If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck …

Recently another “disgruntled ex-student” recommended an episode of the radio program This American Life . It explored regrets; the segment, This is Just as Hard for Me as it is for You, tells the story of a man born & raised in the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints during the Warren Jeffs reign (convicted child molester & polygamist).

It kicks off with church leaders acting paranoid, seeing threats everywhere and asking the congregation’s men to help intimidate some former members. The church instructed these men to vandalize farm equipment, etc., owned by the apostates. The church told these men, “You can’t tell your wives.” (By the way, The Witness Wore Red, by Rebecca Musser — formerly a child-wife married to “the profit” who escaped the group with her children — corroborates this account).

The secrecy rattled this man — but he didn’t question: “That wasn’t something we did,” he explained. The party line was that he “didn’t owe his wife an explanation”, “if she wants answers, she should pray harder” and “a man doesn’t need to tell his wife everything.” At times, he said, she would hide in the bathroom and “weep it out and I would turn my back on her and force myself to not feel… I drove her to a place where she was very depressed.” Eventually she left him and their five children.

Other bizarre edicts followed including the decree that kids weren’t allowed to have toys and play. He could not abide this; so he turned to the church for help. Like his wife, the church told him: you just need to pray more, get over it. Like his wife, he became dangerously depressed. His kids were his lifeline; determined to give them a real childhood, he drove away one day, kids in the car, never to return.

The escape yielded mixed results; eventually, he lost his entire family. But he fulfilled his intention — to free his kids, who now live with adopted families and are able to play and learn like kids should.

Perhaps some of the cultic hallmarks and tactics sound familiar? Paranoia; secrecy; dismissal of “only life things”; pat and canned responses to legitimate concerns and questions, i.e. one-dimensional “help”; the dismissal of his wife as a person, their relationship as incidental, his struggle as insignificant; the required surrendering of everything to the higher cause; the victim blame, etc. etc. etc. Some readers may have had the visceral experience of losing everything.

At this point, I’ve talked to many ex-members of various high-demand groups; these groups all use the same tactics, exactly like “school”. Each one has its specific nomenclature, but the gears grinding the wheels are exactly the same.

Admittedly depressing, it is also empowering to awaken to the widespread disease called cults.  Educating myself freed me of the magical thinking that assigned mystical power to the group. “School” is just one more sleazy cult, misusing philosophical ideas for selfish gain.

 It is no different than Scientology, except smaller, more hidden, less successful and perhaps not quite as extreme. But …then again… who knows. You can read this book and determine for yourself.

4 thoughts on “If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck …

  1. Cassandra says:

    A recently published work titled “Without you there is no us” by Suki Kim was brought to my attention by an interview with the author on The Daily Show. An author and journalist, Kim has traveled to North Korea frequently and spent almost a half a year undercover teaching English to young men from elite families of the regime. This excellent read felt in some ways as if it answered my question, “what would you think/see/feel is you went into school today, knowing what you do, or at least being ‘re-normaled’ in life, with a REAL healthy skepticism and a sense of confidence and identity?”. Kim is that viewpoint – the grounded outsider witnessing a group of people completely and desparately making intellectual, logical, and moral compromises to uphold the unsustainable fantasy version of the world created by their Leader.

    And of course it is easy to recognize some of the exact same techniques used by school being perpetrated by the North Korean regime – sleep deprivation, nutritional deprivation, regular indoctrination sessions where code language must be memorized and spat back without question, sessions where people confess their own short comings and must accuse another, on and on and on.

    I am now on to “The Aquariums of Pyongyang”, the memoir of a man who lived in a privileged household until the age of nine and was then sent to a concentration camp with his entire family, supposedly for his Grandfather’s ‘crime’, for ‘reindoctrination’. There he describes cruelty, immense privation, more of the smae indoctrination, punishments such as “make work” – physical work done as quickly as possible for no reason other than to force one to obey (hint hint), emotional and physical brutality from school teachers and guards, a system of ‘snitching’ that was self-regulating, ‘quotas’ for work groups that kept each group exerting cruel and relentless internal pressue on each other from fear of punishment from a ‘higher up’, and so on…. apparently they are released after ten years – I haven’t gotten that far yet.

    In this world, he explains, there are those who may be released one day and those who will never ever get out. I hope that is where the analogy to school diverges. I hope that one day they will ALL ‘get out’.

    To want the total destruction of school is a serious moral question. There are undoubetedly people there who believe it is good for them, who are innocent of cruelty or lying, who would be genuinely distressed if school were destroyed. Is it my and others moral obligation to make our judgement for them, to believe they are in a state where they have been so mentally twisted and lied to they are incapable of making such a decision at this time and in the midst of their involvement? Unfortunately for them, my answer must be ‘yes’. But I also would hold out to them this idea – if and I fervently hope, when, the day should come when your school is no more, I challenge you to remake an esoteric system for yourself and ‘call no one master (or mistress)’. If you have a conscience and you really follow the humanizing role of doing nothing to other life that you would not want done to yourself, then you need no outer teacher. Restart your school in openess and with kindness. Get rid of all fees and secrecy. Give people receipts for tuition and let them come and go. Have teachers be rotated among students. Let recruitments be open. Do not yell at people or punish them. If you read about Gurdjieff, Ouspensky, and the rest of your founders, you will find that this is how they all operated. There is no ‘secret school through the ages’. There have been groups that are interested in the esoteric. Their histories, their methods, and their continuation or demise will tell you where your school lies in the annals of such groups and it ain’t pretty. But there are other groups that have gone down through time without violence, criminality, secrecy(and I’m not talking about hiding a little ceremony or two), or absolutism – model your group on those and see what you can do.

  2. Hi Cassandra, Thanks for commenting. I saw that Jon Stewart segment and would like to read that book.

    A few things …

    Regarding this … “… people completely and desparately making intellectual, logical, and moral compromises to uphold the unsustainable fantasy version of the world created by their Leader.”

    You have just articulated something that I’ve been struggling to put to words since leaving “school” in 2011 … the theatrical presentation called Queen Sharon.

    I still can’t describe the creepy feeling of realizing that I’d been unknowingly and actively participating in the fantasy of a narcissist, enabling her delusions — it brings to mind a conversation I’d had with my sustainer after one of the few Sharon shows in Boston. Breathless with wonder, my sustainer asked me “How was class?” and what did I think of Sharon. At that point, I was indoctrinated enough to know not to answer honestly — that that the strange woman who swooped into our class probably needed serious psychiatric treatment because she looked like some of the crazed homeless on the streets of Harvard Square, and babbled incoherently. Instead, I responded with a question: who is this woman? My sustainer said, good question.

    Most “disgruntleds” I’ve spoken with since leaving struggle with this question:
    “Is it my and others moral obligation to make our judgement for them, to believe they are in a state where they have been so mentally twisted and lied to they are incapable of making such a decision at this time and in the midst of their involvement?”

    I don’t know if we have a moral obligation in general. I know that I feel driven to do what I can to spread the word about this group and, really, about all cults. I believe we’re talking about a true fundamental freedom — an internal freedom, a freedom to own one’s life & time. And, ironically, that means that “school” attendees need to a come to a decision independently and the longer your tenure, the more difficult it is to do anything independently … so, personally, I feel a moral obligation to shed light on the lie, the fantasy and delusion called “school”, that will hijack your life in the name of “evolution” if you believe in it enough.

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