I was in Scientology for twenty five years and realized that I was in a cult when I realized that the leadership had lied to me about the results of applying our techniques for decades because they claimed in a story distributed by the leadership to cult members that the cult had been infiltrated by incompetent bumbling criminals at the highest levels for decades and simultaneously that the cult was a route to superhuman levels of awareness and intelligence and these include abilities like remote viewing, telepathy, telekinesis and precognition!
The Posse of Lunatics story was presented by Scientology management in the Freedom magazine (cult propaganda) and portrayed the people who Scientology blamed for bad press as being totally incompetent and bumbling idiots, but acknowledging that they had been stumbling through their careers as idiots, obviously, for decades! How could a group of demigods allow imbeciles who cannot do anything right to ever rise up to their top ranks? Let alone allow them to be messing things up for may years before removing them?
This contradiction made me realize that the claims of demigods being created by Scientology had to be false. If Scientology had actually produced hundreds of such beings in the nineteen fifties to seventies as it claims and they founded the Sea Org with a core of several hundred superhuman beings who had superhuman awareness and intelligence, tremendous abilities including telepathy, remote viewing, telekinesis and precognition then the group would have to be impossible for normal humans to infiltrate or exploit. And nothing could have diminished the power of these beings if they had the miraculous technology for operating groups and understanding life that Scientology claims. After all, we are talking about a collection of superhuman beings who have a method of being far behind human level competence in organizing and running groups! At least, that's what Scientology founder Ronald Hubbard alleged!
The process of realizing that you personally are in a cult often involves a long series of experiences that gradually cause a tremendous amount of cognitive dissonance to develop. This was best described by Leon Festinger in his book A Theory Of Cognitive Dissonance.
I recommend that you read this book to understand why and how we reach the point at which we are open minded about a subject and then close minded in supporting it then eventually may become open to criticism and even changing our minds on it, even if we were quite certain in our belief in a subject before this point.
Here is a series of excerpts from a blog post on the book and a link to the post:
Festinger went on to say:
The presence or absence of dissonance in some particular content area will have important effects on the degree of information seeking and on the selectivity of such information seeking. (Page 126)
Relative absence of dissonance. If little or no dissonance exists, there would be no motivation ( considering this source of motivation alone ) to seek out new and additional information. (Page 127)
The presence of moderate amounts of dissonance. The existence of appreciable dissonance and the consequent pressure to reduce it will lead to the seeking out of information which will introduce consonances and to the avoidance of information which will increase the already existing dissonance. (Page 128)
The presence of extremely large amounts of dissonance. Under such circumstances a person may actively seek out, and expose himself to, dissonance-increasing information. If he can increase the dissonance to the point where it is greater than the resistance to change of one or another cluster of cognitions, he will then change the cognitive elements involved, thus markedly reducing or perhaps even wholly eliminating the dissonance which now is so great. (Page 129) Quotes A Theory Of Cognitive Dissonance
I want mention that the articles by top Scientology expert Jon Atack at The Underground Bunker (Tony Ortega's blog on Scientology) in the Scientology Mythbusting series opened my mind up to the possibility that I was fooled. The articles crucially fed me bits and pieces of information on influence so I could see that the essential techniques of repetition, confusion (aka contradiction or paradox), mimicry, vivid imagery and so on are the core of Scientology. I realized that I had spent hundreds of hours having these methods used on me.
The brilliance of Jon Atack in his numerous online articles is that the majority just touch on terms and ideas to get the person who is at the peak of cognitive dissonance to go over the edge and connect the dots to see what an abundance of evidence exists in their own experience that Scientology is not what it is presented as, the hundreds of contradictions in the doctrine and the extreme contrast between the public relations claims of Scientology, especially for outsiders and new members, and the reality of the conditions and actions in Scientology. He has a great group of longer articles on the sources of Scientology materials which Hubbard plagiarized and the hypnotic techniques in Scientology and the occult elements in Scientology. These articles have the extensive evidence regarding these subjects carefully collected by Jon Atack over decades and laid out in the open to expose the plain truth that is usually hidden in Scientology.
If you want to know if you are in a cult I have two lines of thought. First is the quick and dirty answer, then the long and hard one.
The quick answer is look at your own relationship to the group and see if it fits certain criteria and if you have this as well as how the group treats members. You can be a cultic relationship with a group and it is also possible for you to be involved with a group which other people have cultic relationships with while you yourself do not.
The quick thing to look at could be a list including the eight criteria for thought reform by Robert Jay Lifton and the BITE model by Steven Hassan, the six conditions for thought reform by Margaret Singer, and the list of cult characteristics from Cults Inside Out by Rick Alan Ross. These lists give a good view of what cults do and what normal groups do not do.
Here are a list of blog posts that describe each of these lists of criteria.
Dr. Robert J. Lifton's Criteria For Thought Reform...- List Of Cult Characteristics From Cults Inside Out...
- Scientology And Margaret Singer's Six Conditions F...
- Scientology Viewed Through The BITE model by Steve...
The longer method involves a serious examination of the group and your own relationship with it. Top cult expert Jon Atack has remarked on how if you have a political party or leader you follow you can do an exercise.
Take a piece of paper, make a line down the middle from the top to the bottom. On one side put all the pros for the person or party and on the other side all the cons. Be sure to examine their history, statements, and policies in detail including votes for bills and so on.
Put every time you have disagreed or disapproved of the decisions or even statements of the person on the cons side.
If you have no cons you are in a cult. Now, I can include a list of caveats to be sure, you have to actually know a lot about the actions and decisions and not just, for example, use Fox news and other right wing media as the other sources of your information or if you just use MSNBC or CNN and similar sources like The New York Times and Washington Post and you support the democrats, especially the corporate democrats, then you may have no access to neutral or critical information regarding your party.
You should be at least concerned if the media you follow never criticize the party and candidates you support. No one is perfect and no one makes perfect decisions all of the time.
If you are in any long term relationship as an adult with an adult and know them extremely well and have known them for years it is extremely unlikely that you can see no flaws whatsoever in them if it is not a cultic relationship.
To understand cultic relationships I have a list of references that have helped me.
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