daring: Elders and MS, I would think. Absolute power and all that jazz. Makes men into abusers who may not necessarily be predisposed to that sort of behavior. It makes it alright, and once you've crossed one line of control, the next line is a little closer, until in no time flat you're coming up on tyranny.
You know, things are so stratified in the Organization, even within each KH, that it's impossible to get a true picture of people while you're still in.
I think of some of the people I knew when I was growing up, and how highly I thought of them. Elders who treated me like their own family, pioneers who were my closest friends. Then, after leaving, finding out that I was treated completely differently from my peers, who did not have the status that my family had. How, when they got in trouble, these men who I perceived as kind people that I could go to with any problem if I needed to, treated them like scum. The unkindnesses I heard about did not track with my own experiences.
I heard about men who were molesting their kids, I heard about servants having affairs with teenage girls, stories about stalkers... I learned about elders who told people that they could never measure up, and they'd never be worthy of holy spirit. I heard my friends describe judicial committees where they felt like the difference between being DF'd or just reproved, was whether they cried hard enough, not whether they were "repentant." (My best friend was blackmailed by her loving father into baptism - something I NEVER would have suspected of him.)
I think one of the things that kept me in for so long is that my dad was a really honorable man. I mean, the standards that he expected of everyone else... he held himself to the same standards, plus. He NEVER looked at another woman (and he had groupies, well they tried anyways, but not one of them ever got close.) If a sister called to talk to him, he would conference call in another brother, or else he would leave his office door open, and let her know that their conversation might not be private. He was by the book in every aspect he could control.
In some ways that made him harsh, but in others, it set the bar very high. Since he never waivered from his ethics, I think I came to expect that everyone else was acting honorably also. Imagine my shock when I started to see that wasn't true. Drunk elders and their drunk wives, cliques, affairs (hetero and homo), those weird wife swaps where two married people have an affair, and then the "wronged" spouses end up hooking up too, and all of the physical abuse! So many people I had no clue were getting beaten regularly and yet still coming to the meetings and giving talks about love and wonderful the JW family unit is. Gag.
Well, now I'm just rambling, but it just seems like the entire organization is one big fun house mirror maze, where you never know exactly what it is you're seeing.
