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
