The Big Empty
This is the second post in a series on the state a person may find themselves in after leaving a cult. It's in part my own personal experience and in part the result of reading several books on cults and seeing the biographies of ex cult members and their remarks about life after the cult. I recommend that all the posts in this series be read in order from first to last as several build on points made in the earlier posts.
Note: here is a link to my blog archive by topic which has almost all my older posts at the blog sorted into categories for your convenience.
As examples of double binds in Scientology we can find many and I want to try to start with statements or ideas from materials that are not confidential, meaning ones that a new person in Scientology is allowed to see, in fact I will try to focus on ideas that are not esoteric or rare, I want to use ones that I saw early in my indoctrination that many, probably most, Scientologists get exposed to, so it's clear that if you were in Scientology it's quite likely you would get these in your indoctrination as well.
From the Scientology website we have The Code of Honor.
THE CODE OF HONOR
These concepts are very fundamental in Scientology regarding ethics, morality, people and their personality types and deciding if a person is good or evil. They are very important to many Scientologists. I can't over emphasize that point.
Okay, we can look at these three descriptions and they seem compatible. But something stuck in my mind when I studied them years ago in my Scientology indoctrination and I looked them over again and found something interesting.
I want to focus on one point from each of the three to point something out.
8. The Social Personality feels bad about the things he has done wrong and doesn’t find it easy to admit to them. He takes responsibility for his errors.
8. Many Anti-Social Personalities will very easily confess to the most alarming crimes, but they will have no sense of responsibility for them.
Their actions have little or nothing to do with their own choices or decisions. Things “just happened.”
They have no sense of actually having caused something and so cannot feel any shame or guilt when they have done something wrong.
For example, the Anti-Social Personality could carelessly throw something heavy out of a window in a building and really hurt someone standing outside. He would not feel that he had done anything wrong. He would just blame the person for walking past the window when he threw something out of it.
11. Never regret yesterday. Life is in you today and you make your tomorrow.
Okay, if you look closely Hubbard is telling you that a social personality, "feels bad about the things he has done wrong and doesn’t find it easy to admit to them." and further an Anti-Social Personality, "will very easily confess to the most alarming crimes, but they will have no sense of responsibility for them."
This seems coherent but Hubbard in The Code of Honor tells you to, "Never regret yesterday."
Um, it sounds like a Social Personality regrets doing bad things and an Anti-Social Personality doesn't AND Hubbard is telling you to follow his Code of Honor requires NOT regretting the bad things you do! Um?
If you regret the bad things you do you are being a social personality which is presumably good but you are violating the Code of Honor which is presumably dishonorable?
If you don't regret the bad things you do you are being an Anti-Social Personality which is bad but you are following The Code of Honor!
See, the double bind? No matter which option you follow, you are doing something discouraged or condemned in Scientology!
Another topic that has confusing and contradictory information is the answers to the question, "what percentage of people are good, bad, dangerous?"
In different forms people have wondered about this for thousands of years. We have wanted to know who are good people and bad people and how to tell them apart reliably and stop bad people and reward good people for thousands of years.
No end of trouble has come from being fooled by people who lied and had evil intentions and from mistreating good people who were incorrectly judged to be evil. It's one of the basic problems of society and human beings in social relationships.
Hubbard provided answers, but as one is a Scientologist longer and longer and goes deeper into the indoctrination the answers change greatly.
From The Scientology Handbook:
The Antisocial Personality
There are certain characteristics and mental attitudes which cause about 20 percent of a race to oppose violently any betterment activity or group.
Such people are known to have antisocial tendencies.
When the legal or political structure of a country becomes such as to favor such personalities in positions of trust, then all the civilizing organizations of the country become suppressed and a barbarism of criminality and economic duress ensues.
Crime and criminal acts are perpetrated by antisocial personalities. Inmates of institutions commonly trace their state back to contact with such personalities.
Thus, in the fields of government, police activities and mental health, to name a few, we see that it is important to be able to detect and isolate this personality type so as to protect society and individuals from the destructive consequences attendant upon letting such have free rein to injure others.
As they only comprise 20 percent of the population and as only 2 1/2 percent are truly dangerous, we see that with a very small amount of effort we could considerably better the state of society.
Well-known, even stellar, examples of such a personality are, of course, Napoleon and Hitler. Dillinger, Pretty Boy Floyd, Christie and other famous criminals were well-known examples of the antisocial personality. But with such a cast of characters in history we neglect the less stellar examples and do not perceive that such personalities exist in current life, very common, often undetected.
When we trace the cause of a failing business, we will inevitably discover somewhere in its ranks the antisocial personality hard at work.
In families which are breaking up, we commonly find one or the other of the persons involved to have such a personality.
Where life has become rough and is failing, a careful review of the area by a trained observer will detect one or more such personalities at work.
As there are 80 percent of us trying to get along and only 20 percent trying to prevent us, our lives would be much easier to live were we well informed as to the exact manifestations of such a personality. Thus, we could detect it and save ourselves much failure and heartbreak.
It is important then to examine and list the attributes of the antisocial personality. Influencing as it does the daily lives of so many, it well behooves decent people to become better informed on this subject. End Quote
Okay, this is what you see a lot in introductory courses and the initial training in ethics most people in Scientology see as public or staff members or Sea Org recruits on their first few courses.
It sounds quite clear and even optimistic and encouraging! You are told 80% of people are Social Personality types and good people! You are told 20% are Anti-Social Personality types and of them only 2 and 1/2% are truly dangerous!
This sounds like really good news. You can be quite sure that most people are good and evil people, especially the really dangerous ones are far outnumbered by the good. What a relief.
But, there's a big catch. As you progress in Scientology you get more information that totally changes your perspective.
You see Hubbard has this idea that people became "abberated" meaning departed from being rational thinkers and seeing things as they really are in a series of incidents in past lives and this state has negative attributes including poor decision making, inability to see things as they truly are , lowered intelligence and many, many other defects in thinking and character.
So, he amends his original statement to add more and more flaws to people who haven't completed Scientology procedures and as you get more and more indoctrination your information on the character of your fellow man becomes more and more negative.
The following policy letter is a stark example of this reversal. It is studied as part of your indoctrination quite often as one goes deep into Scientology, whether a public, staff member, or Sea Org member. It's meant to shape your perception of yourself, and the other people in the world, in my opinion to shape it radically.
HUBBARD COMMUNICATIONS OFFICE
Saint Hill Manor, East Grinstead, Sussex
HCO POLICY LETTER OF 22 MARCH 19671
Issue I
(Also issued as an HCOB, same date and title)
Remimeo
HCO Hats
IMPORTANT
Admin Know-How Series 14
ALTER-IS AND DEGRADED BEINGS
Alteration of orders and tech is worse than noncompliance.
Alter-is is a covert avoidance of an order. Although it is apparently often brought about by noncomprehension, the noncomprehension itself, and failure to mention it, is an avoidance of orders.
Very degraded beings alter-is. Degraded ones refuse to comply without mentioning it. Beings in fair condition try to comply but remark their troubles, to get help when needed. Competent higher-toned beings understand orders and comply if possible but mainly do their jobs without needing lots of special orders.
Degraded beings find any instruction painful, as they have been painfully indoctrinated with violent measures in the past. They therefore alter-is any order or don’t comply.
Thus, in auditing pcs or in org, where you find alter-is (covert noncompliance) and noncompliance, given sensible and correct tech or instructions, you are dealing with a degraded low-level being and should act accordingly.
One uses very simple low-level processes on a degraded being, gently.
In admin, orgs and especially the Tech Div where a staff member alter-ises or fails to comply, you are also dealing with a degraded being but one who is too much a pc to be a staff member. He cannot be at cause, and staff members must be at cause. So he or she should not be on staff.
This is a primary senior datum regulating all handling of pcs and staff members.
A degraded being is not a suppressive as he can have case gain. But he is so PTS that he works for suppressives only. He is sort of a super-continual PTS beyond the reach, really, of a simple S&D and handled only at Section III OT Course.
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.
Anyone issuing sensible orders is the first one resented by a degraded being.
A degraded being lies to his seniors, avoids orders covertly by alter-is, fails to comply, supplies only complex ideas that can’t ever work (obstructive) and is a general area of enturbulence, often mild seeming or even “cooperative,” often even flattering, sometimes merely dull, but consistently alter-ising or noncomplying.
This datum appeared during higher-level research and is highly revelatory of earlier unexplained phenomena-the pc who changes commands or doesn’t do them, the worker who can’t get it straight or who is always on a tea break.
In an area where suppression has been very heavy for long periods, people become degraded beings. However, they must have been so before already due to track incidents.
Some thetans are bigger than others. None are truly equal. But the degraded being is not necessarily a natively bad thetan. He is simply so PTS and has been for so long that it requires our highest-level tech to finally undo it after he has scaled up all our grades.
Degraded beings are about eighteen to one over Big Beings in the human race (minimum ratio). So those who keep things going are few. And those who will make it without the steam of the few in our orgs behind them are zero. At the same time, we can’t have a world full of them and still make it. So we have no choice.
And we can handle them even when they cannot serve at higher levels.
This is really OT data, but we need it at lower levels to get the job done.
L. Ron Hubbard
Founder
The meaning of the policy is that most people underwent negative experiences in past lives that have left them so negatively affected that they are utterly incompetent and incapable. They are to be seen as non compliant, meaning they can't understand and follow simple commands.
The policy is clear with the eighteen to one ratio of Big Beings to degraded beings.
This puts over 90% of people squarely in the degraded being camp. And less than 10% of people in the Big Beings camp.
Saying that almost everyone is an incompetent shell of a being, mindlessly blundering along in life and only one in eighteen, obviously less than ten percent, of people are on the ball and actually making good things happen is a severe condemnation of the vast majority of humanity.
You can try to square the circle and reconcile the beliefs from the initial training in Scientology and the deeper indoctrination but you are denying the contradiction at some point.
This goes even further as you do the OT levels and see material telling you incidents described in the OT III course materials that occurred many, many lifetimes ago have made EVERYONE incapable of seeing reality and thinking sanely until Scientology techniques are used to alleviate them.
Now, to be clear - perhaps one percent of the people in Scientology ever reach OT III and above!
Scientologists are taught that the material on the OT levels can cause illness, pneumonia, insanity, and death in people if they are not ready for it. So they almost NEVER reveal the material to people who are below them in the group.
So, Scientologists usually don't know that the structure of Scientology is a pyramid and most people are in the lower level and as one rises one gets taught that the people below them are progressively more and more unaware, hypnotised, and incapable.
In fact the Sea Org notably had a poster that had the following quote I will paraphrase that I saw once in a Sea Org org.
"For every Sea Org member working his or her guts out to make it go right, there are a million people who don't even know what right is!"
This has special meaning in Scientology and it can be described as saying that the few thousand people who are in the Sea Org (by dedicating their lives and a hundred and twenty hours a week or so to Scientology) act to fill a special purpose.
They see themselves as literally saving humanity including all current and future human beings from not only death but eternity in a state too degraded to be reborn, floating forever as a spirit in space, blind, deaf, alone, with amnesia, in pain and terrified.
They further see the rest of the billions of people on earth as so degraded we have no sense of what is happening around us and we wander through life like mindless sheep or cattle and do not really experience this life but stumble along in a deeply hypnotised fog and fantasy, totally out of touch with reality.
They see themselves as the only ones awake. Like Neo and the other rebels in The Matrix, they see themselves as the outnumbered but persistent heroes who have to do whatever it takes to see through their missions, because the rest of us are too unaware to even know right from wrong, or truth from fiction.
This is the mindset of the cult members and the fanatic and the result of a lot of indoctrination. In fact it is what Robert Jay Lifton termed a thought reform program. Others use terms like coercive control and brainwashing. Many terms have been used such as trauma bonding, bounded choice and numerous others. You can look at them and see what they each bring to the conversation worth sharing.
In her superb book Terror, Love and Brainwashing Alexandra Stein described how the initial information a cult offers is far different from the information used later. She described the initial information used on outsiders and new recruits as propaganda, meant often to be more palatable to the regular world and new members, while the more extreme ideas are used as indoctrination that one is exposed to as one moves deeper and deeper it becomes progressively more extreme and often more unacceptable to the outside world.
This fits the doctrine in Scientology and as one progresses it has the two distinct qualities of strongly contradicting the propaganda for outsiders and new members more and more and also becoming more extreme and more unacceptable to the outside world.
You have to both accept the more extreme doctrine and obey it and also progressively set aside the awareness of contradictions in the doctrine and practices more and more.
You lay in double bind after double bind and the indoctrination is set up with an ingenious mechanism. If a student is confused by the material in Scientology they are seen as flawed, never the material. Usually they are told they must not understand the words and symbols they studied and required to look them up. This can include regular English words and punctuation and it can also include the thousands and thousands of terms Hubbard came up with new uses and definitions for. He often redefined a term to mean the exact opposite of its true meaning to hide that's what it actually is.
This gives an instant double bind and it often sticks with a Scientologist for life.
I could go through many other contradictions in Scientology and double binds and terms Hubbard redefined as their opposite but I have already written extensively on that in earlier blog posts.
And I have written extensively on the indoctrination methods in Scientology as well.
- Insidious Enslavement : Study Technology
- Basic Introduction to Hypnosis in Scientology
- Pissed It's Not Your Fault !!!
- The Offensive Defensive Technique
- The Critical Factor
The Big Empty
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