Social conformity is a form of mind control. It doesn't require waterboarding to get someone to do things against their usual inclination, just some good old peer pressure will do.
Remember high school? Remember how miserable you were sometimes? That was social conformity working on you. When you never felt good enough, smart enough, or good looking enough.
The B-Org is a lot like that...only they play with more loaded dice.
I also think the degree of "mind control" varies from person to person. There's an old saying among con artist that you can only con a person as long as they want what they think you're offering. People who want certain things are going to want what the Witnesses have to offer, and the degree to which they want it determines their depth of involvement.
Oh, it's nothing bad, it's just that it's just stuff no one can give you...you have to find it yourself, within yourself. Even God can't give what the Witnesses promise, which is utopian BS that was never really a utopia anyway. You do all know that word is ironic in usage, don't you?
It means, "not a place" which means that utopian societies look much better on paper than they do in reality, and are allegorical, not literal. Since humans don't behave ideally, how can one have an ideal society without fundamentally changing human nature itself? We'd have to totally eliminate individual desire and need to have a totally peaceful, unified and organized society.
Give me some good old human chaos any old day over that fantasy!
Life is dirty, messy and complicated, deal with it. See, that's what I really hate about the Witnesses. They're afraid of real life, so they invent a fantasy existence and call it "the spiritual paradise" but it's really a training camp for how to live in denial of the real, messy and screwed up human world that we all have to learn to live in.
That's why they attract people with poor coping skills, like me. I had really crappy coping skills and they took away the few I had and replaced them with something even worse...believing in total brain turds.
Finding out the real world is do-able and that I can really cope with it while working with a therapist helped me conquer anxiety and depression more than 34 years of fairy tales and avoiding reality.
In fact, I think it was a big cause of it. Denial, there's a mind killer.
