Kishkumen wrote:Mister Scratch wrote:Would you mind expounding on this a bit more?
I'll do my best.
Since the Mormon system was founded on conspiracy and criminal behavior, everyone who is involved in that legacy, unless they happen to be charlatans themselves, is bound to suffer the effects of such an abusive relationship. One finds that the entire organization has a cliquish mentality, where bits of gossip are stored and doled out according to the power and pleasure it gives the teller.
Most people will always be on the outside, struggling to prove their worthiness for the secrets of the inner sanctum. They imagine that there must be profound doctrines or hidden bits of knowledge that the hierarchy have waiting for them, if they but suffer the current indignities like good soldiers. Then, if they should happen to "arrive," they find that all they have won is the power to control the kind of information that old folks on porches use to torment their neighbors.
The apologist, like others, has felt this sting and disappointment, but turns it in two directions. First, they concoct new mysteries and revelations to fill the emptiness that ensues when they realize that the Brethren have no deep mysteries to share of the kind they hoped to learn. Secondly, they become enraged should anyone whom they feel has not paid the price and earned the Brethren's trust dares to speak about Mormonism in a way they disapprove of--be that person critic or chapel Mormon. The Brethren, because they still hold the power, are insulated from the rage of the Mopologist, who, being abused but nominally rewarded, is not yet powerful enough to direct his rage at its true object.
This basically sounds like trauma-bonding. You have an abusive, judgemental authority figure that has attained an archetypical role in the lives of Mormons. When the curtain is pulled back, and it's simply an old man pulling some strings and playing an organ, the abused generally follow two courses:
1) Leave that particular abusive relationship (this doesn't mean the abused will "recover" from the mental and emtional state of being a cultist, though).
2) Enable it.
What's disappointing are the numbers of people who go from being abused to abusers/deceivers themselves. I suppose it's the various attachments, ie, social and economic, that they've developed that are hard to sever, because, we know for a fact that you do, indeed, sever these relationships when you leave a cult like Mormonism.