Brainwashing the Brainwashed (More on Scientology Recruitment)

This booklet is called Brainwashing – A Synthesis of the Russain Textbook on Psychopolitics and it has a long and fascinating history both in and out of the Church of Scientology. Researcher and historian Chris Owen has published a two-part history of this book on Tony Ortega’s Underground Bunker blog and links to that article are in the description section below. He describes how it was not only written anonymously by L. Ron Hubbard in 1955 with the specific intent of deceiving the FBI and Scientologists, but also how it became the tool of unwitting far right political groups around the world due to a series of amazing and hard-to-believe events. I can assure you they are true and that this book is all too real. Even though it doesn’t have a Hubbard attribution and has been re-printed and assigned other authorship, to this day this book is still familiar to some Scientologists. In fact, the purpose of this video is to add to Chris Owen’s article by laying out for you how I not only read this book and believed it when I was a Scientologist, but how I actually used it to brainwash Scientologists into joining the Sea Organization, Scientology’s diehard inner core which keeps it going around the world. The Sea Org are the guys who work 24/7 for Scientology and are the ones who sign billion year contracts of commitment. Getting someone to join the Sea Org is not an easy task and usually involves hours or even days of working them over with high pressure sales tactics and indoctrinating them into how bad off the world is and how much they are needed to save it. So in effect, I used this book to brainwash the brainwashed.

I’m going to go over exactly how I used this book in recruitment, but first I want to give a little background on how I fell for this. In a video I made about a year ago called Scientology’s Totally Insane Recruitment Methods (also linked below), I described a series of PowerPoint presentations which were put together by a very well known Sea Org recruiter who recruited hundreds if not thousands of people into the Sea Org during the time he was in. We called this “The Briefing” and there were some quotes from this book in it. If you haven’t seen that video, I highly recommend it so you get the full story on how we conned people to join the Sea Org. Some of what I’ll go over here will parallel what is gone over in that video.

In January 2009, I went to Seattle Org to try my hand at Sea Org recruitment too. While there, I came across a random copy of this Brainwashing booklet and snagged it right up because I knew how rare it was to find a copy. I read the whole thing and was absolutely enthralled by it. At first I thought it was a legit publication as laid out in its Editorial Note. As I went over in that earlier video, I had already been conditioned by Hubbard from many of his books and lectures to believe in a lot of conspiracy-based nonsense and this book fit right in with that.

When I read the book, I noted there are some unmistakeable parallels to Dianetics and Scientology in the text, with some of the phrases and expressions pulled right out of Hubbard’s work. In an effort to make that make sense, I concluded that since the book was reprinted by the Church, Hubbard himself may have synthesized it with the original manuscript of the Brainwashing Manual which Hubbard claimed to receive received “under mysterious circumstances” at the Phoenix Foundation. But I also thought that perhaps some of the basic Dianetic concepts were in Russia because of a story Hubbard told. I couldn’t find a copy of the letter itself but it’s quoted on Arnie Lerma’s site and this fits in with my recollection exactly. Hubbard is talking about the Russians in a letter he wrote to President John F. Kennedy in 1963 and he said:

“Their interest goes back to 1938 when I was offered Pavlov’s laboratories by Russia and large sums to go there and complete my work Excalibur. In 1942 the first manuscript of the work Excalibur was stolen in Miami, Florida. In 1950 the only other copy vanished by theft, in Los Angeles.”

Excalibur was an early manuscript Hubbard wrote back in 1938 which has never seen the light of day but which Hubbard said contained the most basic principles of Diaentics and Scientology. So this gave me the idea that the Rusisans had not only ripped off the Excalibur manuscript but that they were perfectly aware of who L. Ron Hubbard was and his work all the way back in 1938. Combining that story and how Hubbard had been offered work in Russia to figure out how to dominate the minds of men, I thought that it was conceivable that Rusisan intelligence/KGB were aware of the Dianetics/Scientology lingo and appropriated those concepts in their own nefarious work. The Editorial Note by “Charles Stickley” affirmed this line of thinking, since he apparently was not a Scientologist but was acknowledging that Christian Science and Dianetics were antipathetic to Soviet programs.

Of course, as a Scientologist I was also predisposed to believe anything Hubbard said. Stickley also seemed to be on “our side” when it came to psychiatric influences and how the care of the insane shouldn’t be left up to them because they served other masters.

I similarly did not fact check the “Address by Beria” at the beginning, but instead simply looked up who Beria was and used that information to reinforce that, of course, he would have said these kinds of things and wanted psychopolitics to succeed. Chris Owen shows how the truth is somewhat different in his article.

Now let’s talk about Scientology recruitment. First I would go over the existence of the Brainwashing Manual itself and the story from Hubbard about how it came to be in a Scientology group so as to establish its credibility. Then I’d start sharing quotes from the book.

Almost the entire Beria section would be gone over, but to save time, here are the most relevant parts:

“By psychopolitics our chief goals are effectively carried forward. To produce a maximum of chaos in the culture of the enemy is our first most important step. Our fruits are grown in chaos, distrust, economic depression and scientific turmoil. At least (sic) a weary populace can seek peace only in our offered Communist State, at last only Communism can resolve the problems of the masses.

“A psychopolitician must work hard to produce the maximum chaos in the fields of ‘mental healing’. He must recruit and use all the agencies and facilities of ‘mental healing’. He must labour to increase the personnel and facilities of ‘mental healing’ until at last the entire field of mental science is entirely dominated by Communist principles and desires.

“To achieve these goals the psychopolitician must crush every ‘home-grown’ variety of mental healing in America.”

This is where I would then talk about how Russia has had it in for Dianetics and Scientology since before they were even formal subjects because they knew that effective mental technology would undo their ability to do “pain-drug-hypnosis” and other Manchurian Candidate tactics. If the person I was recruiting had never heard Hubbard’s story of fighting off the Russians, I’d tell them all about it and how they even tried to kill Hubbard by sneaking in to his room one night with a syringe but he stopped them.

“You must labour until we have dominion over the minds and bodies of every important person in your nation. You must achieve such disrepute for the state of insanity and such authority over its pronouncement that not one statesman so labelled could again be given credence by his people. You must work until suicide arising from mental imbalance is common and calls forth no general investigation or remark.”

“With the institutions for the insane you have in your country prisons which can hold a million persons and can hold them without civil rights or any hope of freedom. And upon these people can be practiced shock and surgery so that never again will they draw a sane breath. You must make these treatments common and accepted. And you must sweep aside any treatment or any group of persons seeking to treat by effective means.”

This reinforces the entire Hubbard doctrine that psychiatry is the execution arm for the dark conspiracy against not just Scientology but all of mankind. Psychiatry was setup as a tool of ideological enforcement early on.

Then, as though prescient and fully aware of the capabilities of something like Dianetics, Beria warns that a group might come along with the ability to undue their brainwashing.

“…should independent researchers actually discover means to undo psychopolitical procedures, you must not rest, you must not eat or sleep, you must not stint one tiniest bit of available money to campaign against it, discredit it, strike it down and render it void. For by an effective means all our actions and researches could be undone.”

This was all the incentive we ever needed to know that we were doing the right thing in taking psychiatry out. Many of the rest of the quotes from the book just reinforced this.

Now to get into the actual meat of the book itself. It’s 50+ pages long, so I didn’t have time in an interview to have someone read the whole book. Instead, I went through and highlighted certain sections and walked them through it. Let’s see what gems of genius are contained here:

In chapter one, psychopolitics itself is defined:

“Psychopolitics is the art and science of asserting and maintaining dominion over the thoughts and loyalties of individuals, officers, bureaux, and masses, and the effecting of the conquest of enemy nations through ‘mental healing’.”

In chapter two, a theory is presented of a nation-state being composed of individuals analogous to the cells of a human body, all working together efficiently to forward the goals of the organism. However, when individual cells act on their own determinism and against the interests of the group, then those cells are like a virus that must be destroyed lest they infect the entire organism. The goal of psychopolitics is basically to get everyone on the same page by destroying rugged individualism, personal determinism, self-will, imagination and personal creativity.

“The constitution of Man, as an individual body, or the constitution of a State or a portion of the State as a political organism are analogous. It is the mission of Psychopolitics first to align the obedience and goals of the group, and then maintain their alignment by the eradication of the effectiveness of the persons and personalities which might swerve the group toward disaffection. In our own nation, where things are better managed and where reason reigns above all else, it is not difficult to eradicate the self-willed bacteria which might attack one of our political entities. But in the field of conquest, in nations less enlightened, where the Russian State does not yet have power, it is not as feasible to remove the entire self-willed individual.”

Part of the appeal of Scientology is it’s promise to improve or rehabilitate a person’s power of self-determinism and spiritual ability. The carrot that is dangled in front of Scientologists from day one is the power to control and shape their own life, to be “cause over life” as Hubbard put it. So this whole chapter is presented as the antithesis of what Scientology promises. The irony, of course, being that Scientology’s actual goal is to create a slave-like mentality where members not only feel bad for not turning over their time and money to the Church, but will actually compete with one another over who can give more than anyone else.

In chapter three, economics is discussed. The very first sentence was one of those Hubbardian giveaways when he uses a Scientology term: beingness.

“Man is subject to certain desires and needs which are as natural to his beingness as they are to that of any other animal. Man, however, has the peculiarity of exaggerating some of these beyond the bounds of reason. This is obvious through the growth of leisure classes, pseudo-intellectual groups, the ‘petite bourgeoise’, Capitalism, and other ills.

“It has been said, with truth, that one-tenth of a man’s life is concerned with politics and nine-tenths with economics. Without food, the individual dies. Without clothing, he freezes. Without houses and weapons, he is prey to the starving wolves. The acquisition of sufficient items to answer these necessities of food, clothing, and shelter, in reason, is the natural right of a member of an enlightened State. An excess of such items brings about unrest and disquiet. The presence of luxury items and materials, and the artificial creation and whetting of appetites, as in Capitalist advertising, are certain to accentuate the less-desirable characteristics of Man.”

It’s funny because while this rejection of material wealth and gain is espoused here as a communist principle, we’d actually frame this as true when recruiting someone for the Sea Org. You don’t need all that stuff. MEST things are just a trap. It seems that a lot of Hubbard’s actual beliefs were incorporated into the Brainwashing Manual, disguised as Russian propaganda.

“Desire and want are a state of mind. Individuals can be educated into desiring and wanting more than they can ever possibly obtain, and such individuals are unhappy. Most of the self-willed characteristics of the Capitalists come entirely from greed. He exploits the worker far beyond any necessity on his own part, as a Capitalist, to need.

“In a nation where economic balances are not controlled, the appetite of the individual is unduly whetted by enchanting and fanciful persuasions to desire, and a type of insanity ensues, where each individual is persuaded to possess more than he can use, and to possess it even at the expense of his fellows.”

Here we’d stop and take a minute to agree, because of Scientology principles of exchange, that seeking too much material wealth or gain was a losing proposition that would only ensnare a person even more into the trap of the physical universe. Then we’d turn around and use the next quote to make the point that we live in a society that promotes material wealth but punishes dissenters by taking that economic security away and that this whole mechanism is a premeditated plot, that anti-Western forces were hard at work to make economic prosperity a trap, a game you could never win:

“A continuous hope for prosperity must be indoctrinated into the masses with many dreams and visions of glut of commodity, and this hope must be counter-played against the actuality of privation and the continuous threat of loss of all economic factors in case of disloyalty to the State in order to suppress the individual wills of the masses.”

Most people had a bit of a hard time totally understanding this economic stuff, but if we made the point that if they were struggling, that was because there were forces hard at work making sure of that. If they were doing alright or were affluent, we made the point that they may be gaming the system now but that success was going to be short-lived because the system was rigged against them, to make them think that they could succeed but would end up taking it all away and there was nothing they’d be able to do about it. The purpose of this was to make them realize that they were just pawns on the board, cogwheels in a vast money machine that they did not control and weren’t even really aware of. Because people, especially the ones I was recruiting, don’t understand much about economics especially on a macro level, if you come off sounding like you know what you are talking about, most people will believe you.

In addition to the Brainwashing Manual, we were also aided in this by Hubbard’s other writings about how twelve men, most of them international bankers and financiers, were the ones who truly pulled the levers of power, decided who was going to hold elected office and gave our nations’ leaders their marching orders. If I could make you believe that all of international finance and global geopolitical economics boils down to something as simple as some council of twelve calling all the shots, I can pretty much get you to believe anything.

Oh, and for those who wonder about Hubbard’s, and thus Scientologist’s views on taxation, Hubbard gives away his real feelings on the matter here:

“The masses must at last come to believe that only excessive taxation of the rich can relieve them of the ‘burdensome leisure class’ and can thus be brought to accept such a thing as income tax, a Marxist principle smoothly slid into Capitalistic framework in 1909 in the United States. This even though the basic law of the United States forbade it and even though Communism at that time had been active only a few years in America.”

This idea that taxation is theft is a right-wing concept which libertarians love and most Republicans agree with. This prinicple defines much of Hubbard’s economic thinking and is preached liberally throughout his lectures to Scientologists, which is one of the reasons many Scientologists and even ex-Scientologists are so right-leaning politically. In doing recruitment for the Sea Org, I never failed to bring this up using these quotes to show how our own government was no different from a highway robber. By this point in the briefing, I usually had people so convinced that they never thought to question me about the need for things like Social Security, infrastructure or even the military. It’s not hard to convince people the government is out to get them, especially here in the United States. I would then use lines like this one to reinforce that idea:

“The rich, the skilled in finance, the well informed in government are particular and individual targets for the psychopolitician. His is the role of taking off the board those individuals who would halt or corrupt Communist economic programmes. Thus every rich man, every statesman, every person well informed and capable in government must have brought to his side as a trusted confidant a psychopolitical operator.”

With this kind of thinking, McCarthyism can run rampant. I could point the finger at any politician I didn’t like and say they had been subverted by the psychopoliticians and were now working for the other side. How would someone be subverted? Well, here’s one answer, bringing back the psychiatric connection:

“The families of these persons are often deranged from idleness and glut, and this fact must be played upon, even created. The normal health and wildness of a rich man’s son must be twisted and perverted and explained into neurosis and then, assisted by a timely administration of drugs or violence, turned into criminality or insanity. This brings at once some one in ‘mental healing’ into confidential contact with the family, and from this point on the very most must then be made of that contact.

“Communism could best succeed if, at the side of every rich or influential man there could be placed a psychopolitical operator, an undoubted authority in the field of ‘mental healing’ who could then, by his advice or guided opinions, or through the medium of a wife or daughter, direct the optimum policy to embroil or upset the economic policies of the country and, when the time comes to do away forever with the rich or influential man, to administer the proper drug or treatment to bring about his complete demise in an institution as a patient or his death by suicide.

“Planted beside a country’s powerful persons the psychopolitical operator can also guide other policies to the betterment of our battle.”

In chapter 5, called An Examination of Loyalties, we went into the techniques supposed being used against the West by Communist countries to bend or change their will. Hubbard spends quite some time going over similar territory to what we’ve already covered, with control of leaders being exerted through psychiatric means to subdue them or their family members. But he then brings another concept into the mix which irrefutably comes from Scientology:

“In rearranging loyalties we must have a command of their values. In the animal the first loyalty is to himself. This is destroyed by demonstrating errors to him, showing him that he does not remember, cannot act or does not trust himself. The second loyalty is to his family unit, his parents and brothers and sisters. This is destroyed by making a family unit economically non-dependent, by lessening the value of marriage, by making an easiness of divorce and by raising the children wherever possible by the State. The next loyalty is to his friends and local environment. This is destroyed by lowering his trust and bringing about reportings upon him allegedly by his fellows or the town or village authorities. The next is to his State and this, for the purposes of Communism, is the only loyalty which should exist once the state is founded as a Communist State. To destroy loyalty to the State all manner of forbiddings for youth must be put into effect so as to disenfranchise them as members of the Capitalist state and, by promises of a better lot under Communism, to gain their loyalty to a Communist movement.”

This list of loyalties parallels Hubbard’s concept of the dynamics, what he calls the spheres of activity in which people are trying to survive and succeed in life. The first dynamic is self, the second is sex and family, the third is groups or even the nation or society one belongs to. It’s no coincidence these are reflected in this breakdonw of loyalties supposedly written by Russians.

And here’s another little giveaway from Hubbard where he can’t help but comment on another cherished belief of his which he railed about in many of his lectures: the supposed denial of the right of a child to work. In many places, Hubbard went on at length about how child labor laws were actually the demise of the child’s free spirit and morale. This of course, led directly to the uniquely Scientology idea that children are just adults in little bodies and should be treated accordingly, and we know from numerous tragic incidents that this also led to sexual liberties being taken with children of Scientologists. Here’s the quote from the Brainwashing Manual:

“Under the saccharine guise of assistance to them, rigorous child labour laws are the best means to deny the child any right in the society. By refusing to let him earn, by forcing him into unwanted dependence upon a grudging parent, by making certain in other channels that the parent is never in other than economic stress, the child can be driven in his teens into revolt. Delinquency will ensue.

“By making readily available drugs of various kinds, by giving the teenager alcohol, by praising his wildness, by stimulating him with sex literature…the psychopolitical operator can create the necessary attitude of chaos, idleness and worthlessness into which can then be cast the solution which will give the teenager complete freedom everywhere — Communism.”

These two chapters pretty much sum up the fears of the 1950s Western cultures towards the supposed corruption of youth by sex, drugs and rock’n’roll, giving it the unique spin of it all being a communist plot. We would then draw parallels to hardcore rap and sexy pop music, thus “proving” the decline of our culture at the hands of psychiatrists and communists. One Sea Org recruiter literally would tell people that artists like Nelly Furtado, Ariana Grande and NWA were all psych-oriented music that was purposefully promoted by corrupt record labels to unsuspecting teens specifically because these companies were owned by the megacorporations who in turn were owned by these twelve men or their underlings. Classic global conspiracy nonsense.

Chapter six is called “The General Subject of Obedience” and after reading the first three paragraphs, you tell me if Hubbard is talking about communism or if he may in fact be laying out his own personal philosophy which he later developed into the operating pattern of the Sea Org:

“Obedience is the result of force.

“Everywhere we look in the history of Earth we discover that obedience to new rules has come about entirely through the demonstration on the part of those rulers of greater force than was to be discovered in the old ruler. A population overridden, conqueror by war, is obedient to its conqueror. It is obedient to its conqueror because its conqueror has exhibited more force.

“Concurrent with force is brutality, for there are human considerations involved which also represent force. The most barbaric, unrestrained, brutal use of force, if carried far enough, invokes obedience. Savage force, sufficiently long displayed toward any individual, will bring about his concurrence with any principle or order.”

There’s a lot more like this in this chapter, which we would go over in some detail with the recruits to show them how hypnotism and other thought reform techniques could be used to subvert individuals and whole nations. Hubbard speaks in this chapter quite authoritatively about hypnotism and its efficacy and he would know, being an experienced hypnotist long before he invented Dianetics. When I was reviewing this chapter for this video, I realized that Hubbard was giving away a lot more of his personal philosophy of how to control people in this chapter than I ever saw before. As a Sea Org recruiter, it never occurred to me that Hubbard was dishing his own beliefs in this book but it’s so obvious to me now. For example, here’s just one more line:

“The subject of hypnotism is a subject of belief. What can people be made to believe? They can be made to believe anything which is administered to them with sufficient brutality and force. The obedience of a populace is as good as they will believe.”

“Despicable religions, such as Christianity, knew this. They knew that if enough faith could be brought into being, a populace could be enslaved by the Christian mockeries of humanity and mercy, and thus could be disarmed.”

Finally, at least as far as our review goes, there is Chapter 7 called “Anatomy of the Stimulus-Response Mechanisms of Man.” This is supposed to be the view of man according to Russian psychopolitical operators, but it’s almost entirely a carbon copy of the principles of Dianetics.

“Man is a stimulus-response animal. His entire reasoning capabilities, even his ethics and morals, depend upon stimulus-response machinery. This has long been demonstrated by such Russians as Pavlov, and the principles have long been used in handling the recalcitrant, in training children, and in bringing about a state of optimum behaviour on the part of a population.

“Having no independent will of his own, Man is easily handled by stimulus-responce mechanisms. It is only necessary to install a stimulus into the mental anatomy of Man to have that stimulus reactivate and respond any time an exterior command source calls it into being.

“The mechanisms of stimulus-response are easily understood. The body takes pictures of every action in the environment around an individual. When the environment includes brutality, terror, shock, and other such activities, the mental image picture gained contains in itself all the ingredients of the environment. It the individual, himself, was injured during that moment, the injury, itself, will re-manifest when called upon to respond by an exterior command source.

“As an example of this, if an individual is beaten, and is told during the entirety of the beating that he must obey certain officials, he will, in the future, feel the beginnings of the pain the moment he begins to disobey. The installed pain itself reacts as a policeman, for the experience of the individual demonstrates to him that he cannot combat, and will receive pain from, certain officials.”

This passage and the rest of this chapter would “prove” or our recruits that Russian operatives were following Hubbard’s work very closely and, obviously, subverting it to serve their own ends. This is what we called Black Dianetics because controlling people’s minds is not what Dianetics is supposed to be about and the fact that Russians were writing about this just proved how evil they were. It never occurred to us while going over this that maybe we were being manipulated to believe this by Hubbard himself. It also helped that Hubbard had discussed Black Dianetics, communism and psychiatry in his books and lectures, setting the stage for us to believe this Russian fantasy. He even describes the use of a technique called “pain-drug-hypnosis” which is a term Hubbard himself invented in his 1951 book Science of Survival and not something any Russian was ever known to have said or written anywhere.

By this point in the recruitment interview, we had covered a lot of territory and so would generally skip to the end, maybe citing a few more quotes from some of the other chapters on psychopolitical operations. I would never give this book to someone to read, but sometimes I’d let them peruse it in the interview room. The wrap-up was always to go to chapter 16 to make the point that Russians were actually doing all of this out of a perverted strategy at self-preservation. My idea was that they were not wholly evil people, they had just adopted a leadership which was entirely driven by self-preservation and the philosophy of covert domination, since an overt declaration of war would lead to mutually assured destruction. Here are some lines from that final chapter:

“The failure of Psychopolitics might well bring about the atomic bombing of the Motherland.

“If Psychopolitics succeeded in its mission throughout the Capitalistic nations of the world, there will never be an atomic war, for Russia will have subjugated all of her enemies.

“The psychopolitical operative must succeed, for his success means a world of Peace. His failure might well mean the destruction of the civilized portions of Earth by atomic power in the hands of Capitalistic madmen.

“The end thoroughly justifies the means. The degradation of populaces is less inhuman than their destruction by atomic fission, for to an animal who lives only once, and life is sweeter than death.

“The end of war is the control of a conquered people. If a people can be conquered in the absence of war, the end of war will have been achieved without the destruction of war. A worthy goal.

“The psychopolitician has his reward in the nearly unlimited control of populaces, in the uninhibited exercise of passion, and the glory of Communist conquest over the stupidity of the enemies of the People.”

The Brainwashing Manual was a key part of the briefing I would give to potential recruits to establish a mindset of fear and paranoia. I can’t even begin to tell you how ashamed I am of having fallen into this mindset myself and then having spread it to others. I was a full time Sea Org recruiter for about a year and it was near the end of that year that I started seeing holes in these ideas and, being the inquisitive type, once I saw them I couldn’t unsee them and so I checked into them. I didn’t learn the awful truth about the Brainwashing Manual until after I’d left Scientology altogether, but I did learn enough about the inconsistences, logical fallacies and outright lies on the part of global conspiracy theorists such as Alex Jones and David Icke, as well of course as L. Ron Hubbard, to stop promoting this conspiracy nonsense as a reason to join the Sea Org. I dropped this entire briefing from my repertoire and actively encouraged other recruiters to drop it too. I was usually successful with this but since I was in a destructive cult and was bucking the system, I knew I had to be cautious about who I talked to and what I said. Shortly thereafter I was transferred to a different kind of work and I no longer did recruitment and so wasn’t under any pressure to push this conspiracy nonsense anymore. Within a couple of years, I’d come to see through a lot more of Scientology’s lies and I quit the Sea Org and then Scientology completely.

My efforts since have been to expose and educate about Scientology so no one else out there falls for any of this utter nonsense. While a lot of what I’ve covered in this video may seem utterly ridiculous and beyond belief to many of you, believe me when I tell you there are people out there who eat this stuff up and are hungry for more. It really does take all of us to be aware of this and to push back against fake news and nonsensical global conspiracy theories like the Illuminati and Hubbard’s “12 men who rule the world” if we are ever going to see an end to cult leaders like L. Ron Hubbard and profiteers like Alex Jones. These people lack any kind of moral compass and will tell their guillble followers anything if it increases their bank account balances. It only takes a little bit of critical thinking and fact checking to blow their lies out of the water but if we don’t take the time to do it, people will continue to fall for this nonsense.

Thank you for watching.