going-clear-scientology-hollywood-and-the-prison-of-belief-by-lawrence-wright-2

christened as Scientology’s Advanced Org building. There were no lights, so the heavily
armed agents made their way down the stairs with ashlights. They found a warren of
small cubicles, each occupied by half a dozen people dressed in black boiler suits and
wearing lthy rags around their arms to indicate their degraded status. Altogether,
about 120 people were huddled in the pitch-black basement, serving time in the
Rehabilitation Project Force. The ranks of the RPF had expanded along with the church’s
need for cheap labor to renovate its recently purchased buildings in Hollywood. The
federal agents had no idea what they were seeing. Within moments, a representative of
the church’s Guardian’s Oce arrived and began shouting at the agents that they were
exceeding the limits of their search warrants. Seeing that the Sea Org members posed no
threat to them, the agents shrugged and moved on.
It is instructive to realize that none of the Sea Org members consigned to the RPF
dungeon took the opportunity to escape. If the FBI had bothered to interrogate them, it’s
unlikely that any of them would have said that they were there against their will. Most
of them believed that they were there by mistake, or that they deserved their
punishment and would benet by the work and study they were prescribed. Even those
who had been physically forced into the RPF were not inclined to leave. Despite federal
laws against human tracking and unlawful imprisonment, the FBI never opened the
door on the RPF again.
Jesse Prince, one of the very few black members of the Sea Org, was among those
being punished. He had been attracted to Scientology by the beautiful girls and the
promise of superhuman powers. He recalls being told he would learn to levitate, travel
through time, control the thoughts of others, and have total command over the material
universe. In 1976, when he signed up for the Sea Org, Scientology had just purchased
the Cedars of Lebanon Hospital, part of the real-estate empire that the church was
acquiring in Hollywood, along with the Château Élysée and the old Wilcox Hotel, which
functioned as Sea Org berthing. The hospital was a mess; there were leftover medical
devices and body parts in laboratory jars; there was even a corpse in the basement
morgue. The Sea Org crew slaved to convert the hospital into a dormitory and oces.
One night Prince was awakened after an hour of sleep and ordered to report to a
superior, who chewed him out for slacking o. Prince had had enough. “Fuck you, I’m
outta here,” he said. His superior told him he wasn’t going anywhere. “He snapped his
ngers and six people came and put me in a room,” Prince recalled. “I was literally
incarcerated.” It was March 1977. Prince was placed in the RPF with two hundred other
Sea Org members, doing heavy labor and studying Hubbard’s spiritual technology. He
would be held there for eighteen months. “They told me the only way to get out is to
learn this tech to a ‘T’ and then be able to apply it.”
The question posed by Prince’s experience in the RPF is whether or not he was
brainwashed. It is a charge often leveled at Scientologists, although social scientists have
long been at war with each other over whether such a phenomenon is even possible. The
decade of the 1950s, when Scientology was born, was a time of extreme concern—even
hysteria—about mind control. Robert Jay Lifton, a young American psychiatrist, began
studying victims of what Chinese Communists called “thought reform,” which they were