigidly scientific to perform the far-reaching targets the CIA envisioned. As an alternative, cash was funneled by means of the CIA’s conduit, the Human Ecology Basis, to unwitting researchers whose extra imaginative discoveries contributed to the expanded effectiveness of the CIA’s mind-control strategies and unfold to be included by radical therapists within the ’60s and cult leaders within the ’70s.
The majority of the analysis, nevertheless, was dedicated to LSD, which the CIA thought could possibly be used to squeeze data from enemy brokers and discredit them by disturbing their recollections or altering their intercourse drives.
Operation Midnight Climax operatives outfitted an condominium on Bedford Road in New York’s Greenwich Village with crimson lights, Toulouse-Lautrec posters, pictures of ladies in chains and black stockings, and a two-way mirror. Utilizing the companies of native hookers, they examined to see if a john, after a surreptitious dose of acid, was extra more likely to reveal secrets and techniques earlier than, throughout or after intercourse.
Underneath code title MKULTRA, the company sponsored scores of extra LSD experiments. The researchers on this program tried the drug first on themselves and their CIA colleagues. In Pink Panther fashion, brokers had been inspired to dose one another clandestinely (resulting in the infamous case of Dr. Frank Olson, whose suicide after a nasty journey was hushed up). Regardless of such mishaps, MKULTRA was expanded to incorporate college analysis. Ken Kesey turned on in a single such take a look at. From the laboratories, LSD leaked off campus, and by the point Drs. Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert (Baba Ram Dass) obtained in on the act, the CIA’s miracle mind-control drug was nicely on the best way to igniting the psychedelic revolution.
William Burroughs as soon as mentioned, “A paranoid is an individual who is aware of all of the info,” and some folks declare that the leak was not fully unintentional, that whereas tripping out on Sandoz acid, MKULTRA boss Sidney Gottlieb conceived the grandiose scheme of utilizing the drug to disorient and repattern a big “regular” inhabitants—simply to see if it could possibly be carried out.
Interlude
If the doorways of notion had been cleansed, each factor would seem to man as it’s, infinite.
—William Blake
No matter their plan, within the following years the astronauts of interior house left the MKULTRA boys stranded in a cloud of dream mud. In the course of the ’60s, thoughts management meant increased consciousness; brainwashing reverted to its Chinese language root phrase, hsinao, “to cleanse the thoughts.” Folks escaped to the Dream Time on medicine or, like Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, by means of Zen practices as a method out of socially ingrown repressions, hang-ups and the paranoid rigidity of the earlier decade.
Others turned on to mass-marketed group therapies like Silva Thoughts Management and T.M. Whereas a few of these opened out to the farthest reaches of upper excellent knowledge, a countercurrent of back-toreality proponents spliced the journey to increased consciousness with cruder Dream Time—evoking strategies to make devotees really feel excessive with each ft on the bottom.
On the best way to “getting it” (EST language for a crystalline glimpse of final actuality), John Dean, John Denver, Cher and 100,000 Erhard Seminar Coaching graduates had been referred to as assholes and turkeys, blitzed with a mix of encounter, psychodrama, Zen and Dale Carnegie, pushed to the breaking level in marathon classes by which they had been forbidden to eat, smoke, speak or pee (EST toilet breaks, initially scheduled each 12 hours, now come extra usually, because of frequent accidents); and at last, they had been indoctrinated with the gospel in line with Erhard—“What’s, is. What isn’t, isn’t. You alone are chargeable for all the pieces that occurs to you.” Graduates attribute unimaginable life-renewing advantages to the EST catharsis—in fact, so did many American GIs after Chinese language brainwashing, a method that EST carefully resembles, in line with some specialists.
The ’60s ended, the ’70s had been born. Sounds of sloshing in rebirthing tanks, and a refrain of primal screams.
The Coming of the Cults
The workplace of those that search new worlds is to come upon these they by no means anticipated to seek out.
—Cervantes
Then, within the wake of the consciousness revolution, there got here the God Squad—clean-cut, smiling younger missionaries touting drugless, sexless highs and spouting hellfire, denouncing mother and father and society as devices of Devil whereas hawking flowers, incense, books and vacuum cleaners. For the various who had been overwhelmed by the shortage of social management within the late ’60s, the cults supplied muchsought-after structured thoughts house.
By the mid Seventies, there have been a minimum of 3,000 cults in America, attracting some ten million members. In fact, there’s nothing new about cults. They’ve existed by means of the ages. Some 2,000 years in the past, Christianity was a cult. Centuries later, pioneer America was a breeding floor for utopian communes and peculiar spiritual sects, a few of which, just like the Mormons, discovered their method into the mainstream. A cult in a single easy sense is a minority, exterior the tradition, whose beliefs and practices differ markedly from these of the bulk. As soon as a cult is accepted by the tradition, it’s now not a cult. Others outline a cult by the diploma to which it exerts management over its members, however the implication that there are acceptable and unacceptable ranges of thoughts management has led solely to confusion.
Along with the bigger teams—Solar Myung Moon’s Unification Church, the Worldwide Society for Krishna Consciousness and the Church of Scientology—there proliferated a slew of minicults such because the Meeting, the Physique, the Kids of God, the Druids and so forth even unto the Zoroastrians, all with practices as different as their names.
The Hare Krishnas chanted. Members of the Approach Worldwide communicated by way of glossolalia (“talking in tongues”). The Druids, a small Bible-astrology sect, meditated on “Mom” Laura Copeland (nee Gerrie Leah Garcia), their excessive priestess. Moonies targeting Divine Precept (Moon’s e-book of revelation) in moments of stress or doubt, and so they eschewed intercourse, consuming, drugging and sleeping.
To turn into “clear,” the Scientologists practiced a collection of “auditing” drills on the “E-meter,” a crude however efficient lie detector, with which trainees went by means of previous painful experiences till there was no cost (“uptightness”) left. Within the increased ranges of Scientology, “Working Thetans” used the E-meter to supply more and more practical hallucinations of time journey and out-of-body experiences. The easy object of all these practices: obliteration of “self” in pursuit of some highly effective kicks.
These cults promised bliss, ecstasy, life-changing experiences, private encounters with God. And so they delivered. Members noticed visions, heard voices, reported blinding flashes of sunshine by which all was revealed, experiences corresponding to probably the most highly effective hallucinogens.
Robert Kaufman, in Inside Scientology, describes one auditing session:
“I used to be in a jail cell. A noose was being positioned round my neck. I obtained down on the ground . . . and began choking. My head jerked in spasms till I assumed it could rip itself off my neck.”
Of their e-book Snapping: America’s Epidemic of Sudden Character Change, communications specialists Flo Conway and Jim Siegelman have compiled various related incidents from members of different cults:
“I felt my physique going numb, going away, and I had many sensations unexpectedly, like I used to be bodily dying however spiritually being pulled out of my physique. On the identical immediate, this factor was opening up earlier than me. I might see a light-weight and really feel one thing coming towards me to get me or assist me. Then I heard this heavenly singing, all completely different sorts of pitches, like Ahhhh!
“I started fantasizing. It was stunning. I used to be out of contact with actuality; it was as if I might see in a distinct dimension. I skilled an intense pleasure the entire time. I reached some extent the place the fantasies grew to become actual. It was poetical. I used to be talking in biblical languages. At occasions I couldn’t open my mouth, however once I did it got here out in verse.”
It was not, nevertheless, visions, numbers or beliefs that, lengthy earlier than Jonestown, sparked mounting concern; it was the suspicion that some cult practitioners had been shelling out these highs, just like the thoughts manipulators of the ’50s utilizing LSD, to disorient and management. If the MKULTRA boys did have a secret plan to repattern a big “regular” inhabitants, what truly occurred went far past their wildest goals. A big share of the inhabitants was undoubtedly “different.”
Whereas Jonestown is the most effective documented instance of cult thoughts management, the heavy-handed ways used there appear old style in contrast with the probabilities raised by critics for this type of drugless programming. “An individual turns into critically weak within the aftermath of this shattering break,” write Conway and Siegelman. “The mind’s information-processing capacities could actually turn into disorganized, not merely leaving the thoughts open to new concepts and data, however the truth is rendering it receptive to a complete new plan of group.”
One of many unforgettable photographs of the ’60s is that of the smiling, white-robed guru sitting in lotus place on a flower-covered dais. Within the presence of whichever guru you’d care to think about, folks would really feel excessive, declare to see glowing auras of white gentle, really feel a chic sense of happiness and interior peace. The room would invariably glow with good vibrations. To the diploma that the mind-control secrets and techniques of those Japanese masters may be defined by Western science, these good vibes had been actual certainly. Researchers have demonstrated that an environment may be suffused with mood-altering alpha and beta waves, the mind’s personal peace-and-love frequency, stimulated by meditative practices. However an alpha-generating state can be a extremely suggestible state.
The set remained the identical in lots of the ’70s cult practices. Followers acquired heavy doses of peace, love and mind waves. Then, in an insidious twist, they had been indoctrinated. At the very least, that is how Moon did it. Remoted amid these good vibrations, devotees had been instructed to imagine that the cult chief is the divine authority, the supreme operator. “I’m your mind, my will have to be your will,” says Reverend Moon.
Siegelman, Conway and others (together with many ex-cultists) keep that as an alternate actuality is conjured by these practices, it’s formed to the wants of the group by means of indoctrination. The components for cult thoughts management as they see it’s:
Activate convert to alternate actuality by means of cult practices.
Form this new actuality to the wants of the cult by means of group reinforcement and indoctrination.
Purge convert’s aware “self” and maintain it on maintain by means of workouts that cease thought—i.e., chanting, numerous types of meditation, marathon ideology classes—till, within the phrases of 1 ex-cultist, ideas turn into “like distant phone indicators.”
Previous to Jonestown, warnings about cults got some credence by scattered experiences of cult weirdness and violence. In 1972, two followers of Love Israel’s Church of Armageddon died throughout a “religion testing” ritual by which they inhaled toluene, an industrial solvent used for breaking down rubber. “Love Israel did nothing,” a former follower informed the press. “He simply informed us to hope over them and they’d rise in three days. We had been so brainwashed we believed him.”
Just a few years later, David Brandt Berg, the reclusive founding father of the Kids of God, was mentioned to be extolling robotized girls disciples to be “fishers of males,” to frequent discos and singles bars and “flirty fish”—trade sexual favors for church donations. Thus far, nevertheless, law-enforcement businesses have maintained a hands-off coverage on the cults-mind-control challenge, fearing entanglement with First Modification ensures of non secular freedom.
Deprogrammers:
To the Rescue?
“What is occurring to you now’s what ought to occur to any regular wholesome organism …. You’re being made sane, you might be being made wholesome.”
“That I cannot have,” I mentioned, “nor can perceive in any respect. What you’ve been doing is make me really feel very ailing.”
—Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange
Enter the deprogrammers, mind-control hit males who promoted their no-holds-barred, emotionally charged and extralegal strategies as the one option to defreak Jesus freaks and different cultists. With their assist, determined mother and father started to kidnap their kids (even “kids” nicely previous authorized majority) and secret them in motel rooms and camps, the place the deprogrammers carry out their modern-day exorcism rites. The process is just not unprecedented. In accordance with legend, Thomas Aquinas’s mother and father locked him in a room with a whore to dissuade him from becoming a member of the Dominican order. Not like St. Thomas, although, cult kids began suing their mother and father and submitting kidnapping and assault fees in opposition to deprogrammers. On this method thoughts management acquired its first take a look at as a authorized challenge.
On the heart of the storm is Ted Patrick, 48, a brief stocky black man with a rocket metabolism that has earned him the nickname “Black Lightning.” Opponents, calling him a “legal lunatic” amongst different issues, have lodged $60 million in lawsuits in opposition to him, however for a lot of mother and father who’ve misplaced kids to the cults Black Lightning is a superhero. Patrick works with a crew that features mother and father, profitable “deprogrammees” or “reprogrammees” and a safety power of musclemen to help within the preliminary abduction. Deprogramming classes final from two days to 2 weeks and resemble, mockingly, the high-pressure, instant-transformation therapies of the late Sixties from which lots of the cults have borrowed closely. Others bluntly evaluate deprogramming strategies to Chinese language reeducation processes.
The energetic precept in deprogramming consists of bombarding the topic with reverse data designed to “break” false spiritual views. Patrick goals first to enrage his topics. To take action he’ll threaten to place them “out of motion,” to delay detention indefinitely; he rails in opposition to their beliefs, confiscates their Bibles and wipes his ass on pictures of cult leaders. “As soon as they start to argue, we’re residence free,” he claims. “As soon as they begin to talk I do know I can win.” Hopscotching throughout America, Ted Patrick claims to have carried out 1,500 deprogrammings involving Kids of God, Moonies, Hare Krishnas, Scientologists and members of the Approach Worldwide. On one event he even zealously deprogrammed a girl he claimed had been brainwashed by a labor group, the Nationwide Caucus of Labor Committees.
Patrick started his deprogramming raids eight years in the past, after his personal son was briefly enchanted with the Kids of God. His actions rapidly attracted press protection. Jerry Sharpe of the Pittsburgh Press reported, “Patrick is an incredible man. The lady was clutching the Bible, staring forward and repeating ‘Reward the Lord’ on a regular basis. Patrick walked over and ripped the Bible out of her fingers so arduous he nearly threw her in opposition to the wall. He mentioned, ‘You don’t serve God, you serve the Satan.’ ” In fact, not everyone thought he was that “superb.”
By 1973, the cults—supported by the ACLU—had begun to struggle again, and Patrick discovered himself in court docket. That January, Dan Voll, a junior at Yale and a member of the New Missionary Fellowship—a small, respectable evangelical Christian youth group selling quick hair and lengthy skirts—was grabbed by Patrick on 119th Road in Manhattan. His shouts attracted police, he was launched and filed assault fees. To the shock of many, the case in opposition to Patrick was dismissed. Choose “Flip ’em Unfastened” Bruce Wright cited New York State legislation allowing a violation of legislation to forestall a “higher damage,” the identical authorized precept cited by John Erlichman in defending Nixon. Thoughts management, Choose Wright urged, was such a “higher damage.” Patrick termed the choice a “nice victory” for the nation.
However Patrick’s victory was short-lived. Just a few months later, in the same case, he was condemned for “vigilante ways” and despatched to the slammer. Since then he has served time in New York, Pennsylvania and Colorado. But the controversy surrounding the authorized standing of deprogramming and thoughts management stays unresolved. In 1978, for instance, a Rhode Island court docket dominated that deprogramming itself (aside from the preliminary abduction) was not unlawful, by decoding the First Modification to imply that the person is protected against authorities interference in faith, not from particular person interference. “Deprogramming,” this ruling urged, was “persuasion.”
At present, the deprogrammers are as proliferate and different because the cults. Following Patrick’s lead, a number of opponents promoting their very own manufacturers of deprogramming, debriefing, stress interviewing and actuality remedy have entered this new and profitable discipline. Whereas Patrick fees a flat price of $10,000 for his companies, the charges of his imitators vary as excessive as $50,000. Of those rival companies, probably the most profitable has been the Freedom of Thought Basis. Hidden away on 5 acres of land in Arizona’s Tucson mountains, FTF options “the best deprogramming group put collectively in the entire world,” in line with founder Michael Trauscht, who hopes to “make Tucson the anticult capital of the world.”
The “actuality remedy” of the Trauscht group relies largely on Patrick’s strategies, however as an alternative of abducting converts they’ve made use of current legal guidelines—in an alarming method—to legally kidnap members of cults. Underneath California’s “conservatorship” legal guidelines, a brief guardian may be appointed in instances of “incompetency” for 15 to 30 days, “with or with out discover to topic.” The legislation, designed to use to the senile, unbalanced or critically injured, was stretched by a number of sympathetic judges to use to cultists. Translation: cult consciousness is a type of madness.
Trauscht introduced mother and father with an affidavit ready for his or her signatures and containing allegations that their son or daughter seemed to be the sufferer of thoughts management, that his or her character had modified abruptly or that property belonging to the kid had been transferred to cult leaders. The fees could possibly be false, because the complete enterprise was carried out with out the information of the topic, and there can be no listening to, no notification and no illustration for the cult member.
Trauscht and firm had been capable of acquire related orders in ten states, aside from California, earlier than the primary take a look at got here in San Francisco in a case by which 5 Moonies had been allowed illustration at a conservatorship listening to. One other stunning resolution: Choose S. Lee Vavuris dominated in favor of deprogramming, declaring, “The parent-child relationship isn’t ending. The kid is the kid despite the fact that a mum or dad could also be 90 and the kid 60.”
Not so surprisingly, the California State Courtroom of Appeals overturned his resolution.
That ruling stalled Trauscht briefly, however since then, in response to Jonestown hysteria, Vermont and various different states are contemplating guardianship legal guidelines, not for the insane and feeble, however particularly to facilitate deprogramming. The implications of such motion are astounding—visions of writers, artists, punks, unpopular religionists, Excessive Occasions readers, me, you, everyone rounded up and despatched to deprogramming facilities. Nonetheless, the prospect that such legal guidelines shall be written are, presently, slim.
Thoughts Management on Trial
If each the previous and the exterior world exist solely within the thoughts, and the thoughts itself is controllable—what then?
—George Orwell, 1984
On Capitol Hill, because the assassination of Consultant Leo J. Ryan and the debacle in Guyana, the cult wars have heated up. Whereas the White Home has been noncommittal on the problem (Ruth Carter Stapleton is a “reminiscence healer”), the Congress has initiated two new investigations into cult actions. Up to now, these have amounted to little greater than sound and fury, an try to ease the troubled minds of the parents again residence.
I attended one such listening to on February 5, 1979, an “unofficial” investigation into cult phenomena organized by Senator Robert Dole. The Moonies had been out in power. A ragtag oompah band was taking part in “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” and a much less acquainted tune—“Shining Fatherland,” the anthem of the Unification Church—on the steps of the Senate Workplace Constructing. About 500 had gathered to protest the listening to.
Blue and crimson polka-dot badges proclaimed SENATOR DOLE—THIS IS A WITCH HUNT as Moonies sang, clapped, leafleted and “love-bombed” guests, telling everybody to “have a pleasant day.” Peanut butter sandwiches had been handed round. White, yellow and black faces smiled in subzero winds.
Inside, Moonies—together with Hare Krishnas, Scientologists and followers of the Approach—jammed the gallery of the Senate Caucus Room (website of Joe McCarthy’s list-waving anticommie histrionics) elbow-to-elbow with politicians, reporters, psychologists and anxious mother and father, all below a phalanx of tv cameras. A number of ft away sat Neil Salonen, president of the Unification Church and Moon’s chief Yankee spokesman, 34, heavyset and perspiring barely. On the witness desk, Ted Patrick was haranguing the panel: “Cults just like the Moonies destroy an individual’s free will, make it unattainable for him to assume for the remainder of his life.” The chamber erupted in shouts of “Liar! Absolute liar!”
There have been fees and countercharges, however no arduous proof; and definitions of what constituted a cult versus a respectable faith had the committee hung up, embarrassed and confused. Struggling to provide you with a authorized definition of “free will,” one hapless congressman grew to become so disoriented that he started to mumble a hypothetical protection of the Salem witch trials, and the panel was relieved to adjourn for lunch with Senator Dole’s suggestion that they “get collectively and speak some extra.”
As we slouch towards Bethlehem and lurch towards 1984, such bafflement is typical. Although programming is a constant think about any tradition the place folks share a standard language and, therefore, to some extent, the identical mind-set, the very fact is commonly missed within the emotional debate surrounding cult programming. The controversy is just not a few programmed versus an unprogrammed, “free,” anarchic existence; it issues applications that run counter to socially accepted applications. You will need to remember the fact that related however much less excessive thoughts management strategies are employed every day at school, enterprise, “respectable” religions, promoting and tv. The implication that there are acceptable ranges of thoughts management has contributed immeasurably to public confusion.
The fashionable phenomenon of thoughts management, rising out of the key CIA laboratories or out of the tradition itself to be perfected by the cults and amended by the deprogrammers, means that human beings are rather more malleable than some who cling to a delusion of the person as self-contained unit wish to imagine. However, the discoveries on this space trace at powers of communication and management lengthy hidden from the “aware” human being. The expanded-consciousness motion within the Sixties went far in advancing this view.
Ideally, thoughts management is just not indoctrination or deprogramming. Neither is it a type of property to be bought to an elite corps of paying believers. Sadly, at this time it’s all three.
It may be a weapon; it may be a boon. Science may be helpful in explaining these phenomena; it may additionally exploit them. The Dream Time, our historical heritage, can be utilized to obliterate character within the curiosity of organizations and ideologies or to flee character within the pursuits of enlightenment. However till such conflicts are resolved, thoughts management is uncontrolled.
Learn the remainder of this challenge right here.