Hello Alan,
Thank you for your customarily precise comments which I must say put me in the strange position of agreeing with much of what you argue though disagreeing with some basic premises of your argument, an uncomfortable place to sit mentally which I will try to explain.
You note :
It's true, as you say, that most JWs are good, decent people who have become victims of a rotten system of religious control. The problem is that they are by and large willing victims……..Sometimes we would even make a mental choice between doing what we knew was the right or true thing, and sticking to the JW religion because it was the easier or less painful path.
The issue to me is at what point is someone a ‘willing victim’ or an 'unwilling victim'. Judging this, given the complex issues is beyond me. I will accept without question that some of the GB are not victims but victimizers, often intentional and cynical in intent and here I would part company with RF who described even some of these men as 'victims of victims'. My difficulty is identifying at what stage in this very complex psychological maelstrom can we truly say that a person was an willing or unwilling victim of the WTS honed and sophisticated techniques of mind control. Nuremberg set definitions at what was the ‘jumping off point’ for this issue by introducing the individual conscience and its own ability to say ‘no’ to genocide, as some did. But you well know Alan, that even the conscience of JW’s are controlled, sometimes so totally that even grown men quiver at the idea of clinking glasses to wish good health to another.
The average JW from my own experience only stops being a victim when their own core belief is shattered. That belief, that Jah and Christ are in total control of the Universe and especially the expression of Gods worship on earth the WTS, overrides common sense and logic, even to the point of subduing the power to reason effectively, unless that reasoning takes place through the established WTS parameters. When the JW sees things going wrong within the WTS, he is conditioned to respond with ‘everybody is imperfect', when things run smoothly it is ‘the spiritual paradise’, when glaring faults within the WTS become public, either evidence of Armageddon around the corner, or a more interesting one, Jah. refining his people. Intellectual laziness and an element of cowardice is involved and that is part of the human condition, but the conditioning seems to run much deeper than that.
What ex-JW doesn't know a number of current JWs who, in especially private settings, make scathing comments about the Society's practices, but in the company of JW loyalists, or even of anyone not a JW, will deny that anything is wrong? Such people may be victims, but they have still made their own choices, choices that we ex-JWs have had the courage (or perhaps the opposite) to make.
Again I agree that this attitude is growing increasingly more common, and also growing in sentiment, but the question still remains that given the powerful spell cast by the WTS over peoples reasoning ability and sense of logic, at what point are the choices they make their own? You mention the courage of XJW’s and indeed I would thank those who have beaten a path through the dangerous jungle of exit for people like myself. It also has to be noted however that many XJW’s who vociferously condemn JW’s and all they stand for are often JW’s who were put out of the WTS for divers sins of the flesh, or those who drifted away after an unhappy childhood’s etc. still believing that they have turned their backs on God, or others who left not for decisions of principle. They did not make reasoned choices to leave. They drift to the Board and then find out what they have been released from.
I think that there is a strong parallel between what happened in Germany around WWII and the JW organization.
I agree completely with you here, though the WTS has been much more successful, for far longer that the Nazi’s in developing behavioral control. This also brings me to an interesting point. As Russia entered Berlin, Hitler’s last public appearance was at the time he blessed his ‘secret weapon’ that would bring dramatic victory to the Fatherland. This weapon was 14 year old children with pipe bombs. The Allied Forces were instructed to take the adults prisoner but shoot these boys on sight because of their fanaticism. They were clearly naïve and gullible victims who perhaps fall into the category of those you outlined in your earlier post who if asked to destroy ‘apostates’ would not hesitate. No amount of banging people on the head would work with these victims. If they had lived, perhaps they might have matured to realize the folly of the system but like many JW’s they are so controlled that they will gladly go down with the ship thinking they are doing this for God. They are not children physically, but in many ways have never grown up emotionally and to break out of the eggshell of their theology, to them is untenable. It is these that I pity the most, they fill the Branches and live other peoples lives.
The problem with that claim is that the Society first set up the conditions where such a hard mindset could flourish, then a good number of people took on that mindset, then they came full circle and asked JW leaders to become even harder. So here we have a case of runaway positive feedback, where the harder the leadership gets, the harder the followers get, and then back to the leadership, until we have a monster. Who is responsible for the monster? Is it not everyone who encouraged its growth, either by giving overt support, or by giving tacit support by failing to object?
How Alan, can I disagree with this, I cannot. I have seen this scenario develop many times before my own eyes. Again though, understanding the extent of the abusive relationship with the controller and the controlled helps a person to see that this is unnatural and unhealthy behavoir. The desire of the abused wife to make a beautiful meal for the husband that kicks the life from her whenever he is angry is a puzzlement to a reasoning person, but it is classic behavoir, as is the abused becoming the abuser. This is a very complex issue. There are of course people like YK who have convinced themselves on a rather eccentric intellectual level of the validity of the WTS in Gods purposes, but in order to survive within this difficult world he convinces himself of the superiority of his own understanding, but what his motives are for this situation who would know. Though I do think that a wife and three kids would knock the prophecy right out of him! He would quickly transfom from being of the 'annointed' to being of the annoyed.
One thing I am sure of and I have first hand experience of this with my wife when I tried decades ago to get her to see what the WTS really represented. She would not even countenance a discussion about it. Over the years with much patience and love I was gradually able to help her feel comfortable and secure enough to talk about controversial issues and now it is she who wants to take on the GB single handed! Love is a powerful force and I sincerely believe that if more bridges of love were built to the those still ‘in’, more would cross that bridge. A combative approach to the problem is fraught with difficulties, not the least being the complexity of the motives of those involved in combat.
Again Alan, thanks for your thoughts about which I will further ponder!
HS
