Mockingbird's Nest: 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.

L. Ron Hubbard. “Ron looks to the future with the sea org, ”

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.