Free Will and the Infinite Regress of Naive Realism

Chris Shelton recently put out a podcast and YouTube video regarding free will.

Sensibly Speaking Podcast #185: You Have No Free Will - Watch This Podcast!

He described some of the evidence, but far, far, far less than all of the evidence. There are thousands and thousands of experiments that support the idea that free will doesn't exist or that if it does exist at all it is extremely, extremely limited. In other words there is good evidence that free will doesn't exist and only an increasingly tiny corner of the possibility that free will might exist because it has not yet been entirely disproven. 

Numerous experts and books have laid out the evidence. The books Behave by Robert Sapolsky, Subliminal by Leonard Mlodinow, How the Mind Works by Steven Pinker, A Skeptic's Guide to the Mind by Robert Burton and On Certainty by Robert Burton ALL present some of the evidence that free will either doesn't exist or if it exists it is extremely limited and not supported by scientific evidence.

Numerous other books on psychology, neuroscience and economics support the idea that free will doesn't exist or is a far tinier and less free component than we usually believe.

An example is the book Free Will by Sam Harris.

Here is an overview of that book by Wikipedia:

"Harris says the idea of free will "cannot be mapped on to any conceivable reality" and is incoherent. According to Harris, science "reveals you to be a biochemical puppet." People's thoughts and intentions, Harris says, "emerge from background causes of which we are unaware and over which we exert no conscious control." Every choice we make is made as a result of preceding causes. These choices we make are determined by those causes, and are therefore not really choices at all. Harris also draws a distinction between conscious and unconscious reactions to the world. Even without free will, consciousness has an important role to play in the choices we make. Harris argues that this realization about the human mind does not undermine morality or diminish the importance of social and political freedom, but it can and should change the way we think about some of the most important questions in life. " End quote

Any serious discussion of free will should include the terms hard determinism, soft determinism and libertarian free will.

I am going to quote excerpts from the article Free Will and Determinism by Jim Riley

Free Will and Determinism
Jim Riley

"There are three theories of free will and determinism that you will need to be aware of:

Hard Determinism

Hard Determinism is the theory that human behaviour and actions are wholly determined by external factors, and therefore humans do not have genuine free will or ethical accountability. There are several different supporting views for this belief, which incorporates philosophical determinism, psychological determinism, theological determinism and scientific determinism.

Soft Determinism

Soft Determinism is the theory that human behaviour and actions are wholly determined by causal events, but human free will does exist when defined as the capacity to act according to one's nature (which is shaped by external factors such as heredity, society and upbringing).

Libertarianism

Libertarianism is the theory that humans do have genuine freedom to make a morally undetermined decision, although our behaviour may be partially determined by external factors.

You also need to understand that philosophers distinguish between two different definitions of freedom. This will invariably influence one's views on free will and determinism:

The liberty of indifference is a genuine freedom to act according to independent choices that are not wholly determined by eternal constraints such as heredity, background and education.


The liberty of spontaneity is the freedom to act according to one's nature, the ability to do what one wishes to do although what they wish to do is determined by their nature which, in turn, is shaped by external constraints such as heredity, background and education. " End quote

The literature by Sam Harris and other academics generally considers hard determinism the default position. If you say free will doesn't exist or is an illusion that now is taken to mean it as hard determinism - you are saying free will doesn't exist in an absolute sense. It doesn't exist at all to any degree under any circumstances ever. That is the most common meaning and therefore what you are saying when you say free will doesn't exist.

I believe it is the position Sam Harris for example takes. 

I personally believe if we examine the evidence that libertarian free will is completely outside the realm of possibility. It just cannot be unless we are wrong about thousands of studies. 

That leaves soft and hard determinism. I think that mountains of evidence against soft determinism exist and the only "evidence" for it is that it hasn't been completely disproven. That's it.

The odds of libertarian free will being true are far less than one in a million. The odds of soft determinism being true are exceedingly small. Saying it is under one percent may be grossly overestimating it. 

And good old hard determinism has everything going for it. And more evidence piling up with more studies every year. 

Now, I am not trying to sell any of the three models here. I just gave my impression of the status quo.

I want to make a second major point, the first one was what the three models of free will are and the relative acceptance each one has in science, along with hard determinism as the default position in the literature.

The second point is only relevant to hard determinism. We can look at folks like Sam Harris who embrace hard determinism for this part. It just makes it easier. 

There is a tendency in human thought to consider bias or limits as affecting other people but not oneself.

Numerous factors create this. One is naive realism, in psychology we normally assume we personally are unbiased and see the world as it truly is even if we recognize bias and flaws in thinking in others. We have the same bias and flaws as others but have numerous factors that inhibit being aware of and able to perceive our own flaws. The bias blindspot is a name for one of these cognitive biases. 

If you tell people about a particular bias or weakness they believe they do not have it or are not affected because they know about the weakness or are a skilled critical thinker or some other explanation.

As an example I told my wife about the Pepsi paradox. In blind taste tests for decades people choose Pepsi over Coke but in live taste tests they prefer Coke. This has proved true over and over.

The advertising campaigns by Coke have consistently portrayed drinking Coke as associated with positive emotions and relationships. The hypothesis is that the emotional association with positive experience has made Coke associated with good taste and so people prefer Coke, when they know which product they are consuming.

I explained all this to my wife and she said "we are the people who prefer Coke because of how it tastes." I said "No, we are the people who are influenced that they described."

Imagine seeing the world and the people who have biases that impair their judgement. Most people who examine this instictively think of themselves as still being unbiased.

It is like looking at a picture that describes human nature and mentally putting yourself out of the picture. You regress out of the picture and if someone demonstrates to you that the picture includes everyone you momentarily say okay, then automatically again regress yourself out of the picture. 

It is like those pictures they used to have on cereal boxes that have a smaller picture of the cereal box on the box and on that tiny box is a smaller picture and if you keep going down the picture is shrinking and shrinking, seemingly forever. 

The concept is infinite regress. A pattern of something shrinking back in perpetuity. That is how naive realism functions in dealing with hard determinism.

As an explanation I can reference how people discuss it. 

I have run into numerous people who profess belief in hard determinism but use language that contradicts that concept.

Under hard determinism there are no true things that reflect good or bad choices because we have no freedom to choose. Sam Harris has said people SHOULD do certain things but how COULD they if they completely lack free will ?

Similarly neuroendocrinologist Robert Sapolsky has said people SHOULD do certain things but how COULD they choose with no ability to choose ? He has said we in the future should eliminate modern prisons because we are punishing people who have no freedom to choose to be criminals but if the person supporting prisons has no free will either then why would they hold responsibility for their choices while the criminals are not held accountable ?

In other words Sam Harris and Robert Sapolsky as examples act like people have no free will but describe the process of understanding and accepting that free will doesn't exist is something you have free will over. They use language that assumes free will and moral responsibility exist but say free will doesn't exist at all which to me makes ALL moral responsibility illusory because if you have no choice than you should have no blame or credit for things entirely outside your control. 

I have run into this phenomena in dealing with lots of people who both claim free will doesn't exist at all but then describe people as having responsibility for either not accepting this or factoring it into their thinking. If they have no free will then they have no responsibility for not accepting free will or anything else. 

I understand that human minds are hardwired to use moral responsibility and concepts of free will, particularly libertarian free will, instinctively. We naturally behave and assume free will is a fundamental foundation of reality, human existence and morality.

In On Being Certain author Robert Burton described in fine detail the emotions and sensations that accompany the feeling we have made choices and know things. These sensations help frame the world as under our control and our own minds, emotions and decisions as independent choices. But feeling something is one way doesn't make it so. Not by a lot. 

Moving on from Scientology

I think a lot of us have a hard time finding our way and values after spending a long time in Scientology. It provides your ethics and morals.

In leaving Scientology I found out the villain can win all the time. The world is not fair, life is not just and people do not automatically get what they deserve and we ALSO have feelings of moral responsibility DESPITE the universe not caring about our moral values. We have a moral nature (most of us with different values and to different degrees) but the greater environment does not and apparently some people also do not.

We are affected by our own ethics and the unethical or amoral greater world around us BOTH. This worldview is present in the Coen brothers films. In No Country For Old Men they show a world in which someone may suffer from consequences of their own choices and simultaneously the greater world is indifferent to human morality.

The protagonist steals some money and this has the consequence of people coming to get it back and try to kill him and other people.  But the world and some of the other people in it are not constrained by morals or laws in any way. They do whatever they decide to with inconsistent consequences, if any at all.

Bad people enjoy success and comfort sometimes and never get punished while good people get hardships they in no way deserve without justice sometimes and no person or other factor ever intervenes. In short life isn't fair, it never was and never will be but you can also feel responsible for moral failings despite the environment not having any moral nature itself and some people displaying far less morality than you might or far different morality.

Being amoral or nihilistic is a route some people do go on undeniably,  but most of us will not do that and very likely would not be happy even trying. Even if some evidence supports the idea that life, human life,  is without meaning or even value, it doesn't mean it is objectionable for people to act as if they find meaning or value in life and in morality, as imperfect as both are.

Some antinatalists feel we as individuals and a species would be better off if we never existed because life involves both moral failures and very real suffering. In the metaphor of the blue pill and red pill from The Matrix some have taken to seeing the blue pill as settling for the worldview that things are as they seem and okay but the red pill means finding enlightenment about some deeper, truer, nature to life.

This has been interpreted and spun many ways but the basic ideas are essentially the same. There is another element that some nihilists and antinatalists have added - the black pill. They find no meaning or no positive meaning or value in life and some of them claim that there is no possible way life could have meaning or value for any human beings.

I reject this unilateral decision on several grounds.  First off I do not think they have met the burden of proof for such a sweeping statement.  There is a burden to establish something and eliminate all rational doubt and they have not even approached meeting it.

Second,  they are acting like their experience is the only possible experience anyone can have or the only valid experience.  That is absurd. Other people may have a different perspective on life and meaning.

Sometimes I enjoy life and sometimes I do not. I do not wish it to cease for everyone everywhere forever because of the times I do not enjoy it.

Other people might enjoy it a lot more than me and rarely or even never not enjoy it somewhat or desire for it to continue.  Who am I to condemn them ?

In other projects like the Fargo film and television series the Coen brothers show this indecipherable world with moments of cruelty and bizarre indifference both from the world itself and some of the inhabitants and the people that encounter the immoral and even evil aspects of it do their best when they accept both the outside forces of other people who are immoral or less moral and the uncaring universe and also accept their own moral nature.

You can try to be true to your values and see that others have different or no values or are untrue to theirs and that the environment apparently has no values.

I cannot claim this gives life meaning or value in any objective way that is true on a big scale but it is a way to try to be both honest about the world and at peace with its inconvenient nature.


A sort of complimentary or corollary to this way of looking at the nature of life and morality against the harsh nature of reality comes from another film.

This is of a very different genre but has similar elements.  The film Wonder Woman  has a take on this from another angle.  In the film the protagonist, Wonder Woman,  is raised away from men on Paradise Island.  They have no men there and train for combat and are isolated from the world of men.

Wonder Woman only knows the Amazons in her childhood.  When she decides to leave for the world of men she is warned "they do not deserve you."

She is unsure what that means but chooses at first to help men out of a sense of duty. She was raised being told the Amazons were created to protect the world of men and so it is their duty.  She of course encounters men and sees the cruelty,  selfishness, stupidity and evil they can and do display in dealing with each other.

She comes to realize that these traits are part of human behavior,  perhaps even human nature,  and Ares the God of war appeals to her to destroy humanity because they are not worthy of her defense.  She says it doesn't matter if they deserve it or not she chooses love.

In other words,  she doesn't use an argument claiming to be a logical debate with points for humans tallied on one side and points against them on another and attempts to support claims and counter attempts to undermine them.

She skips the debate about people deserving help altogether and she simply wants to help and defend them because she loves them, regardless of any claims of flaws in them. She will help based on caring and not being concerned whether humans are her equals in ability or morality,  or looking at what they can do for her.

People are not really equal.  I am not as smart as some people,  not as strong as some people,  not as attractive as some people,  yet I want to have the same basic rights as other people.

You could argue my inferiority means I should get fewer rewards and rights and some people would agree. But where does this go ? Do the weak and vulnerable get left to fend for themselves  ? What about the handicapped ? Elderly ? Children ?

If we base our cooperation and willingness to help on the relative financial,  political and military power of people then  who are we ?

Is this who you want to be ?

Every person has to decide for themselves.  Do people deserve help or is the issue really irrelevant ? Should you just help who you can where you can how you can because you are motivated by caring. That doesn't mean accepting any treatment or turning the other cheek or a blind eye. You can believe in both self defense and compassion. You can also believe in boundaries,  moderation,  personal privacy and other values.

You can also believe in your right to be cautious and compassion.  These are not binary choices.


In Scientology we were not shown subtle details about life like these. People are going to be disappointing,  hurtful and maybe even to some degree evil no matter how kind or moral you are towards them.  But if you give eye for an eye justice you will be rigid and inflexible and at times cruel. If you do nothing you will be allowing evil to flourish and fostering it by tacit consent.

The ruthless and black and white world Scientology presented isn't the real world. Most people are a mix of good and bad,  and to try to weigh what they deserve to the tiniest bit misses the point - they do not have to live with how you judge them  - YOU do.

Hidden Abuse in Scientology

In Scientology organizations many forms of abuse and exploitation exist and have existed for decades.

Chris Shelton described the subject of case supervising in his Sensibly Speaking Podcast # 183 Scientology and "Case Supervising." Chris and his guest Sunny Pereira explore the role of the case supervisor and the auditor in Scientology.

Sunny Pereira has been described as attaining the training level of a class VI case supervisor, which in Scientology Ron Hubbard described as "the Dukes of the auditor elite." To get this one has to complete the Saint Hill Special Briefing Course which took a year to two years often, studying and auditing for upwards of eighty hours a week non-stop for many people. Some try to do it at only twenty to forty hours a week and take many years to finish. Most people who try to do it part time have not finished in my opinion.

That status is extremely rare in Scientology and currently the training is not even available for ANYONE under David Miscavige. Far less than one percent of Scientologists have completed the Saint Hill Special Briefing Course. It involves studying thousands and thousands of references and listening to many hundreds of lectures and delivering auditing for hundreds and hundreds of hours.

So Sunny can offer a lot of insight into both the theory of case supervising and the reality.

Something vital to understand about Scientology is that it went through a significant series of revolutionary changes in the mid to late sixties, which continued through the seventies and eighties to some degree.

Before the mid sixties Dianetics and Scientology techniques were a mish mash of hundreds of methods. There were literally hundreds of techniques taken directly from old books on hypnosis and altered in a method used by Scientology founder Ron Hubbard for decades. He changed them JUST ENOUGH to hide their origins and to try to make them conform to the pseudoscience framework in Dianetics and later the occult and science fiction repackaged as pseudoscience framework of Scientology. I call the process "filing off the serial numbers" but, to be honest I didn't come up with even that idea. I saw it in a book on making characters that encouraged people to change descriptions of the powers and abilities of characters that they like without actually changing the abilities at all. That way you can make "original" characters who have the abilities of characters that already exist.

As I said, Hubbard plagiarized the techniques from hypnosis and took hundreds of techniques that were in old books and just changed them enough to  fool people who are not well educated in the field of hypnosis, which unfortunately is almost everyone.

We do not take hypnosis classes normally in the course of our education.

Hubbard also took plenty of ideas from psychology, psychiatry and psychoanalysis. He hid this and tried to pretend to completely reject these subjects.

So, from nineteen fifty to the mid sixties a variety of techniques were used in Scientology and Dianetics and sometimes people enjoyed them and sometimes they didn't. Sometimes Hubbard made money and sometimes he didn't. I have seen numerous stories of Dianetics and Scientology organizations making a lot of money then going bust and this occurred over and over for the entire decade of the fifties.

The way Scientology organizations were run and training and auditing were set up was very different prior to the mid sixties.

In a series of sweeping reforms that affected training, auditing, case supervising and ethics and other areas Hubbard dramatically changed Scientology. It was as if Hubbard got a series of ideas on what to do to control people and he was interested in implementing them all at once.

Several books on coercive control were released that are relevant around this time. Like 1984 before them they are meant as warnings and to educate people but can be used as how-to guides by the unscrupulous, particularly if they already have extensive knowledge and experience with subjects such as rhetoric and hypnosis, which Hubbard definitely did by that point. The book Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism by Robert Jay Lifton was published in 1961. Coercive Persuasion by Edgar Schein was also published in 1961. The book Rape of the Mind: The Psychology of Thought Control, Menticide and Brainwashing by Joost A.M. Meerloo was published in 1959. The book Battle for the Mind by William Sargant was published in 1957.

Several cult experts and ex Scientologists have commented that Hubbard likely plagiarized ideas on how to form and run his own cult as a totalitarian organization from each of these books and others from widely varying sources such as the occult and early books on crowd psychology. An extreme number of similarities between Scientology and Nazi ideas has been noted.

It is certainly plausible and worth serious consideration and examination by Scientology watchers, particularly if they want to understand what Scientology truly is, its ultimate origins, its intended effects and its actual results - meaning what it actually does to people.

The fact that Hubbard in the mid sixties has the problem of people in Scientology doing whatever they liked and running some auditing for a while or not as it pleased them and staying or leaving Scientology as they liked was probably driving Hubbard crazy.

The techniques in Scientology only produced any results in a limited number of people and in the people they did do something to only those results happened some of the time and with certain techniques and sometimes a technique that produced a result would not even work on that person any more.

Hubbard understood he had started with hypnosis and it has all these liabilities. It could make some people feel euphoria or be convinced that they had changed but quite often this would wear off within three days. And it didn't work on everyone. Some people apparently are quite difficult or impossible to hypnotize. Some people can be hypnotized with one technique but not another. Some need a certain pattern or method to get into a hypnotic trance and nothing else works.

Here are Hubbard's own words from a tape entitled Structure/Function from 1952:

RON THE HYPNOTIST

Structure/Function: 11 December 1952 page 1

"All processes are based upon the original observation

that an individual could have implanted in him by hypnosis

and removed at will any obsession or aberration,

compulsion, desire, inhibition which you could think of – by hypnosis.“ 

Hypnosis, then, was the wild variable;

sometimes it worked,

sometimes it didn’t work.

It worked on some people; it didn’t work on other people.

Any time you have a variable that is as wild as this, study it.

Well, I had a high certainty already –

I had survival. Got that in 1938 or before that. And uh…" end quote

Next two quotes from the Saint Hill Special Briefing Course lectures. One from tape number 402 and another from tape 447.

SHSBC-402

Of course, we go on a tradition "if you learn anything about man that will help him,

you help him with it." ...

"If you learn anything about man that you can manipulate him 

You're going to manipulate men, 

you've got to change their definitions

and change their goals

and enslave them and do this and do that. 

SHSBC-447

Now, brainwashing simply is the trick of mixing up certainties. 

All you have to do if you want to know and develop the entire field

of brainwashing as developed by Pavlov,

is simply to make somebody ..... into a confused or hypnotic state in which he can believe anything.

So, Scientology is ultimately an attempt to enslave people covertly using repackaged hypnosis. But Hubbard knew it only works on some people some of the time.

This is a vital point: Hubbard knew for decades that Scientology techniques only persuaded a fraction of people they are used on and with these people it also doesn't work consistently and often the effects of euphoric trances or elated emotions wear off in a few of days or hours.

But when Hubbard developed his system in the mid sixties he created a pressure point: auditors get blamed for anything other than the desired results and sent to correction. They are given the IMPOSSIBLE job of making Scientology - which persuades people it is doing something worthwhile only a fraction of the time no matter what the auditor does - work as Hubbard claimed every time. Remember, hypnosis,  which is what ALL processes are based on, has this tremendous variable. It is simply ineffective on some people no matter what you do ! And some people are affected by some techniques but not others. And the auditor has no understanding that this is what is going on.

So if you are an auditor you get blamed over and over for Scientology failing. And blamed over and over.

The case supervisor has to blame the auditor, despite the truth being that Scientology really doesn't work as advertised and often doesn't persuade the preclear (person being audited if not yet at the clear status in Scientology) the auditing is doing anything useful or beneficial.

Auditors in Scientology are in my opinion in a position that has a parallel. Children that are idealized by parents can be treated as infallible and perfect. They are treated as perfect beings and this is a form of neglect as the real person the child actually is doesn't get accepted and the child has the terrible dilemma of either asserting their true imperfect nature and getting disapproval and having all affection withheld or the child denies their own flaws and feelings and plays the role of the superhuman being that is available and they end up in denial about their own feelings and desires and become dissociated from from their own feelings.

The auditor has to deny their inability to make Scientology technology work, when the technology itself is flawed, frankly fraudulent and actually harmful.

The auditor faces abuse and exploitation. This is usually hidden from Scientology watchers. I have realized in looking at books focused on the abusive relationships in cults coupled with the excellent descriptions given by Sunny Pereira that Scientology functions like an abusive family with some family members getting treated as scapegoats or being put on a pedestal and being set up for disaster and failure. In Scientology this takes the form of specific posts in Scientology orgs.

The books that really illuminate this basis for understanding cults include Terror, Love and Brainwashing by Alexandra Stein, Traumatic Narcissism by Daniel Shaw and Take Back Your Life by Janja Lalich.

In Scientology often the executive director at a local org gets tremendous harassment from Sea Org members who are higher in the organization. One simple example is the programs chief for the East U.S. was directly over the executive director at the Buffalo New York org. The programs chief of course was calling the executive director daily and screaming at her ruthlessly.

After several months of constant screaming tirades the executive director had a breakdown or heart attack and was completely stressed out. I didn't understand that this is routine in Scientology.

Lots of people get beaten down and worn out by constant or near constant high pressure abuse. And make no mistake this way of running people is harmful by design. Hubbard wanted people to be run ruthlessly and this encouraged people to be sadistic and cruel, callous and without compassion.

Many higher profile examples of abuse exist and get the attention in looking at Scientology. Things like overboarding, the chain locker, forced abortions, fair game, the hole, ecclesiastical beatings, group confessions, being labeled a lesbo and screamed at in a garbage can, running around a pole in the sun until your teeth fall out of  your head, musical chairs, and other things are obviously attention grabbing.

But the less obvious and constantly continuing abuses in Scientology are worth exposing and exploring. When you see abuse and deception and exploitation as the essence of Scientology and the foundation of it then the alleged gains or value of Scientology are exposed as utter nonsense. You can see that a family being controlled by an abuser who encourages his family members to be cruel to each other and creates a poisonous environment of sadistic abuse is not a good parent or person. You can see that a relationship controlled by an abusive man is a not a good situation for anyone to be in.

I think that when all the little things that are cruel and lacking compassion in Scientology on a day to day and routine basis are explored and exposed it reveals the true nature of Scientology as Hubbard's attempt to enslave people covertly with cruelty.

If you take it apart it has no slightest bit of positive value as a model for relationships or groups. And that is a point many Scientologists and ex Scientologists never arrive at.

See, one of the biggest secrets that everything in Dianetics and Scientology hinges on is the simple fact that Hubbard knew it was a fraud. He knew there was no reactive mind, no tone scale, no Scientology auditing without hypnosis using the guided imagination of the individual cult member, no OT powers, no engrams and no truth to hundreds of other concepts in Scientology.

Robert Jay Lifton has described the mind of the guru (his term for a cult leader) as being able to be split or fractured between knowing his (or her) lies and fantasies are false and another portion of their mind is dissociated from this and wholeheartedly believes in the deception he forwards.

The explanation for this is found in the behavior of the guru that contradicts the claims. Hubbard repeatedly claimed that Scientology produced superhuman beings that could read minds, see through walls and across countries via remote viewing, move objects via telekinesis, heal people, raise the dead, and even see the future. If he could do these things he would never have had to use conventional espionage which he spent probably millions of dollars on.

He faced great risk of legal prosecution to use normal methods to spy on people and to do the fair game operations that Scientology is defined by. If he had the abilities he claimed then he would NEVER have set up Scientology as a conventional espionage and terror organization. Further, he would never have been fooled by Scientology executives who he claimed were plotting against him or incompetently fouling up Scientology. A being that could read minds, see the future and watch events remotely would never be misled by normal people or need to monitor them with the huge surveillance system Scientology has.

The point of this is not that Hubbard lacked superpowers. We can easily see that. The point is Hubbard in part of his mind KNEW he had no powers. He in his surveillance of Scientology cult members behaved like someone who knows he lacks powers, and in his espionage of governments and his design of Scientology set it up to hide his fraud and his activities, like a man who knew it was fake all along.

Hubbard had several times in which outsiders volunteered to use their own personnel and time to verify that Scientology improved memory and reaction time and Hubbard flatly refused them. He also refused to have his own abilities tested and gave excuses.

Hubbard made it clear that he used lies and misdirection to hide his failures, and the subjects he plagiarized from to create Dianetics and Scientology, and his genuine intentions and actions in Scientology.

So, Hubbard understood that Scientology was a fraud, that it didn't really wake people up or use genuine past life memories to increase awareness but instead used hypnosis to create euphoric trances and dissociative states.  Hubbard understood hypnosis can be used to fool people and that it only works some of the time on some people and has further limitations such as wearing off in days or hours and that what works in one person may not persuade another or even the same person over time.

So it shows a cruel and inhumane side to Hubbard. He knew the case supervisor demanding consistent results from auditors was unrealistic. No matter how much training or skill an auditor has the auditing they use won't produce desired results all, or possibly even most, of the time. He knew auditing was based on hypnosis and that it never worked on everyone.

He knew about all the other limits of auditing too. For example there is a story that Mary Sue Hubbard, his wife, said he was just fooling people because she never went exterior. In the story Hubbard took hundreds of techniques from Scientology auditing and had them run on Mary Sue for weeks until she gave up on the issue. This demonstrates that Hubbard knew these techniques simply were unreliable.

With the information that Sunny Pereira provided regarding the immense pressure that auditors are under to be perfect a hidden layer of abuse and cruelty built into Scientology by design is revealed. Hubbard builds up auditors as miracle workers to get credit for himself for building a technology to provide miracles but he switches on the auditors at a moment's notice. The key is Hubbard wanted all credit for any positive or enjoyable experiences created with Scientology but goes from patting the auditor on the back for Scientology getting positive feedback to stabbing the auditor in the back the moment that things do not go well in auditing. And Hubbard knew auditing never really worked as he claimed it did, so he was always willing to scapegoat auditors.

He knew Scientology never worked as advertised regarding auditing, regarding study technology indoctrination, regarding Scientology administrative technology, regarding Scientology ethics technology and regarding the rest of Scientology.

He set it up so at every turn the auditor or student or course supervisor or staff member or Sea Org member who doesn't get desired results is blamed for any bad results or lack of good results. That was there to establish Hubbard's authoritarian and even totalitarian system. Hubbard in my opinion wanted admiration and control of people, perhaps even far more than money. Remember, he left his fortune to smash his name into history.

Hubbard was willing to gain the trust and devotion, even love and reverence, of auditors to turn on them and hammer them with blame and he did similar things with staff members and Sea Org members as they get told they are saving the universe and are the elite of earth and carrying out a sacred mission. He gets them to give everything to him and in return they are set in a caste system that is intended to betray them.

Hubbard in his pathological sickness was willing to utterly ruin people who gave everything to him willingly and to destroy their sanity and lives just to perpetuate the lie that he was a messiah and to forward his name itself into the future. He acted as if having people he would never meet merely knowing his name and thinking certain thoughts about him was somehow going to benefit him as a dead man.

I don't know what happens after we die but do not see how this could benefit a dead man. If there is no afterlife then presumably Hubbard's existence has ended. If there is a heaven or hell or other place or reincarnation then I presume that would occupy the attention of the deceased. So Hubbard's hubris makes little sense.

I think the best explanation is that Hubbard was bound to control people as his method of having relationships. The theory of Alexandra Stein displayed in her book Terror, Love and Brainwashing explains this in fine detail.

Hubbard certainly fulfills this. And Scientology has lots of  high profile examples of abuse but the less obvious and far more prevalent abuse in Scientology is in a million little things. The details of who gets blamed for which problems and failures and how is the story of these hidden and overlooked abuses.

This is why Scientology is abusive. It was always meant to be.

Scientology Assists and Objectives as Hypnosis

I occasionally run across people who believe assists and objectives, which both consist of a lot of repetitive touching of things and walking to things and looking at things over and over, sometimes for hours and hours totalling hundreds and hundreds of times doing the exact same thing, are harmless.

I beg to differ and have found more than a little bit of evidence to back me up.



Hypnotist  Volney Mathison (inventor of the E meter) explicitly described in his book Creative Image Therapy hypnosis being used over and over for hours as a covert way to mentally enslave someone.

Here is the quote:

At this point, nearing the end of this book, the writer reluctantly presents a negative warning. There is extant a pseudo-scientific system of something or other wherein the patient is required to create and duplicate arbitrary systems of mental images that are autocratically selected for him by the operator. Worse still, the patient is forced monotonously to perform interminably-duplicated trivial physical motions, such as touching a certain exact spot on the table, over and over and over, sometimes for hours.

Bluntly, this is a powerful and effective technique for covertly inducing hypnosis. By the duplicated command the subject is caused endlessly to duplicate mental image patterns wherein he is OBEYING the operator, explicitly, time after time after time. The subject is sooner or later reduced to such a zombie-like state that he will thereafter obey the operator's every other covert or indirect command. These covert and indirect commands are presented to the subject in the form of take-it-or-leave-it "suggestions"--to buy every book, take every expensive "course", attend every convention or conference staged by the operator. The victim at long last finds himself penniless, in debt, and much more ill and troubled than ever before.

The seizure of the intense attention of an intended victim by monotonously duplicated little acts is the technique of the rattlesnake as he fascinates a bird. The snake sways back and forth, holding the victim's gaze, causing it to look from side to side, keeping its attention captive by this duplicative technique of fascination. A "fatigue point" eventually is reached. The snake's prey is thereby immobilized, psychically and physically--and devoured.
From Lermanet.com

Next we have quotes from Ron Hubbard, SHSBC is the Saint Hill Special Briefing Course lectures followed by the lecture number in the series and date of the lecture. PDC is the Philadelphia Doctorate Course lectures, given in 1952.

SHSBC-209 – 18.9.62

If you want to make some pc feel like he’s being hypnotized when he isn’t, set up two bottles in front of him and tell him to look at the left one, and then tell him to look at the right one, and then tell him to look at the left one, and tell him to look at the right one, and tell him to look at the left one, and tell him to look at the right one, and tell him to look at the left one, and all of the sudden he’ll get some weird feeling of becoming hypnotized.

SHSBC-330 – 29.8.63

... then tell them what their opinion is and they just sit there… They're – of course, they're in a hypnotic trance to their own opinion, so anything you say must be their opinion, see?

SHSBC-402

Of course, we go on a tradition "if you learn anything about man that will help him,

you help him with it." ...

"If you learn anything about man that you can manipulate him 

You're going to manipulate men, 

you've got to change their definitions

and change their goals

and enslave them and do this and do that. 

SHSBC-447

Now, brainwashing simply is the trick of mixing up certainties. 

All you have to do if you want to know and develop the entire field

of brainwashing as developed by Pavlov,

is simply to make somebody ..... into a confused or hypnotic state in which he can believe anything.

Dec 1952 Philadelphia Doctorate Course

There’s nothing every very weird about hypnotism.

It is the easiest thing in the world. ..

"All right, now you stare at the candle, stare at the candle.

Now uh… you know that concentration of that sort can make you for… sort of sleepy and so on.You stare at the candle until you feel that.“

And he’ll say, "All right.“ See he’s agreed that concentration on that can make him sleep.

All right, … let’s look at this candle a little… a little closer and

now let’s feel… let’s feel the… the… the body becoming more and more relaxed. And, he agrees to feel that the body is becoming more and more relaxed.

That’s all there is to that. He… he just agrees little by little,

the next thing you know the hypnotist says, „

Now your eyes will close.“ And his eyes go bonk. Of course, he agreed to that.

Now, the hypnotist says, "

Now your right hand will rise.“ And with some slight amazement, this fellow watches his right hand come up.
And he says, „Wooo, I’m hypnotized.“ So he just gives it up then,

and the hypnotist now says, "

Now you see that kangaroo on your right knee?“

"Yes.“ He sees the kangaroo on his right knee.

Now take it on your right knee.

“Now let’s see it jump over to the left knee.

Now you got that? All right,

now let’s put… let’s put a… uh… a bonnet on this kangaroo. Got the bonnet on it?

Now have the kangaroo sing a song

.“ And the hypnotized person is very happy to sit there and watch this.

PDC-05 pg 7 SCALES OF HANDLING 2.12.52

Well, that’s… that’s very interesting because we have hypnotism which can be demonstrated as a phenomenon,

and we show that the greater and greater agreement,

all you do to hypnotize somebody is just make him agree… agree… agree 

and after that he’ll see anything.

He’ll do anything,

he’ll see anything.

He agrees, agrees, agrees.

RON THE HYPNOTIST

Structure/Function: 11 December 1952 page 1

"All processes are based upon the original observation

that an individual could have implanted in him by hypnosis

and removed at will any obsession or aberration,

compulsion, desire, inhibition which you could think of – by hypnosis.“ 

Hypnosis, then, was the wild variable;

sometimes it worked,

sometimes it didn’t work.

It worked on some people; it didn’t work on other people.

Any time you have a variable that is as wild as this, study it.

Well, I had a high certainty already –

I had survival. Got that in 1938 or before that. And uh…

 Philadelphia Doctorate Course  lecture tape numbered 39 from 1952 - 1953 known as the games maker tape or lecture

Now the caste system  of game  consist of  this: The Maker of Games, he has no rules, he runs by no rules.

 The player of the games,  rules known but he obeys them. And the assistant players merely obey the players. And the  pieces obey rules as dictated by players, but they don’t know the rules.

 And then, what  do you know. There’s broken pieces, and they aren’t even in the game, but they’re still in  the game.

And they’re in a terrible maybe: "Am  I in the game or am  I not in the game?“  Now, "How to make a piece. This is how to  make a piece: First, deny there is a game. Second, hide the rules from  them. Three, give  them  all penalties and no wins. Four, remove all goals“ –

 all goals. "Enforce them… their playing. Inhibit their enjoying. Make them  look like but forbid their being like players“

 – look like God but uh… you can’t be God.

"To make a piece continue to be a piece, permit it to associate only with pieces and deny the existence of players.“

 Never let the pieces find out that there are players.  Now out of these you’re going to get games.

 Now here’s a process that has to do with the making of games, and all this process adds  up to, is you just address to those factors which I just gave you, oh, run and change postulates and any creative process that you can think of and shift postulates around, you get a whole process. End quote

I obviously have written a tremendous amount more on hypnosis and Ron Hubbard's efforts to control people and exactly what it is and how it works in Scientology.

The posts Insidious Enslavement: Study Technology, Basic Introduction to Hypnosis in Scientology, The Critical Factor, The Secret Of Scientology Part 1 Control Via Contradiction, Burning Down Hell - How Commands Are Hidden , Varied And Repeated In Scientology To Control You As Hypnotic Implants, Why Hubbard Never Claimed OT Feats And The Rock Bottom Basis Of Scientology, Propaganda By Reversal Of Meaning In Scientology, Hypnotism: Science Or Pseudoscience ? Not So fast, A Psychiatric View With Comments On The Admissions By Lafayette Ronald Hubbard (1947), Scientology Was Ron Hubbard's Private Game at  Mockingbird's Nest all have further information on this topic. 

Confirmation Bias - Can Versus Must

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In the book The Righteous Mind author Jonathan Haidt outlined the essential experience of confirmation bias. He described how he has studied confirmation bias in people for many years (He has a PhD in psychology) and didn't really grasp it fully until his wife told him she has asked him to not put dishes in a certain place and he answered her then realized he had made an excuse that required combining bits and pieces from different events to create an exaggerated version of reality to justify his excuse.

Haidt described talking to his young son and realizing that if his son wants something he asks CAN it be done ? And tries to find any way possible that something CAN be how he wants it to be.

If he finds something he doesn't want he asks MUST it be this way ? Meaning is it absolutely necessary and unavoidable ?

We all tend to do this. If something fits what we want and is in agreement with our chosen behavior, thoughts and emotions we are eager to find and accept it and present a very low bar for considering information as correct and valid.

If something contradicts what we want and is in conflict with our chosen behavior, thoughts and emotions we are uncomfortable with it, it triggers cognitive dissonance and we become guarded and defensive and treat the disconfirming evidence as a threat and seek to negate, minimize or refute it as strongly and quickly as possible. It is treated as if it must be false and great efforts are made to find any way it could be wrong.

I am going to use a few simple examples to highlight this. In Scientology Scientologists are told Scientology is huge and expanding in the world. Outside of Scientology most critics (like myself) claim Scientology is dwindling and that it has perhaps twenty thousand members or less. We claim that the ideal orgs are almost all nearly empty with just a few dozen staff and a similar number of public Scientologists and that only Flag, the L.A. area and a very few orgs exceed this diminutive size.

We claim the ideal orgs are really a con to prop up Scientology and fool people about Scientology.

Okay, now if I was still a Scientologist eager to believe that Scientology is doing great I would probably do something like this - I would consider the claims by David Miscavige that orgs are booming. I would look at the dozens and dozens of ideal orgs being constructed. I would look at all the money being raised by the IAS. I would look at the Super Bowl commercials and other advertisements Scientology is buying and the Scientology television channel and see these efforts at costing millions of dollars.

If I was a Scientologist I would consider all the claims above as rock solid evidence that Scientology CAN be doing great and expanding as claimed, feel great about believing this and feel there is no reason to listen to any claims that Scientology is declining or small or that orgs are empty. I would see the above as far more than enough to settle the issue and not even look at the evidence or arguments for the other side, and I would be WRONG.

See, with just three or four BELIEVED claims to support an argument I - and probably most people - consider my (our)  desired argument supported and fully settled.

Those claims themselves were not thoroughly investigated because they CAN support my preference for reality.  So on a very weak foundation a faulty structure is built.

Here is another example. A harder example. Some people claim study technology is beneficial or harmless. Okay.

I have claimed it is harmful, was always meant to be harmful and constructed by Ron Hubbard to covertly enslave people.

Now, I have run into people who were supervisors in Scientology who find this incomprehensible.

They may not even still be Scientologists at all. They simply say "there is evidence Hubbard plagiarized study technology, so it might have been good."

 I will quote something  Chris Shelton wrote:

"Now there’s one more aspect to this I want to cover. L. Ron Hubbard credits himself as the sole source of every important discovery and technique of Dianetics and Scientology. Yet, the truth is actually quite different from that. Hubbard was a pathological liar when it came to the events of his own life and his accomplishments. Despite his grandiose claims of having succeeded in every endeavor he set his mind to, he actually flunked out of college, was a sub-standard naval officer who never saw a single day of actual combat during World War II and therefore lied about being crippled and blinded by enemy fire, and he even lied to his own wives, marrying two different women at the same time who didn’t even know of each other’s existence for almost a year. It should be no surprise that a man of such low character would blatantly steal other people’s ideas and claim them as his own, and that is exactly what Hubbard did." Chris Shelton

After leaving the Church, former Scientologist Alan Walters wrote at length of Hubbard’s plagiarism and idea theft, explaining that almost all of the basic principles and techniques of Scientology came from people other than L. Ron Hubbard. One of these ideas, he claimed, was the principle ideas of Study Tech. He said:

“I and several other [Scientologists] had dinner with Chuck and Ava Berner at the Forrest Row Hotel, it was June 1964, the night before Chuck and Ava were to meet with LRH to go over this new discovery they made to do with study.

“We were all enthralled with what they had discovered.

“Imagine the shock we had when LRH told us in a the lecture that night that he had made a momentous discovery in the field of study.

“The data he gave was almost word for word with what the Berners had discussed with us the previous night.

“There was no mention of the Berners who were in the audience.”

Walters later wrote:

“I know they had discovered the misunderstood word concept and the indicators of them, also study and intention, how fixed ideas block study, the importance of familiarization and how misunderstoods causes separation from the subject.”

Over the years, Walters has been quoted in various sources about this, but no one has ever contacted Chuck or Ava Berner directly. So I took it upon myself to track them down. I discovered that Charles Berner had died in 2007 and that he and Ava had divorced many years earlier but had remained in communication. Ava was happy to discuss the events of 1964 with me and here is what she had to say:

[quotes from Ava Berner interview]

In looking all of this over, it’s clear that there is certainly nothing wrong with clearing up definitions of words in dictionaries or even making models or demonstrations of things that are not easy to grasp in just spoken words. What L. Ron Hubbard did was elevate the importance of this to a level of absurdity, claiming that his plagiarized and re-packaged ideas were the only thing of any importance in all of education and learning. He so convinced his followers of this that they started an international organization to espouse and disseminate Study Tech to teachers and educators around the world. Tom Cruise even did a presentation on this to the Department of Education back in the mid-2000s. Fortunately, real educators can see that while there’s nothing wrong with the fundamental ideas, there is a lot more to the difficulties that students have with learning than just the definitions of words. End Quote

From The Basics of Scientology Study Tech

July 27, 2017

So, someone could say words and definitions SHOULD be learned and if a couple of teachers developed study technology independently of Scientology then it is just a benign creation and if they were a student in Scientology or especially a supervisor they can add that Scientology has made students BRIGHT in their experience over and over.

If someone is more comfortable with the claim study technology is beneficial or at least that it is not an attempt at covertly mentally enslaving people they can simply say "Hubbard plagiarized the ideas and I don't think learning words is bad and that I cannot believe that study can be persuasion. " And simply NOT even look at the huge amount of information and evidence I have presented in several blog posts such as Insidious Enslavement: Study Technology, Basic Introduction to Hypnosis in Scientology, The Critical Factor, The Secret Of Scientology Part 1 Control Via Contradiction, Burning Down Hell - How Commands Are Hidden , Varied And Repeated In Scientology To Control You As Hypnotic Implants, Why Hubbard Never Claimed OT Feats And The Rock Bottom Basis Of Scientology, Propaganda By Reversal Of Meaning In Scientology, Hypnotism: Science Or Pseudoscience ? Not So fast, A Psychiatric View With Comments On The Admissions By Lafayette Ronald Hubbard (1947), Scientology Was Ron Hubbard's Private Game.

There is also the fact Hubbard reportedly ALTERED the ideas and methods he took from those two teachers to end up with a product SIGNIFICANTLY DIFFERENT from the original ideas they presented. There is also the fact that Hubbard had combined methods from different sources to create his own hybrid that he presented as his original creation. He read and recommended the book Hypnotism Comes of Age. In Hypnotism Comes of Age the method of combining hypnosis and psychoanalysis to create hypnoanalysis is described in detail. 

Hubbard combined Freudian abreactive therapy and hypnosis to create Dianetics but put tremendous efforts in denying the hypnotic origins and nature of Dianetics and later Scientology auditing and made great efforts to assure people that auditing doesn't hypnotize people but occasionally let slip the fact that auditing does indeed hypnotize people. Remember Hubbard gave thousands of lectures and on many occasions used various drugs and alcohol to get through the day, so occasionally letting the cat out of the bag despite his best efforts to lie is understandable.

I imagine I would occasionally let some secrets out too if I was smashed out of my mind and gave lectures thousands of times that were taped and had to remember hundreds of lies and kept piling on tons of new ones. I can't remember everything I say and while I am no saint I am fairly confident I have told several thousand fewer lies than Ron Hubbard. To say nothing about my far greater sobriety.

I have several examples of these contradictory statements on hypnosis by Hubbard and Jon Atack have perhaps the best outline of these in his essential article Never Believe A Hypnotist and Arnie Lerma has more evidence compiled at Lermanet.com.

You can also find messages in online groups about the hypnotic nature of Scientology indoctrination and auditing. 

Now, the point of all this is not that everyone should have identical beliefs to me. Not by far. The point is to TRY to objectively evaluate something a person should attempt to hold the evidence for and against their beliefs to the same standards AND they should weed out the BEST arguments both FOR and AGAINST their beliefs. Little tricks like finding one flaw or weak claim in a pile and dismissing all of them or finding one or two or even a few claims that support your beliefs then not examining the other side or deciding that the people making claims you disagree with lack the credibility to be listened to or that the people who have claims that you support have expertise and authority that supports their claims are ALL shortcuts to not examine disconfirming evidence and to blindly accept confirming evidence without examination and evaluation.

I think that serious students of psychology can learn more regarding this from the books A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance by Leon Festinger, Subliminal by Leonard Mlodinow, Thinking Fast and Thinking Slow by Daniel Kahneman and most of all On Liberty by John Stuart Mill.

I will close with something from John Stuart Mill:

“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

“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

“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