Sunday, March 24, 2024

Scientology Conditions - Their Purpose and Practice (4) Review of Ethics Conditions

 Scientology Conditions - Their Purpose and Practice



Young Ronald Hubbard



In Scientology Hubbard had many policies and procedures for people to follow. 

Among them are Scientology ethics conditions. They are formulas to describe the conditions a person or organization or just about anything can be in and further step by step instructions on what to do when you are in one of these conditions. 

Many people believe they are true and accurate. But if you allow a skeptical person to question them it becomes apparent they are not really accurate or workable.

It requires quite a bit of faith and setting aside critical and independent thinking to take them as legitimate and never find flaws and weaknesses in them, quite plainly they don't really describe reality and the steps they have aren't really adequate to improve absolutely every situation in real life. 

In particular a number of conditions require a person to do something.


We can look at the condition formulas and see they are intended to control the behavior of people as individuals, in groups, and in organizations. 


I am going to quote the book Understanding Scientology, by Margery Wakefield. She provides an excellent concise and accurate description of the Scientology ethics conditions and their formulas. Her quotes are verbatim from The Scientology Handbook, The Introduction to Scientology Ethics Course and several policy letters in the Scientology reference materials. Virtually ALL, Scientologists study and apply the ethics conditions in Scientology, routinely. 


Here's a quote by Margery Wakefield:


"Ethics" is defined in Scientology as rationality toward the highest level of survival along the dynamics. But in Scientology, ethics has to do primarily with the group -- the group being Scientology. Anything that promotes Scientology or benefits Scientology is therefore defined as "ethical," whereas anything which is contra-survival for Scientology becomes, by definition, "unethical."

Similarly, there is a phrase frequently heard in Scientology, "the greatest good for the greatest number of dynamics," meaning that which is good for the group (Scientology) and for mankind is more important and takes precedence over that which is good for the individual. A dangerous philosophy.

The chart of "ethics conditions" in Scientology is as follows, in descending sequence:

  • Power
  • Power Change
  • Affluence
  • Normal Operation
  • Emergency
  • Danger
  • Nonexistence
  • Liability
  • Doubt
  • Enemy
  • Treason
  • Confusion

The theory in Scientology is that a person will always be in one of these conditions with regard to any area of life. So a person could be in a condition of Affluence at his job, a condition of Emergency in his marriage, a condition of Nonexistence in his finances, a condition of Normal Operation with his health, etc.

And for each of the conditions, Hubbard devised a formula which, if applied, is supposed to cause the person to progress to the next higher condition. That some of these formulas may not make much sense does not matter. Because Ron (Hubbard) has said this is what they are, they must be right. Right?

The formula for the condition of Confusion is, simply: FIND OUT WHERE YOU ARE.

Once that has been done, the person will move "up" to Treason, for which the formula is: FIND OUT THAT YOU ARE.

In Enemy, the formula is: FIND OUT WHO YOU REALLY ARE.

The formula for Doubt is a bit more complex.

When one cannot make up one's mind as to an individual, a group, organization or project a condition of Doubt exists. The formula is:

  1. Inform oneself honestly of the actual intentions and activities of that individual, group, project or organization brushing aside all bias and rumor.

  2. Examine the statistics of the individual, group, project or organization.

  3. Decide on the basis of "the greatest good for the greatest number of dynamics" whether or not it should be attacked, harmed or suppressed or helped.

  4. Evaluate oneself or one's own group, project or organization as to intentions and objectives.

  5. Evaluate one's own or one's group, project or organization's statistics.

  6. Join or remain in or befriend the one which progresses toward the greatest good for the greatest number of dynamics and announce the fact publicly to both sides.

  7. Do everything possible to improve the actions and statistics of the person, group, project or organization one has remained in or joined.

  8. Suffer on up through the conditions in the new group if one has changed sides, or the conditions of the group one has remained in if wavering from it has lowered one's status.

Now "upgraded" by the Ethics Officer to a condition of Liability, the formula is:

  1. Decide who are one's friends
  1. Deliver an effective blow to the enemies of the group one has been pretending to be part of despite personal danger.

  2. Make up the damage one has done by personal contribution far beyond the ordinary demands of a group member.

  3. Apply for re-entry to the group by asking the permission of each member of it to rejoin and rejoining only by majority permission, and if refused, repeating steps 2-4 until one is allowed to be a group member again.

When a person first begins a job in Scientology, he starts off in a condition of Non-existence, for which the formula is:

  1. Find a comm (communication) line.

  2. Make yourself known.

  3. Discover what is needed and wanted.

  4. Do, produce and/or present it.

In other words, find out what needs to be done and do it.

Having done that, one is now in a condition of Danger. This

condition applies when an activity is in trouble. The formula is:

  1. Bypass (ignore the junior in charge of the activity and handle it personally).

  2. Handle the situation and any danger in it.

  3. Assign the area where it had to be handled a danger condition.

  4. Handle the personnel by ethics investigation.

  5. Reorganize the activity so that the situation will not repeat.

  6. Recommend any firm policy that will hereafter detect and/or prevent the condition from recurring.

When the person has gotten his activity out of danger, he or she is then in a condition of Emergency, for which the formula is:

  1. Promote and produce.

  2. Change your operating basis.

  3. Economize.

  4. Then prepare to deliver.

  5. Stiffen discipline or stiffen ethics.

If the person has successfully applied the Emergency formula, the condition of Normal Operation now applies and its formula is:

  1. Don't change anything.

  2. Ethics are mild.

  3. If a statistic betters, look it over carefully and find out what bettered it and then do that without abandoning what you were doing before.

  4. Every time a statistic worsens slightly, quickly find out why and remedy it.

If things are going well and the formula for Normal Operation has been applied for a period of time, then the person could be said to be in a condition of Affluence, for which the formula is:

  1. Economize. Be sure you don't buy anything with a future commitment to it.

  2. Pay every bill.

  3. Invest the remainder in service facilities, make it more possible to deliver.

  4. Discover what caused the condition of affluence and strengthen it.

If things are going really well, the person may make a Power Change into another area of endeavor. If not, the person is in a condition of Power for which the only rule is: Don't Disconnect. Take ownership and responsibility for your connections.

These are the Ethics Conditions in Scientology and they are taken very seriously. Each week, each person working for the organization (i.e, "on staff") will turn in his or her "stats" to the Ethics Officer. The person will be assigned a condition by the Ethics Officer, and will be required to apply the appropriate formula for that condition to their job. In addition, the Ethics Officer can assign a person a condition in any area of his personal life, and the person must apply the appropriate formula and submit a written application to the Ethics Officer for "upgrading" to the next higher condition. For the Scientologist, the ethics conditions and their formulas is a way of life.

 End quote by Margery Wakefield from Understanding Scientology

Now that is a pretty good description of the conditions and their formulas. When one is in Scientology some knowledge about statistics and the corresponding conditions they are assigned to is also required.

I have broken up the original very long blog post on this topic to make it  more manageable as a series of short posts. This is the fourth in the series of short posts to address this. 


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.




Thought Reform/Influence






Brainwashing: Standard Tech In Scientology

Hypnosis and Covert Persuasion













Scientology Doctrine and the Words of Ronald Hubbard



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.


Scientology Conditions - Their Purpose and Practice

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Scientology Conditions - Their Purpose and Practice (3) You and Your

 Scientology Conditions - Their Purpose and Practice



Young Ronald Hubbard


Now there are some things in Scientology that have links and relationships that are often not obvious. But one thing that you get if you are indoctrinated in Scientology doctrine for decades and then leave is time. Time to reflect on your experience and sort out your feelings and beliefs and not face penalties for your actions.


While one is in Scientology it's very rare to get a chance to discuss this and take time to sort out what makes sense to you and what doesn't. And Scientology definitely forbids open discussion of these things and using ideas and models from other subjects to look at your own experience. 

It also forbids looking at criticism and negative accounts of Scientology experiences from other people to make sense of it, but real people have been through similar experiences very often in Scientology and looking at their experiences and criticism should be no threat to Scientology if it is a legitimate subject and organization. 

I ended up studying hypnosis in 2014 after I left Scientology after twenty five years (1989-2014) and read a couple of books, looked at quite a few others and read many articles and watched many, many videos from people who claimed to be experts on hypnosis. I also read numerous books on cults and psychology to understand the subject. 

I am not a person who would give classes or hypnotize people but I certainly understand more than most laymen who don't study it as a profession.

I ended up finding out all kinds of things along the way and it was a very long way.

One thing worth noting is that lots of people who practice hypnosis or similar practices believe in hypnotic writing and things that go by various names like hypnotic language patterns and so on. 


If you pick up a few books on hypnosis or NLP or the power of attraction and similar concepts you rapidly realize the authors of these books all seem to have the same techniques. 


Many, maybe most of them, claim that by using their powerful communication system that you can persuade individuals to do almost anything including buying things. They usually, it seems, claim you can get a man to buy a car that he neither needs or wants. A lot of them openly claim you can get a woman to sleep with you if she is not remotely attracted to you without protest. That's rape in case it's not clear enough and some of these guys in their books are very open about it. 


So, I am generally one to say that if a guy loves NLP or conversational hypnosis or some other type of covert persuasion method, by any name, that's a huge red flag and I would probably never get in business with him and especially would never be vulnerable to him in my personal life if possible. I give this as a very serious warning. 

If they are not conflicted about using these covert techniques to make car sales or sell hypnosis courses or books, it's disturbing they use the methods that are marketed for getting women who want to say "no" to say "yes," even though the women don't want to.

One thing that is central to their efforts is their belief that a person can be manipulated by using the terms "you" and "your" quite frequently. The idea that using these terms over and over in speech and writing is persuasive is one I have seen in articles on hypnosis and powerful words. The degree to which they are effective is debatable, but the fact that lots of people who believe in the power of rhetoric or hypnosis to persuade people both believe in these words and use them to attempt to persuade people, is in my opinion well established by their own words and actions.


A lot of books on hypnosis and persuasion feature sections that are jam packed with the words "you" and "your," over and over again. In some cases "you" appears both at the beginning and end of a sentence and the words are used dozens and dozens of times in a few paragraphs. 

I have seen it time and time again. When I first started looking at these books I would get annoyed that the author was trying to use covert hypnosis on me as the reader of their book! 

I would go to a bookstore that carried such books and look at one after another and realized they were all chocked full of the unethical techniques they promised to teach! 

Often a book would describe a technique, then I would see that that very book had it used within that very book, then the next and the next. 

When you have a few of these things fresh in your mind with examples it is very easy to see them in the books. Sometimes an author would describe some techniques but use others, but the thing is once you have seen a few you recognize them in any variation. 

It is kind of annoying to learn the technique and have the author think you won't recognize it or one that is similar right in front of you. But perhaps they think that anyone who studies the material that much is a good customer or avid wannabe hypnotist like themselves.

And I found ample evidence that Scientology founder Ronald Hubbard was a very knowledgeable hypnotist. He was a poor student in many other ways and a pathological liar and notorious plagiarist but in my opinion he studied and practiced hypnosis for many years.


I do not believe this because he said he did, but because I have found a tremendous amount of evidence that he did. Many of his contemporaries have given accounts of him using hypnosis effectively. In addition he has made hundreds and hundreds of statements about the subject. 

I am not going to say that every single one is accurate, because they are not all true, but the degree to which a very, very high number of these statements are in agreement with ideas that appear in various schools of hypnosis is far too great to be coincidence.


Plainly he had to know a lot about hypnosis to be able to make these statements. Imagine if a doctor made hundreds of statements about very specific medical issues and another doctor said "well, he has some unusual ideas, but he has a very thorough education on medicine, despite those ideas." You can assume the person somehow got the knowledge, any other facts about them being as they may. 

The work of Jon Atack in my opinion has well established this fact in his excellent articles on Hubbard such as Never Believe a Hypnotist and The Scientology Mythbusting series at The Underground Bunker blog by Tony Ortega. 

The Affirmations of Ronald Hubbard shed even more light on this in several ways. For one thing they show his belief in and persistent reliance on hypnosis to be the foundation of his "psychology" as he called it. 

For another they show he used the words "you" and "your" in several sections of his self hypnosis scripts. He could have either read these to himself aloud, thought these to himself, or played a recording of them over and over, either while awake or asleep, over and over again every day for decades.

Additionally, a Scientology critic at The Ex Scientologist Message Board (ESMB) ran the transcripts of several taped lectures by Ronald Hubbard through a program that gave number counts for the words used and he found that Hubbard very frequently used the words "you" and "your."


The critic known as Jachs claimed that Hubbard on The Philadelphia Doctorate Course lectures in 1952 (a very frequently studied series of taped lectures that are part of the foundation of Scientology) used the term "you" 20,878 TIMES IN 62 HOURS!

This was described in the blog post: Hubbard Hypnotist Part One: Now And You

It took me a very long time to really understand the techniques Hubbard was using and just how widespread they are in Scientology. I had to actually look at the conditions years later and take them step by step, one by one to see that they are used covertly even in the conditions.


I recommend that anyone who wants to understand the mind of a cult leader, or to understand the underlying foundation of Dianetics and Scientology read the affirmations and understand they were private self hypnosis commands intended to influence the mind of Ronald Hubbard and written by Hubbard himself. He likely used them many, many hundreds or thousands of times. 

He quite likely bought into the idea that the words "you" and "your" used over and over again are especially persuasive, otherwise it would have made no sense to use them as he did. It's almost an absolute certainty that he knew that hypnotists saw these words as particularly potent in influencing people. 




I have broken up the original very long blog post on this topic to make it  more manageable as a series of short posts. This is the third in the series of short posts to address this. 


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.




Thought Reform/Influence






Brainwashing: Standard Tech In Scientology

Hypnosis and Covert Persuasion













Scientology Doctrine and the Words of Ronald Hubbard



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.




Scientology Conditions - Their Purpose and Practice

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Scientology Conditions - Their Purpose and Practice (2) Reviewing Brainwashing

 Scientology Conditions - Their Purpose and Practice



Young Ronald Hubbard


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.


From: Brainwashing: Standard Tech in Scientology


Several days ago Lori Hodgson was harassed by someone from the Scientology cult. I copied and examined the comments by Vistaril at the Underground Bunker blog by Tony Ortega on this. I realized that the brainwashing techniques of Scientology which Vistaril quoted Ron Hubbard on (described as introversion) were also the exact same method that was used on me in an attempt to drive me to madness or death.

I had spent hundreds of hours trying to understand exactly what had been done and how. I believe the same method has been used on Bob Minton and many others over the years. I will quote Vistaril and some Hubbard references that relate to his methods. I had written about my experience in A Million Years In Hell but feel the exact methods used sheds new light on what Scientology attempted to do to me and has done to ruin utterly several others.

Vistaril to Lori Hodgson

Stay strong, Lori!
That comment from Scientology is a particularly nasty one. It is a classic use of KSW Standard L Ron Hubbard Scientology "Shattering Suppression" Tech™ in that it is a full-on attempt to "introvert". Note the wording . . .

(below is the comment from a Scientology operative intended to introvert Lori Hodgson )
YOU won’t, Lori. Every action I have seen YOU doing in the past years has further alienated YOUR kids from YOU. I would think YOU know that but YOU do it anyway. But maybe YOU don’t see it. So I am telling YOU. YOU can’t force them to love YOU again.

. . . is designed to focus the subject's attention in on themselves. It also employs the use of "Enemy Tactics" in its attempt to stir up "aberrative" wog HE&R concepts like love and attachment to family. And then there's the threat aspect as pointed out below with Cash Bolt's connection to weapons. Cruel, nasty, critical, intimidating and vindictive, just as L Ron Hubbard would have liked it. Wouldn't surprise me in the least if the comment was the work of David Miscavige himself. It takes a special kind of arsehole to come up with that sort of mind fuckery.

From an academic point of view, it is interesting to show just how duplicitous L Ron Hubbard was in his advocacy of such practises. Of all the words used to describe Scientology, perhaps the one which Scientologists rail against most is "brainwashing". But look how the term is defined in L Ron Hubbard's Administrative Dictionary . . .

BRAINWASHING, 1. brainwashing is a very simple mechanism. One gets a person to agree that something might be a certain way and then drives him by introverting him and through self-criticism to the possibility that it is that way. Only then does a man believe that the erroneous fact was a truth . . .

. . . now, contrast and compare L Ron Hubbard's "Shattering Supression" Tech™. One will find it is littered with instructions on how to introvert people and organizations. A stark example can be found in L Ron Hubbard's HCO Policy Letter of 15 August 1960 Dept. Of Government Affairs . . .

. . . The goal of the Department is to bring the government and hostile philosophies or societies into a state of complete compliance with the goals of Scientology. This is done by high level ability to control and in its absence by low level ability to overwhelm. Introvert such agencies. Control such agencies. Scientology is the only game on Earth where everybody wins. There is no overt in bringing good order . . .

. . . that HCOPL is compulsory reading for all Scientologists involved in Scientology's public relations and "special affairs". Yet how many Scientologists reading it realise that what L Ron Hubbard is telling them to do is to apply what he also defines as "brainwashing"? Not only that, L Ron Hubbard tells his Scientologists that applying such practices against people and organizations, regardless of the effects on individuals and their families, is not a sin (overt). Watta guy. Note also, that the general practice of Scientology is all about control and overwhelming a person and getting them so introverted they come to believe material which is demonstrably false - from the existence of Engrams right through to Xenu.

Perhaps if Lori was an isolated Scientologist stuck in L Ron Hubbard's weirdo world such tech may have an effect. But, in this particular case, the attempt is entirely futile. Well, perhaps not "entirely" because there will be an effect, but it will be the exact opposite of what was intended. First of all, Lori knows all about these pernicious Scientology teachings and can recognize them from a mile off. Also, she has far too much love and support around her for them to have any effect other than to reinforce the need to expose Scientology and make more strenuous efforts to reach out to her children.
EDIT: Typos, grammar, wording. Usual end quote by Vistaril.


I have broken up the original very long blog post on this topic to make it  more manageable as a series of short posts. This is the second in the series of short posts to address this. 


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.




Thought Reform/Influence






Brainwashing: Standard Tech In Scientology

Hypnosis and Covert Persuasion













Scientology Doctrine and the Words of Ronald Hubbard


Scientology Conditions - Their Purpose and Practice

Posted by at No comments:
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