The whistleblowers shall set you free
Good Morning & Happy July, fellow “Disgruntled Ex-Students” and Rule Breakers!
Independence Day holds special significance for me. One silver lining of my 5 years in cult lite: I really get freedom. For as Tom Waits sings in San Diego Serenade, “Never saw the morning, till I stayed up all night.”
I never understood that free speech equals free minds, until I gave my voice away. Never understood the old saying, The Truth Will Set you Free, until I found the truth in a website called Esoteric Freedom. It exposed “school” lies. That freed my mind.
Here’s a source of truth for you: My Life in a Cult. The author spent 23 years in corporate HQ (i.e. School, NYC). This article is an excerpt from his forthcoming memoir. Perhaps his story will mirror yours. Perhaps you will see that a new “friend” is vetting you, or did vet you.
My recovery required understanding what happened. I wound through and unravelled “school’s” convoluted “clever insincerity”. It was 2011 and Esoteric Freedom exposed the cult’s seedy history, additional classrooms, “businesses”, arranged marriages, bizarre baby-swapping practices and the like. The lies became so stark that my cult coma snapped. Key moments that had always haunted me suddenly, made sense – for example when Lisa, my recruiter, told me, ” … I met my husband in an acting class. It’s hard to explain.” I thought, “Oh my God, ‘school’ arranged her marriage! No wonder she changed the subject.”
Esoteric Freedom handed me the key: truth. I released my story into this blog, stumbling and bumbling into recovery — reclamation of self though authentic voice. I will forever be grateful to Esoteric Freedom and the site’s creator, who took risks to expose the cult as a public service.
Unfortunately, “school’s” scumbag legal maneuvers took the site down — that’s what cults do, after all. Cults don’t like being called cults. L. Ron Hubbard built the litigation template for cults and “school” implemented the Scientology strategy. Those with wealth can intimidate and silence whistleblowers through the courts. Free speech anyone?
But truth does come out eventually and it will help you. So, I strongly recommend, this thoughtful, raw and honest account of how and why “school” ensnared an intelligent, articulate, educated young man for 2-plus decades. Truth is the medicine that your soul needs. There are reasons too vast for me to explain here why these con games work. (I’m writing my own book about that). For me, these two graphs boiled down the intentions of ALL cults. They all use the same playbook, altering details slightly, to isolate and foster dependency. I thank both of these whistleblowers and I look forward to the reading the entire book.
