It’s impressive, isn’t it? I’ve often wondered if there are a lot of Sea Org members who work their butts off for years and years without any break, suffer through stints in the RPF, with nary a chance to see their families, only to finally get to their OT levels and become utterly astounded at how insanely ridiculous the entire thing sounds.
Part of me feels deep sorrow for the poor fools duped by $cientology…but part of me says: “what on earth were these people thinking”?
The fact is , if you read LRon’s own works, he makes big claims for $cientology-such as, when you reach “clear”, you will have a genius level IQ.
Of all the thousands of people “cleared” by this cult, how many have ever done anything of significance.? How many have won a Nobel Prize? Answer-Zero.
The “tech” doesn’t work-and if you part with hndreds of thousands of $$ finding this out, you surely are pathetic.:smack:
I don’t think, though, that there’s anything in Scientology to address that.
My suspicion is that a lot of these celebrities got into it before they were famous–while they were still struggling–desperate, really, to make it in Hollywood. And part of the process in the beginning is to tell the auditor your darkest secrets. Once they get famous, they don’t want the secrets to get out, so they play along with it. In a way, I believe it’s a kind of blackmail.
I happen to live near Clearwater, Florida (Scientology’s Rome) . . . If you’re ever in downtown Clearwater and see people in what at first glance look like blue Navy or Air Force uniforms, they’re probably Sea Org.
Certainly there’s a big Scientology presence in LA (they’ve got a big Scientrology Center right on Hollywood Boulevard, not far from Vine and the former Grauman’s Chinese Theater) and in the entertainment world, but that’s a result of Hubbard’s big push – as I say, he deliberately tried to recruit famous people in the hopes of getting others in because of them.
Hubbard is as much of a fraud as he seems to be.
One of the many aspects of their endemic fraudster mindset is that they spend a great deal of time and effort vastly overstating their own numbers and influence. You might be surprised to know that several careful analyses have concluded that there may be as few as 10-15,000 Scientologists – worldwide. They’re particularly fond of claiming “millions” of adherents by counting everyone who’s bought or been given a copy of Dianetics (Hubbard’s original bible).
http://blogs.villagevoice.com/runninscared/2011/07/scientologists_1.php
That guy (Tony Ortega) has written dozens of spot-on critiques on the antics of the cult (linked at the bottom of the story).
The Hollywood thing is a bit of an accident of history that has benefited from the inherent vacuity of most celebrities (many of whom did not graduate high school or were at best tutored in a trailer) and the tendency of attention whores (including actors) to like the attention. The specific genesis of the Hollywood connection is that one of the earliest adherents of Scientology happened to be a guy (Milton Katselas) who taught at a pretty prominent acting school in So. Cal. and imparted the idiocy to many of his pupils as they passed through. Lots of background here:
How do you figure that? Today you can find this stuff on the Internet relatively easily. For most of the history of Scientology, that wasn’t the case.
People have been lying about their military careers and getting away with it for years (until they don’t). Would you know how to verify someone’s military record? Are you sure there aren’t privacy restrictions?
Okay, suppose you work your way around it – they’ll claim (they have done so) that the records are incomplete, inaccurate, or have been doctored. And 50-60 year old documents do sometimes go missing.
Oh, and you get through all that – guess what, he was on secret missions, the records are sealed.
Why you are correct that finding information is easier now than it was, something like a military record can be easily verifyed by the press. He claimed to been wounded and to have recieved the Purple Heart, 21 medals and palms and they claimed that he was a military hero. A public figure making such claims puts himself in a very akward position. Any member of the press could call the respective branch of the military to confirm these awards. It would be so easy to discredit, so easy in fact that one would be foolish to make the claims, especially if that person maintains a public life.
As far as “secret missions” and the like. If you are proven to have lied about decorations your credibility will fall short on any other claims you might make about military service.
And according to the link also :
I did that, when I was about 16, and, along with a friend, passing by their headquarters in Paris. We had never heard of Scientology at the time, filled a personnality test but never came back to find out the result because those guys seemed weird.
So, It seems I’m technically member of yet another religion, Scientology.
Oh, I agree with you his lies were pretty transparent once people started going to the trouble of doing some actual investigative reporting. But bear in mind the only people he really has to impress are those who have already bought far more ridiculous notions than his fabricated military career. Thetans, Xenu, ancient spacecraft that looked exactly like 727s – if they can gloss over that . . . .
Plus the entire operation runs under a constant air of secrecy and persecution complex and paranoia. Followers are already well aware that the journalists are “out to get the church because of all the good work it’s doing.” Convincing them that the media (or even military) are doing a hack job on LRH would be child’s play.
LRH was a pathological, compulsive liar. Sometimes people like that can be very persuasive (especially when they quasi-believe their own lies) to some. Like Bill Clinton, Hubbard “lied when he didn’t even have to.” Somewhere in those most excellent articles, it mentions that LRH said that he had specifically formulated the higher level OT materials such that a person who hadn’t completed the previous levels properly would die – would literally drop dead from being blown away.
He didn’t have to invent that detail to sell his scam. It just sounded cool to him, a tossed off grandiose bit of blather that could quite easily be falsified. By the way, there’s also the notion that pathological liars are habitual risk takers. They get a lot of gratification out of fooling people with total B.S. that the mark could have (but won’t, the liar gambles) easily suss out or contradict.
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My apologies for the long copypasta, but the host site might get taken down or appropriated by the Scientology organisation
Namkcalb, that quote was much too long. It violates our copyright rules. I understand your concerns about Operation Clambake, but it’s been on the net for a very long time and it’s not going anywhere.
The Scientologists have some built in advantages. As mentioned, many flow from the fact that their adherents are self-selecting – anyone who can be lured in by bad pulp sci fi masquerading as "religious technology"is likely easy to manipulate in other ways.
Someone mentioned sunk costs – when you’ve paid tens of thousands for the Secret Of Lige, leaving is not an easy choice. When you hear about an LRH lie about his bio, it becomes easy to reduce it to a fallacious he said she said thing – “I know theree’s some controversy about his military record, but that’s rally a distraction from the larrger issues.”
In fact, a dismaying number of effective COS critics are former members who still basically believe in “the tech” but take the position that current leadership has perverted it. It is easy (if fallacious) to idealize LRH and the early days of Dianetics as some pure era or sincere (pseudo) technology and point to the increasingly-organized harassment and black operations that emeerged as the grouup got more sophisticated in its shadiness.
Disconnection is both their biggest weapon and biggest liability. Threatening to cut you off from family and friends if you dissent is cult 101 (it happens in any closely-knit identity-ibased group – Syrian-rite (wrong term but . . .) Jews are notorious for shunning anyone who marries a “J-Dub” (non-Syrian Jew).
Most people who quit seem to quit over the disconnect/“suppressive person” policies. The second biggest threat/vulnerability COS has is their scummy use of confesions made in auditing to discredit any apostates. They do this every time. This also alternately keeps people from leaving or (when it gets too much) turns them against the org.
it’s funny, I once started two different serendipity like wiki searches on what I thought were two completely unrelated subjects:
-L. Ron Hubbard
-Japanese attacks on mainland US during WW2
At a moment those two searches reached the exact same point:
That was weird.
Yeah, that’s actual weapons grade stupidity from L. Ron. Military career of L. Ron Hubbard
Gosh, me to! I was talked into doing the test when I was 20 and a fairly mucked up student. I did wait for the results but even in those days could see how the recruiter was spewing crap. Maybe having actually read some of LRH’s SF books provided protection :dubious:
There’s now two of the “millions” of “scientologists” on this board
I think this explains it.
I was once approached on the street by CoS types offering a test to determine “How Good Is Your IQ?” Judging by the word choice I assumed that my IQ was probably “gooder” than theirs and swiftly moved on.
My entire knowledge of Scientology comes from the article in the New Yorker that Huerta already linked to. My theory is this.
Dr. Daniel T. Willingham, who teaches psychology at UVa, is a big proponent of what he calls “Bubbe psychology”. Bubbe is Yiddish for Grandma, so Bubbe psychology is simply the common sense stuff that your Grandma would tell you: get plenty of sleep every night, when you have a fight with someone talks things over and reconcile, get some exercise, and so forth.
The first “levels” of Scientology, as I understand it, are all about Bubbe psychology. That is to say, when a convert first enters the system of Scientology, he or she will spend quite a while learning only ordinary, everyday advice. All the things that make people laugh at Scientology, such as space aliens and history from other planets, psychic powers, and so forth, come much later, and are only taught to people who have been members for years. Many Scientologists are utterly unaware of these things.
So imagine that you’re a Hollywood celebrity. You party late into the night almost every night, you drink heavily, you use hard drugs, you sleep with ten different people per week, you don’t eat right, you don’t exercise, and so forth. Naturally you feel awful almost all of the time. Then one of your fellow celebrities encourages you to take a look at Scientology. You give it a try and the first lessons they give you involve not drinking or doing drugs, getting regular sleep, eating right, talking with friends and family members, and so on. You try this for a few days and suddenly you notice that you’re feeling better than you’ve felt in a long time. In those circumstances, you might start thinking that these Scientology folks are really onto something, and hence you’d be willing to participate more deeply and believe more of what they tell you.
Pls, LRH wrote crappy SciFi.
years ago, I was given a bunch of his books (paperback editions). As an avid Sci Fi reader, I tried reading them-they were awful!
I think thats why the guy got into the religion racket-he was such a bad writer!