Synanon began as something good, and its trajectory is the clearest illustration in this part of the guide of how a legitimate method becomes a control mechanism.
Charles Dederich, a recovering alcoholic, founded it in Santa Monica in 1958 as a residential community for drug addicts at a time when almost nothing else was available. Its central practice was the Game: an unstructured group session in which participants attacked each other verbally, without restraint, about anything — appearance, failures, self-deception, sexual history, cowardice.
The therapeutic rationale was that addiction is sustained by self-deception, and that only brutal confrontation from peers who cannot be lied to will break it. It was reported to work for a substantial number of people, and Synanon was celebrated for years.
The Game had two properties that made it convertible into governance.
It produces shame and dependency. Being publicly stripped of every defense leaves a person in a state of acute self-doubt, from which restored standing is available only from the group that stripped them. This is Lifton's cult of confession: the mechanism is not the confession itself but the fact that the community holds what you have confessed and decides what it means.
And it implicates everyone. Each participant both attacked and was attacked. There is no position from which to object to the practice that does not indict your own participation in it — which means the practice is self-protecting in a way that a policy imposed from above is not.
The escalation followed the ladder of chapter 3. Synanon stopped being a rehabilitation program and declared itself a religion. Members shaved their heads. Then men were required to have vasectomies and pregnant women to have abortions. Then, in 1977, married couples were required to separate and take new partners assigned by the community — hundreds of people complied.
Each of these is enormous. Each was continuous with the last, and each was framed as a demonstration of commitment by people who had already demonstrated it repeatedly.
The end came through violence. Synanon formed a paramilitary group, the Imperial Marines. Attacks were carried out on critics and on former members. In October 1978, two members put a four-and-a-half-foot rattlesnake with its rattle removed into the mailbox of Paul Morantz, a lawyer who had won a case against the organization. He was bitten and nearly died. Dederich was recorded on the organization's own tapes discussing violence against enemies, pleaded no contest in 1980, and Synanon lost its tax exemption and collapsed.
The confrontational-group model did not die with it. It was carried into the American troubled-teen industry, where variants of attack therapy have been used on adolescents for decades.