Thursday, December 29, 2022

(5) Scientology and NXIVM - Parallels and Plagiarism

 Scientology and NXIVM - Parallels and Plagiarism




Influences on NXIVM beliefs and practices, sourced from Natalie et al (2019), rendered in the mode of W.S. Bainbridge, e.g. Bainbridge 1978. |NXIVM teachings drew upon diverse influences, including Ayn Rand ("parasites"), L. Ron Hubbard ("suppressives"), Milton Erickson's hypnosis, Isaac Asimov's science fiction, Rudolf Steiner, Tony Robbins, and neuro-linguistic programming. NXIVM incorporated elements of multi-level marketing and practices from judo, with colored cloth for rank and bowing.

This is the fifth post in a series that examines the book Scarred: The True Story Of How I Escaped The Cult That Bound My Life by Sarah Edmondson.

I recommend reading these posts in sequential order and have listed them in order to make reading them in order easy.

Unless noted otherwise, all quotes used in this series are from that book. 


Regarding "collateral" we have a bit to look at.


First off "collateral" in NXIVM is material that can be distributed via media to ruin the life of a NXIVM member. It is described as material that a member is pressured into giving that is embarrassing, humiliating, and could harm the reputation, career, freedom, and standing in the community of a member.

Collateral is things like nude photos that show both the genitals and face of a NXIVM member. A video showing a member confessing to a crime or crimes. A video in which a member says extremely negative things about friends and family members that could destroy the relationships the NXIVM member has with those people if released.

Notably, the contents of these videos are often false and they are intended to be harmful, life ruining, for the NXIVM member who creates them if released. They are not intended to be TRUE. 

Many people don't have a laundry list of secret resentments and crimes that could utterly ruin their lives, so they have to make up things in creating collateral so it has the genuine threat of ruining their life if released. So, I would NEVER believe any statements in collateral unless entirely separate evidence was sufficient on its own to prove them! 

That's collateral as I understand it.

Now for comparison in Scientology we have a lot of other things that end up serving the same purpose.

If you get auditing in Scientology you are encouraged to disclose every single thing you have ever had any negative feelings about including both your actions and thoughts.

Scientology in many organizations has auditing sessions videotaped and the organization hangs onto the video permanently. 

Scientology tells members that auditing is confidential under a priest penitent privilege but routinely violates this agreement with the members.

You are also encouraged to disclose evil acts and hidden acts and thoughts through a method called "OW write ups".

OW stands for "overts and witholds" in Scientology.

Many Scientologists spend many, many hours writing up OWs and fill folders with them. I am sure I have written up hundreds.

The most personal and embarrassing things that one may see as qualifying as overts or witholds end up getting written up and the documents are saved (usually permanently) in the organization. 

Additionally, a variety of auditing includes the disclosure of OWs and may involve a few or be hundreds of hours of this.

It's noteworthy that in Scientology and Dianetics auditing so much hypnosis is used and such extreme pressure to find OWs to disclose is routinely and repeatedly brought onto a member that they can disclose many instances of events that never actually occurred to satisfy a requirement!


Ronald Hubbard, Scientology founder

This is true in both auditing and the OW write up procedure as well. Scientologists often are convinced that they committed many hidden evil acts in both this life and past lives which they confess to over and over.

In fact I wrote the post "Crimes That Never Were" to describe this exact phenomena.

So, in both the case of the statements made for collateral in NXIVM and the crimes and secrets disclosed in Scientology I find the similarity that these "confessions" are of no evidentiary value whatsoever!


Probably the most overt (meaning open and clear, not the Scientology definition of overt) effort ever at Brainwashing in any cult is called the Truth Rundown.


Almost exclusively for Sea Org members (and Leah Remini for criticism of David Miscavige) the Truth Rundown is gaslighting to the unimaginable extreme.




A Sea Org member who has fallen out of favor with current Scientology leader David Miscavige is sent to the Rehabilitation Project Force, a re-education gulag within the Sea Org.

There a member must do hard physical labor, eat scraps, run everywhere, be considered a degraded being and usually a suppressive person as well and be required to undergo "therapy" sessions in which they are asked for critical acts, remarks, or thoughts they had regarding David Miscavige or other high ranking members of Scientology.

The heart of the procedure is convincing the person, that they have done something evil regarding, for example, David Miscavige, if they saw David Miscavige beating a staff member or being cruel or unfair or having any flaws of any kind and that they themselves had done something evil which made them SEE something that NEVER HAPPENED!

in other words the procedure relies on the assumption that David Miscavige is absolutely perfect and infallible in every word and deed! 

It relies on the assumption that every single person who observes David Miscavige lying, beating people, committing crimes, and so on ALL have a mental deficiency, a character deficiency, that makes them do evil acts, then hide them, then distorts their perception so they see evil in others where it's not there and hide evil in themselves that is allegedly there!

This is similar in my opinion to how Keith Raniere and Nancy Salzman and to varying degrees other people in NXIVM used the "tech" of NXIVM to always act like the senior person, especially Nancy or most of all Keith, is correct when there is disagreement or criticism or doubt and the person lower in the organization hierarchy is ALWAYS in the wrong! 

Notably Keith Raniere acted like everyone had to please him all the time or it's an ethical "breech" but what did Keith do about his own ethical breeches? What did Keith do about his constant lying about his credentials, education, and achievements? What did Keith do about the fact that gossip was discouraged but he made negative remarks about everything and everyone under the sun? What did he do about pretending that people should give up attachments but he wasn't the celibate "renunciate" he claimed to be but in fact had several female sex partners and lied to many of them about the others for years? He lied to the group and often the families of the women and girls he was having sex with and betrayed their trust.


Keith Raniere, NXIVM leader

Notably Scientology founder Ronald Hubbard also reportedly had numerous affairs and in fact was legally married to two women at the same time! He abandoned and betrayed each of his three wives. 

He even had one wife, Mary Sue, go to prison for him. 





Scientology and NXIVM - Parallels and Plagiarism

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