The Day I Changed Scientology Forever

[degraded being]

On the point about how the acceptance of the BS happens and how intelligent people might or might not be.

I am compelled to say that when one particular staffer friend used to go on about marcab stuff and HOM stuff and get "keyed in" (he had not done OT levels) I just used to think "Well I'll just wait and see about that stuff". I was also gently coerced into a bit of "past life" stuff (auditing) and even there I did not actually accept that it was really lives that I had lived. It was just to please the auditor and to see if it made the emeter do the right thing. So I had definite lines of gullibility that I didn't cross up to the time I got out of the mndfk machine.

A factor that I think is quite relevant is that although Kha Khan and some others were university educated, many of us were not. I left school at age 15.
I did not learn critical thinking skills until many years later. I went back to high school then Uni and later got a post grad degree. People do not necessarily have to go to uni to be smart or good critical thinkers, and conversely there seems to be no shortage of people who get the higher education and appear totally fkng stupid. But critical thinking is the main thing on the menu if you do go to Uni.
If all scio sign-ups had to finish their uni education first there might be a lot less sign ups and lower average length of stay in the cult.
Many people develop sharper critical skills as they mature even without higher education, which was happening with me, but the university sure did speed the process up!

In scio I heard a lot of plain stupid stuff, such as disparaging all academia/ all science etc. Just babyishly ignorant shit. That's TC talk. It is very widespread in scio which is why Kha Khan couldn't have an intelligent conversation with anyone.

 

[FlunkedForLaughing]

In scio I heard a lot of plain stupid stuff, such as disparaging all academia/ all science etc. Just babyishly ignorant shit. That's TC talk. It is very widespread in scio which is why Kha Khan couldn't have an intelligent conversation with anyone.

The first lecture in Milestone One says something to the effect that all studies like biology, physics, and chemistry are inferior to Scientology because those other fields of study all stopped when they had some principles written down, but never bothered to study the factors of life that are above those fields, like Scientology did. So therefore Scientology is more important and more dependable than all those other fields.

I find it amazing how gullible I was. When I first heard the lecture from Milestone One, I thought "Wow, how lucky I am to be studying Scientology". When I read the example of someone gaining and losing 30 pounds by mocking up black mass and pushing it into the body, I thought "Wow, I wonder if I am carying around an extra 10 pounds of mental mass. I might come out of session one day 10 pounds lighter".

I really wanted to believe. My bullshit detector was totally turned off. I never questioned anything, or used any critical thinking to analyze anthing LRH said or wrote.

Now I find it hard to believe I lived like that.

Thanks for your insightful post.

FFL

 

[Kha Khan]

A factor that I think is quite relevant is that although Kha Khan and some others were university educated, many of us were not.

While I think my education helped to keep me from falling deeper into the trap, it didn't help me as much as one would have hoped, or as much as it should have. When I first read about the "30 lbs of mental mass" experiment, and the "clam experiment," and saw that other Scientologists seemed to accept these empirical statements without reservation, it did cause me to think "Oh my God!" and stop me from falling deeper into the trap.

But I didn't get me out -- truly out -- right away. As I indicated in my earlier post, while I left I also eventually came back for a time. Part of the reason was that my education gave me an undeserved and dangerous sense of immunity, invulnerability and, to be honest, intellectual superiority. Indeed, I suffered from hubris. As a result, I suffered the well-deserved fate of retribution.

Surely I, being relatively intelligent and well-educated, would not succumb to the BS of Scientology. Yeah right.

What I didn't consider were the powerful, primitive and entirely emotional and psychological needs -- the insecurity, the loneliness, the need for purpose, the need (perfectly understandable given my family history) to help, serve or "save" others -- that can overwhelm all rationality if one is not very careful. As a result, for a long time I was under the naive, and indeed insulting delusion, that I could "help" or "save" Scientologists, or help "reform" the Church. Insulting because the members of the Church did not want my "help" (at least not the way I wanted to "help" them), didn't believe they needed "saving," and believed the Church was in no need of "reform," thank you very much.

The truth is that I underestimated Scientology and Scientologists in a very important and fundamental way. I will never again make that mistake.

I saw the same hubris, sense of intellectual superiority, and tendency to underestimate Scientology and Scientologists among the OCs (original critics) starting in the mid-1980s on ARS (the usenet newsgroup alt.religion.scientology). Mostly well-intentioned, intelligent, college educated critics who (with the exception of a few ex-Scientologists, and particularly ex-Scientologists who had been Sea Org or, better, had been in or suffered the wrath of OSA) had no idea, no clue, what they were dealing with.

Until their bosses received calls at work about the "religious bigot" they were employing, or their neighbors received inquiries during a noisy investigation, or they were hit with the threat of a trademark or copyright lawsuit.

While it was largely a hobby for the OCs, it was life or death (indeed, eternal life or death) for the Scientologists -- OSA members who, if not broadly or scientifically educated, were themselves intelligent, well disciplined, fanatical and the product of a Darwinian environment that make college and graduate school look like nursery school in comparison.

Speaking through a number of usenet names I tried to warn the OCs, but to no avail. Indeed, as a long time observer of the Scientology scene, it appeared to me that until the advent Anonymous the Church had largely, although not entirely, defeated the original ARS OCs through relentless discipline, hard work, ends justifies the means viciousness and attrition.

For what it is worth, in my experience the college, or indeed high school, educations that best immunize one from Scientology are educations in a hard science (e.g., chemistry, physics, biology, etc.), the scientific method, and the philosophy of science (particularly falsifiability and Karl Popper, or perhaps verificationism and A.J. Ayer).

Unfortunately, I think that a lot of the crap that is taught in college does nothing to immunize one from Scientology and other b.s. in life. Indeed, some of what is taught in college -- the moral relativism, the post-modernist "truth is a construct," "truth is subjective" bullshit -- can make one more susceptible to Scientology and other b.s. Further, purely deductive systems of thought (e.g., math divorced from science, deductive logic) can make one more susceptible in that they can cause one to following trains of logic without first considering the empirical validity of the premises.

 

[thetanic]

I find it amazing how gullible I was. When I first heard the lecture from Milestone One, I thought "Wow, how lucky I am to be studying Scientology". When I read the example of someone gaining and losing 30 pounds by mocking up black mass and pushing it into the body, I thought "Wow, I wonder if I am carying around an extra 10 pounds of mental mass. I might come out of session one day 10 pounds lighter".

Ditto. Meanwhile, I still ate too much junk food, and I was definitely carrying around more than 10 pounds I didn't need.

 

[Kha Khan]

A factor that I think is quite relevant is that although Kha Khan and some others were university educated, many of us were not.

"He only wanted people in the organization who would do what he said." -- Pam Kemp, talking about LRH

I just wanted to respond to these two observations with one of my own. My understanding after reading many histories of Dianetics and Scientology (including all of the critical books) is that in the beginning Dianetics attracted, and made an effort to attract, a lot of well-educated people and was considered an "intellectual" pursuit. It seems the initial Dianetics craze following the publication of DMSMH was largely made up of educated people who believed in therapy, psychotherapy, psychology, etc., and were interested in the low-cost, do it yourself aspect of Dianetics.

It appears to me that with the passage of time Scientology in particular became increasingly anti-intellectual and anti-education (or at least anti-wog education), and directed more and more to those who were not college or broadly educated. One reason for this, I believe, is that Hubbard could not tolerate the risk of having his ideas actually tested or subjected to experimental, statistical, or other empirical analysis.

Another reason for this, I believe, was that Hubbard could not stand intellectual competition, or competition of any sort. He had to be "Source" -- the "Only." While I've seen critics deride Hubbard's own college career (which I think is valid only to the extent it serves to attack Hubbard's credibility and hypocrisy, but not on the merits of his intelligence or knowledge), he was undoubtedly very intelligent (I would say a genius), well-read, and very well self-educated. Nonetheless, he couldn't risk having somebody point out (as I've alluded to in another post) that, for example, his "greatest good for the greatest number of dynamics" idea was an elaboration on Utilitarianism or the thought of Jeremy Bentham, or suggest a new idea, development or improvement on existing Dianetic or Scientology theory.

As I also noted in a prior post, I was around during the mid-90s when Scientology actually made a Dianetics push on college campuses. Indeed, I was present when the LA Orgs did their Dianetics lecture and recruitment push at UCLA. I was told the 1990s Dianetics college push was an attempt to repeat the interest in Dianetics on college campuses and within the intellectual community in the 1950s. (As usual, the Church was again trying to repeat an effective action from the past, not recognizing that society really does change over time.) I thought the idea was insane, and it failed utterly.