Alternatives To Scientology 8 Subliminal 7

The Alternatives To Scientology series Subliminal is based on the chapters in the book Subliminal by Leonard Mlodinow and should definitely be read in order from number 2 to number 11. If read out of order they definitely won't make sense.

In chapter 7 (Sorting People and Things) of his book Subliminal, Leonard Mlodinow took on the human tendency to place people and things in categories. He started with the example of a list of twenty groceries being difficult to remember just from hearing them said aloud. But if they are sorted into categories like vegetables, cereals, meats, snacks etc then it's easier to remember them.

Mlodinow wrote, "categorization is a strategy our brains use to more efficiently store information." (Page 145)

"Every object and person we encounter in the world is unique, but we wouldn't function very well if we perceived them that way. We don't have the time or the mental bandwidth to observe and consider each detail of every item in our environment." (Page 146)

Mlodinow made the example of a hypothetical situation - if one encountered a bear and took the time to evaluate every detail of sensory information in full we would likely be eaten before we got through deciding what is going on, never reaching a decision to leave.

 In every day life for most of the last fifty thousand years human beings have needed to get a thousand to three thousand calories of food and some water and protect themselves from predators, the weather and other people. To be efficient and fast enough in decision making people must take a shortcut, so we use categories as shortcuts to survive.

Even young children can tell a tiny chihuahua, a medium pit bull and a huge Saint Bernard are all dogs while a tiny kitten is a cat which is different from a dog despite there being many differences in the broad category of "dog."

Mlodinow described the focus we have on specific details in categories to distinguish between items in categories. The difference between a "b" and d" is the direction the curve goes in and we instinctively key on this to see which we are dealing with.

Similarly we key on other differences in categories. I look at the air and ground to see if it's raining, if I am not sure due to darkness I look at puddles to see if they are responding to falling rain by moving or if they are still. I may assume that indicates no rain or light rain. These are subtle differences in otherwise identical environments.

Mlodinow wrote, "If we conclude that a certain set of objects belongs to one group and a second set of objects to another, we may then perceive those in different groups as less similar than they really are. Merely placing objects in groups can affect our judgment of those objects. So while categorization is a natural and crucial shortcut, like our brain's other survival-oriented tricks, it has its drawbacks." (Page 147)

Mlodinow described an experiment in which people were asked to judge the length of lines. Researchers put several lines in a group A and others in a group B.  Researchers found people thought lines that are in a group together are closer in length than they actually are and the difference in length between lines from different groups is different than it really is. Similar experiments with color differences and groups and guessing temperature changes in a thirty day period within one month or from the middle of a month to the middle of the next month is seen as more extreme. Same number of days but just saying it's a different month increases the estimate of change.

The implications are stunning. If people can be placed in categories and thought of as fundamentally defined by those categories we easily can misjudge people.

This reminds me of a terrible quote:
“The leader of genius must have the ability to make different opponents appear as if they belonged to one category. ” ―Adolf Hitler

That's a reminder of a terrible problem with human behavior and categorization.

Mlodinow wrote, "In all these examples, when we categorize, we polarize. Things that for one arbitrary reason or another are identified as belonging to the same category seem more similar to each other than they really are, while those in different categories seem more different than they really are. The unconscious mind transforms fuzzy differences and subtle nuances into clear-cut distinctions. Its goal is to erase irrelevant detail while maintaining information on what is important. When that's done successfully, we simplify our environment and make it easier and faster to navigate. When it's done inappropriately, we distort our perceptions, sometimes with results harmful to ourselves and others. That's especially true when our tendency to categorize affects our view of other humans--when we view the doctors in a given practice, the attorneys in a given law firm, the fans of a certain sports team, or the people in a given race or ethnic group as more alike than they really are." (Page 148)

Mlodinow wrote on how the term "stereotype" was created by French printer Firmin Didot in 1794. It was a printing process that created duplicate plates for printing. With these plates mass production via printing was possible.

It got its modern use by Walter Lippmann in his 1922 book Public Opinion. Lippmann is perhaps best known nowadays as a person frequently quoted by noted intellectual and American dissident Noam Chomsky. Chomsky has criticized the use of propaganda to manage populations by the government, wealthy individuals, corporations and media.

From Subliminal Mlodinow quoted Lippmann,  "The real environment is altogether too big, too complex, and too fleeting for direct acquaintance...And although we have to act in that environment, we have to reconstruct it on a simpler model before we can manage with it." (Page 149) Lippmann called that model stereotype.

Lippmann in Mlodinow's estimation correctly recognized the source of stereotypes as cultural exposure. In his time newspapers, magazines and the new medium of film communicated in simplified characters and easily understood concepts for audiences. Lippmann noted stock characters were used to be easily understood and character actors were recruited to fill stereotypes.

Darell J. Steffensmeier and H.T. Himmelweit , two social psychologists performed an experiment in a large department store in Iowa city. A person in either fine clothes, like a nice suit with a tie or modest clothes like dirty, patched jeans and a workman's shirt would walk down an aisle and place a small item of clothing in his pocket in front of a customer. The thief then walked out of hearing range but stayed within sight of the customer. A store employee then came near the witness and began rearranging shelves. The thief remained within sight and the witness could report the crime, unheard or ignore it. This was repeated over a hundred and fifty times at stores throughout the area. Both the thieves and employees that rearranged shelves were actors, and everything was done with the permission of the stores.

The witnesses reported the well dressed thieves less often and in their descriptions the scruffy looking thieves were described in far harsher terms. This is the accumulation of results of our vision missing elements we fill in and our hearing filling in sounds we don't hear and our memories fill in gaps with details that seem appropriate and consistent with our knowledge and our brains fill in details on faces which we only remember a few general features of.

Mlodinow wrote, "In each of these cases our subliminal minds take incomplete data, use context or other cues to complete the picture, make educated guesses, and produce a result that is sometimes accurate, sometimes not, but always convincing. Our minds also fill in the blanks when we judge people, and a person's category membership is part of the data we use to do that." (Page 152)

Mlodinow described how psychologist Henri Tajfel was behind the realization that perceptual biases of categorization lie at the root of prejudice. Tajfel was behind the line length studies that support his hypothesis. Tajfel was a Polish Jew captured in France in World War II. He knew a Frenchman would be treated as an enemy by the Nazis while a French Jew would be treated as an animal and a Polish Jew would be killed.

He knew how he would be treated was entirely limited by the category he was placed in. Being a Polish Jew was a guarantee of death and so he impersonated a French Jew and was liberated in 1945. Mlodinow wrote, "According to the  psychologist William Peter Robinson, today's theoretical understanding of those subjects "can almost without exception be traced back to Tajfel's theorizing and direct research intervention." (Page 153)

Mlodinow wrote, "Unfortunately, as was the case with other pioneers, it took the field many years to catch up with Tajfel's insights. Even well into the 1980s, many psychologists viewed discrimination as a conscious and intentional behavior, rather than one commonly arising from normal and avoidable cognitive processes related to the brain's vital propensity to categorize." (Page 153)

In 1998 Tajfel was vindicated. Researchers at the University of Washington published a paper on the Implicit Association Test.

In the test a person is presented words like "brother" or "aunt" and respond with "hello" to male terms and "goodbye" to female ones. You proceed as quickly as possible and try to avoid errors.

Next you are given names of unambiguous gender to respond to like "Dick" and "Jane.

Finally the real test begins in the third part of the exercise. You get names and relatives to respond to:

Joan, John, granddaughter, Beth, daughter, Mike, niece, Richard, Leonard, son, aunt, grandfather, Brian, Donna, father, mother, Gary, Kathy.

In another phase you are asked to say "hello" to a male name or female relative and "goodbye" to a female name or male relative.

The time it takes to do the answering in this phase consistently is longer than the earlier phases. You have to sort by four categories now where before it was simply two categories of male or female.

Mlodinow wrote, "That is the crux of the IAT: when the labeling you asked to do follows your mental associations, it speeds you up, but when it mixes across associations, it slows you down. As a result, by examining the difference in speed between the two ways you are asked to label, researchers can probe how strongly a person associates traits with a social category." (Page 155)

As an example Mlodinow described lists with male and female names and terms from science and art. He said if you had no association between men and science or women and art the time it would take to respond to male names and art terms with "hello" and female names and science terms with "goodbye" would be identical to the time to respond to female names and art terms with "hello" and male names and science terms with goodbye."

Many people associate women with art and associate men with science. The times to respond for the counterintuitive associations of men with art and women with science are longer for many people than the time for men with science and women with art, even among people that exhibit low gender bias via self reporting.

The test has also been performed with black faces, white faces and positive terms (peace, joy, love, happy, etc) or negative terms (awful, failure, evil, nasty etc) if you have pro white and anti black bias it will be counterintuitive for you to associate positive terms with black faces and negative terms with white faces. According to Mlodinow about 70% of  white people tested show significant time increases when matching black faces to positive terms and negative terms to white faces over the time it takes to associate white faces and positive terms and black faces to negative terms. This stuns some people who report not consciously holding racial bias.

It even shows up for some black people. They are exposed to stereotypes via media and it has some effect. I have seen evidence that the media over represents black and Hispanic folks as criminal, lazy, dishonest, drug addicts and prostitutes. The New Jim Crow and Age Of Propaganda both go into detail on this far more.

Even some Jewish people display antisemitism immersed in a culture with antisemitism as a component.

There's a portion of the brain that professor Robert Sapolsky associates with very emotional reactions and decisions, the ventromedial prefrontal cortex or VMPC. It's got a counterpart called the DLPC. Sapolsky describes the VMPC as very emotional and the DLPC as deliberate. It's associated with careful and logical decisions.

Mlodinow wrote, "Though your evaluation of another person may feel rational and deliberate, it is heavily informed by automatic, unconscious processes--the kind of emotion-regulating processes carried out within the prefrontal cortex." (Page 156)

It's been found that damage to the VMPC eliminates unconscious gender stereotypes and other associations in a variety of situations.

Lippmann was correct that the culture through movies, T.V. shows, magazines, newspapers and now memes online creates and reinforces categories we absorb and retain. Significant research described in Robert Cialdini's book Influence and Age Of Propaganda establishes that repetition of messages strengthens their impact and media specifically heightens belief in stereotypes the media present and that includes inaccurate stereotypes used often.

Mlodinow wrote, "The challenge is not how to stop categorizing but how to become aware of when we do it in ways that prevent us from being able to see individual people for who they really are." (Page 157)

He described how psychology pioneer Gordon Allport wrote that categories saturate all they contain with the same "ideational and emotional flavor." (Page 157) He cited a 1948 experiment. A Canadian social scientist wrote letters to a hundred resorts that advertised in papers around the holidays. The resorts each got two identical letters asking for accommodations - with one difference. One letter was from Mr. Lockwood and the other from Mr. Greenberg. 95% of the resorts offered Mr. Lockwood a room and 36% offered Mr. Greenberg a room. The perceived religion of Christian or Jewish obviously explains the discrepancy.

Mlodinow listed quotes that show extreme racist attitudes by historical champions of the oppressed Mahatma Gandhi, Che Guevara and even Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln is noteworthy for giving a variety of statements on race and not all were free of bias and discrimination.

Hopefully we have made some progress regarding conscious discrimination for much of the population but unconscious bias is just beginning to acknowledged. We have to recognize our tendency to use categories and work to find differences within categories.

Mlodinow is optimistic about reducing bias and uses the fact that for minor crimes more attractive people get far less severe punishments but for serious crimes the punishment is more even. For murder you typically get a longer trial and more of a chance to look closely at details.

I think we may never eliminate unconscious racial and gender bias completely, certainly not in my lifetime. But acknowledging that reality and honestly facing scientific evidence that supports the fact that we are biased and social and historical evidence like that described in The New Jim Crow is a beginning. I think the best way to deal with unpleasant realities is to start with honesty about them and speak out. Complacency is the first enemy to overcome in society and ourselves.

I have been lucky enough to know women that have been much smarter than me, overcoming gender stereotypes and black folks that are also much smarter and harder working than me and of honest and admirable character, also overcoming racial stereotypes and Muslims that are just interested in the same things as anyone else like having a decent job, taking care of their families and enjoying time off. I could go on but the point is that despite bias evidence that it's inaccurate on every level is available.

I think the human race now with nuclear weapons needs to overcome bias in a way that is more dire and urgent than ever before. In earlier times even a Hitler or Stalin or other leader couldn't kill the human race if they devoted all their resources to it for their entire lives. Now several countries could exterminate the entire human race if they used their nuclear arsenals. Certainly Russia and the United States with over three or four thousand powerful nuclear weapons each could do that. In a few hours either one could unleash enough destruction to render earth uninhabitable for humans and destroy hundreds of millions immediately and billions in the aftermath of one day of attack.

We can't afford the immaturity of racial and religious discrimination at the levels we have displayed in the past or we guarantee ourselves no future. Curbing our genocidal tendencies is now a matter of species survival.

I have to comment here on the implications this chapter has on Scientology. In Scientology Hubbard tried to use categories to control the thoughts and behavior of his followers.

Here are a few of Hubbard's quotes to show his intention:

"Psychiatry" and "psychiatrist" are easily redefined to mean "an anti-social enemy of the people". This takes the kill crazy psychiatrist off the preferred list of professions … The redefinition of words is done by associating different emotions and symbols with the word than were intended...Scientologists are redefining "doctor", "Psychiatry" and "psychology" to mean "undesirable antisocial elements"...The way to redefine a word is to get the new definition repeated as often as possible. Thus it is necessary to redefine medicine, psychiatry and psychology downward and define Dianetics and Scientology upwards. This, so far as words are concerned, is the public opinion battle for belief in your definitions, and not those of the opposition. A consistent, repeated effort is the key to any success with this technique of propaganda. "Propaganda by Redefinition of Words" (5 October 1971) L Ron Hubbard 

The only safe public opinion to head for is they love us and are in a frenzy of hate against the enemy, this means standard wartime propaganda is what one is doing, complete with atrocity, war crimes trials, the lot. Know the mores of your public opinion, what they hate. That’s the enemy. What they love. That’s you. You preserve the image or increase it of your own troops and degrade the image of the enemy to beast level. February 16, 1969 policy letter Battle Tactics L Ron Hubbard

In any event, any person from 2.0 down on the tone scale should not have, in any thinking society, any civil rights of any kind, because by abusing those rights he brings into being arduous and strenuous laws which are oppressive to those who need no such restraints." Science of Survival L Ron Hubbard
...

"There are only two answers for the handling of people from 2.0 down on the tone scale, neither one of which has anything to do with reasoning with them or listening to their justification of their acts. The first is to raise them on the tone scale by un-enturbulating some of their theta by any one of the three valid processes. The other is to dispose of them quietly and without sorrow." Science of Survival L Ron Hubbard

THE PERSONAL ENEMY

Unfortunately, the person who does not want you to study Scientology is your enemy as well as ours.

When he harangues against us to you as a “cult,” as a “hoax,” as a very bad thing done by very bad people, he or she is only saying, “Please, please, please don’t try to find me out.”Thousands of such protesting people carefully investigated by us have been found to have unsavory pasts and sordid motives they did not dare (they felt) permit to come to light. The wife or mother who rails against a family member who takes up Scientology is, we regret to have to say, guided by very impure motives, generated in the morass of dread secrets long withheld. The father, husband or friend who frowns upon one knowing more about the mind is hiding something that he feels would damage him.“You had better leave Scientology alone!” is an instinctive defense, prompted in all cases investigated by a guilty conscience. CERTAINTY
The Official Publication of DIANETICS and SCIENTOLOGY in the British Isles

Vol. 7 No. 2 1960 L Ron Hubbard

Degraded beings are about eighteen to one over Big Beings in the human race (minimum ratio). So those who keep things going are few. HCO POLICY LETTER OF 22 MARCH 1967 Alter-Is and Degraded Beings L. Ron Hubbard

Some thetans are bigger than others. None are truly equal Degraded beings, taking a cue from SP associates, instinctively resent, hate and seek to obstruct any person in charge of anything or any Big Being. HCO POLICY LETTER OF 22 MARCH 1967 Alter-Is and Degraded Beings L. Ron Hubbard

Hubbard in hundreds of references put his enemies and critics in broad categories of evil. His critics are all portrayed as liars and criminals without exception.

This ends up permeating the thinking of Scientologists. He also portrays all confusion and disagreements in indoctrination as being due to misunderstood words and all desires to leave as always being motivated by hidden evil acts and misunderstood words. No valid reason for wishing to leave Scientology is recognized.

Hubbard in one set of references defines social personalities as helping constructive groups and hurting destructive groups and antisocial personalities as helping destructive groups and hurting constructive groups. He shifts this in his definition of suppressive persons to people that otherwise are identical but hurt Scientology and don't help it. He calls the antisocial personality the suppressive person and the anti Scientologist.

He praises Scientologists in comparison to all others and proclaimed there is no more ethical group on the planet than Scientologists. He stresses the broad categories and denies nuances within categories.

His view of pure good and evil is reinforced in hundreds of references on crimes and ethics and the tone scale and numerous other topics.

Scientologists increasingly see cult members in good standing as acceptable and outsiders as evil, degraded, criminal and unaware.

In the elite Sea Org a recruitment poster had a line that I will paraphrase. It said for every Sea Org member working to make it go right there are a million people that don't even know what right is. Outsiders are seen as completely incompetent and unethical, like children that refuse to grow up and have to be led to even survive.

Overcoming the negative aspects of bias regarding categorization is a tremendous challenge for each individual and society. It's a much, much more extreme challenge for members of the Scientology cult, proportional to their fanatical zealotry and degree of indoctrination. Children raised in Scientology face particularly unique and difficult challenges compared to adults that became cult members.

I hope this helps some people move from the category of unaware about prejudice and helps some ex Scientologists move towards recovery.