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 benefit 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 trafficking 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 Chateau 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 offices. One night Prince was awakened after an hour of sleep and ordered to report to a superior, who chewed him out for slacking off. Prince had had enough. “Fuck you, I’m outta here,” he said. His superior told him he wasn’t going anywhere. “He snapped his fingers 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 carrying out in prisons and revolutionary universities during the Maoist era; it was one of the greatest efforts to manipulate human behavior ever attempted. In 1949, a number of Americans and Europeans who had been imprisoned during the Maoist revolution emerged from their cells apparently converted to Communism. Then, during the Korean War, several United Nations soldiers captured by Chinese troops defected to the enemy. Some American soldiers among them went on camera to denounce capitalism and imperialism with apparent sincerity. It was a stunning ideological betrayal. To explain this phenomenon, an American journalist and CIA operative, Edward Hunter, coined the term “brainwashing.” Hunter described robotic agents with glassy eyes, like zombies or the products of demon possession. A popular novel, The Manchurian Candidate, published in 1959, and a film of the same name that came out three years later, capitalized on this conception of brainwashing as being the total surrender of free will through coercive forms of persuasion.
Lifton’s early work on thought reform has become the basis for much of the scholarship on the subject since then. Lifton defined thought reform as having two basic elements: confession, which is the renunciation of past “evil,” and re-education, which in China meant refashioning an individual in the Communist image. “Behind ideological totalism lies the ever-present human quest for the omnipotent guide—for the supernatural force, political party, philosophical ideas, great leader, or precise science—that will bring ultimate solidarity to all men and eliminate the terror of death and nothingness,” Lifton observes. In facing the commonplace charge that psychiatry, or the Marines, or Catholic schools all engage in forms of brainwashing, Lifton developed a set of criteria to identify a totalistic environment, and contrasted these with more-open approaches to reshaping human behavior.