cult

Cruising for Scientologie

January 29th, 2009 |

One of my close family members is an alcoholic, or to quote a popular tshirt, she’s a drunk (because alcoholics go to meetings). She wasn’t always a drunk but she has always been a borderline sociopath with very little empathy for others and this has exhibited itself quite strongly over the last decade while she has covered up her tracks. Apart from isolating her youngest child from his paternal grandparents and spreading rumours about her other children to discredit their stories of her drinking she managed to polarise many of her family members in a big dispute that she orchestrated. She relied on the fact that she could stage manage her family by keeping them from trusting each other and feeding them carefully crafted versions of her ‘truth’ that in most cases directly contradicted each other. She promoted various unsavoury rumours about family members, going so far as to accuse a grandparent of being a paedophile, in order to keep disparate members of the family from talking to each other and told several family members that I was a drug addict when I mentioned to a family member that her drinking was getting out of hand.

Eventually the matter came to the attention of Children’s Services and during the proceedings with them she maintained many separate personalities and was charming and helpful to those she believed to be of influence and rude and abusive to everyone else. She relied on the fact that the different staff members were rarely present at the same time in order to give her ‘truth’ to anyone who would listen. Children’s Services, with a care order in hand, ensured that she was supervised at all times when with her youngest child so that she would not be able to manipulate him with her version of the events. Eventually her finely constructed web of lies fall by the wayside when the courts were able to pick through all the reports prepared by various different social workers, family members and friends to come up with an integrated and overall view. Her lies did not stand up to scrutiny and one of her older children was granted guardianship of her youngest child. Since all contact with family is now done in an open and recorded setting she has no opportunity to manipulate the truth and so family members who were once loyal to her have seen the real truth behind her lies.

This story sprung right into the forefront of my mind when I read about the practices or Scientology, a popular and growing cult which has gained a lot of fame for the many Hollywood A-listers who make up the ‘faithful’. Scientology is shrouded in secrecy and uses a phalanx of lawyers to protect it from any form of criticism. They use intellectual property rights to protect the inner workings of their bizarre auditing machines (a device which appears to measure electrical resistance through the body) and have direct access to the ebay systems in order to remove listings for second hand auditing machines. Scientology has even been accused of using search engine optimisation to ensure that search engine results about Scientology are positive and that negative search results are buried.

L Ron Hubbard, the father of “dianetics”, was a science fiction writer who later repackaged his ideas about dianetics using the concept of ‘Scientologie’ which he borrowed from Dr. A. Nordenholz. Dr Nordenholz was a german who published a book in 1934 which concerned itself with the science of understanding and consciousness. While the original dianetics piece was not particularly successful (self published and with little circulation, a true vanity piece) the later, probably borrowed, ideas of Scientology have been more successful and amassed LRH a considerable personal wealth prior to his death.

The Scientology corporation continues now after his death and for a few thousand dollars you can buy into their stories of aliens and mystical science machines. For a few more bucks you can train up to be an auditor and then charge your fellow Scientologists for the pleasure of being audited (hmmm, a cynic might say ‘pyramid’ right about now). Those who are critical of Scientology continue to endure negative propaganda and those who attack it are branded as whackos, conspiracy theorists and bigots.

Of course now that I have published something slightly critical of Scientology I shall no doubt be branded a whacko, conspiracy theorist or bigot. One of those accusations would be true.