Paradise Incorporated

Paradise Incorporated: Synanon: A Personal Account by David U Gerstel, 278 pages

Synanon began life as a group within Alcoholics Anonymous in Santa Monica that developed a form of group criticism they dubbed "the Game".  After breaking with AA, they began their own rehabilitation program centered on communal living and playing the Game.  As the group's successes with addicts garnered publicity, Synanon grew rapidly, and attention and power increasingly accrued to the charismatic leader, Charles Dederich.  As it grew, the group became less effective at reforming and retaining addicts, but also began to attract non-addicts experimenting with encounter groups and communal living.  This adjusted the goals of the organization, which began to aim at a general moral reform of society as a whole.   

The cult of personality surrounding "the Founder", Dederich, likewise grew, along with his ambition.  Synanon went into decline, which triggered ever-greater demands on members, which further shrank the group down to a dedicated core willing to defend their way of life by any means necessary.  Dederich became increasingly controlling, erratic, and paranoid, mandating shaved heads and vasectomies, ordering harassment, abuse, and beatings against enemies internal and external, real and imagined.

Author Gerstel was a member of Synanon for a number of key years at the peak of its success.  Although his history of the group, before, after, and during his own involvement, provides little insight into the development of such groups generally, the book shines as an unpretentious personal account of how an idealistic, intelligent, educated young man could find himself a member of such an organization, how normal the abnormal can be made to seem, and how difficult it can be to leave.