I would recommend a book called "Character Disturbance" by George K Simon Jr which gives a very experienced view on why a lot of people have trouble confronting evil of sociopaths and how to improve the recognition and addressing of the evil.
I haven’t read the book but I have my own theory and I think the phenomena of Stockholming is a good place to start. As a species we evolved without the usual offensive and defensive attributes of horns, teeth, speed, size or strength. We evolved to be intelligent and to function in groups.
Functioning in groups requires intelligence to develop influence in order to survive as either a leader or a follower. If the leaders and/or followers are not very intelligent, as we would probably expect of a goodly number of cavemen, then intelligence would probably be manifested more as manipulation. I think sociopaths intuit this and it may even be genetic. It would be consistent with Crowley’s “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law” which Hubbard seems to have adopted as his guiding principle early in life, although I expect there were even cavemen who would find this offensive.
Being thrust into a mind warping society like Scientology I think triggers this atavistic response in many people. But we aren’t cave men any more so you must be clever about it and corral people slowly and methodically to convert reason into instinct. Hubbard started out gently and ratcheted up the brutality the more he felt in control such as when he settled on the formula for an isolated community on the ships. Most people would leave after a certain amount of abuse but I think he figured out that those people were more of a liability anyway and contaminated the herd. In later years I think he was more focused on culling the non-stockholmees from the stockholmees so here we are thinking that all this brutality is an aberration within the organization when it was calculated by LRH to create a concentrated stockholmed following consisting of a more naturally converted percentile that he could trust according to his increasingly paranoid standards.
Loyalty to other members of a group is also a key component to LRH’s version of stockholming. In the crudest caveman terms, we evolved to help other group members survive because our own survival depended upon it and there are aspects to loyalty that are as deep in the human psyche as the mechanisms of stockholming. I think Hubbard was keenly aware of this and designed a society that was constantly “under threat of survival” by artificially creating emergencies and perceived enemies to keep us intellectually off balance and focused on helping each other.
We want to understand all this in rational logical terms but that just doesn’t work unless you accept that there is something very deep in the human psyche that makes us this way. I think it is sad and disturbing to see people cling to this in any fashion long after the facts are in but it speaks to who and what we are as a species.
