| Topic Name: |
Thought Control ? |
| Message Name: |
OMG! |
| Date Posted: |
01/30/2006 |
| In Reply To: |
Please find below excerpts from a webpage entitled "Thought Control and Scientology". Enjoy.
Some of the influence techniques that attract and hold people in a thought reform environment are:
?? A leader??s allegedly immense intellectual, spiritual, or even physical powers may rationalize whims and doctrines, [allowing him] to hold sway over followers. While leaders are intelligent and articulate, often their biographies and abilities are puffed up.
?? Attributing "all individual suffering to misapplication, misunderstanding or even casual doubting of the group??s unfailing teaching."
?? Inducing "sensory deprivation and sensory overload, guided imagery and visualization, trance induction through repetition of words or slogans..."
?? Controlling the environment, i.e., the group member "is deprived of the combination of external information and inner reflection which anyone requires to test the realities of his environment and to maintain a measure of identity separate from it."
?? Creating a mystique of importance around the group and its leader, so that the group and its goals are seen as more important than anything else.
?? Requiring a level of perfection that is unattainable, with consequent guilt and shame serving as powerful control devices.
?? Creating a unique language, often non-understandable to outsiders, the effect of which "can be summed up in one word: constriction.... [The group member] is, so to speak, linguistically deprived; and since language is so central to all human experience, his capacities for thinking and feeling are immensely narrowed."
?? Giving the member a new identity by bringing his or her thinking into alignment with the group??s, prompting a redefinition of the self and a reinterpretation of the past in terms of the new present. The individual "switches worlds...and through socialization, discovers the ??plausibility structures?? that make the new world coherent, fully tangible and fully believable...The formula for reinterpretation of the past is, ??Then I thought...now I know.?? |
| Message: |
It's worse than I thought. I totally didn't understand most of what you posted, but I think you're trying to tell me that Dale is controlling my mind (and that's why I'm staying).
DALE! GET OUT OF MY HEAD! AHHHHHHHHHH!
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