Orders Of Magnitude Part 1

The phrase orders of magnitude means degrees of size. Specifically an order of magnitude is a multiple of ten.

So if you estimated a need for ten dollars to cover an expense and it turned out to be a thousand dollars you were two orders of magnitude off. Each multiple of ten was one order of magnitude.


I feel I am far enough into studying the nature of Scientology and cults to sort of step back and note an important fundamental observation: at different degrees of size of certain systems common qualities and traits reappear again and again. Technically these aren't exactly orders of magnitude. So it is a metaphor and not literal. It here means degree of size within several contexts I will elaborate upon.

The first degree of size I will start with is the single mind of a person. In several minds significant factors and differences are worth examining. First off there is the mind of Ron Hubbard himself. I have elaborated on his unusual mental, emotional, and behavioral traits in my post Scientology's Parallel In Nature Malignant Narcissism.

Simply put, I feel Hubbard was a cult leader as Margaret Singer described a con man, as Robert Jay Lifton said the guru (his term for cult leader) has a split mind, both believing his lies and simultaneously knowing they are lies the whole time. In my opinion the best description I have seen for Hubbard is the term malignant narcissist. That is defined by some psychologists as a person with both an extreme lack of humility as a narcissist and the traits of a sociopath of utterly lacking compassion and empathy toward other human beings.

In my opinion Hubbard fit a type of malignant narcissist doctor Daniel Shaw calls traumatic narcissist. I won't try to interpret all his work but will give a brief description here of Hubbard's relevant qualities.

Hubbard, in my best current estimate, was idealized as a child. He reportedly had aunts that protected and doted on him. His grandfather also was reported to treat Hubbard as a perfect being. Now I hate to have to break it you but human beings in my experience are never actually perfect, or even remotely close to perfect. Now lots of people are in my opinion more good than evil, probably the majority by a large margin. But being more good than bad is not perfection.

And a child being idolized knows as they grow up that they aren't really perfect. They know it emotionally, as we all experience emotions we don't enjoy and the child knows they make errors in judgment as they learn prior beliefs were wrong. So the idealized child has suffered a special kind of narcissistic abuse. By being placed upon a pedestal the actual child is ignored and grossly neglected.

The idealizing parents (or aunts and grandfather who raised Hubbard) are displaying a special kind of narcissistic abuse. A person can treat another as an entirely separate individual with different ideas, desires, feelings, abilities, wishes and unique strengths and weaknesses. A person can understand another has inherent qualities and is subject to influences from the environment and you never get exactly the same result. And most importantly a person can with humility, empathy and compassion recognize the equality, justice and brotherhood (and sisterhood) among all people.

That is NOT what the idealizing narcissist does. They want qualities in another person to reflect well on themself. Say one wants their daughter to be seen as the product of an obviously outstanding mother, then the image of the daughter is vital for the mother (in this example) to control. If the daughter isn't interested in dressing how the mother wants, talking the way the mother wants or having the interests the mother wants the narcissistic mother who idealizes doesn't care one bit about her daughter's actual needs and wants. When a narcissist idealizes another they actually project their own desires onto that person and don't really actually recognize that person as a human being or even accurately observe them.

She will either pretend to care and brush them aside, or brutally discourage them as improper or a personal attack or ignore them and perhaps withold approval or affection to the degree the child defies the idealized image the mother pushes. By repetition of rewards and punishment the child learns going along gets acceptance and doing anything else gets no love. A parent or child may be any gender in this model. The idealized child is often called a golden child.

So the idealized child may over time develop a coping mechanism with short term benefits but extremely harmful long term consequences. The child develops a split reality. Internally the child is alone, ashamed and has a self image of being truly worthless, useless, incompetent and undeserving of love, acceptance and even life.

After all the caregiver, which is usually a narcissistic parent, is seen as giving love and knowing what the child should be. So the greater the idealization, the higher the pedestal the child is put on, the greater the incentive to deny the inner image. After all the all too human being cannot live up to the infallible idealized image and so in being unable to accept the actual nonrecognition as an individual and utter lack of true love the caregiver displays the vulnerable child instead denies the flawed idealization to hold onto the illusion of love from the caregiver.

The child internalizes the conflict between reality and perception by holding themself unfairly as too inferior, which is actually untrue but not realized, and desperately avoiding this horrible double bind with a kind of permanent lie, an entirely false facade of being what the idealization portrays.

The mind splits into the inner self as an atrophied,  belligerent, petulant, worthless, honor-less, useless identity to avoid facing the true horrible conditions the child exists in and the concurrently developed false outer self which is Godlike, perfect, morally and spiritually above all others and all criticism, fully expert in all subjects and fields and an authority to be admired so completely as to never be doubted or disobeyed under any circumstances.

The outer facade is exemplified in Ron Hubbard's claims about himself and his creation Scientology. He portrayed himself as superior to God quite literally. And far, far above all humans.

This inhuman cruelty, unhealthy delusion and avoidance of reality repeats itself in different forms in different systems. Daniel Shaw writes about how traumatic narcissism is a relational system that uses trauma to continue through generations. An abused child in this manner may in turn carry on this abuse and their child may also, as the pattern in his hypothesis has the trait of encouraging recreation again and again with victim becoming abuser to tragically give traumatic narcissism the quality of continuing with further generations.

Similarly cult leaders in his terms also are traumatic narcissists and abuse the cult members who in the social setting of the cult are strongly obligated to abuse others and recreate socially on a larger scale the abuser in Hubbard then victims in cult members then further abuse in new or more vulnerable cult members.

So in an individual a split can exist which starts with one person being denied acceptance: the traumatic narcissist fails to accept their own circumstances and in turn fails to accept themself. To hold onto the lie that the abuser is good and possible acceptance and love from the abuser is better than facing no love from the abuser. Why ?

Imagine being a small child with a mother raising you, at say six or seven you could face that your mother is a monster incapable of love, and you for no fair reason will never have a good relationship with a close caregiver as a child, which seems like forever to a child. Or you could hope if you were a little better, a little smarter or a bit better student or athlete your parent would be satisfied and everything will be fine. Compromising your beliefs a bit, then a bit more becomes habit then lifestyle then identity. The child in attempting to cope with trauma builds the prison of their own mind, certainly unknowingly. The process involves lying, denial and dissociation. It creates doublethink and relies on cognitive dissonance. It relies on the double bind. It uses the intellectual double bind Jon Atack has written on and the emotional double bind others have described.

In my opinion double binds rely on lies and emotional trauma and cognitive dissonance to exist and to persist.

The trauma of knowing one is secretly ashamed and in need of love is held in place by simultaneously knowing one is evil and unworthy of forgiveness and love. One needs to open up to face the truth as an example but knows they don't deserve help, love, forgiveness, relief, friendship or even death in the self image of the inner child, so they dare not face this or tell others.

That is a double bind - one needs to thoroughly, rationally face the self image and circumstances of its creation to see the profound trauma the child is perpetually avoiding. Having been neglected and used to project idealized fantasies of the narcissistic caregiver is such a humiliating and total betrayal, such a cruel and unfair childhood it must be denied and dissociated from to preserve any illusion of love having occurred, of life being fair, of love being returned. Surely realizing one has been neglected, used and exploited with no love, affection or actual recognition as a person is shattering. It shatters illusions about life, fairness, the nature of families, the reciprocity of love and the ultimate nature of human existence.

After all standing up to an authority figure and rejecting their values when that figure has raised one and by implication all values one attained are interrelated to the legitimacy of the authority is an immensely problematic proposition. One must simultaneously throw off emotional bonds long held and relied on and intellectual values supported by a fallen leader.

I have focused so extremely on the mind of Hubbard and the hypothetical recreation of his traumatized mind in his victims and their inner world to make it very clear. A split occurs in which part of reality and equality and empathy and compassion is denied to one portion of a system - in this case a single mind. In a simple comparison some see an authority and submission based relationship as bringing on subjugation and a lack of empathy, compassion, humility, equality and honesty in certain circumstances.

Another model of relationships can theoretically occur with equality, compassion and basic human decency as fundamental values in which subjugation and traumatizing acts are seen as undesirable and strongly discouraged.

The two extremes are diametrically opposed. Relationships and groups can be examined against criteria including the universal declaration of human rights, Robert Jay Lifton's eight criteria of thought reform and similar lists by Margaret Singer and Steven Hassan. ICSA also has lists of cultic attributes.

This repeats in cults: the cult leader denies the cult members love, honesty, equality, basic human rights and empathy and compassion. Through the actual institutional structure and functions of the cult the abuse is perpetuated in a manner which is encouraged and hidden by the individual group members. The group overall doesn't recognize its abusive nature, just as the individual victim of traumatic narcissism internally doesn't recognize how they were abused and denied recognition by the abuser as an individual with full rights deserving of love, compassion, empathy and honesty in turn.

They in the terms some psychoanalysts use hold the trauma and are negatively impacted by this and in groups the group members are exploited and deceived by the cult leader and eventually the cult doctrine itself. The untrue ideas carried on by the cult indoctrination act to make a self protecting system of institutional evil which may be well hidden from individual cult members.

With small, uninspected assumptions and intellectual compromises compiled into fully accepted deeply held convictions the cult members one by one collaborate as unknowing accomplices in constructing their own prisons of the mind from Ron Hubbard's beautiful quite generous empty promises and the counterfeit dreams that seduce with vivid imagery and enthrall through euphoric ecstasy.

Doublethink occurs in an individual like Hubbard and is encouraged in others through the propaganda method of redefinition of terms explored in my blog post Propaganda By Reversal Of Meaning. In other words Hubbard recreated his own way of thinking in others. His way was possibly chosen as an avoidance of reality, while his victims have choice taken away.

This is similar to the small acts a victim of narcissistic idealization takes to cope with traumatic narcissism. One by one they seem bearable, the long term cumulative effect is horrific. Similarly the cult uses small seemingly bearable compromises with the group. These mirror the coping acts by the individual victim. A small change, a bearable compromise in the short term occurs. But similarly the long term relationship is harmful.

So within the victim that will perpetuate traumatic narcissism a split occurs and is perpetuated against the victim, but seeming to help them cope. And in the relationship between individual abuser and victim in a one on one relationship such as husband and wife or parent and child the same split occurs. Now I am not saying every abuser had to be severely abused or idealized. There are other possible factors including genetics which I haven't addressed and will not dismiss as possibly influential.

 I am just bringing forward hypothetical components of several hypotheses which appear complimentary in terms of mirroring one another in certain qualities across differing orders of magnitude. These hypotheses address similar relational systems of dysfunction and perpetuation of dysfunction. Start with the individual malignant narcissist as a traumatic narcissist, then move to the highly abusive relationship as a one on one or family relationship. Then move up to a larger group such as a cult, perhaps as large as tens of thousands of members such as Scientology.

Some can extend this even further and apply it to even larger groups to examine how the authority and power holders treat others and how institutions adopt doctrine that has underlying false assumptions that lead to abuses.