Checkout this blog Edge Induced Cohesion It has an entry on autocratic regimes and how the WCG compared to them.
I have long been a student of autocracy and its workings, as my passionate commitment to egalitarian practices has made me a recognized and determined enemy of tyranny from my youth. Today a conversation about Saudi Arabia prompted me to think on how different autocratic regimes appear on the inside and on the outside. I have already commented about this phenomenon once before from the perspective of solidity [1], but I would like to examine the problem again from a different angle, and offer insights on how autocracy works in practice, and why it is not always recognizable as such to those who are themselves in autocratic regimes.
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However, I have within my circle of acquaintances someone who has lived and worked in Saudi Arabia, and he tells a very different tale. He tells a story of kings and men making decisions by consensus in family councils, of a great deal of freedom in discussion, and a country where he felt comfortable and free. Such a Saudi Arabia is not the image I have when I think of the country. And yet I believe he is telling me the truth. That is because I have enough experience of my own in dealing with autocracies and how they work to understand that they are very different on the inside and on the outside. That is to say that they are a refracted mirror that appears very repressive for outsiders but very comfortable to insiders. The act of being granted inside status in such a regime (as my acquaintance was, by his ability to participate in the consensus-building family councils) itself makes the regime and how it operates feel and appear far less repressive and far less repressive. Indeed, what is autocratic can appear to be very egalitarian without losing its essential core of autocracy in how it appears to outsiders.
How is this possible? In fact, it’s very straightforward. That said, before I go into explaining the case intellectually, I would like to give a personal example that explains why the question interests me in the first place. I was born in the Worldwide Church of God during what was known to insiders as the period when Worldwide was “back on track” in the early 1980′s and what people like myself considered the “reign of the Ayatollahs”. (The relationship between the unholy theocratic autocracy of Iran or Saudi Arabia and that of the Worldwide Church of God, and many of its splinter groups, is not coincidental. Nor is my interest in it accidental.) Largely because of my own horrific childhood, I became driven to understand autocracy and tyranny and how it worked, and how I might avoid being its victim again, when I was able to speak up for myself and do something about it. It should be noted that my intense hostility to abuse of power and authority has tended to self-select me as an outsider when it comes to autocracy, as both those who support and those who rule in tyrannical regimes have tended to view me automatically and instinctively as an enemy.
Nonetheless, I have seen enough of how autocracies operate to realize that they are not what meets the eye. For outsiders to the Worldwide Church of God, the word “cult” gets thrown around a bit too freely. And when one examines the mental images of people drinking kool-aid in mass suicides, that is a bit over-the-top. But in an essential way (shared with, say, monarchies or theocracies in general) there clearly is a cult of personality in a vast majority of the Church of God culture. I do not share it, but I have suffered from it and I recognize it. Some truths cannot be spoken; some doors cannot be opened; some rails cannot be touched. When that is the case, one is dealing with an autocracy, regardless of its form of government. For the form is but the avatar; it is what is inside that matters. On the outside, the Worldwide Church of God (and many of its offshoots) have tended to seem like very barbaric autocracies. Marriages were broken up because someone had made an ill-advised marriage decades before conversion. Communication in sermon messages is, in times of crisis, often in code because some people know what is really going on but those people do not want others to know before their plans are complete and successful. People were told whether they could or could not wear make-up, how long their dresses had to be, how long their hair could be, what kind of sugar or flour they could cook with. Clearly this was an autocratic regime, and so it was.
But it did not appear so to those who were insiders. If you are an insider in an autocratic regime, you do not see the wizard behind the curtain. You do not feel your arms pulled by a puppeteer. Instead, you feel a very friendly atmosphere of meetings, hunting trips, conferences, frequent and friendly dinner conversations, golf outings, and the like. You see promotions through the ranks based on loyal service (which you do because you genuinely support what you feel as your party, your group, your organization). You see yourself supporting a group of orderly, orthodox men against rebellious upstarts or intellectual revolutionaries who want to destroy your order and bring chaos and heresy.
The rest of this interesting entry is here: A Refracted Mirror: Consensus Building In Autocratic Regimes
3 comments:
You do not feel your arms pulled by a puppeteer. Instead, you feel a very friendly atmosphere of meetings, hunting trips, conferences, frequent and friendly dinner conversations, golf outings, and the like.
If you were either completely naive or part of the power structure.
The fact that dissidents who knew that what was being preached was a lie were disfellowshipped should be your first clue that the WCG and all its offshoots (spit-offs) are cults. The very term autocratic means that one person or a very special cadre of people are in charge. Therefore, anyone who dares bring up the fact that British Israelism is a fraud and that church history is complete rubbish will be silenced one way or another. It is not benign.
One of the things which crops up is the influx of sociopaths and psychopaths into such an environment.
This is all made to seem to be made so benign sounding. Once someone looks at the book, "Take Back Your Life" the damage such an environment becomes much more clear. As long as you can lie, cover up the lies, cover up the cover ups and make the whole thing undiscussible, you have a toxic dysfunctional environment.
There were endemic lies built into the WCG environment. The first one was that the leadership and founder cared about the people. Herbert Armstrong was an autocrat who only cared about money, the things money could bring and most of all, his ego. He was a very sick person and such as is the case with every autocrat, the entire community has become sick as well.
It is in this cult environment that the Lucifer Effect takes hold -- the title of which is the name of the book about the Stanford Experiment of Guards and Prisoners. In the WCG, the founder, leaders, ministers and even the deacons were the Guards and their mission was to maintain order -- even as this post reveals near the end: You see yourself supporting a group of orderly, orthodox men against rebellious upstarts or intellectual revolutionaries who want to destroy your order and bring chaos and heresy.
The whole thing was rubbish. There's no Scriptural basis for tithing on wages and there is no Scriptural basis for having three tithes taken away from you.
The bottom line is that the cult of the Armstronist CoGs as developed from the Radio Church of God and later the Worldwide Church of God are all autocratic, controlling and destructive. Certainly, just prior to World War II, it was great to be a German in Germany unless you were a Jew. It was a polite prosperous society where everyone was unified under Hitler. It was orderly. The trains ran on time. People had a very friendly atmosphere of meetings, hunting trips, conferences, frequent and friendly dinner conversations, golf outings, and the like. Yes, it was a great place. Too bad it robbed a certain segment of its society for the benefit of all, but that's just too bad.
In the ACoGs, stalkers are supported by the autocratic leaders, fondling of teens by elders is upheld, a minister has affairs with 16 teen daughters and 8 of their mothers (but he gives such great sermons), murders occur, reputations are ruined, people are driven into financial ruin, some people have died because of being told they couldn't have medical treatment. Those of us from the Sixties remember the ministers actually coming into our homes and looking through the cupboards for white sugar and white flour.
To be a member of the Radio Church of God was to sacrifice your freedom on the empty promise that you would gain everyting back in the Kingdom of God. "Follow me," Herbert Armstrong said, "I will lead you into the Kingdom". He's now a dead false prophet. To believe such grossly psychotic things he taught (Mussolini will be the BEAST!) is to adopt insanity. Everyone should be reminded that often PTSD lasts a lifetime and the stress of cognitive dissonance is a killer.
The key here is never to forget the facts: They lied to you and took your money.
Whether or not you enjoyed it is certainly not the point.
Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah on Wednesday overturned a court's sentence of 10 lashes for a woman arrested for driving in the kingdom.
Saudi Arabia used as a great example of how autocratic government works. Yeah. Right.
When I worked as a manager at Weyerhaeuser, I met and got to know an HP3000 MPE contractor. He told me the story of how he worked in the data center for the government in Saudi Arabia. He even mentioned when the Prince came in to inspect the center.
He had a hobby in photography. He was quite good at it. As an amateur photographer, he subscribed to a photography magazine. Each month, he would receive the photography magazine in Saudi Arabia after the censors had gotten through with it. It was filled with gaping holes where the censors had cut out the pictures.
We should remind everyone that Saudi Arabia is a country that does not permit the Bible within its borders. It should also be mentioned that in order to maintain stability in the country under the autocratic regime, members of the family who convert from Islam to Christianity might actually legally be murdered by other family members. There are any number of Christian martyrs in todays Arab Islamic countries. The lucky converts make it out of the country with nothing more than the clothes on their backs -- sometimes after being beaten.
So we can see just how civilized and genteel autocratic governments can be. And we have our own examples of similar behavior within the Armstrongist Churches of god.
No, you might not feel your arms pulled by a puppeteer. You might, however, feel your arms pulled off.
No one has challenged my statements thus far, but if any would like to take the risk....
This is off the subject, but maybe illustrates more of what you point out. UCG's Victor Kubik has just announced that Zambian brethen had 7 cattle stolen from them by former friends who now go to the African region of COGWA. Christianity when you need it!
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