"Join My Cult"

[Inculcated]

Join my cult is a site about a film called My Cult.

MY CULT is a film about my childhood in an alternative community called Synanon that developed out of a drug rehabilitation program in the 1960’s and, according to many became a violent and manipulative cult in the mid 1970’s.
Despite its reputation, I remember my childhood in Synanon fondly and have always considered it to have been a happy one. For me it was not a cult, but the community I grew up in: as different as it might have been to the world in which I live today, as strange as much of it might seem to the man I am now, when I was a child, it provided me with those elements of childhood that rendered mine a happy one.
Regardless of how I perceived Synanon, there is a darker dimension to this story that cannot be ignored. Synanon had many practices that were cult-like and the organization during its lowest moments engaged in activities that ranged from suspect and manipulative to downright violent and illegal. I would have liked nothing more than to tell the story of my idyllic childhood in the hills of Northern California but that simply is not possible without facing the uglier truths that surrounded it. To do otherwise would only betray and belittle what I loved most about Synanon by implying that its value was dependant on the suppression and equivocation of its darker side.
Luckily, my childhood home itself provides the means of bridging the contradictions it presents. If it failed in its practices, many of its principles remain sound, and to this day I still hold faith in many of them them. Synanon’s particular emphasis on truth, for instance, is specifically appropriate to the subject of this film, and will serve as its guiding principle.
It is a conception in which the expression of truth has value in itself - that merely telling the truth about a thing, looking at it squarely and in the full light of day, stripping it of the guilt and shame that feeds off and feeds the need for secrecy you can redeem what would otherwise be condemned to the shadows of the guilty conscience, forever dissembled, defended, and denied.
It was, I believe one of the principle failings of the community, that in the end it refused, or was unable to examine itself with the same harsh honesty it demanded of its members. I can see no reason why, from this distance, we cannot look back upon Synanon with the same spirit of honest examination on which we so prided ourselves back then.
MY CULT will take this principle of truth as its own - to look as honestly as possible on its subject, but without passing judgement; to look on both the good and bad of it, "for better or for worse as was its lot" in an attempt to bring Synanon to conform to the valid principle at its centre, no matter the corruption of its practice.

I wonder if this was ever released. I couldn’t find any further information. The firsthand account of a former child of Synanon would be interesting.
*See link for a handful of pics.

[try another castle]

Synanon’s particular emphasis on truth, for instance, is specifically appropriate to the subject of this film, and will serve as its guiding principle.
It is a conception in which the expression of truth has value in itself - that merely telling the truth about a thing, looking at it squarely and in the full light of day, stripping it of the guilt and shame that feeds off and feeds the need for secrecy you can redeem what would otherwise be condemned to the shadows of the guilty conscience, forever dissembled, defended, and denied.
It was, I believe one of the principle failings of the community, that in the end it refused, or was unable to examine itself with the same harsh honesty it demanded of its members. I can see no reason why, from this distance, we cannot look back upon Synanon with the same spirit of honest examination on which we so prided ourselves back then.

Holy shi**

No wonder that's the first propheet.

I wonder if he was there before or after children were separated from their parents (upon arrival)? What an unusual environment to grow up in.

Now that's an interesting life story for you.

[SharonMcCarthy]

Hey I know two guys that would probably love to join..db and aw.

[SharonMcCarthy]

seriously did the booklet actually state that