Scientology's Secrets - 1 The Self Is Not The Other

 A small percentage of people, some estimates are between one and perhaps four to eight percent depending on the source, are considered to have no empathy and no real love for anyone besides themselves at all.

It's hard to get normal people to understand some people don't care for their parents, spouses, friends or children in any way resembling love or compassion. That's alien to their thinking and their deepest feelings.

If Scientology has taught me anything it is this: everyone is not identical in disposition. Some people are extremely different. When I first encountered Scientology I thought of it in terms of how I would have created it. I thought if I was running a fraud I would have made a good fortune and fled to a nice country that would let me stay there and enjoyed a nice retirement. Or that if I made Scientology and believed sincerely in the technology and claims of results I would have stuck with Scientology and worked on it for life.

I didn't realize other options were available. I didn't realize other kinds of personality existed. I didn't realize the methods to persuade and shape a group that has faith in Scientology persist despite a lack of results due to psychological and social factors.

You can get people in certain environments and circumstances to believe things that aren't true. You can get only one in a few thousand potential recruits to join and if your group is isolated and controls the information the members receive make it look larger and more successful than it really is.

I didn't realize that some people that fool people don't just want money, but they also want to control others as fully as possible for as long as possible and feel powerful from fooling many people. The more people they fool the more they want. It's a ravening hunger for some.

Some people are not sane and also are dishonest within the information they do hold. In other words some are both conmen and mad. I didn't know some people have denial, dissociation and projection as permanent aspects of their identities. I didn't know some people hold such fully developed separate aspects of their fragmented or split minds they make actual identities of complex deception that seem genuine to even them but mask deep hidden identities of opposite character.

I didn't understand that certain people hold contradictory qualities in conflicting selves within one mind. I didn't understand that the required efforts and knowledge to hide fraud, crimes, pathological lying, plagiarism and false research and results could be carried out for decades by a mind that via continuous double think also simultaneously denies these things and presents itself as infallible, successful, honest and moral and fully believes it.

The split mind of the guru was something I wasn't prepared for. It explains the compulsion of Hubbard to keep Scientology going and keep plagiarizing long after any desire to become wealthy enough to retire was achieved. He was addicted to fooling himself and pretending to be a god and messiah and the more people he defrauded and enslaved, the longer he escaped justice and the longer he felt victorious against law enforcement agencies and even governments the more he felt proven better than others, despite a deep, deep feeling of worthlessness and inadequacy. The emptiness inside him could never be filled.

Scientology taught me that people can be fooled because we aren't prepared for certain actions and attitudes we ourselves don't hold. Psychologists sometimes call it reverse projection - a normal person thinking everyone is of similar character and thinking everyone has a conscience, everyone has humility and shame, everyone has consistent character and if they lie knowingly to others they don't deny it to themselves, everyone has self reflection and admits errors and limitations within themselves, everyone has love, compassion and standards of basic human decency. Believing these things in relationships with narcissists and other predators is a fatal error.

The fundamental expression of this error is with Hubbard himself and his cult. He wasn't a normal person and through his cult his predatory instincts are expressed and his contradiction filled mind. Scientology claims to be ethical but is in fact criminal and abusive.

He got individual cult members to mirror his confidence without results, ruthlessness without self reflection and his fanaticism for him without benefit to others. By getting people to one by one embrace blind devotion to him Hubbard built a bandwagon fallacy. It seemed like so many people wouldn't form a consensus without real results, but as they say you can fool some of the people some of the time.

Scientology taught me that when it comes to predators and their deceived followers that become zealots and fanatics the self is not the other.