I read an article today about a group of people and found
the descriptions of them oddly familiar. It took me a few
minutes to figure out why, but then I got it...the article
could have been describing many of the TM TBs I'd met
over the years in the TM organization, especially those
who managed to achieve positions of power within it.
Members of this group were described in the article as:
* Feeling an exclusive and protective loyalty to the founder
of their organization and an unconditional loyalty to the
organization itself.
* Claiming to be superior in purity and abilities to other
people, whom they consider inferior and "less highly
evolved."
* Being mainly men, with no women given positions of
power. Many of the men espoused and glorified celibacy
and purity in public and practiced homosexuality in private.
* Formed tribunals and submitted people to questioning to
determine whether they were following the lifestyle
dictated by the founder of the organization and believed
sufficiently in his ideology. If they found that someone
was *not* following this prescribed lifestyle, the offender
was viewed as "deviant to the ideology" and was isolated
from the mainstream population of the organization as not
to "infect" them with their deviance.
* Believed that they owed absolute obedience to the founder
of the organization.
* Created a system of "ranks" within their own group to
indicate how important they were within the group. These
distinctions were reinforced in that the "higher" ranks got
to wear special costumes and have more privileges.
* Had a sub-group composed of medical doctors and scientists
whose purpose was to conduct experiments to validate and
"prove" the dogma of the organization. Special privileges and
advancement in rank were given to doctors and scientists who
published studies that were seen as advancing the organization's
ideology.
The article is about the SS -- der Schutzstaffel -- in Germany.
Interesting parallels, eh? But it's probably just a coincidence...
