A lot of people have noted that Miscavige’s events and speeches are taking on more of an hypnotic sounding tone, and yet his sheep don’t seem to notice. There are also many comments here wondering aloud how on earth kool aid drinkers can keep compulsively drinking kool aid in the face of the abuses escalating within the church. I believe the following may shed a bit of light on those concerns.
David Miscavige developed a technique that he called “rolling thunder” for his event presentations. Mike Rinder and others who worked on events over time can describe this far more competently than me since I was not so intimately involved in the event evolutions as they were. But I know this much, Rolling thunder consisted of a series of “facts” and “stats” of the church – all exaggerated, and some made up out of whole cloth – being forcefully communicated to the audience and accented with overwhelming and building music, lights and graphics being flashed in the recipients’ faces – until the climax of an “applause line” is reached. “Rolling thunder” is considered achieved if, and only if, the entire crowd is swept to their feet in adoring, accepting, and rapturous AGREEMENT with the “applause line” of the speaker. Miscavige was obsessed with ensuring his speeches in particular had several “rolling thunder” moments. Over the years, he weeded out the involvement of other speakers in the events until over the past few years there has only been one, David Miscavige. When you add to the equation that virtually all church of Scientology staff have been forced, coerced and conditioned into immediately and savagely punishing the slightest indication of “doubt” about the infallibility of David Miscavige that manifests itself with any church staff or public, you’ve got a perfect recipe for disaster. That is, mind controlling hypnotism on a mass scale.
While reading a section of the Phoenix lecture – Axioms, Part III, on the subject of how Scientology can be reversed to effectuate hypnotism – all of the above came back to me. I believe the following passage sheds light on what Scientology public have been subjected to, increasingly, for the past twenty years in very regular, predictable intervals.
The whole of existence, actually, is run very much like an hypnotic trance. How do you hyptnotize somebody? Well, you get them to agree with you. And then you get them to agree with you a little bit more. Oh, most people think that it’s done by watches or something or other. It’s not done that way. It’s done in a very interesting way.
I don’t know much aboutWestern hypnotism. I myself studied hypnotism in the East and when I came over to America again, I wondered what on earth this strange practice was that these people were practicing and calling hypnotism. Because it wasn’t even vaguely what is taught in the East to induce trances. It’s quite remarkable that hypnotism is inducible on small or large groups.
Now, the worse off a group is, which is to say, the less communication they have, actually, the more communication can be forced upon them. And you can get a form of hypnotism there. But the interesting thing is that they must have been prepared by an enormous number of agreements before they got into that state. In other words, somebody else prepared them, so they didn’t care who they agreed with after a while.
Anybody in a uniform walks up to a soldier, if that uniform has a higher rank on, the soldier will obey them. Well, this is a form of hypnotism.
Now, you can take an audience and simply get them to agree with you. And you get them to agree more and more and more and more and more and the next thing you know — and, by the way, when I say ‘agree with you’, I mean you could get them to agree first that you were simply standing there.
And then, the next thing that you could get them to agree to is the fact that they were listening to you. And then you would give them a few little things on which they would agree with. And the next thing you know, you could tell them that the world was on fire and the audience would rush out to find out. Or maybe they just sit there and burn. It’s quite interesting. But you could move it out that way.
Now, what is this all about? Does that mean that anybody bringing about an agreement would bring about hypnotism? Oh no. The reason why in Scientology we do not bring about a hypnotism, even by Opening Procedure by Duplication – every Case V, that’s had this run on him claims, it’s a way to induce a trance – but every single one of the tenets of Scientology could be reversed and with a bad intention, and so forth, could be worked out in the opposite direction.
We are undoing the agreements which people have been making for 76 trillion years. Only we’re undoing them, so this makes them freer and freer and freer.
Now, show you this fellow on the stage who simply gets the audience to agree and agree and agree and agree and then tells them the place is on fire. Oh? He isn’t really going in the direction of making them freer, is he? His intention for this is entirely different.
It isn’t that intention is above agreement. It’s that consideration is always above agreement. And he is trying to work them into a situation where they will accept what he says without question. We’re not interested in Scientology, in anybody accepting what we say without question. We ask them to question it. We ask them to please look at the physical universe around you, please look at people, at your own mind and understand, thereby,that what we are talking about happens to be actual. This is the series of agreements. These are. They aren’t just fancy ideas.
Let us also consider the following facts. First, over the past thirty years the church’s Bridge has altered to consist on average of more than fifty percent security checks. And those security checks are done within an imposed mores that considers the highest crime one can commit is to question the infallibility of David Miscavige. Second, over those same thirty years church staff have been pressured and coerced into immediately, and ruthelessly, punishing anyone who might manifest the slightest doubt about the veracity of the utterances of Miscavige. Third, RTC has been programmed to immediately target and destroy the life of anyone who dares report on false reports delivered in events by Miscavige. Those are people who actually observed arrogantly announced Miscavige “facts” to not in fact exist in the physical universe. Fourth, church policy has evolved that has any member seriously punished for exposing himself or herself to any source of information (by personal contact, by way of media, or the internet) that does not agree with Miscavige’s official state of Scientology utterances.
Is there really any question why once intelligent and caring people are now acting like so many cattle dutifully lining up for slaughter?