If the last week has taught me anything, it has been the importance of telling the truth about the world around me. Sometimes you have to shout the truth in order for anyone to pay any attention, but it sometimes works. 
On the same basis, I think it is time to link to some other truth-tellers.
This story over at ODAN is pretty damn heart-wrenching. It is of the life of a former Numerary Assistant to Opus Dei:
My life was controlled and suppressed and I had little access to the outside world. Our newspapers were censored and our television was often switched off if it was deemed unsuitable by one of the fanatic numeraries... I lived a life of conformity and indoctrination. I began to ask questions about some of the contradictions that I saw, but was quickly quieted by being told I would go to hell for even thinking such things.
At the other end of the spectrum, John Roche writes of his time in Opus Dei:
The supervision of our lives was almost total. To leave the house one had to get permission from the director. Members were not permitted to go to the cinema, theatre or public sports, or to sleep in their parents' house. One even had to get permission to read any book. Innumerable other rules from the Father concerned deportment, dress, relations with other members, how to write letters, how to make the best use of soap and how to close doors.
They maintain control by disabling the judgment of many members and their ability to assess objectively or criticise Opus Dei... This is mainly achieved by undermining the semantics of ordinary language in a remarkably Orwellian manner. So extraordinarily successful are these techniques that lay members will claim to be completely free. It's thought-control raised to a fine art.
Whenever I hear a claim that someone has reached "total freedom", that's usually a way of sensing that they are in a cult - hence Scientology advertises itself as "The Route to Total Freedom".
The root of this is obvious - it's Nietzschean. Nietzsche considered humanity as a bridge - a bridge, something to be crossed and overcome - "What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal" (Zarathustra I Prologue 3-4). The Superman concept is the end result of crossing away from humanity, and creating something new.
These religious cults like Opus Dei and Scientology are offering what Nietzsche promised - but they are doing it in such a way that so that it is never actually possible to find the end, the total freedom, but only the illusion of it. In the search, someone is profiting, that's for sure...
Tags: opusdei, nietzsche, scientology
