Shaved Heads, Snipped Tubes, Imperial Marines and Dope Fiends: On Synanon (2013) | Hacker News Reader

Shaved Heads, Snipped Tubes, Imperial Marines and Dope Fiends: On Synanon (2013)

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73 pointslermontov27 comments

I would like to use this post to draw attention to the Toubled Teen Industry. Its foundations are rooted in the Synanon.

Former Synanon members founded an organization called CEDU https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CEDU

CEDU created therapeutic boarding schools and wilderness retreats marketed for "troubled teens." These schools and programs used behavioral modification and therapy created by Synanon to control and brainwash the students. These schools still exist today as members of CEDU branched off and founded their own organizations.

The best site dedicated to compiling this knowledge isn't even available right now http://wiki.fornits.com/index.php/Main_Page

Came to see if the troubled teen industry or Fornits was mentioned. Amazed to find out how far this cult has spread and how many it's affected.

David and Kathy Mitchell won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for their exposes in their newspaper The Point Reys Light. They wrote a book on their experience: The Light On Synanon, and they were the subject of a made-for-TV movie.

That was an incredible read. Power corrupts I guess. The whole point was that he was his own savior, and he became other's saviors and that was the beginning of the end. Be very watchful of yourself.

I wonder how many readers of HN have ever heard of this. I grew up in the area at that time but hadn't thought about this in decades. It was big news in the San Joaquin valley towns near Badger. The family of my sister's BF at the time had a cabin in Badger, which, after Dedirich moved in to the area, they were terrified to visit.

The Orange Papers are a good source for why AA is a great breeding ground for this sort of insanity.

http://aorange1.tripod.com

In my limited experience with it, it does not seem to be a place conducive to helping people lead a normal non-dependent life. The people that stave off demon rum seem to very often become addicted to the shame and self-abasement of AA meetings, to the point sometimes that they get itchy if they don't get their daily fix.

Of course I see some of the more strident AA members coming in and out of the state liquor store all the time, too.

Theres a difference between sharing honestly and vulnerably, and self flagellation. Or humility versus spiritual pride.

The Orthodox Church has the concept of prelest: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prelest

It's something like spiritual misdirection and there should be greater awareness of the phenomenon in Western society.

Christianity has bred all sorts of craziness, too. Westboro Baptist church, the inquisition, etc.

There are very extreme/fringe elements in christianity and elsewhere. Because they are so extreme they are necessarily more "visible". Synanon is to AA what the Westboro Baptist church is to christianity. Hardly even the same thing.

AA members are supposed to be anonymous. This is quite the opposite: a cult of personality.

You've misunderstood me. I'm saying AA itself is very extreme / fringe. I consider it to be a cult (and Orange makes a convincing argument for that position).

AA doesn't always manifest as obviously as Synanon, but that's partly because it has a legacy of very effective propaganda normalizing it for the past 80 years, and partly because the local manifestations that are nearly as extreme as Synanon are swept under the rug of "well, OK, but on the whole it's doing so much good for society!" There are many examples of AA meetings that have perpetuated a culture of exploiting people for sex, money, and power. Orange has some well-documented examples.

As an aside, I have met some former Synanon members in AA rooms. Most of them miss Synanon and consider AA to be weak tea. My point is that it still has enough of the tea that they go there rather than somewhere else.

I'd say being a junkie or alcoholic is pretty fringe and extreme. I don't get your point.

In any movement with a spiritual basis you're going to find zealots, fundamentalists, cult leader megalomaniac, etc. That's all I was saying. Your comment that synanon folks think "mainstream" aa is weak is in agreement with the point I was attempting to make.

I was unclear, I guess. I do agree that Synanon is more extreme than AA, on the whole. But AA is still extreme and fringe, all by itself.

I disagree that AA is a "movement with a spiritual basis." It's not. To quote Orange, AA began as a branch of a cult religion invented by an evil fascist renegade Lutheran minister named Dr. Frank Nathan Daniel Buchman, who actually admired Adolf Hitler and praised the Gestapo leader Heinrich Himmler as a "wonderful lad." It's not at all "mainstream."

So I guess the comparison for me is, AA is the Nazi party, Synanon is the SS. Neither is acceptable, though one is perhaps more obviously unacceptable on its face. So the Synanon members who hang out at AA meetings are like SS members hanging out at boring party meetings since they can't any longer go out and do the 'more exciting' things they used to do.

It sounds like orange has a small axe to grind... that's a very uncharitable description. Like saying christianity was started by a Jewish criminal who was condemned and executed at the insistence of his own community.

I don't argue with fanatics. You're arguing the and hominem fallacy, at any rate. Whatever the case may be you seem to have very strong feelings about aa and let's not waste any more time on it.

It's not uncharitable. It's documented fact.

For example, Dr. Frank N.D. Buchman in fact did praise Adolf Hitler in a published interview [0], and did in fact meet with Himmler in Germany at the 1936 Olympics [1], and was close friends with Putzi Hanfstaengl, who personally helped Hitler into a car to escape after Hitler fell and dislocated his shoulder during the Beer Hall Putsch and was later his foreign press secretary. [2]

After Buchman was roundly criticized in the U.S. for his support of Hitler, he changed the name of the Oxford Group to Moral Re-Armament. The Oxford Group was, of course, the birthplace of Alcoholics Anonymous, and Bill Wilson attended its meetings for four or five years before breaking off to form AA.

I'm not a fanatic. I'm simply someone who was exposed to AA and discovered what a toxic dump of bad ideas it is. Which is what prompted my original comment that it is no surprise that Synanon was incubated in AA meetings.

[0] http://web.archive.org/web/20160508021611/http://www.orange-...

[1] http://web.archive.org/web/20160417033412/http://www.orange-...

[2] http://web.archive.org/web/20160319224125/http://www.orange-...

I'd like to talk more and hear about your experience, and perhaps share my own. If you're interested hit me up. My email is on my profile page.

I've sent you an email.

You ever gotten in a vehicle made by the Ford company, or VW?

This style of guilt by association article is ridiculous at best.

If widespread sexual abuse is your bar for "fringe", then the Catholic Church, Congress , the movie and TV industry, boy scouts, public school, college, the nuclear family, non-nuclear families, and cities are also "fringe", to name a few.

I guess that link is down because Terry didn't pay the bill. Here's an archived link:

http://web.archive.org/web/20161202185738/https://www.orange...

Interestingly, the movie poster halfway through the article seems to have filtered out the needle the man is using.

Wow, that escalated rapidly at the end. :S

Personalities like this are incredibly common in that whole industry.

Synanon was just one insane phase of a weird American self-help/productivity/management religion which seems to have started with José Silva and his UltraMind ESP System, almost immediately reached its final form through William Penn Partick and Leadership Dynamics/Holiday Magic, then after Synanon becoming basically the entire 70s with est etc., next during the 80s the self-help book boom and the rise of pop management theory then lasting throughout the 90s, and the TED talk culture now.

If Synanon hadn't tanked, they'd be controlling half of the country by now. Jordan Peterson looks like a Synanon revival from what I hear about him.

Anyone else think "a scanner darkly" was about some experience PKD or a close friend had in synanon?

It's well known. The book is about X-Kalay canadian synanon.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Scanner_Darkly

Thanks for the pointer! It's been years since i read the book, well before Internet days. I should have done my homework before posting.

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