Scientology Reflections (7) 10 Years After Leaving-A Delicate Problem
This is the seventh post in a series that I am publishing in 2024. The series is on the journey I have been on AFTER leaving Scientology and Dianetics and what my experiences were, and mistakes I made, and things that I learned, some shortly after leaving Scientology and others further along the way, even up to the present day. Some of this involves Scientology and Dianetics. Some involves the process of leaving a cult. Some is just knowledge that I could have benefited from knowing sooner, that may even be unrelated to the cultic topic entirely.
For anyone who is unaware, I was in Scientology for twenty five years, between 1989 and 2014. I left in 2014 and discovered that Scientology is a harmful fraud and jam packed with lies and further it is composed of techniques plagiarized from other practices and sources. Ronald Hubbard had the ability to take a practice, file off the serial numbers and repackage it as his own in first Dianetics and later Scientology.
I upon leaving Scientology decided that a democratic system of some kind is better than the fascist dictatorship that exists in Scientology. And make no mistake, Scientology's not remotely democratic.
So, I fully intend to support some kind of democracy and oppose authoritarian, fascist, totalitarian and other similar systems. So, I ended up opposing a lot of the systems in the world today, a lot of the policies in the world today and so on.
Over time I have found numerous obstacles to a democracy being able to function. I could go on for some time regarding many of them.
But one thing that I have had to come to terms with is that if we are to have a democracy and have it work, we are going to need a population that is educated enough to participate and not be completely unaware or incapable of even understanding what is going on.
The sad reality is we will need a population that is literate enough to make decisions for themselves and they are going to have to read things for themselves or they will be extremely vulnerable to propaganda and incapable of even examining the arguments for and against ideas.
And the sad truth is, if the research data is accurate, they are not ready, not even close.
"Nationwide, on average, 79% of U.S. adults are literate in 2022. 21% of adults in the US are illiterate in 2022. 54% of adults have a literacy below sixth-grade level. 21% of Americans 18 and older are illiterate in 2022."
source 55 US Literacy Statistics: Literacy Rate, Average Reading Level by Steven Zauderer
So, the grim reality is over half the adults, 130 million people, are not literate enough to do their own fact checking. They are not capable of applying the most basic ideas in critical thinking.
I have written about this at length in Mockingbird's Nest blog on Scientology, so I won't go over the whole encyclopedia of information that I have published but I will point out one of the simplest ideas that is essential for a person to be able to even form an educated opinion about a topic.
Briefly, I want to go over a few ideas from the fourth post in this series (just to refresh your memory)
“There must be discussion to show how experience is to be interpreted. Wrong opinions and practices gradually yield to fact and argument; but facts and arguments, to produce any effect on the mind, must be brought before it.
Very few facts are able to tell their own story, without comments to bring out their meaning. The whole strength and value, then, of human judgment depending on the one property, that it can be set right when it is wrong, reliance can be placed on it only when the means of setting it right are kept constantly at hand.
In the case of any person whose judgement is really deserving of confidence, how has it become so? Because he has kept his mind open to criticism of his opinions and conduct.”
John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, published in 1859
“the only way in which a human being can make some approach to knowing the whole of a subject, is by hearing what can be said about it by persons of every variety of opinion, and studying all modes in which it can be looked at by every character of mind. No wise man ever acquired his wisdom in any mode but this; nor is it in the nature of human intellect to become wise in any other manner.”
― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
“He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that. His reasons may be good, and no one may have been able to refute them. But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side, if he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion... Nor is it enough that he should hear the opinions of adversaries from his own teachers, presented as they state them, and accompanied by what they offer as refutations. He must be able to hear them from persons who actually believe them...he must know them in their most plausible and persuasive form.”
― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
John Stuart Mill makes a persuasive case for hearing the best arguments for and against ideas before being able to properly form an opinion.
He also makes it clear that we need to hear about a subject from people of all types of opinions and backgrounds and from all different kinds of approaches to the subject.
I have heard of a professor who has classes on certain texts and he brings in people from different backgrounds to examine the topic from a historical perspective or a political perspective or another perspective in a different semester. Each year he tries to get one of several experts on different subjects to give their perspective.
People who have different philosophies and education on different topics give their own perspective on the subject to add more to the understanding of the professor and the class.
It's somewhat against human nature to look for the evidence against what we believe or the best evidence for arguments against our beliefs. But it's a foundation of good critical thinking.
I have seen efforts to explain phenomena in human behavior and sometimes information from a different subject is essential to finding a highly plausible explanation.
In psychology we have the difference between the Northern states and Southern states in the US in aggression and the hypothesis that the culture of the people who settled these areas and the honor culture of the people who settled the South is a highly plausible explanation and supported by empirical evidence from psychology research.
We also have the fact that since a peak in crime in America in the early nineties we had a huge decrease (by about half by some estimates). Research involving the harm leaded gas caused and the removal of lead from gas is recognized by many researchers and experts as extremely likely to be a major factor, if not the biggest factor, in causing the huge decrease in crime we have seen since the early nineties.
Without that information from another field we might never understand the huge reduction in American crime.
There are many other examples of information from a different perspective or subject being essential for understanding something important in a subject.
Without that you might have an incorrect conclusion. Now an important point to me is that you need a good basic grounding in a subject itself to form an educated opinion on the subject in general and specific ideas in particular.
I am not at all a fan of the "All you need to know is..." style of claims, regardless of the topic. That is anti critical thinking and anti looking at all the relevant information regarding a claim.
The opposite of this in some ways is something I have written about in the past that is worth mentioning to me.
I call it The Sixty Minutes approach. I saw an episode of the American news television show years ago and it introduced a way to evaluate something that's worth using.
A woman was an assistant coach at a college basketball team and the head coach retired. She was not offered the head coaching position. A man who was far less qualified got the job.
The attorney for the woman coach put up a big piece of paper and put the names of her client on one side and the name of the man who got the job on the other side and below each person she listed all the major qualifications they had. The man had two years experience as an assistant coach.
The woman had decades of experience and winning numerous awards and the team she coached winning a tremendous number of games and the players she coached winning various awards and on and on and on.
At the end the male coach had his two years as an assistant and the woman coach had the entire side filled with both individual and team accomplishments that she could be given the credit for.
The jury found that the team did discriminate against her, because no other explanation was offered and no one believed that the woman was less qualified than the man.
I realized that this is useful for weighing the evidence for and against claims.
There are many situations in which you can use this.
I would have done far better in my life regarding Scientology and a million other things if I had adopted this mindset and applied these principles with personal discipline religiously to my life.
I frankly have found it's especially useful for beliefs or an outlook that is strongly or deeply held. For most people this automatically includes religion, politics and similarly passionate or traditionally close minded beliefs.
Lots of incidents of hearing one thing from just one side and having beliefs that are not accurate can occur but if you look at the information from different sides in their best form you can often see that there is strong evidence that is credible for a different perspective or you might have an opinion that's not what Democrats or Republicans or most media say on a political issue, for example, if you have looked at information from a variety of sources. End quote
So, in light of the literacy rate in America we have a huge problem. I personally think that people need to be able to understand and apply both the ideas that John Stuart Mill in my opinion made compelling arguments for and also the idea of weighing ALL the evidence for and against an idea in a balanced way, that's not rushed or overly biased.
With over half the adults in the country in my opinion likely incapable of reading the ideas here and about a fifth incapable of reading at all, we have a huge obstacle to a functional population for democracy or any other task that requires even a tiny ability to apply critical thinking for oneself. These people can't read the evidence for and against claims and understand or evaluate it.
They in my opinion can't read about history. Or at least they can't read as well as I would hope for at a minimum level to fully get what they read. So, this presents a huge problem, not just for these individuals, but for a democratic society.
“History is important. If you don't know history it is as if you were born yesterday. And if you were born yesterday, anybody up there in a position of power can tell you anything, and you have no way of checking up on it.”
― Howard Zinn
I have many times since leaving Scientology heard claims that I was able to challenge because they involved historical information and they either contradicted information that I already had or they involved something empirical (measurable or observable with human senses or equipment) that I could check on.
Sometimes I found that a claim is not supported by the scientific and historical evidence, not even slightly. Sometimes I found that there was some event that I didn't know about.
But I had a basis and a method to start looking and often could say, "Here's a lot of evidence that contradicts that idea, I can provide links to citations from sources going back decades and they are consistent. Your information is not supported by any evidence I have found and is part of a modern conspiracy theory. Why would people over the last fifty years manufacture fake evidence to support a conspiracy in 2023?"
Sometimes it's quite clear. Sometimes it's not. A lot of the time it relates to how well I know the history of the topic at hand, or a particular part that is challenged by a particular claim.
And I have had to be willing to look at the claims and evidence for multiple sides of the issue.
Now, I know that from the ancient past we had philosophers who proposed the solution to this problem was to simply let the educated class, the philosophers themselves of course, either rule directly or be the advisers to whoever rules, and thereby one step from power and living the lives of honored intellectual aristocracy and the problems with this should be obvious. The philosophers would look out for themselves and even if an odd one here or there was a bit more decent and fair, the system itself couldn't be.
I am afraid that the only system that I can see as fair is a democracy and like it or not all adult citizens should be able to participate and have the power be as fairly distributed as possible. And the only thing that makes sense to me is that you let qualified adults vote. Who is not qualified? Perhaps the severely mentally handicapped or insane. I have been on both sides of the idea of allowing and disqualifying felons and don't know the right answer, honestly.
But for everyone else, I hope they can vote and instead of making a test for them to be allowed, I would rather we improve the education system to prepare them, personally. Otherwise we can see that politicians could have minorities fail any test and they could have their supporters pass or be grandfathered in, as was done in the past to ensure that whites could vote and black people couldn't, for example, in the US.
So, I do not want any repeating of that awful policy.
Or any scheming to create what amounts to the same thing but by another name or list of criteria.
Often people will say that ideas need to be taken on in some kind of marketplace of ideas and defeated if they are bad or championed to victory if they are good, but this is an idea that requires a tremendous number of things to work.
I have long been against burning books and that sort of thing, personally.
I am not going to pretend that I have a one size fits all solution to this issue or that I know all the factors that have resulted in this outcome.
I can say that lots of experts say that other countries have better outcomes at education, particularly Finland as one example. If this is true then possibly trying the methods they use may be useful in the US. One thing that the US is an outlier on is that most public education is financed by local property taxes, so you have far better schools in wealthy communities and mediocre schools in middle class communities and terrible schools in poor communities in general.
I am going to include links to a number of my posts related to this topic.
Here's a link to the blog archive by topic
Cornerstones of Critical Thinking
Several more posts on critical thinking
I am going to close this with a lengthy quote from George Carlin for your consideration:
“But there’s a reason. There’s a reason. There’s a reason for this, there’s a reason education sucks, and it’s the same reason that it will never, ever, ever be fixed. It’s never gonna get any better.
Don’t look for it.
Be happy with what you got. Because the owners of this country don't want that.
I'm talking about the real owners now, the real owners, the big wealthy business interests that control things and make all the important decisions.
Forget the politicians. The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don't. You have no choice. You have owners. They own you. They own everything.
They own all the important land. They own and control the corporations. They’ve long since bought and paid for the senate, the congress, the state houses, the city halls, they got the judges in their back pockets and they own all the big media companies so they control just about all of the news and information you get to hear.
They got you by the balls. They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying, lobbying, to get what they want. Well, we know what they want. They want more for themselves and less for everybody else, but I'll tell you what they don’t want: They don’t want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking.
They don’t want well informed, well educated people capable of critical thinking. They’re not interested in that. That doesn’t help them. Thats against their interests. Thats right. They don’t want people who are smart enough to sit around a kitchen table to figure out how badly they’re getting fucked by a system that threw them overboard 30 fucking years ago.
They don’t want that. You know what they want? They want obedient workers. Obedient workers. People who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork, and just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shittier jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, the reduced benefits, the end of overtime and the vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it, and now they’re coming for your Social Security money.
They want your retirement money. They want it back so they can give it to their criminal friends on Wall Street, and you know something? They’ll get it. They’ll get it all from you, sooner or later, 'cause they own this fucking place.
It's a big club, and you ain’t in it. You and I are not in the big club. And by the way, it's the same big club they use to beat you over the head with all day long when they tell you what to believe. All day long beating you over the head in their media telling you what to believe, what to think and what to buy. The table is tilted folks.
The game is rigged, and nobody seems to notice, nobody seems to care. Good honest hard-working people -- white collar, blue collar, it doesn’t matter what color shirt you have on -- good honest hard-working people continue -- these are people of modest means -- continue to elect these rich cocksuckers who don’t give a fuck about them. They don’t give a fuck about you. They don’t give a fuck about you. They don't care about you at all -- at all -- at all. And nobody seems to notice, nobody seems to care.
That's what the owners count on; the fact that Americans will probably remain willfully ignorant of the big red, white and blue dick that's being jammed up their assholes everyday. Because the owners of this country know the truth: it's called the American Dream, because you have to be asleep to believe it.”
― George Carlin
Scientology Reflections (7) 10 Years After Leaving-A Delicate Problem
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