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

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 justies 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 dened as
“[t]he art and science of asserting and maintaining dominion over the thoughts and
loyalties of individuals, bureaus, and masses, and the eecting of the conquest of enemy
nations through ‘mental healing.’ ”
The text species how to realign the goals of the individual with those of the group.
The rst 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 aection 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
elds 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