FFF said-
We willingly (for those that chose to really believe the lies) bound ourselves in chains. We always had the opportunity to releaase ourselves...it was all an illusion...an illusion that we played along with. But the option to end the mental confinement was always within our power.
Interesting analogy, as individuals need to accept their culpability for keeping themselves in the group, since JWs are a GROUP that exerts power through membership. Think of all the groups out there, whether political parties, street gangs, knitting clubs, Kiwanis, etc: all exert power over their members to varying degrees via certain pressure (whether paying membership dues, or under threat of death, etc).
It's always easy to scapegoat the unnamed "they" who held you in against your will (typically the GB, elders, etc) but the point is that EVERY individual member's presence in the group contributes to the collective power OF the group, since every person is a "THEY" to someone else in the group, too. Humans cannot read thoughts, and even if they have internal doubts, they look around the KH and see all the faces of those who's association they stand to lose if DFed. You don't even have to actually shun someone to be guilty of supporting the JWs, since by your very presence you are sending a tacit unspoken message to the others.
People try to absolve themselves of guilt by saying they didn't shun anyone who was DFed, or tried to be kind, etc, but that completely ignores the point that they nevertheless were a card-carrying member OF the JWs, and while you may not have done the group's dirty work by serving as the "stick", you were the "carrot", the one who used your powers of charisma and charm to encourage the person to stay in. Nevertheless, you were still a member of the group.
The ONLY way to break the dysfunctional cycle of the WTBTS that many individuals are trapped in is by voting with your feet: despite personal cost, simply don't play the dysfunctional game. It's really that simple (and yet that hard, since don't expect a mass exodus of others deciding to take personal responsibility for their actions, and quit engaging in post-hoc rationalizations to justify them).
Cofty said- It was also something that victims of Soviet communism realised in retrospect. "we got so used to this second opinion lurking in our own heads that we considered it our own" - Gunter Kunert
A tad extreme, comparing the Soviet Union totalitarian regime to the JWs?
Last I checked, the JWs can't declare an apostate an enemy of the State and have them executed by firing squad. Anyone who's visited Berlin before the Wall came down remembers the East German border guards manning the guard towers armed with machine guns, given orders to shoot to kill anyone who attempted to escape to the West (and many died trying).
But sure, the psychological control mechanisms are similar, just that the USSR didn't have to stop there: if they didn't like someone's thoughts, they could exercise the ultimate form of thought control, using a bullet to the head.
