TrueLife - Unveiling Cult Dynamics & Coercive Control: Wisdom from Chris Shelton

Episode Date: December 17, 2023

One on One Video Call W/George https://tidycal.com/georgepmonty/60-minute-meetingSupport the show:https://www.paypal.me/Truelifepodcast?locale.x=en_US🚨🚨Curious about the future of psychedelics? Imagine if Alan Watts started a secret society with Ram Dass and Hunter S. Thompson… now open the door. Use Promocode TRUELIFE for Get 25% off monthly or 30% off the annual plan For the first yearhttps://www.district216.com/https://mncriticalthinking.com/Welcome to today’s episode featuring Chris Shelton, a multifaceted individual whose journey spans authorship, consulting, podcasting, videography, and a unique perspective as a former cult member. As a consultant, Chris extends a helping hand to those transitioning out of coercively controlling environments, offering emotional support and evidence-based advice. Specializing in high control groups like Scientology, Chris guides individuals in acclimating to the larger world beyond their previous cult paradigm.For family and friends grappling with loved ones entangled in destructive cults, Chris provides invaluable insights on maintaining communication, understanding the situation, and assisting in navigating the complex terrain of mind control techniques. With a wealth of experience, he aids in facilitating escapes from such environments, recognizing the nuances of each individual’s circumstances.Beyond consultation, Chris is a prolific educator, sharing his knowledge through videos, podcasts, and written works on high control groups and predatory behaviors. Since departing Scientology in 2013, his platform serves as a comprehensive resource, offering a nuanced understanding of the challenges posed by cultic influence.Join us for a deep dive into Chris Shelton’s unique expertise, shedding light on the intricate dynamics of cults, mind control, and the path to recovery. One on One Video call W/George https://tidycal.com/georgepmonty/60-minute-meetingSupport the show:https://www.paypal.me/Truelifepodcast?locale.x=en_USCheck out our YouTube:https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLPzfOaFtA1hF8UhnuvOQnTgKcIYPI9Ni9&si=Jgg9ATGwzhzdmjkg

Darkness struck, a gut-punched theft, Sun ripped away, her health bereft. I roar at the void. This ain't just fate, a cosmic scam I spit my hate. The games rigged tight, shadows deal, blood on their hands, I'll never kneel. Yet in the rage, a crack ignites, occulted sparks cut through the nights. The scars my key, hermetic and stark. To see, to rise, I hunt in the dark, fumbling, fear. Fearist through ruins maze lights my war cry born from the blaze.

The poem is Angels with Rifles. The track, I Am Sorrow, I Am Lust by Codex Serafini. Check out the entire song at the end of the cast. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the True Life podcast. I hope everybody's having a beautiful day. I hope the sun is shining. I hope the birds are singing. and out the wind is at your back.

And I hope that you make a decision today to tiptoe up to, to take a baby step too, but to move in the direction of a better version of yourself. You're good enough, you're wonderful, you're beautiful. And just if you have the courage to start chasing that thing you love, your life will get better. And I think that the world will unfold in front of you in a way that helps conspire to make your life better

if you're willing to be honest and take the courage to do it. I got a great show for you today, the incredible Chris Shelton, someone with an incredible amount of lived experience. And I've always found that a person with lived experience is someone worth talking to. And so as we welcome to this episode today, Chris, a multifaceted individual whose journey spans authorship, consulting, podcasting, videography, and a unique perspective as a former cult member. As a consultant, Chris extends a helping hand to those transitioning out of coercively controlling environments. offering emotional support, evidence-based advice.

Specializing in high control groups like Scientology, Chris guides individuals in acclimating to the larger world beyond their previous cult paradigm. For family and friends grappling with loved ones entangled and destructive cults, Chris provides invaluable insights on maintaining communication, understanding the situation, and in assisting in navigating the complex terrain

of mind-control techniques, with a wealth of experience, He aids in facilitating escapes from such environments, recognizing the nuances of each individual circumstances. Beyond consultation, Chris is a prolific educator, sharing his knowledge to videos, podcast, and written works on high control groups and predatory behaviors. Since departing Scientology in 2013, his platform serves as a comprehensive resource, offering a nuanced understanding of the challenges posed by cultic influence.

Chris, thank you so much for being here today. I'm looking forward to our conversation. How are you? I'm a thank you. That is got to be the best intro I've ever had. Thank you so much. That was amazing. Because it was 100% accurate.

That's exactly what I do. Thank you for that. Yeah, I'm stoked. And I always feel good when people do that. I like, I want part of my method or my idea of my podcast is to show people with, show people this incredible people I'm talking to. And I think you are, man. I think that like I said in the previous, in the interview and

prior to discussing, there's something that everybody can learn from someone else's lived experience. And you have an incredible lived experience. I've got to dish it off to you. Where's a good place to start? You want to fill in the background or wherever you want to start? Yeah. Let's start at the beginning, I guess, because it's easiest for people, I guess. I grew up in a cult.

I was raised in Scientology. And it's a cult. It's a destructive cult. It's a group that is not good for people to be part of. It takes and takes and takes from you. And cults are, you know, when we talk about destructive cults, we're talking about groups that do very specific things to their members. And my parents had those things done to them.

So they were indoctrinated and, you know, brainwashed and all of that. And it sounds all very nefarious, but it's actually pretty easy to understand if you get into the details of it. And it's not, you know, men in smoke-filled rooms, you know, rubbing their moustaches or anything. It's a lot simpler to understand. But growing up in it, I just thought it was normal. You know, I thought Scientology and Elron Hubbard and the beliefs and ideas that he, you know, put forward in his books and his lectures.

I thought that was a reality. I thought that was how the world worked. And I went to public schools. I had a regular life as far as my upbringing goes. We didn't live on a commune. We weren't off in some, you know, gated community or something where only Scientologists were. But it being a destructive cult, most of my family and friends were Scientologists. And the people that we trusted and the people that we had closest relationships with were Scientologists, were our fellow believers.

That's kind of one of the things that is sort of reinforced or, you know, encouraged in these groups is that you cut ties with people who aren't part of what you're doing. And, you know, you only want to associate with the good people, the right people, the true people. And that Scientology to a T, right? Scientologists very much believe they are the center of the universe and they are the ones who have the truth and with a capital T and nobody else really understands what's going on, just us. And that creates, you know, this us versus them thing. And so I grew up thinking I was superior. I was more knowledgeable.

I was more wise than other people. And I'll tell you, when you get raised with that and then you become part of that group, which I did for 27 years after I really started formally getting involved with it as a teenager, I spent a lot of years in Scientology. So I've been, so the short version is I've been out for 10 years. I was involved with it all the way up until I was about 42, 43 years old. And in 2013, I got away. And I've been spending the last decade recovering from the experience and educating myself and trying to educate other people about how to avoid that kind of thing or how to get past it or how to recover from it or how it all works.

Because if you don't understand how it works, you'll never be able to take it apart and move on from it. and it will still affect you, and it will still cause you to think like a cult member, you know, and that kind of thing. So it's been a real journey going through all of this, both in the cult and then coming out of the cult and trying to share that knowledge with people and experience. So obviously, you still are friends,

you're still friends with everybody in the cult. Oh, yeah, obviously not. Yeah, yeah. It doesn't quite work that. that way. No, that's the thing about these groups is these are, it's our way or the highway, right? You're either with us or you're against us. And when you have any group, I don't care what it is. I don't care if it's a sports team. I don't care if it's an acting class. You know, if you have that kind of attitude, if it's all us and everybody else is wrong and we're

the only ones who are right, you got to run, not walk away from that group. That is not a healthy place to be. And I don't care what they're talking about that. I don't care if it's a group centered around chocolate chip cookies. If it's that kind of attitude, run, because it's, because it's not healthy for us. We need to be open. We need to be transparent. We need to be willing to talk and ask questions and receive answers from people and hear what they have to say that might not agree with what we have to say and at least be willing to listen. And these groups specialize in not doing that. And Scientology is one of the worst when it comes to that.

If you stray from the path like I did and you go, hey, this isn't what I want to do. This isn't right. This is abusive, in fact. This is hurting people. And you start talking publicly about that. They shun you. They disconnect you. They disfellowship you.

They kick you out. And not only are you no longer part of the group, your whole family, your friends, your business contacts, your social network. if they're still Scientologists, they cut you off. You're done. You're out of the family. You're out of the business. You lose your job.

You lose everything. People have lost kids. People have lost their parents. I mean, it's tragic what happens with this. And fortunately for me, my parents actually kind of got out before I did. So thankfully, they were there to support me when I got out and came to my, you know, sort of came to my senses. But it took a long time. and there was a lot of stuff that happened during that time period.

You know, it's interesting being born into that. And you had mentioned like, how would you know anything else? Like, if you're born into something, it just becomes normal, whatever the hell that means. But like, you know, and also as a young age, it seems like that is the foundation when we begin to grow these skills of critical thinking. And so if you're if you're not allowed to really flex those muscles of critical thinking at a younger age, how do you begin to question things at an older age?

And I'm wondering, what was that like? Were there certain things that started happening? We're like, that doesn't really make sense. You know, did you start? What were the cracks that began to happen to allow the light to come in for you? Well, it's a process, really. It's a long-term thing, especially when you're involved for as long as I was. There's a difference between, and we sort of classify people as first generation members versus second generation members.

In other words, people who were converted into the group as an adult or as a young person versus someone who was raised in it, who never had any worldview outside of the, you know, what you might call the cult paradigm, right, or the way of thinking. And so being raised in it, it's your version of normal. It's your version that, you know, you are raised with the idea, for example, for me, Scientology has a very specific set of beliefs. One of them, and one of the most foundational is that you and me and everybody are spiritual entities first. And we have our own bodies, like the body you have and the body I have right now. It's just like a set of clothes we're wearing.

It's a temporary thing. You go from life to life to life. and you grow a body and you experience a lifetime and the body dies. And then as a spirit, you're still alive. You never died. You move on and you get another body as a baby in a hospital. You go, you know, assume a body and you grow it and you have a whole life. And you think you're that body.

Yeah. Because you're kind of conditioned as a spirit to think that way. There's a lot more to that. But, you know, in Scientology, that's kind of the version of reality. is that reality is that you're not your body. Your body has nothing to do with who you really are. And since I grew up with that idea, that brought a whole set of beliefs and conclusions and attitudes with it.

For example, in Scientology, one of the attitudes towards children, often from Scientology adults is that their children are really just adults in little bodies. And they treat them as though they are adults in little bodies. They give them responsibilities that are adult responsibilities. They will talk to them and interact with them as though they are adults with a limited language set, right? And this can become quite abusive when it comes to certain adult activities that people get up to or adult conversations that people have that are not at all appropriate for children to hear or be involved in because they don't have the experience or maturity for it. But Scientologists believe, well, you're an immortal spiritual being first, so that's how I'm going to treat you. And this is,

you know, open the door to some real child abuse in that group. We don't have to get into all the specifics of how right this second, but just in terms of answering your question, it, it, It's a different kind of normal, you know, and informed by this whole different set of beliefs. And some of these beliefs might seem kind of no big deal or it's just a religious faith and what's the big deal. But then I point out something like this and I go, look, if you're talking to a 10-year-old about, you know, intense sexually explicit matters because you think they're an adult in a little body, you are not treating that 10-year-old well. you're abusing that 10-year-old. And it's not just, and it doesn't just go to talking. It also goes to how they act. And that can be quite traumatizing to children. So, so these beliefs and these ideas can really have very negative outcomes. For me, I believe not only that I was an immortal spiritual

being, but that I had a line in on the truth and that I was better than everybody else around me. And it's the ego trip. It instill a kind of narcissistic attitude in children. And when you grow up thinking that, and that's your version of normal, you carry that on into your adulthood. And you basically act like a jerk to everybody, right? Which is kind of how I was for a lot of years. I'll admit it. I'm not, I own all of it.

You know, I did horrible things as a cult member, not criminal things. I didn't go that far off the path. But I did some really. nasty stuff and I treated people very, very badly. And I thought because I was in this morally superior place that it was fully rationalized and justified and acceptable behavior. So it can affect your life in very, very interesting ways, you know. And it can be a real process to start putting holes in that story, to start figuring out, wait a minute, something's not right here. and it usually is a progression of what we might call like moral outrages.

You know, like somebody does something, you see something happen that you disagree with in the group. Somebody gets disconnected. Somebody gets shunned. And you know that person's not an evil person. You've known that person for years. They're not horrible. They're not awful. They're very faithful people.

But suddenly the group is turned against them. And now they are, and now they can't just leave the group in peace. They must be vilified. They must be turned into a villain. They have to be a bad guy. Because it can't be that somebody just decided one day to leave the group. They have to be a bad guy. And so they are declared a suppressive person.

This is the label that the Scientology will give you. You're suppressive. You try, you as a suppressive person, all you do is, is push people down all day. You just suppress people. You, you stop them from being who and what they, you know, could be or whatever. So, um, so I saw some people get declared and I thought, that doesn't quite seem right. And there were, and I was working for the church at this point in a very, very intense full-time, 24-7 operation, right, which is called the C organization. I had steadily gotten more and more involved over the years of my experience with it.

I started working for the church out of high school. And then when I was 25, I went all in to the C.org. It's called the C.org. And it's quite something. It's not quite like anything else. It's its own thing. It's sort of like joining the military if the military was a monastery. You know, it's kind of like a little bit of both.

There was ranks and ratings and yes sir, no sir, how high sir and saluting. And it was kind of paramilitary. And there were uniforms, you know, just like the Salvation Army has uniforms. We had uniforms. And it's this whole culture of conformity and compliance and doing what Elron Hubbard said and not doing anything else and dedicating your life to it. And I did that for 17 years. I work very hard. If you've ever heard about Scientology,

if you've ever heard about the billion-year contract that you sign, that's the C-org. That's where you're committing yourself to a spiritual commitment of a billion years of your, you know, not only this lifetime, the next one and the next one and the next one, I'm all in. That's what the C-org is about. So it's pretty fanatical. And I was in a very fanatical kind of headspace about Scientology.

I thought this was the only thing that was going to save the world. This was the only thing that was doing any good. If you've ever heard Tom Cruise talk about Scientology, he talks about it like this. You know, we're the only ones who can help. We're the only ones who know what we're doing. You know, he said these things on camera. So that's how I felt. And so when you're in that frame of mind, when you're that far into it,

it's pretty hard to just snap out of it one day. It doesn't quite work that way. It takes a series of things to kind of break down your belief and your faith in it and your dedication. So there were a lot of things that happened that were, I was physically assaulted, I was psychologically abused. I had a lot of things happen that sort of war at my, at my, my, my, belief. But the thing that finally sort of turned the tide for me and made me wake up was when I realized it was as an epiphany, as like a, oh my God, kind of moment, that my day-to-day activity in Scientology was more consumed with lying to people than it was in telling them

the truth in order to get them to do Scientology or be part of Scientology or recruit them. into it, I had to lie. And there were a number of lies I had to tell. And I had so conditioned myself to believe that these were okay to do and it was acceptable because the end justifies the means. Right? As long as they come in, as long as they're part of Scientology, I've done a good thing, no matter how much I had to lie to them to get them to come in. And once that became clear, Once I had that like, oh, kind of moment of, oh, my God, wait a minute. This isn't right. I'm lying.

It's just straight up, you know? And I thought, okay, this is not what I got into this for. I did not join this group to run around lying to people all day. And it was also, of course, by this point, I'd also noticed how money intensive this group was. You know, for years and years, it was so obvious that it was. just after people's money. And I didn't join this group to, you know, rip people off or cause them to go bankrupt.

That wasn't part of the picture. I was there to help people. And so watching people go bankrupt, watching them cash out their kids, you know, college funds or trust funds or take out four or five mortgages on their house and max out all their cards to pay for more and more and more Scientology, and then see that their life wasn't getting any better as a result of that, it was getting worse.

Well, that's the exact opposite of what I thought Scientology was supposed to be doing for people. I thought it was supposed to be helping them and making their life better. So that disparity, seeing that and it becoming more and more obvious to me over time finally made me wake up in 2012. And I was like, you know, I got to step away and I got to stop working for the church. And I still believed in the faith of it. I still believed in the tenants and the practices of it. I just thought the organization was a bit off the rails. You know, as an organized religion, something's wrong here.

But after I got out, I learned a lot more. And within a few months of leaving, I learned everything. And I was like, okay, I got it. This is, I'm never doing this. This is crazy. And I learned it was all based on lies and deception and fraud. and it was actually hurting people. And I didn't want to be,

I didn't want to have anything to do with that. So that's what finally got me out. And that was in 2013. Wow. Yeah. Wow. Answer to a short question. Yeah.

Well, thanks for sharing it. It's, it must be difficult. You know, I've seen abusive relationships. And I can only imagine the magnification of an individual being in an abusive relationship versus that relationship

with an individual being with a group. Like it's bad enough when you're with one person that does mean things to you or manipulate you or says things. But what happens when it's a family? What happens when it's a community? What happens when it's an organization? How hard is? Like it must be

incredibly difficult. This is probably what other this is probably why you're so good at helping people is like how do you get to the point where you go, okay, this is wrong and this means Everything I've thought of for the last 40 years is wrong. Like, that's a big step, man. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, it is a big step, and it's not one that most people take right away, right? Right. It's not a light switch. Our beliefs don't work that way. Our brain doesn't work that way. You know, you can look at neuroscience. You can look at psychology.

You can look at how this stuff works, and you come to realize it is a process. Like I mentioned before, right? It's a series of steps getting yourself out of that headspace. Yeah. It took years to get you into it. It's going to take years to get you out of it. I mean, that's kind of how it works. Yeah.

And it's sort of like moving, a way I could describe cult recovery, not totally accurate, but close, is it's kind of like when you move to another country. Like if you imagine moving to, if you're, you know, American and you move to China, I mean, a place where you have no real connection with what's going on, the culture is wildly different, the language is based on a whole different set of foundation, you know, as far as how it's put together. You've got, you've got so much to learn and acclimate to, right, to relearn how to live your life in this new normal. Well, that's kind of what it's like coming out of a cult, is you're so in. to a set of beliefs and ideas and actions, rituals or mantras or chanting or auditing or whatever it is that the cult does, that you got to relearn everything.

And a lot of people don't necessarily see that right away. They want to just forget it. They want to leave it behind. They don't want to think about it anymore. And that's understandable because the, the reason why my analogy kind of breaks down is because it's not just moving to another country because you have all this trauma that you're carrying around. You've been traumatized.

Part of the structure or the experience of being in a destructive cult is psychological, physical, sexual, and financial torment and trauma. Mostly all of, you know, some or all of the above. And some of it can be really bad. Some of it goes back to people's childhoods where they are sexually abused or, you know, psychologically abused, where their control that is put on them and their life is so intense that when it's removed, they don't know how to get along in the world. They don't know how to control themselves because they were never asked to. You know, they don't know how their brains work.

They don't know how their emotional life is supposed to look in a healthy way because it's, been so unhealthy for so long. They're constantly yelled and screamed at. They're punished. They're put in a corner. They're thrown in the in the basement. They are, you know, put through rehabilitation work or hard physical labor on a routine basis. And, and they're stripped of their human rights. That's what you lose when you're part of one of these groups. And so coming out of it, it's not just a, oh, well, now I know everything I didn't know before and now I can, you know, and now my life will be perfect. You got to, there's a lot to catch up on and learn, you know, and even cultural references. You know, I came out of Scientology.

I never saw South Park. I never watched friends. I never saw so many trends and social, cultural events meant nothing to me because I was in this isolated world. And so when you come out, it's not like somebody just hands it to you all on a silver platter and says, well, here you go. Here's all the blanks you have to fill in now. You're going to figure it out for yourself. And it's not easy.

It's not easy for any of us who come out of cults to experience that. And I'm really glad that you mentioned domestic violence because it's exactly analogous to that. It's the same thing. It's the codependency and the ability. abusive environment and the controls. Everything I just said totally fits for that situation too. Even getting thrown in the basement, right? Even being denied cultural references, even being let out of the house or having control over your own finances, right? There are husbands and wives who control their spouses to such a degree that their spouse doesn't even have control or access to

their money. And this is we call coercive control. And this is, this is the, this is sort of the thing that cults do and domestic abusers do and gangs and trafficking and sex trafficking and all that. That's coercive control. It all fits under this model of behavior, which is coercive control. And that's, that's what you really need to learn about after you come out of a cult and learn how it happened to you and why it happened to you so that you proof yourself up to not let it happen to you again. And if you don't learn and you don't grow after you come out of the cult, you're probably going to cult hop.

A lot of people do. A lot of people do, right? And I have my own explanations as to why people do that, but it really has everything to do with that recovery process and realizing like a recovering alcoholic, you know, and realizing like a recovering alcoholic or like a recovering drug addict, you have things you need to do. And if you don't, you're going to keep yourself susceptible to falling back into that problem. It's like that. And that's why I'm such a strong advocate for post-cult education and recovery and therapy and doing the work, you know, because I think that there is work to do.

Yeah, I read a, there's a really great book. called Metaphors in the Mind. And in that they talk about symbolism. And in this particular paragraph, in this particular book, they were talking about patterns. And the author says that people don't go to a therapist because they have a psychological problem. On some level, they know that if they don't seek out answers to another person, that they'll continue creating this destructive pattern in their life. So they're seeking validation in this other path.

pattern. And when I think about culture, when I think about coercive control, it's just weird twisted logic of like, if I don't let them leave, they'll find a way to love me. Like, you know, it's just so freaking weird to like think. And even though I say it's weird, like, I allow myself to be in that position for them. Like, I could see how someone would do that. Like someone who has been twisted their whole life or wants to be loved or doesn't have the necessary tools in order or doesn't think they have the necessary tools, of course they're going to find twisted logic to keep people in their power. Maybe we can talk a little more about these like patterns and cold hopping.

Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah, yeah. No, this is good stuff. Because I talk about schemas, right, in the brain, right? This is a psychological principle. It's not what you're thinking. It's how you're thinking.

I like that. It's the pattern of your thinking. Right. Right. And for example, right, some people lean more authoritarian than, other people who may be leaning more free will and progressive and let's be, you know, very loose about the rules that we're going to live under. And there's some people who really want structure and they want things to be patterned very specific ways, right? And so we can call these

two things different ways of thinking. It doesn't matter what belief you put on top of those. The way you think about it is kind of structurally different. And these we might refer to as schemas or, you know, metaphors or whatever in terms of how we think about how our brain is putting this stuff together. It doesn't really matter what word you use. It's just patterns. Right. And cults, here's the thing about cults, is a destructive cult leader has created a pattern for you. And the, and the whole method of getting into a cult is becoming indoctrinated and learning and accepting this new pattern. This is how you have to think.

Not only am I going to tell you what to think, I'm going to teach you how to think. And for example, one of the ways that they teach this in Scientology, and this might sound very innocuous, but I'm telling you, this is really, this is powerful stuff. You are told constantly in Scientology, what would Ron do. El Ron Hubbard, the founder of Scientology, if you're faced with a dilemma or a problem in your life, you are not asked to figure out how you would solve it or what you should do. You're asked, well, what would Ron do? And you start patterning your behavior off what you think this guy would do. And that, again, might not sound like a big deal, but you do that over and over.

and over and over and over again. You're giving over your free will and your independent thinking or your critical thinking to this other person. And you have to pattern your life around how they act. That, in fact, is one of the main goals of a cult leader is to create a bunch of mini-mees, a bunch of people who act just like the cult leader does and believe and follow the cult leader's teachings. And it doesn't have to be religious.

either. I mean, Keith Reneer, nexium. That wasn't really. That had nothing to do with religion, but it was sure a cult, and he was sure telling people how to think and how to act, and everybody emulated Keith. Keith is the man. Keith is the wise guy. Keith is the one who's succeeding in life. So I need to act like him. In Scientology, you will get, you'll get El Ron Hubbard as the model. But you'll also get, you'll also get the living model of David Miscavage and Tom Cruise. And they are the living embodiment of Scientology. So I need to live like they do, right?

They become kind of cult leader-like in their own way. And David Miscabbage is the head of Scientology. He's absolutely a cult leader. So this kind of modeling of our behavior, there's nothing wrong with having role models. But the thing about cults is they take normal, regular human behavior. And they dial it up to 11, right? And so, you know, where you might look to a role model or look to an inspirational speaker or look to a motivational speaker and go, yeah, that guy's making some good points or that woman has some good things to say, I'll, I'll accept that.

In the cult, they're beating over the head with it, you know, and it's not your choice. It's you have to do this. otherwise you can't be part of our special secret little group right and and that's that's how they indoctrinate you that's how they get you thinking how they want you to think and once you're thinking the way they want you to think and you're interpreting reality what you see and sense and feel and experience in your life once you're interpreting all of that through the lens of the cult well then they own you. They control you. That's how they get it. That's how they get you, right? I'll give me an example. Yeah. When I was in Scientology, I never, ever wanted to go look on the internet because they teach you very, very carefully in Scientology and other cults do this too, that if you go looking at negative criticism of our group, it will harm your spiritual progress.

It will actually interfere with your ability to do Scientology, to experience the wins and the gains and the changes that Scientology is going to bring you in your spiritual, your path of spiritual growth. Well, if you go look at all that negative criticism, you're stopping yourself from doing that because you're going to get upset and you're going to believe lies and you're going to hear a bunch of, People with axes to grind who are going to tell you all the nasty, horrible stuff that none of it's true. They're just making it all up because they hate the fact that we're succeeding and they're failing. They're failures. They couldn't make it. And so they're trying to drag you down into the mud with them. And if you believe that, if you come to believe that, and it wasn't hard to believe.

Yeah. You know, when you're in a group where you think everybody's, you know, saving the world. then you stop yourself from going and looking at that criticism. You don't need somebody standing over your shoulder telling you. You can't look at that because you think you take it on yourself. You police your own behavior. And there is nobody who's going to be a better policeman to you than you. So that's how I did not look at the Internet for so many years or watch South Park or read any of the

criticism because I thought it was going to impede my spiritual progress. And that was a lesson that Scientology taught me. It's not true. There's nothing true about that at all, but I believed it. And that's one of the things that kept me in for so many years is I was never exposed to the other side of the picture. Wow. It's, you know, with every lie, there's always some truth intertwined in there. And you can see the way that skilled propagandists can twist words,

but more than that can twist the meaning of it. To say that if you look at this, it's going to interfere with your spiritual journey. And it's true. And when you start believing that, you're probably not going to believe in that anymore. But just a different way of saying it. And then it ties into the repetitive nature of who we are and our identity. And like, it's so amazing to me to see the way in which the word cults. is part of the word culture.

That's right. You know, you know, that's right. It's amazing. And it's, it's more than Scientology. It's the community you live in.

It's the country you live in. It's all the, it's UPS. It's Goldman Sachs. It's all of them. They're all cultic in nature. And if you don't, anybody that's bald deep in that stuff,

you can see it. And it's, you know what's really, what I really love, Chris, is that once you see it, you can't unsee it. Exactly.

That's something really beautiful about that. right. That's right. Maybe you can speak about culture and cult like that. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah, yeah. No, you're, hitting on a very important point. It's a, it's a nuanced point, though. It's one that's often that I find is challenging for some people to get their wits around. So I've tried to explain this in different ways. Groups are necessary, right, in order for us to survive. I mean, when you come down to like, you know, the brass tacks of our existence, the real honest bottom line of how human beings get along in the world.

We're born into a group called a family. We are then thrust out into the world, pretty young, into school and kindergarten and social groups and playdates and getting along with other people who we don't know and have to learn and we have to learn all those social skills and go through all those phases of development in our life through childhood where we learn how to get along in groups and stuff like that. And some people are good at it and some people suck at it. And it's difficult for some people and it's harder and easier for, you know, others. But there's no getting away from it.

Not one single human being lives on an island, never, ever having any relationship with anybody else ever. You know, that would be castaway material. That's crazy. That's way, way outlier kind of material. Most human beings were in groups. and when we're in groups, we organize in particular ways, right? This is what sociology is all about. We have leaders.

We have followers. We have codependency develop as a result of that. We have lots of things called group dynamics that how groups act. And we have to organize this way because everybody can't be in charge. That would be anarchy, right? And we wouldn't have groups. And so you have to have a certain structure. and you have to have a, you know, like a hierarchy.

And this is just how we organize. And so some people will experience, have a really bad experience in a group and then come away not thinking that group is bad. They'll think all groups are bad or any structure is bad or any, you know, society is bad. And we used to see this with the old frontier mentality, you know, of, well, we're out here on the frontier. and we're living large and we're independent thinkers and we're independent people, right? And we have this independent existence. And fair enough. And that's great until you need a post office or until you need a fire department, right?

Because your house is on fire. Or there's a lot of good reasons for us to organize into groups and not be siloed off into hyper-individualism. Yeah. So that all being said, there is a kind of personality that lives among us, and it's not a different kind of human being. It's just a different kind of personality, which is predatory. It's not a social personality. It's kind of an antisocial personality. It's the kind of person who will knowingly, premeditatively, take advantage of other people.

gain resources, gain influence, gain power at the expense of other people. Now, thankfully, most of us aren't like that, but some of us are. And when those people learn the different ways of controlling other people, because there's only so many ways to do it, really comes down to about 10 different things, you know, they'll take advantage of people. and when they're really good at it, they'll take advantage of people without those people knowing that's what's happening.

They trick them, they lie to them, they deceive them. This we call fraud or deception or, you know, over, if there's a repeating pattern of this, it moves over into this area called coercive control. Because coercive control is not just a one-off. you don't coercively control somebody once. It's a repeating pattern of behavior, right? Like we see with domestic abusers or with cult leaders.

Yeah. So we have to have culture. This is what I've been talking. This is what I've been describing this whole time is culture. That's what this is. Right. And within cultures, you can get these mini cultures, these little cultures, these this one guy or this one woman or this one group of people is dictating to a whole bunch of people

under them how to behave, how to think, how to talk, how to act, what to believe, how to believe. And when that person has that level of control over people and they're doing it in a disadvantage, you know, to take advantage of them and to abuse them and to hurt them so that that person at the top can get all the power and hold all the influence and and holds all the cards that's what we call a destructive cult and that's that's kind of how i relate those things if that all makes sense yeah it makes perfect sense and you know throughout literature and history like you hear echoes of you know stoic philosophers or people in biographies say things that people who seek power should be the people with whom power is never given.

Yeah. You know what I mean? Like there's signs. There's signs of it. That's right. And on some weird way, I can totally understand the intoxication of getting a group of people to do things and them not even knowing that you're the one that put the idea in their head.

Like there's something amazing about that. Yeah. But it's, it's, you know, it speaks to the other ideas we hear of that absolute power. corrupts absolute. How close can you be to that flame before you get burned? Even if people that have good intentions that have that, I hesitate to call it a gift, but have learned that particular dark art or have that instinct or that insight, like even those people with a heart of good intentions end up being corrupted by it. I mean, you could argue that that's what Frodo and the whole idea of the ring of power is talking about, right? That's right. I mean, that's kind of what Tolkien said.

That's it, man. That's it. I mean, you kind of said, this is what these stories are about, you know, and that's exactly right. It's a tricky, tricky thing because, you know, we value things, we judge things, we rate the goodness or badness of a thing based on the context in which we're looking at it. It's always context specific. Always. There's no such thing as absolute good or absolute bad or always good and always bad. there just isn't. And so even death, right? Even killing somebody has justified reasons for doing it and insane reasons for doing it. And context is everything. And context can change over time also, as we are so well aware of in this hyper-cancel culture world that we live in now, right? Yeah. Context changes. 20 years ago, it wasn't a bad thing.

tell that joke. Now it is and you're getting burned for it, right? But 20 years ago, nobody cared. No one cared. And so to make it out that it's a big crime from 20 years ago to tell a joke, you're kind of like, wait a minute, right? How to this changing context, you know, like we kind of think about this a little bit because we judge people fairly harshly sometimes when we shouldn't. Now, that all being said, and I hope the audience's heads aren't exploding right now, because I'm saying context always matters, right? I'm not saying, you know, you're wrong for judging somebody, but let's figure out why and what, you know, for what reason. When it comes to leaders, there are certain leaders who have their followers best. Well, see, it's not about intent.

That can be a tricky place to go. Yeah. Marshall Applewhite, the guy who headed up Heaven's Gate, which ended in mass suicide, truly appeared for many, many years to have a sincere belief in absolute insanity. He was completely off any touch with. reality, believing that, you know, that aliens were coming to, you know, that they were going to transcend into this alien life form and, and move on and shed this mortal coil and go on to a higher plane of existence.

And this resulted in a lot of people offing themselves. And it was an incredible tragedy. You know, same with, well, different circumstances, though, might be Jim Jones. Right. He became just straight up. murderous and psychotic. And he didn't start out that way, but he became that way through drugs and too much power and too many drugs. And he lost the damn plot, right?

And he ended up killing over a thousand people down in Guyana, which was basically the cult 9-11. That was basically the wake-up call for the world, that cults are real and that they're dangerous. That was kind of when it started. So intent is a tricky thing, right? You can't really judge a leader by intent. You have to judge by what they do. It's like a cult. You can't judge Scientologists by the whole Zeno story because that's ridiculous.

But is it any more ridiculous than the flood story or the resurrection story or, you know, the Muhammad story or the Buddha story? I sat under a tree until I got, you know, spiritual enlightenment. What? What are you talking about? Like these are interesting stories, but they're not in and of themselves destructive. beliefs. It's what you do with them that matters. And when you're, when you are breaking down in a, in a modern context, when you have a group that is breaking down and violating people's human rights, literally as laid out in a document called the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, I mean,

you can go look at this. This is not, you know, some mythical sort of, airy-fairy concept, this has been written down. People have a right to movement, to belief, to speak their mind, to ask questions when they have them, and to be not interfered with physically. These are rights that we recognize that all human beings have. And a destructive cult is a group that is dedicated to breaking these things. things down in its members. And in doing so, taking advantage of them and abusing them, all for the aggrandizement of a small number of people, often just one person, the cult leader.

And so it's really not that hard to see, you know, my context is crucial to this because people can get so wrapped up in the context of only seeing things through the lens. of the cult that they become blind what's happening to them. I sure is held it. You know, for decades, I thought upside down. I thought good was bad. I thought freedom was slavery. I thought, you know, I thought I was part of something amazing.

And I was dead wrong. And I was being abused the entire time. I was just looking at it through a different lens, you know? And it can be tricky. It can be real tricky when it comes to nuances like that of trying to figure this stuff out in a way that you can talk about it broadly. It's hard. It's hard to do, you know.

It is hard to do. I can't help but notice the incredible symbolism on your shirt with John Lennon saying that organized religion is the opiate for the masses. Then you have Pac-Man, which is also like an incredible cult classic. Right? Like, I just screaming. Absolutely. Absolutely, right?

And in a way, I can speak to the fact that we, it's not just, You see, we like to point and look at the cult leaders as the whole villain and the Pete, but the fact of the matter is we are co-dependent. Yeah. We all do it. Yep. Right? We have a tendency to form up in groups.

Again, this is just built into us. It's not like you can talk yourself out of this. Right. So we want leaders. We want people to tell us what to do. We want people to give us some guidance and direction. And sometimes we can let ourselves get so carried away. way with that or get so into that belief that this guy, this woman is so wise, is so full of,

you know, goodness and wonderfulness that that I must give over my entire identity to this person. That's another way of describing what a cult is. It's where you lose your identity. You have your identity is completely wrapped up in the cult identity. I'm a Scientologist first. Before anything else. Before I'm a mother, before I'm a father, before I'm a parent, before I'm a child, before I'm a worker, before I'm a friend. I'm a Scientologist.

And that's where I believe you get into an unhealthy level of commitment to a thing. no one, no human being anywhere in the world should ever be that committed to anything. Because that's on us. We do that. The cult leader is only giving us good reasons to do that, but we're the ones who have to actually do it. And when we do, we lose ourselves. And it's really hard to get back from that and get back to being you again. That's what recovery is all about.

Man, there's so much in there like. No, right? Wow. Yeah, yeah. It gets pretty heady. I love it. I love behavior. And, you know, I think Chris Ryan wrote a book.

Forgive me for not knowing the title of it. But he speaks about this potential when grasshoppers begin to swarm to become locusts. And there's like a physical change that has. happens in them. You know, and if we look at nature, if we look at ourselves as nature, then we can see the way in which nature moves and understand our identity and our actions. Grasshoppers is another way to do. Yeah, that's a great, that's a great analogy. I might use that in the future. Yeah, please, man. Look at a mob. You know, we have work for mob mentality. Yes, that's right. Culture. You know, it's getting away. It's a way for all of us. It's a way for an

individual to experience a situation through the eyes of everyone. Yeah. Like we are, that same force is what people want a harness to create change. In some ways, like if we just take out the negative connotation of cult and culture, like you said, it depends on intention.

It depends on this. This is how movements get started. This is how the United States may have got to start. That's how countries get started. This is how Apple gets started. This is how new ideas form. It just so happens that. Sometimes those ideas turn out to be horrible disasters, but without it, without the charismaically, without the strong man, without this potential reservoir of energy that guides people in a group, we're stuck.

You know, and like, there's a lot there, but what do you think of? Like, why do we take out David Koresh, but not David Miscabbage? Is it because they've gotten too big and too accepted? Like, you know, is the success of Scientology, has that made sure that no other cults can survive? Was the government like, okay, that's enough. This is it. No more. We've had these guys go.

We can't let this keep happening, you know? Or what do you think? Well, you know, it's hard to nail down exactly an answer to the question. Why do we take out David Koresh, not David Miscavage? The guns had something to do with it in terms of Koresh. I mean, you know, the fact that there were, you know, not just rumors of, but actual knowledge of high-powered weaponry. And the other thing that attracted attention to Koresh was the child abuse and the sort of ritualistic child abuse that they were engaged in. But, you know, finally law enforcement took that kind of seriously, but they didn't really understand what they were dealing with.

And it was such a bloody disaster because they went in so stupidly. They just, the entire operation was just a, you know, a bit of a cluster fuck, if you will, from beginning to end. Because they didn't really understand the nature of what they were dealing with. Oh. Right. They didn't understand that Koresh was actually okay with dying for his cause. They didn't get that, right?

And when you go into a hostage negotiation or you go into those kind of situations back then, the common wisdom was, well, the guy wants to live. no, not always true and not so with him. So you're dealing with a different level of commitment, you could say, to or dedication to a cause or to a belief than law enforcement's usually used to dealing with. And they had no real prep for that. But the pressure that came on them to do something about it came from the guns and the children. You know, it just so happened with nexium that it coincided with Me Too. And it had that not happened, we would not know who Keith Rennar is right now.

Because it just so happened that that chance and circumstance created the situation necessary for the federal government to finally act. They had known about Keith Rennary's crimes for like a decade before. but nobody did anything about it until New York Times finally published a piece and it just so happened to coincide with a cultural moment. And then let's get this guy. That has not yet happened for Scientology and it may or may not happen. And the fact of the matter is that Scientology is one and a very tiny one, if I may say, of thousands of cults. destructive cults out there. I mean, let's talk about the Moonies,

the Unification Church. That's a gun cult. They get money from every time you buy sushi, you're giving money to a cult. I don't know that people realize that, right? I didn't realize that. Yeah, no, that's a true statement. Or you have, you know,

I mean, a lot of people feel a little contentious about this one, but it happens to be true that the Mormon church, the Latter-day Saints, They got some culty stuff going on in that group with their kids. The way they deal with their children is a little iffy in some areas. I'm not talking about straight up, you know, ritualized sexual abuse. That's more where you get into the FLDS, the fundamental LDS polygamy cult. That's where things really take a turn steeply, you know, steep dive very quickly when it comes to human rights.

But the Mormons, for example, not the Mormons, for example, not the, to be all mysterious about this, but they have their children are subject to very, very detailed interrogations about their sexual activities as young as 10 years old. From strangers, unlicensed, unregulated strangers, adults, people who are chosen to be local parish pastors or whatever. The terminology is in that group. And I don't think that's appropriate behavior. for a 10-year-old, for some grown adult to be, you know, not only quizzing them,

but then judging them and dictating to them how they should be behaving sexually at, you know, at that age is just grossly inappropriate. But the Mormons do it as a ritualized practice, and they all do it all throughout Utah all the time, right? And this is just one of many things that Mormons are sort of subjected to that's kind of culty, not quite as bad as what Scientology does to kids, but it's kind of up there, you know. So there's a spectrum of destructive activity, you could say. Some is more destructive than others.

And it's, I can't remember exactly how we got onto this, but I will say that, given the propensity of people to fall for nonsense, pseudoscientific nonsense, religious nonsense, political nonsense, you know, ideological nonsense. We're surrounded by nonsense, right? Scientists, you know, the whole vaccine thing, the climate change thing, right? Right, right. You know, you can just go round and round and round and round all day on this.

And people will, and regardless of where you stand on any of these issues, I think we can all agree that, you know, when you've gone. into the Q&N conspiracy world. Yeah. You know, people will adopt some really, really nuts ideas that have no basis in reality whatsoever, but they absolutely 100% believe it.

Must be true. And so people kind of have a propensity to do this, which is why cults are always going to be around. You can't, you're never going to get rid of them. you know and so all we can really try to do over time is educate people in the methods and means by which cults take advantage of you so that if those red flags start appearing in your own personal life you can go wait a minute this sounds a little familiar hang on didn't somebody say something about this one time and maybe you can stop it before it gets too far before the Scientology recruiter convinces you to give them you know your $100 you go wait minute, and I think I heard something about this. I need to go break this out, right?

Yeah. Like, if we can just do that much for people, that would be a lot. That would be a lot. Because right now, too many people unquestioningly accept information from sources that they just should not be accepting it from. And Scientology would be, for example, one of those sources, right? Elron Hubbard had absolutely no idea what he was talking about when it comes to science. He never, he's not degreed. He doesn't, he didn't have an academic bone in his body. He wouldn't understand the concept of peer review or evidence or how to do a real study.

I mean, none of that applies to Scientology. And yet here's this guy talking, blustering on for thousands of lectures and thousands of pages of writings about what a genius he is and how everything he says is glittering gold, right? And you just go, okay, you know, people buy it. You know, what are you going to do? Yeah. Hopefully, hopefully you don't buy it. Well, that's right. You encourage people.

It's hard, though. Well, it is hard. And the thing I try to get across to people in terms of, you know, some ideas or tools you can use to arm yourself against this kind of thing is, one, don't be afraid to say I don't know. let's don't be afraid to say that. These are the three hardest words for people to say. They just can't have it. Oh, no, I must know. It's like, no, it's okay to not know.

Because that's what opens the door to learning and growing and expanding your views and getting new perspectives. And even if you're even, you know, I don't want to use extreme examples to make my point, but it's just, you know, engaging with people you don't agree with. can be a really interesting thing to do. And it can really grow your perspectives. And you really learn things about the other side that you didn't see before. You know, you didn't know before. I am pretty progressive.

I'm a pretty left-wing kind of guy. But I engage with people on the right all the time. And I don't have a problem doing it because I get where they're coming from. And I can agree with lots of things that they have to say because I agree with where they're coming from. And I'm not making them out to be some villainous, dressed in black, satanic person, you know? And that's what, and we go there so quickly these days. So, so giving ourselves a little latitude of thinking and perspective shifting is an incredibly healthy thing to do for ourselves. And it starts with the phrase, I don't know. Instead of thinking or

assuming you know things, right? That's how you run into so many problems. Another really simple principle is waiting. Just wait. If you got some important decision, if you got some important thing that's facing you that you got to deal with and somebody's like, now, now, now, you have to decide now, you know, you got to buy it now. You have, don't walk out of here. If you walk out of here, this sale is going to go away or, you know, all the tricks they use, right? Give yourself some time. If it's that big of a deal, it'll still be that big of a deal tomorrow. But your emotional state will change. And that lets your frontal, that lets your rational mind kind of kick in a little harder, right?

Because when we make emotion-based decisions, they're so often so wrong and we regret them later, you know, because we don't give ourselves the time to actually think about what we're doing. And this is encouraged. You only live once. Yolo, go, go, go, right? That whole thing, right? Yeah.

We have a society that is built around the idea of go, go, go, go. And it really should be maybe hang on a second. So there is a little bit of that. And the other thing is understanding that you have emotions. Yeah. And that emotions, the biggest thing, the number one biggest thing in the last 10 years that that has meant more to me in my own personal recovery and in helping other people with theirs

is really breaking down for people that their emotional life is a very real thing and that their emotional needs and that their emotional reactions are the thing that drive their decision making. It's not their rationality and their logic and their reason that is behind them, most of their decision making, right?

We're driven by our emotions. And if you can understand that, that's a very powerful step in getting some control over it. Because our emotions are built to literally control us. That's what they are. I mean, their responses and reactions to things in the world. And we get mad, we get sad, we get upset, right? We become bored with things sometimes. like there's lots of different emotional reactions, but those emotions are there for a reason.

And if we can learn to listen to them and understand them and what they're trying to tell us or do for us, then we have what's called emotional intelligence. And if you have some emotional intelligence, you are more armed in this world than almost any number of lessons in critical thinking. They go hand in hand, believe me. They're both necessary. but emotions is really where it's at because that's what when cult leaders get you when domestic violence abusive personalities when predators prey on you they do it through your emotions they don't reason you into stuff they feel you into stuff you know and that's a really important principle to understand to get along in this world yeah it's plugging into a it's circumventing the rational mind. You know, when you used to, you know what an interesting emotion is, is guilt.

A lot of people feel guilty about something. And so then that caused them to do other things or to act in this other way. But, you know, the purpose of guilt is not to stay in guilt. The purpose of guilt is to realize you've made a mistake and not to make it anymore. But we don't teach emotional intelligence. Like, imagine what the world may look like if in grade school, children were taught that their emotions are action signals. Hey, this is an action signal.

This means this. That's right. You can alleviate a lot of, a lot of interesting things, right? Oh, absolutely you could. It would be tremendously important to do that. And I want that. You know, I mean, when I first, when I first, first, first got out of Scientology, I ran across the works of Carl Sagan, James Randy, skeptic.com, right?

Michael Shermer, Penn & Teller, like professional skeptics, right? And a lot of them tend to come out of the field of magic, which is really hilarious. Nowadays, you have Darren Brown, who does amazing work breaking down so many psychological principles of influence and control through a bunch of, you know, documentaries and work that he does. And that's where you can learn, you know, sort of, you know, there are people who frame it in different and interesting ways. Joe Rogan had Darren Brown on his show a few years ago, and Brown was explaining hypnotism and the nuances and layers of hypnotism and how it really works,

because it's not, you know, dangle a watch in front of people and all this other crap that you see, right? There's so much to it. And he was talking honestly about it, and Rogan was kind of like, so you're kind of meaning, like, it's really interesting that you can kind of hack somebody's mind, you know,

you can get admin control of their mind. And it's, no, that's not what this is. It's not like that. It's, it's, it's, it's, it's that there are things that will influence people. And there are only so many things that will do it. Right. And emotion is the easiest way to do it. Because we're so conditioned to it and because we're going to have emotional responses,

whether we want to or not. We don't control them. We have them. And once you have them, that's when you can start putting some control in. You can't necessarily control if you're going to feel anger or not. It's what you do with that anger that matters, not whether you're feeling it. Same with grief, shame, blame, guilt. Guilt is a very powerful motivator.

Yeah. Incredibly powerful because it relies on the threat of loss of your social network. Right? If you feel shame, you feel guilt because you've done something that other people are now going to judge you for and look down on you for and think badly about you for. And you're going to lose valuable connections and valuable resources and valuable, you know, relationships. And that's, you know, where that blame and guilt stuff really sits for us. And it's and it's incredibly powerful because of all the social conditioning and social, you know, and social. necessities that we have. Community, the sense of community and having a community and having

social relationships is classified within us as an emotional need. It's not an emotional desire. It's not a want. It's not an option. You have to have it. And if you don't have it, you're not happy. And you'll never be happy until you fill that void somehow. That's what an emotional need is. And that's why these motions can be so powerful for us in motivating us or influencing us to behave the way we do. And the predators in the world, and I call them that because I don't want to talk about narcissism and personality disorders and all this other stuff.

You know, I'm not a psychiatrist, right? And personality disorders are a thing, but they're not the only reason people act predatory. Predators are predators. And when somebody's praying on people, they're often using emotional buttons and triggers to get people to act the way they want them to. So there's no other way around it except to understand your own emotional life. It's fascinating to think about, you know, a lot, it seems to me another powerful emotion is fear. And if you look at the way it's wielded through television or propaganda,

or sales or shared sacrifice or shared goals. You know, it's weird how we, maybe you could speak to the idea of how we use emotions coupled with language is like a two-punch combo to lead people down the primrose path. Oh, absolutely. Oh, yeah, yeah. Oh, sure.

I mean, this is all based on now. We go back to Lifton here. There's a guy named Robert J. Lifton, who did a whole research study, wrote a whole book on the psychology of authority. authoritarianism and totalism and thought reform, right, which we, which is another term for brainwashing. Thought reform. Yeah, thought reform.

That's the, that's the more scientific term for it, right? Because brainwashing is so colloquial as a term, right? But what you're, but, but the, but the root of brainwashing, the concept there is purity of thought or purity of thinking. You're washing. You're making it pure. and it's not cleaning it out and making a blank slate. It's a purity thing. And this comes out of Maoist reconditioning camps back when the Chinese Revolution happened.

And they needed to re-educate people. And Lifton studied this in detail. And he came up with these eight points of thought reform, these eight things that if you do these things, you can change it. You can radically change how people think and how they act and how they feel about things. And one of the key, one of those eight points is called loaded language. You load the language. You set up a language so that it means something a bit different than how other people understand the language.

You come up with specialized meanings for word or phrases. But not only that, but you actually use language as a tool of control. And one of the ways that this is done is through what's called a thought-stopping cliche or a thought-terminating cliche. It's a phrase, a word or a phrase or a label that we will assign something so that we don't have to think about it anymore. A conspiracy theorist. Well, conspiracy theorists all the time, right? All the time, right? Sure.

We all use this mental mechanism of categorization in order to understand the world better and not have to think all the time. I mean, that makes sense. Your brain is already running, you know, 30% of the energy in your body is being utilized by this thing. Right. All the time just to keep your body going and regulate your body and do your thinking for you. That's its function, right? and it's predicting and its thinking and calculating and all of that. A lot of energy is used doing that.

So as much as can be conserved as possible, it makes sense that we would want to think and act that way. Cult leaders take advantage of this. And the way they do it is they feed you mantras or phrases so that when you say them, you don't have to think anymore. For example, I am a Scientology critic. I have made many, many, many videos breaking down why Scientology is bad for you. In order to nullify all of that work, you could go and debate me point by point piece by piece,

take every single claim I make and go, well, that's not true because blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You could do that. Scientology won't do that. They never will. But you could. you'd lose anyway because I am speaking the truth, but that's beside the point. You could also nullify everything I am saying by sticking a label on me. And the label that Scientology uses, the loaded language that they've invented out of nowhere, right, is suppressive person.

I am a suppressive person according to Scientology. And by making that label and defining it as an antisocial personality whose sole intention is to harm everybody around them, make them less able to survive in their life, and thereby control and cow them and make them into ineffective people. That's what a suppressive person is, according to Scientology. So they slap that label on me, and every single Scientologist immediately can ignore everything I have to say. He's just a suppressive person. That is the thought-stopping cliche. He's just a suppressive person. That's an example of loading the language, of taking language and making it into a tool where you control how people,

think. Does that make sense? Yeah. I see it. I mean, you see it. Yeah, it's, it's, it's, it's rampant through our society. Oh, yeah. And the way in which we're divided amongst races and genders and like, that's right. Once you begin seeing it, you know, you just have to put your head in your hands on your knees for a minute and take a breath and be like, these motherfuckers. Yeah.

You know, these motherfuckers, man, they do not want us working together at any means. It's the white guy. It's the black guy's fault. The women's fault. It's the gay people's fault. It's always somebody else's fault. And there's always a reason to hate your neighbor. Always.

And they're the problem. You know why you can't get it? It's not the guy up top. It's not people controlling the money. It's not the government. It's not the coercive power up top. It's the guy next to you. That's fucking son of a big man.

What he's doing? He's got a blue car, man. Yeah, we know about blue cars, right? Yeah. Uh-huh. You know what I'm talking about. Right. That's right.

No, and that's exactly right. We take the natural function of categorization that our brains do and we vilify it, right? We turn it on its, we turn it on its ear. And we all do it again, like this is normal behavior. Right. It's totally fine, totally organic, totally makes sense. Right. But when a predatory personality constructs these on purpose and instills them in his followers or the people who are willing to listen to the guy and convinces them of the

truth of it, now you have culty activity, right? Because it's not just organic or temporary or a cultural fad or something like that. This is a dedicated activity. Those suppressive people are out there, right? This is a label Hubbard came up with in the 60s. And once he came up with it, there was this entire system that went into place to label somebody, declare them in writing, right with a with a yellow piece of paper chris shelton's suppressive person and they list all the person's crimes according to scientology right he did this and he did that and he did this other thing and he's not welcome in our group anymore and should he ever come to his senses then he can come crawling back to us and go through the whole appeasement and rehabilitation process which we will

so, you know, what's the word? Magnanimously allowed. There it is. That's the word, right? Which we will so magnanimously give to him in our, in our gracious, you know, wonderfulness, right? So, you know, it takes this normal, natural thing that we do where we can kind of act a little viciously toward each other and it just dials it up to 20, right? And that's kind of what I'm talking about in terms of making these things formal structures of control. It's a dedicated, premeditated effort.

It's not an accident. None of this stuff that goes on with coercive control situations or cult situations is an accident. There is opportunism and there is, you know, cult leaders will take advantage of situations, organically, but it's always a premeditated, dedicated effort on their part. They didn't just luck into it, you know, and that's important to understand about this, you know. You know, that brings up an interesting point that I don't know a whole lot about, but it seems to me that when the charismatic leader of an organization is on its way out, like, is that

why Marshall and and and um Jim Jones is like do they see the end near's like okay I got to kill everybody or wait is that like the final do you think that the end being near for them as them losing control that's what I mean by the end is that what facilitates a drastic action on the end on the other side absolutely yeah oh yeah no no question about it I mean this is a psychotic personality and psychosis is a thing and you know psychopathy and you know evil exists it's a real thing um and and and when in in the in the mind of a deranged individual who is losing all of his influence and power that is accumulated over years decades of time they implode and when they implode they take as many people with them as they can yeah now apple white situation was

a premeditated knowing goal i mean they'd been working for it for years. They said exactly what they were going to do. And everybody who really came into that group and dedicated themselves to it knew where it was going, which was a little bit of a different thing, in fact, a wildly different thing from a David Koresh or a Jim Jones implosion, where external forces are coming and operating on the group and they know they're about to lose all of their power. This happened with Koresh. This happened with Jim Jones.

And so their response to that is to throw a psychotic fit and take as many people with them as they can. You know, when we look at bigger groups, especially religious groups, there seems to be, and it seems to me that there is an opportunity for reformation sometimes.

If we look at like Martin Luther and he staples his paper to the door, like this is what we're going to do now. You know, or if you look, if you go way back to like the Sunni Shia split and you're like, okay, are we going with Mohammed's family or are we going with this number two guy?

Right. You know what I mean? Like you see these splits happening. And in a slightly humorous but interesting way, might it be possible for a new wing of Scientology to take over or like someone to wrestle control and take it in a different way? You know, like? Well, as a matter of fact, that's already happened.

What we call that is independent Scientology. Okay. And it's Scientology's methods and practices outside of the formal umbrella of the Church of Scientology as an organization. You're talking about schisms, right? You're talking about denominations and how they form. Yes. Oh, yes. This is, again, classic human behavior is a group forms, and then, you know, somebody has. has a real problem with what the leader is doing or saying or, you know, and it becomes enough

of a moral problem to them, because I mentioned earlier, moral outrage. Yeah. Right. There is nothing more powerful, I believe, personally is my opinion. I believe that there is no other thinking that is more powerful to our, to influence our behavior than moral thinking, right? What's right and wrong, good and bad, what we think of as acceptable as unacceptable. And when a group schisms, it's usually on that kind of basis of like, no, no, no, this isn't the right path.

We got to go down this other path. And the person saying that will try to accumulate, you know, we'll try to gain social proof, to get social acceptance of this. And if half the group or a quarter of the group or some of the group goes, yeah, you're right. Ha, okay, good. Now I can go be my own leader and go do this own. thing and they split off. And this is, this is the evolution of religion on this planet from day one is, has been a pattern of this over and over again throughout every culture that human

beings have ever created. There's not been one that has been immune to this divisive phenomena. You know, it's, it's how people, it's how, it's how ideas evolve over time. It's like beehives. You know, when it gets too big, they swarm and they go and they create a new hive somewhere, you know, exactly the same, only different, you know. That's right. What do you think? Yeah, it's fascinating stuff. Yeah, I, I, and on some ways, I'm so thankful to, I'm so thankful to have, like, I was a

UPS driver for like 26 years and in some weird way, like, yeah, like, I couldn't do it anymore. And I feel like I broke the behavioral conditioning of a corporate livelihood. And it's not the same as a cult, but in some ways, like I was, I felt as if, like, the company that I worked for betrayed me and everybody working there by putting on these incredibly unrealistic work standards and driving everybody into the ground. And they gave you an employee number instead of a person and you had to do all these humiliating things. And it just became too much for me. And I got to a point where I'm like, I'm not going to do it anymore. And, okay, so what should I do? well, I should, you know what, maybe the leadership

doesn't still really understand they're doing these things. And the best thing to do is to point out the flaws in it. And so you start doing that. And you get to a certain point where you get to a district manager or a cardinal or however you want to draw the parallel. And you realize, son of a bitch, this is not a bug, it's a feature. Yeah. You know, and now you're like, okay, what are you going to do?

Are you going to find ways to make yourself be okay with it? You're going to continue to lie to yourself? Or is the lie so big that you're going to you're going to find ways. you create a catalyst in yourself to change. And in doing so, hopefully spread some breadcrumbs for those that have doubt to follow you out. And I think that that's what I see in like people like yourself that have found the courage or dug down deep enough in them to make a change not only in what they believe, but fundamentally change who they are. Like I think it's so powerful to do what you're doing, man. Thanks for that.

Oh, well, thank you very much for that. And I understand what you're talking about because the way I put it is how I understand it is you, you know, you're hitting the reset button on your life. Yeah. You know, and when I did that at 42 years old, that was a big risk. That was a jump off the cliff. It was like, I don't know where this is going to go, but something has to change. And not everybody's up to that. And it's not a value judgment on them.

It's just a fact. It's just a fact. Otherwise, you know, we would have a very different. world. If everybody was willing to just, you know, cut and run when things got difficult or disagreeable to them, then groups would not have the cohesion that they have. And the methods of control that cults use are the same methods to control everybody else uses. Again, it's just a matter of degree, right? Yeah. And the other thing that we can differentiate, because, you know, people have said over the years to me things like, well, the military,

is a cult or well my company is a cult or the government is a cult or all religion is a cult and it's like no no guys there's nuance here there's nuance and it has to be understood um one of the things that cults that you know you're dealing with a destructive cult as we call them is what do they do when you try to leave you know your company didn't stalk and harass you and follow you home and go through your garbage and start trashing you on public social media after you left, they went, okay, you quit, bye. And they went and hired another driver, right? They didn't care.

That's corporate culture. It's an uncaring culture. It's got its goals, and its goals have to do with making profit for its shareholders, and that's the goal. And humanity and human rights for its employees is a secondary goal. It's not the primary goal of any corporation anywhere. And we all kind of live in this society, where we know that's true and then we kind of pretend it's not, but it kind of is.

Yeah. You know, cults are different. Cults are lying to you from day one. A corporation isn't. They'll tell you straight up, these are the rules. You're going to follow them. And if you don't, you're not going to have a job here anymore. And that's how it's going to work.

But if you do follow the rules and you're willing to do this, we'll pay you this, we'll give you X benefits, and we will assure that you can continue to have an existence in this world because we're giving you money. That's the agreement. It's totally up front or most of it is very upfront. And if you look, you can see it's all there. It's called informed consent. Yeah.

A cult does not give you informed consent, not once. You come in and you think you're going down road A and you're actually being put very firmly on road B. And you're told and sold on road B. told and sold on road A. You're told you're going to have this happen to you and this is going to have and you're going to invest a little bit of money and you're going to have the most amazing returns and you're going to have spiritual powers and abilities or you're going to have riches beyond the dreams of Averis, you know, because multi-level marketing does the same crap, right? It's the same

culty kind of paradigm. Right. You get all these promises and all this wonderful talk and all these wonderful words are thrown at you and you're just and it's usually accompanied by an emotional experience which is quite heady right you're like you get to this euphoric you know oh my god scientology is the be all end all of existence and i couldn't believe how great i felt when i signed up because it was so wonderful right um that's induced in you they want you feel in that way because you're not thinking so well when you're in that state and they're not to telling you on day one in Scientology that in order to get to the top level of Scientology, it's going to cost you a million dollars.

Wow. And you're not getting there until you give us a million dollars. And you go, if they told you that on day one, you'd probably be like, that's way too much money for this. Right. So they don't tell you that. And in fact, they absolutely tell you the exact opposite. Oh, no, no, you can do Scientology for very little money. It's not going to cost you much of anything at all.

You can team up with somebody else and you can work with them and it's really cheap and you can go all the way up this bridge to total freedom and it's going to be wonderful. And you're only going to pay a few hundred bucks and no big deal, right? That's not informed consent. That's fraud. That's a lie. that's what they always do. When that's part of the anatomy of the group, when that's part of the recruitment process of the group,

you know you're dealing with a dishonest group. And that's one of the things that is a big difference between a group like Scientology and a group like IBM. Or even the military. It's not like the military isn't straight up with you about what's about to happen when you go into boot camp. There's movies about it. There's books about it.

You can go watch TV. You can read articles about it. You know minute by minute, day by day, exactly what's going to happen to you. And it's not going to be fun. And it's going to be a little traumatizing. And it's going to be really damn difficult. But you know that on day one. And that matters when it comes to how you, you know, sign up for things.

You should know before you go. Yeah. So that's kind of an important point. It's what happens at the beginning and what happens at the end can tell you an awful lot about the nature of a group. On some level, though, like if you look at the military propaganda, like, and you look at movies like Top Gun, you know, or like you look at movies like, like some of the, some of the ways in which they use the advertising. machine in order to get you to sign up for something. And they use things like, hey, man, we're going to spread some democracy. And we're going to get some oil too.

I mean, but mostly democracy. You know, and these people aren't freedom fighters. These are terrorists. Correct. You understand that? There's a difference there. That's right. You know, so like on some level, they're using those same techniques.

And, you know, it's interesting we bring up advertising because I've read, you know, certain accounts of certain advertising firms studying the words of, you know, words of Charles Manson. Like they harness these, these technology, I guess you can call them technologies or cadences or provocative behaviors in order to hook people's attention and stuff like that. But you know, before I jumped too far, did, was it, were there people coming and looking through your trash and threatening

you? Like maybe you could talk a little bit about what it was like to escape this, man. It sounds pretty, oh sure. Yeah, yeah. No, of course. Yeah, no, Scientology is pretty, is pretty nuts. in that regards. I've managed personally to kind of fly kind of under the radar in many, many ways compared to a Leah Remini or a my friender, right, or a Tony Ortega, people who have

really gotten some shalacking. Yeah. You know, and that's okay with me. I'm not in this to get, you know, they inside how do they call it fair gaming? You're fair game, right? They're coming after you. They don't go after everybody, right? I mean, people have gotten really paranoid about this. They think, oh, I don't even want to leave a comment on one of your videos because Scientology is going to come after me. It's like, calm down. It's not, they're not that big and they're not that powerful, right? They're not going to do that. But they do do it.

They do go after high profile people and they do go through their trash and they do follow them around and they do harass them. And they call their family and friends and harass them too. And it's a very vicious, ugly thing that they get up to. these are dedicated efforts to intimidate bully and harass until the critic shuts up the entire point is get them to shut up because they don't want their crimes exposed that's the bottom line right Scientology is a fraudulent activity which rips people off into the tune of millions and millions of dollars and they like that money and they want it to keep coming in and if we're exposing all their abuses they don't like that And they can't argue with the truth because that is the truth.

So they can only reframe it so many different ways. Charles Manson's group was no different, right? Jim Jones's was no different too. They had PRs and PR lines. And a lot of people forget that Jim Jones was a very well-accepted person in the California and even federal governments. You know, like he had ties with all kinds of people. Sun Mung Moon of the Moonies, the Munei's, the Mung.

Unification Church. That guy had his picture taken with five or six different presidents of the United States, you know, powerful people. So these guys are all about harnessing and controlling that power. And when they are threatened, they use that power very liberally to try to destroy their enemies. Hubbard literally wrote, ruin them utterly. That's what you do with critics. So I've gotten off pretty light comparatively. I have a hate website that is still up. You look me up on the internet. You'll find it, right?

Claims I'm a horrible, awful person, and I cheated and I did this and I did that. You know, and it's so third grader in its attitude. It's such a bullying sort of, you know, lame attempt that it's really not harmed me in any real specific way. but it's um but again you know lea remini on the other hand has had her life significantly messed with yeah and uh and that's no joke right and so i'm happy that i can kind of just sluff it off whereas somebody like her um really has to deal with the with the daily problems of it and she's bringing a whole lawsuit against scientology right now uh to get them to stop doing that it's that bad you know gotten that bad for her as someone who consults with former cult members what

patterns or tactics do you often observe in these coercibly controlling environments? How do you guide individuals in breaking free from such an influence? Cool. So the Lifton's eight points are a great guide to figuring out how control is exerted in the first place, right? Through milieu control and through loaded language and enforced confessions and, you know, sacred science and all these various things. So what you do with people when they come out is you educate them first on these. structures on these principles. How is it that control happens in the first place? And by control, I mean undue influence.

I mean people being told what to do or being made to feel certain ways to limit their choices to sort of bind their ability to exert their free will so that it follows only the path that the cult wants, and they don't stray from that path. That's what I mean by control. So, you know, for example, not going to the police to report a crime. Don't get to do that when you're in Scientology. You got to go to Scientology's internal justice system to report crimes. And I'm talking about crimes like sexual assault, like crimes.

Right. Right. You don't get to do that. it's literally in written into scientology's justice codes that you do not publicly disavow Scientology or Scientologists and you don't report them to the media and you don't report them to authorities you report them to Scientology and we'll take care of it that kind of thing right so you start showing people or breaking these down for people as to how this is a controlling apparatus and that it's built on purpose that way.

And once they start seeing that, they go, oh, right. So this and this and this. And you go, yeah, exactly, right? All these little things that didn't look like a big deal at the time, but you start reframing it and seeing how it has been limiting your choices. And that limited choice kind of thing is sort of like, well, you still have choices. So you still experience this idea that you're controlling your fate. or your destiny somehow, but the choices are so limited that you really don't have any choices.

It just looks like that. And that's what you teach people, right? That kind of thing. I usually start with that sort of thing. I also often get into attachment theory and the fact that the psychological, the way we form attachments or relationships with other people, how we attach to them, how the relationships work is often crucial to understanding the cult relationship because it's often a codependent relationship.

And codependency is not a good thing. Yeah. Because what happens is you start defining your own happiness or your own success based on what other people think or say like the cult leader. Yeah. And if he doesn't approve or she doesn't approve or she has something to say about it, oh, I guess I didn't deserve that. I wasn't, you know, I shouldn't be happy, right?

That kind of thing. It's complicated. It's hard to break it down into simple examples, but it's that kind of, that codependency is the same kind of codependency you see in domestic abuse situations. Why can't you just leave? Why didn't you just walk out? Right. It's the stupidest question in the world where you really understand how this stuff works,

that you can't just walk out. Your entire life is structured around this person or this group. So destructuring that, deconstructing that is the process that we call recovery. And learning how it works, talking it through, journaling, watching shows, you know, anything that kind of produces some catharsis is valid. And all of these things provide that, right, as well as, of course, getting some actual therapy if there is trauma or, you know, other issues that need to be dealt with along the way. Because sometimes cults will induce dissociative states. Yeah. Yep. Right?

These out-of-body experiences, for example, or, you know, these sort of ethereal sort of awe-induced sort of, you know, you chant or you might. meditate for 10 hours straight and you're in this very altered state of thinking, that's all by design. That's on purpose. And they're taking you places that are pretty psychologically unhealthy. So, you know, undoing that kind of stuff can involve therapy. But I think education is really where it's at. Do you think that, like, David and Tom sit down and they speak about, like, this is just a total

speculation, but you know, like on some level, I try to imagine like what it would be like to have that kind of power and to start thinking about those kind of power dynamics and like, listen, we need to continue to get people to think this way or are they totally consumed with like, yes, El Ron Hubbard was a God and we had that same thing in us. Do they believe what they're telling people? Are they aware, you know, which world are they living in? Are they a manifestation of God? Or are they a sort of huckster that is like drunk on power?

It's interesting because it tends to be a little bit of both. I could see that. Yeah, it tends to be, again, you know, spectrum-based thinking, right? It's not a black and white binary. Right. Elron Hubbard was the same, right? And it can be very different for each person, a martialist. Applewhite, 100% committed.

Obviously, a true believer. Committed. He went all the way. I shouldn't laugh. I apologize for laughing, but it's, that's commitment. That's right. He was. He was.

Now, does that mean anything he had to say was true? No. Right? So it doesn't, it's a separate thing from the truth of a thing as to how committed somebody is to it. Now, that being said, it's a source of much speculation in the ex-Scientology world, just how committed David Miscavage is to Scientology. When you go all the way?

Versus how much does he know it's a con. Yeah. And the same applied to Elron Hubbard in many ways. There are very interesting personal writings that Elron Hubbard wrote pre-Scientology, which indicated that he had deep and real occult. magic beliefs. Right. And that he wanted as a life goal to exert his will and dominate the will of others.

That was in his own private writings. So you can't ignore that. You go, wow, this guy was a real megalomaniac. This guy was on a real power trip. Yeah. But at the same time, in those same writings, he's acknowledging his disabilities and his disfunctions and his problems and issues that he was clearly struggling. struggling with and his self-loathing and his fits of depression and anxiety and drinking

and drugs that he was using to try to deal with that. And you look at a man who is a very broken, unstable, self-hating individual. And you go, wow, but this exists in the same guy. This is a complicated individual, as are we all, right? Once you really get into the psychology, you start realizing, damn. We got a lot of layers to us. On Tuesday, we're the megalomaniac, and on Wednesday, we're, you know, the alcoholic fit of depression. Yeah.

Same body, same mind, radically different places. And Elron Hubbard also, for example, might have actually had a physical problem with his brain, which we call temporal lobe epilepsy. This is a pretty well-studied thing now, but when El Ron Hubbard was around, it was not. And that can cause, lesions in the brain can actually cause epileptic seizures, which cause and induce religious mania and fervent religious belief to the point that a person who suffers from TLE could believe that they are God. And literally have a conversation with you as though they are fully believing they are during the time of their seizure. So could that be an explanation for some of Elron Hubbard's behavior? It absolutely could be. So I bring up El Ron Hubbard because, you know, we've kind of dived into him a lot.

He is the source of Scientology. Miscavage is an offshoot of that. He was a young man who grew up in Scientology, his second generation, just like I was. And he bought into it fully and completely. He felt it cured his asthma when he was a teenager. It did. He still has asthma. but it did so much for it that he thought it cured it.

And he fully hooked on. And in a couple of years, he was right under the old man working for Hubbard. I mean, he was that dedicated and that intent on doing Scientology. And within a few years after that, Hubbard died and Muscovich was in the power position and he took over. And it seems pretty clear that he was a true believer the entire time, meaning he was all in. He absolutely believed in Elron Hubbard. and the workability of Elron Hubbard's methods. So does he still, after all these years and all these failures and all these problems,

does he still a true believer? We actually don't know. Maybe yes, maybe no. There's indications on both sides. It's a little hard to tell, right? Mind reading is difficult. So it gets interesting. What I can say for sure, based on all the knowledge that I do have and people that I've spoken with who were in the inner circle, it seems very, very clear that Tom Cruise is an absolute dedicated religious fanatic.

He's all in on Scientology. He absolutely believes it's all true. He is at the highest levels of Scientology. He's gone all the way to the top. And from his point of view, it's not exactly that hard to understand. He's only the single most successful actor who ever lived. Yeah. He's only one of the most admired people on this entire planet.

I mean, he's kind of accomplished all his goals and he keeps accomplishing more. Yeah. And he personally credits Scientology for that. Now, I wouldn't credit Scientology for that. Right. He does. So he's as true a believer as you ever going to get. That also means there's another side to Tom Cruise, which we probably don't have time to get into today, which is a very dark side.

Because Scientology imbues in people not only a successful go-get-em hyper-focused attitude, it also imbues an awful lot of awful in people. Cruz has abused his family. He is taking advantage of people in very, very gross and disgusting ways in terms of practically, you know, slave labor for him. I mean, his whole life has been sort of, what's the word, infiltrated by Scientology. His personal staff or Scientologists, you know, that kind of thing, right? He doesn't see his own daughter because of Scientology. that's why he won't see surrey right and she's almost an adult now um he just eschews that entire

thing because of scientology he could have been a wonderful father to his daughter i'm sure he's got a lot of good traits yeah but the scientology makes him crazy and i mean crazy like full blown he believes crazy things and he believes that they're absolutely true so um so that's tom cruise right So it's a mixed bag. It's like there's all this good. There's all this charity work. There's all this incredible entertainment that he provides people. But then there's this dark side.

And people don't want to see or acknowledge that dark side exists. They just don't want to. They're too entertained by him. And he's got that winning smile, you know? And that's human beings. And that's taken me a lot of years to come to a place where I'm okay with that. Because I used to grit my teeth and just be so. upset with people that they couldn't see what I could see. But how could they? They don't know all the

things I know, right? So it's a difficult proposition, you know. But in terms of intent, at the end of the day, whether the cult leader really believes in their mantras and their belief system or not is of secondary importance to me to the abuses that they engage in, regardless of whether they believe it or not. That's well said. You know? Yeah. yeah it's so like you know i think we lack the language to fully communicate meaning and feelings to one another sure and in that like you know in that like you could tons of people do and you can easily make the argument the elron hubbard has the divine spark you know what i mean like i don't mean that like in a good positive way of like divinity and and

Who am I to interpret divinity? But I mean, by saying that, like, if you look at what his writings have left behind, on one level, you can see this trailer park of despair. Or you can see this incredible pathway to achieving wealth and riches beyond your means, you know, just depending on which lens you do. And like, maybe that's a sign that that spark is in all of us. And which one do you want to nurture? And how easy a good idea.

idea can go bad. That's right. It's so amazing to me, man. No, I agree. I agree completely. It is amazing. And I have sat and stood in wonder at some of this, you know, because it is quite amazing. It is.

It can be amazingly good or amazingly bad, you know, depending on the context again, right? Of course. See, Cruz and Scientologists who are successful are that. way because they emulate Elrond Hubbard's personality in that they are willing to step on anybody to accomplish their goals. They're willing to destroy anybody who gets in their path as long as they get what they want. So from their point of view, they are highly successful. I mean, this even goes back to Nietzsche, right?

I mean, master philosophy, master morality. The Ubermitch. Right, versus the slave morality, right? And Scientology and Elron Hubbard very much considers himself master philosophy, right? The Uber man. That is what it's all about. And when you're in that framing of the world, the only thing that really matters to you is what matters to you. No one else matters.

And then there's those of us who kind of have a more communal approach to the world. We kind of want everybody to get along. And we'd rather have a level playing field where everybody can kind of, interact with one another and have an equal chance and opportunity and that kind of thing. That's what we would really like to see. That's not what those guys want. And they develop this morality built around that and they act accordingly. And it can and it is capable, that morality is capable of taking an individual CEO level,

movie car level, you know, grand leader level, right, president of the United States level. it doesn't necessarily take you to a place where you actually help a lot of people or where you're really doing a lot of good for anybody but you, you know? And that can be rough because people want that level of success and that degree of wealth or opportunity or influence or power. But the road to that is often paved, you know, on the dead bodies of those you have to destroy to get there. And that's what Scientology teaches you is how to do that. If you take all the teachings and you apply it in that way, you can be a Tom Cruise. But you're going to leave behind

you a lot of broken people. And if that's okay with you, then you and I have a problem, right? Because that's not what I think is moral behavior. And that's why I do what I do is because It's not just about success or wealth or influence or power. There's more to this world in life than that. You know? Yeah, I do. That's my moral preaching on the matter, but that's where I come from in this. You know, it reminds me of when you talk about Tom or David or, you know, pick your, pick your maniacal leader.

Yeah. You know, I think John Ronson wrote a book called The Psychopath Test. And you can read that book. And in the back of that book, there's a quiz that you can take. And I think he makes the point in that book, too, that, you know, our, in the Western world, it seems that we are beginning to self-select leadership based on attributes in that psychopath test. And if you start rising up the ladder of power, more and more people have those attributes. And like, look where we are today.

They kind of manifest itself like, oh, these are the attributes of someone who's a psychopath who doesn't really, care too much about the well-being of others as long as they accomplish their goals like look where that's gotten us right that's right no that's that's exactly right and that's that's the flaw inherent in the system that ultimately causes or brings about revolutions in the system which is the self-correcting mechanism for when psychopaths get too much power um is we have a revolution right and often it's violent which is very unfortunate because there's usually this phase where some other psychopath rises to the occasion to do the revolt, and then we have to get rid of them too.

Yeah. You know, one of the grand, amazing things about the American experiment, you know, of U.S. democracy or U.S. government is that we had a violent revolution, but it wasn't a bunch of psychopaths leading it. And we didn't have the Maoist, let's line up all the intellectuals and let's line up all the academics and let's line up all the troublemakers and let's kill all of them at the first step in our glorious new world right right that we didn't do that in the united states and that that that i believe was an exception to the rule of how revolution usually goes and then we built a system

based on the idea that people have rights and that those rights matter and while it wasn't everybody universally at the beginning it you know it more and more and more is because we have a system that built to self-correct itself. Yeah. Which is, again, a rarity in our world. So this is why I, you know, I look at our system here in the U.S. right now, for example, and I'm kind of biased toward it. Of course, I've grown up in it too.

But, you know, I have good reasons to support it. Authoritarian systems of control always emerge when people at the lowest levels are stressing out and freaking out and losing their damn minds because, they feel, and often rightfully so, that their lives are not what they could be or should be, and they want more, or they want, you know, a better quality of life, or at least a living wage, right? Like in the United States right now. And we're kind of ruining this experiment through the rise of the psychopathy. And as they wrote all the way back at the beginning, if you're a student of history,

with the Federalist Papers, you have factions, right? which they warned us about, right? And yet here we are with political parties, and we've only got two of them. I mean, I could go on all day about the inequities of our current system and the sort of destruction that's built into it. But eventually, this stuff all works out, you know,

one way or another. And when you keep moving on, you know. Yeah. So I'm more of an optimist than a pessimist, to be honest. You know, I can rail about these inequities and stuff. But I feel our system is capable of self change. And I'd like to see more of that in our world, you know, rather than just let's get each other's, you know,

let's pitchfork each other in the throats. I think that's a ridiculous way to conduct ourselves these days. And I think social media is partly to blame for that. And I think our media has a lot to answer for in terms of its clickbait advertising. based model. I think that was an incredibly horrible decision, I think now early on in our news media thing and all of that. So there's a lot of irons in the fire as to why things are the way they are. But I wish it were simpler. Yeah. And I wish I could talk about it in more simple ways, but I'm just too much of a nuanced guy, you know. Well, I think it comes from lived experience

and knowing that there is no simple answer. That's right. There's a true power in having the empathy and the patience to try and listen to the other side and put yourself in that spot. Like, that's how problems get solved. Like, look, I get it. Okay, tell me what it is. Oh, shit, I never thought about it from that angle.

Okay. Okay. And then, you know, that's how we move this thing forward. And, like, that's kind of what gives me hope right now is that even though there seems to be two sides at end, like they're coming to loggerheads. Like that's when it gets so bad you have to solve something. You know, and a lot, history shows that sometimes it, it turns into Israel and Palestine, or sometimes it turns into right or left or two political parties.

But, you know, I think that enough people, and just look at the symptom of this, like, here you are leaving this institution. You had the courage to leave a family, a community, a foundational structure with which you were brought up in a set of beliefs that you believed your whole life. Like that is progress. You know what? Not anymore. I think something's wrong. I'm going to change.

And it's those small changes we do as individuals. It's those, the individual becoming a thorough, authentic version of themselves, the best version of themselves that changes. society. And when we all do that, the change happens around us, I think, on some level. But I got to tell you, Chris, this is, this is fascinating, man. And I, you have to come back because I got two questions and I have 12. So, well, you know, I wish I could say that was a, not a common thing, but it happens all the time. I am more than happy to talk more about all this stuff. We've gotten into some really interesting fundamental stuff here. And I, yeah, I, I, I, I really thank you for providing a, I didn't quite expect this.

This was really quite, quite good. And what you had to say in your emails was true. You really are open to lots and lots of ideas about things. And that's great because that's how we actually have real conversations and not just political, ideological diatribes. Yeah. Yeah. I think we need a lot more of that. Me too.

I think people are like, I like to think that. most people, I want to hear your opinion and maybe it's right, maybe it's wrong, maybe it's misguided. I know for me, like,

maybe this is not the best way to do it, but I think most people are like me and are like, I say things all the time that are wrong, but I'm happy to be corrected. I'm happy to be like,

oh, I never thought about it from that angle. You're right, you know what? I'm sorry for that, or I didn't know. I was naive. I didn't know, man. Sure, sure.

And people are misguided. They want to know, and they give the illusion of knowing. I know this. You know how I know? because I live my life like this. Well, maybe you shouldn't.

Why not? Right. You know? Right. So. Now you're absolutely right. And these, and you know, the, the word that we've forgotten, the word that seems to be disappearing from public discourse these days is compromise. I love it.

You know? And it's what our, it's, it's the one concept that our entire government is based on. Our entire social structure in the United States is based on. because we're the melting pot, right? We're the place where all the different cultures come together. And to think that you're going to set up something like that and there isn't going to be conflict, of course there's going to be. On a routine basis, there's going to be.

Conflict is not the bug. It is a feature of our society that there is conflict. It's the ability to compromise with that conflict that we've lost sight of. And that's the extremism of the both ends of any spectrum, is it's our way or the highway. There is no compromise possible. And that's where we're, that's the way that our society is becoming more culty.

Yeah. And that's what we need to get the brakes applied to. We need to slow that down and we need to get more towards the middle again where we can recognize nuance and differences, you know, shades of gray. Yeah. And we can recognize that just because we think a thing doesn't know. necessarily mean it's true. And be willing to be open to other ideas.

You know, it's taken me a long time to be able to say that across the entire spectrum of my life. But at this point, the only real cure for cultism is to not commit 100% to anything. Because you'll never going to know before you go into something the full experience of it. Yeah. You can't. have to experience it.

Yeah. So never let yourself go 100%. I really don't care about what it is, what culture war value, morality issue, religious issue, political issue, it doesn't matter. Don't go 100%. Because when you do, you're doing yourself the disservice of not being able to think anymore about that topic because it's just this. You know, you lose your critical thing.

thinking and you and you become so emotionally invested that it becomes part of your identity. And once it's part of your identity, it's too late. You've committed. You've overcommitted to it, you know? And that's where that's that if there was one thing, you know, if it was one thing I could get across to people, it would be that. That's well said. Thank you.

Yeah. This is fun, man. I really enjoyed it. But before I let you go, like work. people find you? What do you have coming up? Is the book for sale? Is this a part two? Is there another part? Like, what can people get it? Absolutely. Can you sign copies or what's going on?

Yeah, yeah. No, all good questions. Okay, so this is my book. I will be writing more, but this one is it right now. If you want to know about Scientology, this is the book. Okay. There is actually two books to read. This is one of them. It's called Scientology. It is Enu. And this is not my memoir. This is a breakdown of Scientology. If you want to know all about it, it's in here. The other book to read, by the way, is John A. Tax, a piece of blue sky. That's also another good one. You can find me on YouTube under my name, Chris Shelton, Chris Shelton, M.C. I am really not trying to be egotistical, by the way, by putting letters after my name. It was just too damn hard to get that degree. So I put it there, right? It was just, it was a major accomplishment in my life, so I'm proud of it. But I've got a channel. I've got a YouTube channel. I have a podcast. that I will be, it's coming out in the new year,

it's going to be called Speaking of Cults up till now it's been called the sensibly speaking podcast. But it's all on my YouTube channel and it's all on my website, mncriticalthinking.com. Yeah, everybody.

I thought, what about dionetics? Isn't that, when I was growing up, there was dionetics everywhere. And like, that was sort of my first look into this thing. And I never read it,

but it seemed like it was really blown up. Is that affiliated with, with Scientology? That's how it all started. Elron Hebrd wrote Dianetics in 1950. It was released in May 1950 as the modern

science of mental health, quote unquote. And within a year, within a year and a half, it was bankrupted. I mean, it was a legit bestseller. It was a total,

it went viral. Yeah, it did. Yeah, it went totally viral in 1950. And then then it went bankrupt. And out of, the ashes of that, Elron Hubbard formed a religion called Scientology.

Interesting. Yeah. So fascinating. Ladies and gentlemen, go check out Chris Shelton's YouTube channel. Check out his book. If you know somebody that may have found themselves in a situation where they're being coercibly controlled, this is the guy to talk to. This is someone who has fundamentally changed the way he sees the world.

But beyond all that, he has lived experience of the techniques that were perpetrated against. to him and he used in some ways. Like, this is a guy that knows. So go and reach out to him if you find yourself in Hawaii. We have a cult on Molokai. Like if you're in Hawaii and you've been part of that cult, or if you find yourself anywhere in the world or if you, I think that your work leverages over into the world of well-being and mental

illness and abusive relationships. So anybody that's curious about coercive behavior, this is a guy to talk to. Go down to the show notes, check him out, reach out to him. He's a really fun and interesting and intelligent person to talk to. to. So please go check him out. Listen to his YouTube channel. Get the book. And that's all we got for today. Chris, hang on briefly afterwards. I'll speak with you. But I just want to say to everyone out there listening, thank you so much for being here. I hope you have a wonderful weekend. Aloha. Bye-bye.