Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief (25 page)

Because the moral climate is entirely controlled by the group, the “sins” that one is made to confess function as pledges of loyalty to the ideals of the movement. The repetitive nature of these confessions inevitably turns them into performances. When the treasury of real sins is emptied, new ones may be coined to satisfy the incessant demands of the inquisitors. In Scientology, one can conveniently reach into previous existences to produce an endless supply of misdeeds. Lifton points out that in totalist hands, confession is used to exploit vulnerabilities, rather than to provide the solace or forgiveness that therapy and religion seek to provide. The paradoxical result can be the opposite of
total exposure: secrets proliferate, and doubts about the movement go underground.

The dogma of the group is promoted as scientifically incontestable—in fact, truer than anything any human being has ever experienced. Resistance is not just immoral; it is illogical and unscientific. In order to support this notion, language is constricted by what Lifton calls the “thought-terminating cliché
.” “The most far-reaching and complex of human problems are compressed into brief, highly reductive, definitive-sounding phrases, easily memorized and easily expressed,” he writes. “These become the start and finish of any ideological analysis.” For instance, the
Chinese Communists dismissed the quest for individual expression and the exploration of alternative ideas as examples of “bourgeois mentality.” In Scientology, terms such as “
Suppressive Person” and “
Potential Trouble Source” play a similar role of declaring allegiance to the group and pushing discussion off the table. The Chinese Communists divided the world into the “people” (the peasantry, the petite bourgeoisie) and the “reactionaries” or “lackeys of imperialism” (landlords and capitalists), who were essentially non-people. In a similar manner, Hubbard distinguished between Scientologists and “
wogs.” The word is a derogatory artifact of British imperialism, when it was used to describe dark-skinned peoples, especially South Asians. Hubbard appropriated the slur, which he said stood for “worthy Oriental gentleman.” To him, a wog represented “a common, ordinary,
run-of-the-mill, garden-variety humanoid”—an individual who is not present as a spirit. Those who are within the group are made to strive for a condition of perfection that is unattainable—the ideal Communist state, for instance, or the clearing of the planet by Scientology.

When a
preclear voices a criticism of Scientology or expresses a desire to leave the church, the
auditor’s response is to discover the “crimes” that the client has committed against the group. In Scientology jargon, those crimes are called “
overts and
withholds.” An overt is an action taken against the moral code of the group, and a withhold is an overt action that the person is refusing to acknowledge. Hubbard explained that the only reason a person would want to leave Scientology is because he has committed a crime against the group. Paradoxically, this is because humanity is basically good; he wants to separate himself from the others in order to protect the group from his own bad behavior.

In order to save the preclear from his self-destructive thoughts, the
E-Meter is used in a
security check (sec-check) to probe for other thoughts or actions. For extreme cases, Hubbard developed what he called the
Johannesburg Confessional List
. The questions include:

There are further questions asking if the respondent has ever sold drugs, committed adultery, practiced homosexuality, had sex with a family member or a person of another race. It winds up by inquiring:

The result of the sec-check
procedure is that the person expressing doubts about the church is steered into thinking about his own faults that led him to question Scientology in the first place. In the Chinese Communist example, Lifton points out, the combination of enforced logic and clichéd discourse creates a kind of melodrama, in which formulaic thoughts and handicapped language substitute for real emotions and complex understandings of human nature. Once inside the powerful logic of the group, one drifts further and further from the shore of common understanding.

According to Lifton, factors such as these award the group life-and-death authority over individual members. And yet, despite the Communists’ absolute control of the environment, of the forty victims that Lifton studied, only three were “apparent converts
” to the ideology. That figure has been used to discredit the notion of brainwashing, although Lifton himself later said that he was impressed by the extent to which minds could be altered and “truth blurred
to the point of near extinction.”

The
CIA, alarmed by the reputed success of Chinese indoctrination, started its own research into mind control, through a program called
MKUltra. In the mid-1950s, the agency began funding Dr.
Ewen Cameron, a Scottish-born American citizen who was then directing the Allan Memorial Institute at McGill University in Montreal.
Cameron was one of the most eminent
psychiatrists of his time: earlier in his career, he had been a part of the Nuremberg tribunal that examined the atrocious human experiments of
Nazi doctors; later he became president of the
American Psychiatric Association, the
Canadian Psychiatric Association, and—when the CIA stumbled onto his work—president of the
World Psychiatric Association. Cameron hoped to cure mental illness by eliminating painful memories and reordering the personality through positive suggestion. The agency’s goal was somewhat different, of course; the stated reason was to uncover effective methods of mind control and then train American soldiers in ways of resisting such efforts. The CIA eventually destroyed the files of the MKUltra program, saying that it had acquired no useful information, but the real intention
of the agency may have been to learn scientific ways of extracting information from unwilling subjects. (After 9/11, documents emerging
from the
Guantánamo Bay Naval Base showed that the methods used by US interrogators to question al-Qaeda suspects were based on Chinese Communist techniques.)

The methods that Cameron used to erase his patients’ memories certainly meet the definition of torture.
Electroshock therapy was administered to break the “patterns” of personality; up to 360 shocks were administered in a single month in order to make the subject hyper-suggestible. On top of that, powerful drugs—uppers, downers, and hallucinogens—were fed to the incapacitated patients to increase their disorientation. According to author
Naomi Klein, who wrote about these experiments in
The Shock Doctrine
, when Cameron finally believed he had achieved the desired blank slate, he placed the patients in isolation and played tape-recorded messages of positive reinforcement, such as “You are a good mother
and wife and people enjoy your company.” Some patients were put into an insulin coma to keep them from resisting; in that state they were forced to listen to such mantras up to twenty hours a day. In one case, Cameron played a message continuously for more than a hundred days.

Cameron was a perfect archetype for the evil that science has done in the name of mental health, and in the minds of many Scientologists, his work justifies the campaign the church has waged against psychiatry. It is intriguing to compare these actual experiments with Hubbard’s mythic vision of
Xenu and the
R6 implants, in which the disembodied
thetans were forced to sit in front of movie screens for thirty-six days of programming at the hands of psychiatrists.

Although it is unlikely that Hubbard would have known about MKUltra when it was going on, he had become fascinated by the
mind-control scare. In 1955, he distributed
a pamphlet, which he probably wrote, called “
Brain-Washing
: A Synthesis of the Russian Textbook on Psychopolitics.” For some former Scientologists, “Brain-Washing” provides a codex for Hubbard’s grand scheme. There is an eerie mirroring of the techniques described in the pamphlet and some Scientology practices, especially those put into effect in the
RPF.

The pamphlet opens with what is claimed to be a purloined speech given by
Lavrenti Beria, the head of the Soviet secret police under Joseph Stalin, to American students studying at
Lenin University, on the subject of “
psycho-politics.” The term is defined as “[t]he art and science
of asserting and maintaining dominion over the thoughts and loyalties of individuals, bureaus, and masses, and the effecting of the conquest of enemy nations through ‘mental healing.’ ”

The text specifies how
to realign the goals of the individual with those of the group. The first task is to undermine the ability of the person to act and to trust himself. Next, his loyalty to his family is destroyed by breaking the economic dependency of the family unit, lessening the value of marriage, and turning over the raising of children to the State or the group. The individual’s trust and affection for his friends is shattered by anonymous reports to the authorities, supposedly from people close to him. Ultimately, all other emotional claims on the person have been broken; only the State or the group remains. “A psychopolitician must work
hard to produce the maximum chaos in the fields of ‘mental healing,’ ” Beria says in his introductory speech. “You must labour until we have dominion over the minds and bodies of every important person in your nation.”

FROM THE PERSPECTIVE
of
those social scientists who believe that brainwashing is a myth or a fraud that has been used to denigrate new religious movements, including Scientology,
Jesse Prince must already have been a convert, or close to one, before he went into the RPF. Although he says he was attracted to the church largely because of the girls, he was aware of the rigors of the
Sea Org before he joined it. Perhaps, like the three victims of Chinese Communist thought reform that
Lifton termed “apparent converts,” Prince was predisposed to be a part of a totalitarian movement because of his own psychological
need to conform, or to be a part of a polarized system that separates all humanity into the saved and the damned. Such persons, the theory goes, are reared in either chaotic or extremely authoritarian homes. They have conflicted images of themselves as being at once extremely good and extremely bad. This is particularly true in adolescence, when identities are still volatile. Prince didn’t need to be brainwashed, the theory goes; he was actively looking for a totalistic organization that accommodated his polarized personality.

Some incidents in Prince’s background support this hypothesis. Although his upbringing was “tumultuous
”—his mother died when he was ten—Prince maintained close and loving relationships with his father and his three younger siblings. After his mother died, however, he began experiencing bouts of total body paralysis accompanied by a sense of falling—“like jumping off the Grand Canyon.” The feeling was of helpless, abject terror. Then, suddenly, he would be outside his body, as if a parachute had opened, and he could observe himself sleeping in his bed. The intensity of these experiences made them absolutely real to him, but he decided not to talk about them because “if you bring that up, you go to the crazy house.” Prince now sees those episodes of body paralysis as severe anxiety attacks, but they prepared him to accept the truthfulness of the paranormal powers that Scientology claimed to provide.

Brainwashing theory
, on the other hand, proposes that strenuous influence techniques can overwhelm and actually convert an individual to a wholly different perspective, regardless of his background or pre-existing character traits, almost like an addiction to a powerful drug can create an overpowering dependency that can transform an otherwise stable personality. Stripping away a person’s prior convictions leaves him hungry for new ones. Through endless rounds of confession and the constant, disarmingly unpredictable fluctuations between leniency and assault, love and castigation, the individual is broken loose from his previous identity and made into a valued and trusted member of the group. To keep alienated members in the fold, “exit costs”—such as financial penalties, physical threats, and the loss of community—make the prospect of leaving more painful than staying.

Whether Prince was brainwashed, as he believes, or spiritually enlightened, as the church would have it, his thinking did change over
the year and a half he spent in the
RPF. In order to move out of the RPF, a member has to have a “cognition” that he is a
Suppressive Person; only then can he begin to deal with the “crimes” that he committed that caused him to be confined in the RPF in the first place. During his many hours of
auditing, Prince later related, “You just kinda get sprinkles
of little things that seem interesting, sprinkles of something that’s insightful. And then you’re constantly audited and in a highly suggestible state … like being pulled along very slightly to the point where now I might as well just be here and see what this is about now. Maybe it’s not so bad, you know?”

ONE OF JESSE PRINCE
’
S COMPANIONS
in RPF was Spanky Taylor, an old friend of
Paul Haggis’s from his early days in Scientology. She had become close to Paul and Diane soon after they arrived in Los Angeles. She called him “Paulie,” and had helped him market some of his early scripts when he was still trying to break out of cartoons. From the beginning, she had seen his talent; her own talent was helping others realize theirs.

“Spanky” was a schoolyard nickname for
Sylvia, but it had such a teasing twist that she could never escape it. She was the child of Mexican American laborers in San Jose. When she was fourteen, she became a fan of a local cover band called People!, which included several Scientologists. She began helping the group with concert promotion, and soon she was working with some of the other great bands coming out of the Bay Area, such as
Creedence Clearwater Revival and Big Brother and the Holding Company. Scientology was just another expression of the political and cultural upheaval of the times. Even members of the
Grateful Dead
were drawn into Scientology, which promised mystical experiences without hallucinogens.
Albert Ribisi, the keyboard player for People!, introduced Spanky to the church. She joined the staff at the Santa Clara mission when she was fifteen.