New York City Skeptics Paul Grosswald Cults Scientology

A few weeks ago the New York City Skeptics sponsored a lecture by Paul Grosswald on cults & coercion. The lecture is now available online, and holy crap you have to listen to this. The first half or so is interesting but nothing special, as he lays out some of the general principles by which cults operate, but in the second half he talks about his personal experiences in Scientology, and everyone in the audience was just transfixed. This is one of the craziest stories I’ve ever heard. Here’s a sample:

So they sat me down in a room. They had these two people dressed in their military Sea Org uniforms, and they had a man and a woman, and the man was somebody I had previously met in Scientology, so I kind of had a buddy-buddy relationship with him, and then the woman was, you know, an extraordinarily beautiful woman, and she was flirting with me and telling me how great it would be if we could be in the Sea Org together, and she was like from Louisiana, she had this really charming Southern accent, and they’re working me. There would be times when she would get up and leave and I’d be alone with the guy, and I’d be bonding with him, and then he’d leave and she’d come back. This went on for five hours, and I now know that the woman had been at the Long Island center where I’d worked previously, and so certainly would have had access to my auditing files. Because when I was talking to them I was amazed at how much these people seemed to know about me, it was like they could see right into my soul, you know? They say the files are confidential, but obviously they’re not. So they’re like pushing my buttons and getting me to be upset, and I’d be crying, and then they would calm me down, and then get me to cry again, calm me down. This is torture, this is psychological torture, for five hours they’re doing this, and now I’m like an emotional wreck, my head is spinning, and then they say, because, you know, I didn’t want to drop out of school, so they say, “Look, suppose you stay in school, and you have a good education, and you get a good job, in fifty years you’re going to be dead, what’s the point? But if you join us, you’ll live forever.”