The Light of the Mind - Scientology Casts A Dark Shadow

At this point I don't even approach it like I would have before Scientology. I accept no one is completely right. I look at the limits of language. John Stuart Mill said "language is the light of the mind."

In Scientology your mind is limited to thinking things that don't exist are real and things that do exist aren't real. The language twists, distorts and often reverses truth. Just by thinking in Scientology terms and making decisions with them and interpreting emotions with them one gets put in Hubbard's hypnotic delusional reality. And often never comes out.

In trying to come out of that I found that I didn't just need to stop using Hubbard's terms, phrases and concepts. I needed to learn entirely different subjects to have the capability to think of things in different ways and examine ideas. Without that ability I can't even understand the possibility of other ideas.

In taking parallel tracks you can see how an idea may reappear or have a cousin in another subject or by a different source within a subject. By looking at cognitive dissonance theory you get Festinger's language which is thousands of times simpler than Hubbard's. By looking at Cialdini's book Influence you get a different model that overlaps with Festinger.

And hypnosis has it's own complexity and challenges but also overlaps in places with the social psychology language. A student of hypnosis could take the time to find hundreds of ideas and studies in psychology that support individual claims and ideas in hypnosis. Propaganda analysis has terms for ideas from Socratic debate and rhetoric. Information on attachments, boundaries and personality disorders all illuminate different aspects of Scientology and Hubbard himself.

Parts of rhetoric and studies on relationships between people and mass movements all play a part. A psychologist, hypnotist, linguist and student of critical thinking could all look at Scientology indoctrination and auditing and see things in the terms from their disciplines. They would be foolish to argue. They all have wisdom to share.

The hypnotist could even without using Hubbard's quotes describe how the students are being covertly hypnotized as well as the cult members in auditing. The psychologist could describe how the cult members use influence in terms from Cialdini's studies or Festinger's books if he understands that, the critical thinker could describe the fallacies being used or the rhetoric as classic pathos, ethos, logos and sublime writing. And how they are intertwined to bolster each other.

The linguist alone could describe the loaded language itself and how it uses definitions within definitions within definitions to confuse and overwhelm a mind along with redefinition of terms for propaganda and Orwellian reversals with words used to describe their exact opposites to utterly confuse people with double speak and alterations of parts of speech to create terms like beingness, doingness, and havingness. Every one of these methods is described by Orwell in his essays and the afterword to 1984.

So a book or subject isn't just a validation of my own ideas or a way to support them through association. It's a possible route to the tools to even think in the subject presented. For most subjects several books with different perspectives are needed to even get my bearings on the most basic ideas in a subject.

Another possible difference between Marty Rathbun and myself is his approach to the authority other people hold. I usually accept the greater knowledge an author has than me off the bat. I try to find experienced authorities with high staning in their field or speciality. I never want to be the smartest guy in the room relative to the author, particularly in their area of expertise.

As an example of an expert I chose to learn from I have Margaret Singer.

Margaret Singer spent decades studying cults, interviewed over four thousand ex cult members and could very smoothly discuss in very simple terms or very complex academic terms anything about cults. I easily accept her far greater knowledge about them than mine. Obviously she isn't perfect and could be wrong even with her experience.

She is just one example of many, many experts I seek out because they offer relevant information in books that are accessible to an uneducated person such as myself and in terms that are the most basic for the subjects. They present the basic ideas in clear descriptions that make thinking in their terms easy.

I really think Marty Rathbun has an entirely different opinion of himself and the authors he reads. And sometimes that makes all the difference.