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?”