Scientology Reflections (4) 10 Years After Leaving-More Mistakes

 Scientology Reflections (4) 10 Years After Leaving-More Mistakes

This is the fourth 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. 

 Ronald Hubbard. 

I have found several more mistakes in my journey into and out of Scientology to describe.

I have discussed a certain couple of mistakes that I made regarding falling for Scientology recruitment several times in the past, but a couple are so harmful in numerous situations, most of which don't involve Scientology and affect people every single day, so it is worth repeating these points, because they are so important.

Almost every person in Scientology gets there one of two ways. Either they are recruited or they are raised in Scientology as a child. 

And almost every single person who is recruited and later leaves says the same thing. They say that if they knew the truth about the character and behavior of Ronald Hubbard they would never have joined Scientology. 

They say that if they knew the abuse and betrayal they would experience in Scientology they would never have joined. They say that if they knew that they would be pressured thousands and thousands of times to disconnect from their family and loved ones they would never have joined Scientology. They say that if they knew that the result of the lower bridge was nothing but broken promises and the upper levels are the absurd Xenu story and exorcism of spirits from other planets and civilizations millions, billions, and trillions and quadrillions of years ago and they provide no real gains whatsoever they would never have joined Scientology.

 They say that if they knew Scientology staff and The Sea Org would be mental slavery and the RPF and Truth Rundown are the most overt form of brainwashing ever attempted they would never have joined Scientology and certainly would never have joined staff or The Sea Org.

So, you can say, how did they not know? Well, depending on their age and when they were recruited they may have had limited or no access to criticism of Scientology. I certainly didn't know how to use the internet back in 1988 and 1989.

But even further the approach to examining the information is not something to overlook. 

Frankly, I think that I should have had an entirely different approach to learning about ANYTHING. 

“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. 

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.

• Blog Archive by Topic

I am going to include links to several articles at Mockingbird's Nest blog on Scientology that have either been quoted in this post, or that expand on the topics introduced here.

• Dr. Robert J. Lifton's Criteria For Thought Reform...

• Scientology And Margaret Singer's Six Conditions F...

• Scientology Viewed Through The BITE model by Steve...

Thought Reform/Influence

• Insidious Enslavement : Study Technology

• Scientology Was Ron Hubbard's Private Game

• The Scientology Tone Scale as Ron Hubbard's Game

• Propaganda By Reversal Of Meaning In Scientology

Brainwashing: Standard Tech In Scientology

Hypnosis and Covert Persuasion

• Basic Introduction to Hypnosis in Scientology

• Burning Down Hell - How Commands Are Hidden , Vari...

• The Critical Factor

• Scientology Assists and Objectives as Hypnosis

• Hubbard on Hypnosis

• Scientology, Ron Hubbard and Hypnosis 1: Hypnosis ...
• Scientology, Ron Hubbard and Hypnosis 2: Hubbard's...
• Scientology, Ron Hubbard and Hypnosis 3 - Hubbard'

Scientology Reflections (4) 10 Years After Leaving- More Mistakes

Scientology Reflections (3) 10 Years After Leaving-The Unexpected

 Scientology Reflections (3) 10 Years After Leaving-The Unexpected

This is the third 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. 

 Ronald Hubbard. 

William Shakespeare — 'There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.'

Something that I realized was essential for Scientology recruitment is the trust of the Scientology cult members and further the lack of understanding that a person quite different from themselves can exist.

I think for many people brought up in a society as I was we get taught a kind of grossly over simplified and frankly inaccurate picture of people and life and the world around us. 

I do not think it's out of malice or neglect. I think a lot of people share the image of the world they were taught and they themselves to some degree still believe in. 

An example is something that I realized was part of how I was fooled by Scientology when I was initially recruited in about 1989. This was a key moment in my indoctrination in the first few months of my time in Scientology. 

I was on a course in the courseroom and saw that Scientology had recruited many thousands of people and they had clearly donated millions and millions and millions of dollars over the years.

I saw the tremendous amount of policy and technical materials and books and thousands and thousands and thousands of taped lectures Hubbard had produced.

I thought to myself that either all of these people had been fooled somehow OR there was genuinely something beneficial here. (I was of course wrong, I didn't understand that Scientology uses a wide variety of covert techniques to exert undue influence over members and persuade them that actually harmful methods that reduce critical and independent thinking are enlightenment and further that euphoric trances - induced by a variety of hypnotic techniques that are employed covertly in Dianetics and Scientology - that increase suggestibility are transcendent spiritual experiences)

I also didn't understand that a different type of personality than my own could exist. I think a lot of people see themselves and their own thoughts and feelings and think that other people are the same, but I have discovered over time that different kinds of personalities exist.

I imagined Hubbard as one of two things that I thought I could understand. I thought he either was honest and sincere OR that he was a lying conman and sought perhaps wealth enough to live a good life and to never have to work again.

I didn't imagine that other possibilities existed.

So, I looked at the huge amount of content in Scientology and thought that Hubbard had accumulated millions of dollars by the end of the fifties or sixties and he could have been happily retired on some remote island that has no extradition treaty with the US and enjoyed his money if he was my imaginary conman.

Only many years later did I discover that other possibilities existed. Hubbard could have been a person who seeks power over others. Further, he could have sought admiration from others but not had the emotional maturity to accept emotional vulnerability to others but to seek a way to always have the upper hand in relationships.

Many models and various descriptions exist and several call this type of person a narcissist or vulnerable narcissist and I think that in many ways they are accurate regarding Hubbard.

He, unlike my imaginary conman, wanted wealth but further he desperately wanted attention and admiration. He in essence wanted to be loved but didn't know how to love, so he for example didn't have compassion or empathy for others but definitely had them both for himself and wanted to be treated well despite being incapable of treating others well because he lacked consideration for others.

In my opinion, Hubbard was desperately trying to escape feelings of being worthless, cowardly, inferior, and unworthy of love by projecting an image of a perfect being to the world.

And he wanted the number of people who fell for this image to grow and grow so he could have more and more admiration and more and more cult members to show him how great he was.

I think Hubbard had a view that many human predators hold of the world. They see everything as a contest of all against all, meaning that every person is out for themselves only and competing against every single other person in a contest of survival and dominance. He saw it as a zero sum game. If one person gains in a relationship to Hubbard another must lose. 

And he planned to gain far more than he lost. 

His ultimate motivation in my opinion was expressed in the famous Skipper letter he sent to his wife. 

In 1938 Ronald Hubbard sent a letter to his wife Polly (who he called Skipper) and I believe Jon Atack best described this:

"The Dev-OTs believe that Hubbard was a selfless humanitarian, who sacrificed his health in noble pursuit of the liberation of mankind. Contrary to his pronouncements, Hubbard desperately needed praise, admiration, and sympathy, and his goal was not really “star high.” As he put it succinctly in his self-affirmations, just months before introducing Dianetics to an unsuspecting world, “Men are your slaves.” But enslaving humanity wasn’t his goal, either (though he did pretty well, leaving tens of thousands of zealous worshipers, who will harass critics viciously without the slightest twinge of conscience). Hubbard’s motivation was far more simple than that.

Scientology begins in 1938, when Hubbard wrote his first text, “Excalibur,” which remains buried in the archive. He later claimed that he had died while under anaesthetic during a dental procedure. (Whatever else this incident did, it certainly put him off dentists. His teeth would later rot in his head, such was his phobia.) While dead, he was offered a “smorgasbord” of knowledge, which he claimed to have distilled into “Excalibur.” Here he first put forward his famous tautology that the purpose of existence is, well, to exist. This sounds much better if you say “to survive,” but it boils down to the same thing. He would later lead his followers to believe that “Excalibur” was so dangerous that three people went mad from reading it (various Hubbard lectures are almost suicidally tedious, but that isn’t what he meant). As is so often the case with Hubbard’s statements, this is just hyperbole, with no basis in fact. Followers believe that Hubbard here discovered the immortality of the spirit, but there is a letter from the same year (misdated 1939 by the Scientologists, in the copyright filing), which is likely the most important single statement in the whole Hubbard canon.

The letter is addressed to his first wife, Polly, whom he called “Skipper.” First of all, he gives a rather melancholic explanation for his discovery of the principle “Survive!,” saying: “Living is a pretty grim joke, but a joke just the same. The entire function of man is to survive. Not ‘for what’ but just to survive.” He added: “It’s a big joke, this living. God was feeling sardonic the day He created the Universe. So its [sic] rather up to at least one man every few centuries to pop up and come just as close to making Him swallow his [sic] laughter as possible.”

As for immortality, Hubbard is entirely unconvinced of the survival of the soul, spirit, or thetan: “Personal immortality is only to be gained through the printed word, barred note or painted canvas or hard grabite [sic — presumably he meant “granite”]. Note the word “only.”

A 26-year-old Hubbard laid out his aim in life: “Foolishly perhaps, but determined none the less, I have high hopes of smashing my name into history so violently that it will take a legendary form even if all the books are destroyed. That goal is the real goal as far as I am concerned. Things which stand too consistently in its way make me nervous. It’s a pretty big job. In a hundred years Roosevelt will have been forgotten — which gives some idea of the magnitude of my attempt. And all this boils and froths inside my head and I’m miserable when I am blocked.”

Hubbard added that he was going to “make Napoleon look like a punk” in comparison to the fame he would come to enjoy.

So, “Excalibur” was not about spiritual immortality, or spiritual anything. Hubbard felt that he had made contact with some underlying force in the universe, and that he was the only person ever so to do, but he wanted to exploit that force not for the good of the world (which finds no mention anywhere in this five-page letter), but to “smash” his name into history.

Believers will say that Hubbard changed his mind, but at the very end of his life, there is a telling confirmation of his “only goal.” When Hubbard dropped his body, almost fifty years later, he had failed to spend $648 million of the monies he’d extracted from the Dev-OTs. A paltry million went to the wife who had endured prison to protect him, far less to his surviving children. But half a billion dollars went to the Church of Spiritual Technology, which lists as its corporate purpose, “To perpetuate the name L. Ron Hubbard.” Not the “technology,” just the name, please note." 

From

What Motivated L. Ron Hubbard?

 Historian Jon Atack Follows the Clues (at The Underground Bunker blog)

By Tony Ortega | August 26, 2013

See my point? 

I mistakenly thought that everyone (or almost everyone) was similar to myself and that I could imagine being willing to con someone if I didn't have any conscience or remorse. 

I could fathom a criminal that would try to defraud hundreds or thousands of people to get the money to enjoy a decent lifestyle without having to work a regular job. 

I couldn't fathom a guy spending decades and decades of his life "researching" (actually plagiarizing) mountains and mountains of material to make up the seemingly coherent (it's not really) doctrine and practices of Scientology and not being honest. I figured, why would someone bother with all this work for thirty plus years, when they clearly made multiple millions long before that point?

And I also felt that they would not be able to fool thousands and thousands of people who are often well educated and successful! Scientology is jam packed with doctors and lawyers and dentists and chiropractors and contractors and all manner of people who have learned a lot to get the money to pay for their Scientology services! 

I also had to learn that people have different philosophies and aptitudes in life. I thought that everyone who is a fully functioning adult knows that if they see that something is wrong when others do it to them (regarding any behavior) then it's wrong when they do the same exact same thing to other people!

I really thought that everyone else who is not some type of human predator, whether we call them a sociopath or psychopath or anything else, has a basic understanding of this principle by the time they have entered puberty or perhaps finished puberty and certainly by the time they are in their early twenties. 

And I was simply wrong. I have discovered that plenty of people, including perfectly acceptable people to be around, who can be co-workers or neighbors and you can get on with them just fine for years or decades and they don't have any philosophy of the golden rule and they don't see any inconsistency in being a hypocrite regarding the ethics of their own behavior. They may or may not have feelings of empathy and regret hurting others. They can be a very good person if they are guided by such feelings and just lack a thorough explanation via any philosophy.

 They also may just not get why certain things are wrong because of a logical argument for the idea.  They may just go by their feelings and they could have strong and consistent enough feelings to be a decent person. But they might not have such a framework for reflection on their behavior.

With such people, once someone gets on their bad side, it's almost impossible to get them to see that they are in the wrong. 

Apparently, a tremendous amount of people just go through life feeling like they are right just because they feel like it with little or no other thought given to the subject. 

So, trying to persuade them through logic or debate is a complete waste of time. Or damned close to it.

I certainly have wasted quite a bit of time this way. 

“You like or dislike people long before you know much about them; you trust or distrust strangers without knowing why; you feel that an enterprise is bound to succeed without analyzing it. Whether you state them or not, you often have answers to questions that you do not completely understand, relying on evidence that you can neither explain nor defend.”

― Daniel Kahneman

I misunderstood the people in Scientology, I certainly misunderstood the founder of Scientology, Ronald Hubbard, and I most definitely didn't understand the activities and outcomes of those activities in Scientology. 

I made a series of errors in my thinking that, coupled with the techniques of persuasion hidden in Scientology, resulted in my plunge into the web of lies that Hubbard crafted to trap the Scientology recruits to fall under his spell.

To be quite clear I don't believe in magic or the supernatural, but I definitely believe in psychological influence and undue influence, coercive persuasion, and a number of other related terms to describe what is sometimes called brainwashing by laymen and understood as such. The exact terms and definition and legal definition vary to some degree. 

When I use the term spell it is a metaphor, not literal.

“we can be blind to the obvious, and we are also blind to our blindness.”

― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

I was ill equipped to examine Scientology when I first came into contact with it. But I was extremely overconfident and totally uneducated about cults, hypnosis, undue influence, brainwashing, thought reform, mind control, psychology, propaganda techniques, and on and on. 

I SHOULD have realized that I was not remotely prepared for the task I took on. I should have just went the opposite direction and never went back.

But like millions of other people, I assumed that I was far too intelligent and sane and wise to be fooled by a cult.

“This is the essence of intuitive heuristics: when faced with a difficult question, we often answer an easier one instead, usually without noticing the substitution.”

― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

Intuitive Heuristics is the natural way we think, to Daniel Kahneman.

This is vitally important to critical thinking and looking for accuracy in your thinking, or more accurately looking for instances of inaccuracy in your thinking and realizing how you make errors.

I certainly misunderstood Scientology and Dianetics and Hubbard and the organization and the doctrine and techniques.

And lots of the things in that list have extremely difficult questions to answer, IF you ONLY seek answers and evidence inside the Scientology system. If you look at the critical information regarding Scientology and the arguments against Scientology and the scientific and psychology based evidence (along with a grounding in hypnosis and broader cultic studies) against Scientology then, in my opinion it's a lot of work, but it delivers clear answers that in my opinion have coherent arguments with very strong evidence.

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.

• Blog Archive by Topic

I am going to include links to several articles at Mockingbird's Nest blog on Scientology that have either been quoted in this post, or that expand on the topics introduced here.

• Dr. Robert J. Lifton's Criteria For Thought Reform...

• Scientology And Margaret Singer's Six Conditions F...

• Scientology Viewed Through The BITE model by Steve...

Thought Reform/Influence

• Insidious Enslavement : Study Technology

• Scientology Was Ron Hubbard's Private Game

• The Scientology Tone Scale as Ron Hubbard's Game

• Propaganda By Reversal Of Meaning In Scientology

Brainwashing: Standard Tech In Scientology

Hypnosis and Covert Persuasion

• Basic Introduction to Hypnosis in Scientology

• Burning Down Hell - How Commands Are Hidden , Vari...

• The Critical Factor

• Scientology Assists and Objectives as Hypnosis

• Hubbard on Hypnosis

• Scientology, Ron Hubbard and Hypnosis 1: Hypnosis ...
• Scientology, Ron Hubbard and Hypnosis 2: Hubbard's...
• Scientology, Ron Hubbard and Hypnosis 3 - Hubbard'

Scientology Reflections (3) 10 Years After Leaving-The Unexpected

Scientology Reflections (2)10 Years After Leaving - Mistakes

Scientology Reflections (2) 10 Years After Leaving- Mistakes

 This is the second 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. 

 Ronald Hubbard. 

I wanted to acknowledge some of the mistakes that I made in the process of leaving Scientology and trying to get an understanding of what happened to me. 

The obvious mistake of not leaving sooner or questioning things that I didn't but should have and similar criticism regarding not leaving earlier or thinking for myself sooner are not the kind of mistakes that I am going to discuss here. 

I am going to discuss mistakes that in many ways don't get attention and don't have to do with Scientology itself necessarily. 

“If they are wise, do not quarrel with them; if they are fools, ignore them.”

― Epictetus, Discourses and Selected Writings

Okay, this is something lots of people experience. 

To be clear, I have engaged with lots of people who I would have been far better off, not engaging.

If you post online long enough you are likely to respond to people and regret it. There are some people (sometimes OSA, sometimes not) who are seeking to irritate or make look foolish or get de-platformed others who criticize Scientology. 

I have found that some platforms get the combination of non-attentive or incompetent or biased admins and mods who are happy to watch members violate the rules of the platform and then they themselves bully or harass other people who are trying to follow the rules.

You can have a very tough time on a platform where ad hominem attacks on you are ignored or cheered on by the admins and mods while any response by you is treated as a serious violation.

You can also get swamped by people acting in obvious bad faith that a mod encourages.

One example at a certain message board I used to post at, for years, was an effort by people to get me kicked off in which they went to the mod and lied about me behind my back.

That board was shut down a few years ago.

The mod out of nowhere said that I was saying that they personally were hypnotised in Scientology and that meant they were stupid and gullible! 

I have gone to great lengths to express the idea that hypnosis is not related to stupidity or gullibility or anything negative. That stereotype in my opinion is not based on reality. 

Plainly lots of people assume they are not vulnerable to persuasion by thinking that they are not stupid, gullible, weakminded or something else enough to be hypnotised, but they have zero understanding of the way that hypnosis works.

To sidestep the difficulty this mod had I simply explained that I had never claimed he personally was hypnotised and that I had no way to know. 

I explained that every school of hypnosis that I have ever seen has certain ideas in common. They all have the idea that some people are apparently easy to hypnotize and some are difficult to hypnotize and some may be impossible to hypnotize. 

I have no way to know if a particular ex Scientologist is a member of any of these categories. 

But without that quick response that shows that I wasn't judging the mod I could have been kicked off the platform for something I never said and don't believe.

I realized that the effect of the negative people is often only magnified if you engage with them. 

I made the mistake of arguing with people who don't act in good faith, far too many times.

If I could go back and do it over I would just not answer unless I wanted to. Period. People would figure it out. 

You don't owe people who are disrespectful your attention or time. 

If I had just left the negative alone I could have posted more and had much more peace of mind.

I used to post at a blog by someone else and over time I let a few argumentative people discourage me. Later I found that the proprietor was unwilling to consider evidence that he had some minor details about what Scientology orgs are like wrong and he simply doesn't listen to people who disagree with him, even if they were in Scientology for twenty five years and personally witnessed the things they describe.

If I was at peace with that I would probably have had a far better relationship with that person and would still be posting comments at that blog. 

Other bad faith arguments you get if you post a lot include the "you are wasting MY time!" complaint. To be clear, at the message board every single post has the author listed and you see this BEFORE you open the post. You also can block anyone who you want, besides admins and mods. 

So, anyone can simply not open my posts or block me to never see them. But some members are hell bent on getting content they want, catered to them! 

I responded by simply agreeing that I was stealing their time and to prevent this they should NEVER go online and further never communicate with anyone because they could get their time stolen!

Another thing is that I explained that if they chose to just use ad hominem attacks that I would block them. Rapidly people who include ad hominem attacks in questions or statements that are supposed to be clever, like "anyone who believes that is either stupid or crazy!" And they claim that is not an ad hominem attack! Because it is not definitive and clear!

It is an ad hominem attack, disguised as not being one.

So, the technique used here is one I call hop scotch. A person is rude and insulting. I eventually just block them. They get mad that I do not respond to their comments, since I can't see them. 

They get someone who I haven't blocked to quote their remarks and these may be more ad hominem attacks. The admins and mods don't do anything. 

In a number of these situations the simple problem boils down to a number of bad actors getting together and the mods and admins simply not doing their jobs. 

You could have one person using a few accounts and the mod or admin could tell ALL of these people that if someone blocked someone else, don't act as a way to bypass this. Period. 

Anyway, I could give many other examples. 

Sometimes I have joined Facebook groups and discovered that the admins and mods may be biased towards some members of the group or the group may state it is for certain ideas and actually have mods and admins who don't follow the stated rules of the group.

It is best to simply leave these groups. Every time. Say nothing, when you realize that they are either not doing what they say or not the right fit for you, just leave, say nothing.

I have several times made the mistake of telling an admin or mod that they don't run the group as they claim or something similar. The inevitable result is they report me to Facebook and try to get me sent to Facebook jail. 

You are dealing very often with people who can't stand the idea of someone telling them off and simply getting to get away with it. Or the fact that you tell them their group is not what it claims is too much to bear.

My advice now is just realize they are not right for you, say nothing and leave. Block anyone you want.

I am not talking about people you have a real relationship with. I am not talking about friends and family and a partner that you see in person in real life.

I am talking about people that you just interact with very slightly and briefly online only, very briefly, that you don't have a strong connection to. 

I mean that you can see a group, either get invited or join, and immediately see that the other people are not a good fit for you or that the group is not right for you. 

I have had members of a group ask very rude questions that contain negative remarks and conclusions about me. I have chosen to not answer these loaded questions. I have had an admin or mod tell me they are telling me I "have to" answer these questions!

I realized this was unacceptable to me and left the group then blocked the admin or mod who ordered me around. Then I got asked by others to unblock the mod or admin and explain why I left the group!

It's funny how some people can decide they are important authorities and then demand that others obey them! 

I would have been best off if I had simply left the group earlier and never remarked on it. 

Another mistake I have made is mistaking a para-social relationship for a real one, a few times. 

As a Scientology critic, like many others, I made the mistake of thinking that the person (who I am reading the blog of and watching the YouTube videos of) has a similar relationship with me. 

Simply put, I can read hundreds of pages of material by someone and watch hours of videos by a person and they can see a half dozen comments by me on their articles and videos and I can mistake this as a relationship. For the other person it is quite clear that they may have a fan or not, but I am essentially a stranger. They don't know me and they know that they don't know me. 

This is something that happens to a lot of people who leave cults as they look for a way to make sense of their new life and they are often overly eager to replace the group they are no longer a part of.

People leaving a cult often lose all of their friends or loved ones. 

Margaret Singer was a top cult expert for decades and interviewed over four thousand ex members over decades.

She remarked in an interview that after you leave a cult don't rush into relationships and you can trust people again but take your time and let relationships develop slowly. 

Of course an ex cult member often doesn't want to hear this. 

I saw a quote by someone and I don't remember who. 

I will try to paraphrase.

The person wrote that some people learn by their mistakes, some learn by observing the mistakes of others, and some are merely guided by their desires from one moment to the next.

It took me a long time and a lot of mistakes to see this.

I was recommending reading books on cults and related subjects to people who, well frankly don't learn much, if anything, by reading. For them a book is read, discarded and forgotten. 

Reading a book won't help such people, sadly. 

I also dealt with a number of people who think anything past reading a Wikipedia article on a subject is "going down a rabbit hole" and wasting time. Some people think we shouldn't even have higher education.

I of course disagree, strongly. 

I of course dug deep into many subjects to be able to dissect Scientology because I had to understand the tools that Hubbard had in his tool box and how and why he disguised them and his intentions to make Scientology.

I simply had to develop a better than surface level understanding of the parts of Scientology to see what they actually are and how they fit together.

I am sure an engineer needs to understand how various components of something they design work and what the parts are doing. A doctor must understand what various parts of the human body do and what various injuries and diseases do to human beings. We could go with many examples, lawyers, mechanics and many specialists and experts. 

But I didn't understand that lots of people are just not going to get that. They may or may not have been heavily indoctrinated in Scientology and really have a need to understand the techniques and parts of Scientology very in depth to recover from Scientology, but need doesn't equal inclination or ability.

It is sad but some people really don't have the aptitude to understand what they really need to. Life unfortunately sometimes involves challenges that people simply are not equipped to overcome.

I have had to learn that you are only going to do certain things in life and if something is not going to help you it is not for you.

If I was wiser, I would have simply said that this material is for anyone who it may help, if that's not you, no problem. 

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.

• Blog Archive by Topic

I am going to include links to several articles at Mockingbird's Nest blog on Scientology that have either been quoted in this post, or that expand on the topics introduced here.

• Dr. Robert J. Lifton's Criteria For Thought Reform...

• Scientology And Margaret Singer's Six Conditions F...

• Scientology Viewed Through The BITE model by Steve...

Thought Reform/Influence

• Insidious Enslavement : Study Technology

• Scientology Was Ron Hubbard's Private Game

• The Scientology Tone Scale as Ron Hubbard's Game

• Propaganda By Reversal Of Meaning In Scientology

Brainwashing: Standard Tech In Scientology

Hypnosis and Covert Persuasion

• Basic Introduction to Hypnosis in Scientology

• Burning Down Hell - How Commands Are Hidden , Vari...

• The Critical Factor

• Scientology Assists and Objectives as Hypnosis

• Hubbard on Hypnosis

• Scientology, Ron Hubbard and Hypnosis 1: Hypnosis ...
• Scientology, Ron Hubbard and Hypnosis 2: Hubbard's...
• Scientology, Ron Hubbard and Hypnosis 3 - Hubbard'

Scientology Reflections - 10 Years After Leaving

Scientology Reflections (2) Mistakes