The greatest protection cults like Scientology enjoy is the profound confusion and lack of clear and true information about them most people have. What cults are and in particular what it's like to be in a cult are not well described for most people.
The experience is rarely well understood by people who have never joined cults. Most people simply don't get enough information or interactions with cult members or ex members.
Now in fairness folks like Margaret Singer, Robert Jay Lifton, Rick Ross and several others who never join cults really gain a deep understanding and great education about cults through years of in depth study and analysis.
There also are people like the folks at the Underground Bunker who put in the work of coming back and reading the stories over and over. They put in the time to look at comments and stories by exes like Jon Atack and Chris Shelton and Derek Bloch and many others and see these people are intelligent, sincere and sane.
So the experience of seeing that helps to knock around assumptions and false ideas about cult members.
Then talking to each other in the comments section helps to bring out those ideas to have them described and examined in depth. That's why the Bunkeroos really understand Scientology far better than most other people. Even sometimes better than exes who never get education on it except from Scientology itself.
After a while it's clear many Indies know less about many aspects of Scientology in its history and actual effects than Bunkeroos who just put in the work of reading the stories here and actually thinking about them.
Now, that will earn me some attacks but I still believe it's true.
Hubbard took particular care to ensure his doctrine would never be discussed or interpreted at length. He wrote several policy letters and bulletins that forbid this. Scientology objects to anyone displaying them without permission, but someone was kind enough to already write a summary with the important facts presented:
I'm quoting this from Prof Dave Touretzky's website:
Hubbard took particular care to ensure his doctrine would never be discussed or interpreted at length. He wrote several policy letters and bulletins that forbid this. Scientology objects to anyone displaying them without permission, but someone was kind enough to already write a summary with the important facts presented:
I'm quoting this from Prof Dave Touretzky's website:
Quote:
Jon Atack used this quote from John Stuart Mill to describe how to take on the complex and intentionally unclear ideas in Scientology.
“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
"If a doctrine is not unintelligible, it has to be vague; and if neither unintelligible nor vague, it has to be unverifiable.”
― Eric Hoffer, The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements
"If a doctrine is not unintelligible, it has to be vague; and if neither unintelligible nor vague, it has to be unverifiable.”
― Eric Hoffer, The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements
Margaret Singer as a top cult expert and in her book Cults In Our Midst she described cults and Scientology in particular quite well:
First a quote that struck me instantly. It reminded me of an analysis of Scientology written by a class XII auditor. She said Hubbard's writings can seem contradictory and paradoxical. That is actually intentional.
The more complicated and filled with contradictions the new system is and the more difficult it is to learn, the more effective the conversion process will be. ( page 67 )
The more complicated and filled with contradictions the new system is and the more difficult it is to learn, the more effective the conversion process will be. ( page 67 )
You affirm that you accept and understand the ideology by beginning to talk in the simple catchphrases particular to the group. This "communication" has no foundation since, in reality, you have little understanding of the system beyond the catchphrases. ( page 69)
Loading the language. As members continue to formulate their ideas in the group's jargon, this language serves the purpose of constricting members' thinking and shutting down critical thinking abilities. At first, translating from their native tongue into "groupspeak" forces members to censor, edit, and slow down spontaneous bursts of criticism or oppositional ideas. ( page 70)
One international group, for example, has dictionaries for members to use. In one of these dictionaries, criticism is defined as "justification for having done an overt." Then one looks up overt and the dictionary states: "overt act: an overt act is not just injuring someone or something; an overt act is an act of omission or commission which does the least good for the least number of dynamics or the most harm to the greatest number of dynamics." Then the definition of dynamics says: There could be said to be eight urges in life...." And so, one can search from term to term trying to learn this new language. (page 70 )
Peer pressure is very important to this process:
If you say it in front of others, you'll do it.
Once you do it, you'll think it.
Once you think it (in an environment you do not perceive to be coercive ), you'll believe that you thought it yourself. ( page 76 )
If you say it in front of others, you'll do it.
Once you do it, you'll think it.
Once you think it (in an environment you do not perceive to be coercive ), you'll believe that you thought it yourself. ( page 76 )
This is key to Scientology. Hubbard set it up so the new cult member practices in drills, including patter drills, then does many of the desired actions of a cult member. Hundreds of drills in fact practiced for hundreds or thousands of hours. Then the cult member feels Hubbard's ideas are their own and defends them as irrefutable deeply held personal convictions.
By having the ideas in Scientology never examined or verified by members they remain hazy. This is greatly compounded by the ideas being full of contradictions and endless word salad of words defined by piles and piles of related new terms. They function as the web of lies with the term engram related to the reactive mind and both linked to charge and secondaries and incidents and auditing and the tone scale and each tone level and on and on it goes. Most Scientology terms link to hundreds or thousands of other Scientology terms to fully define them. It's an entire language of unproven yet extreme claims.
And the Orwellian use of two practices makes Scientology particularly difficult to understand. Hubbard changed verbs to nouns often like beingness, doingness, and havingness. It makes the ideas he described with these terms confusing, unfamiliar and hazy. It took the familiar and changed it enough to make it unsettling.
Orwell described this in his description of how Newspeak is created in the appendix to 1984. Hubbard paid close attention.
Hubbard also uses one hundred eighty degree reversals. He called things their exact opposites. It's a fundamental to double speak.
Calling adding hypnotic content auditing and defining that as removing hypnotic content, calling removing a fake identity clearing while it actually adds a fake hypnotic cult identity, calling a poisoning program the purification rundown, calling a program to install hypnotic directions the False Purpose Rundown which actually knocks out a person's own beliefs and decisions to replace them with Hubbard's purposes - which are certainly false for the victim who receives them, calling a route to physical and mental slavery the bridge to total freedom and saying it delivers spiritual freedom is a complete opposite.
Getting someone to think in and speak an opposite term for something makes seeing the contradiction within the use of the term versus the definition extremely difficult.
It's used frequently by politicians. Almost every time a law has the term freedom it actually restricts or removes freedom for someone. Or everyone.
But by looking at these ideas, describing them and discussing them they can become clearer and be doubted, accepted or rejected.
But by looking at these ideas, describing them and discussing them they can become clearer and be doubted, accepted or rejected.
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