Civitate Thetani

"Middle America, now it's a tragedy, now it's so sad to see

An upper-class city having this happening"

 

Eminem - The Way I Am

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"you get a handful of different people representing different religions who're changing their minds constantly so the room is always filling up with more and more people, each with the absolute truth; they all have a dart in their hand and they all throw it blindfolded at a board (hopefully) but wherever the dart lands that's the absolute truth and they gonna stick with that until the next guy comes in and throws his dart, and that's why religions seem to shard off in every possible direction - because they have no substance, whatsoever, to them"

 

Aron Ra - The Failures of Creationism, Little Rock Arkansas, 2012/10/27

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Been amusin' m'self with a few more episdoes of Scientology and the Aftermath recently (everyone loves a freakshow) and for the most part it's what I expected - which only prompts me to re-iterate my consternation at others' consternation at Scientologists' excesses. So let's get this out of the way first: they all do it. Power structures. Religions, corporations, armies, street gangs, there is no fundamental difference. They're tribes to which one swears allegiance in return for joining in communal aggression against outsiders. Search their ranks and you will always find a disproportionate weight of those whose impulses might offend society at large, and who join such organizations precisely to be shielded from investigation behind the organization's defensive apparatus, to indulge their sadistic impulses with impunity. It's not a bug. It's a feature. It's one of the unspoken perks hidden between the lines of every recruitment pamphlet. Give us your life and we will allow you to harm others in return, to the worst of our collective abilities. The ready proliferation of such cabals merely demonstrates that anywhere "da gummint" and the press' light does not pierce, you will invariably find a venomous, verminous nest of abhumanity.* It's not Scientology's putative uniqueness which warrants condemnation but its all too familiar essence and trappings.

 

While Rinder and Remini's interviewees are slightly more clean-cut than I'd expected from a bunch of brainwashed cultists (yeah, yeah, putting on a good face for the cameras) they're still painfully... average. Random schmoes incapable of evaluating their environment, lost in an uncaring universe, looking for an ideological "security blanket, a thumb to suck, a skirt to hold" as Asimov's quote goes. One exception stuck out halfway through the second season: Paul Haggis (guy who directed Crash, remember him?) who most concisely verbalized Scientology's inherent conflict. As a post-Enlightenment faith targeting white-collar, literate proselytes, it promises free thought while remaining no less dogmatically obtuse and occulted than any other irrational belief in an unproven master plan. How'd they pull it off? Bury questions in discipline, ritualism, officiousness, the illusion of quantifiability and preparedness, until the very concept of "free thought" is just another mindlessly repeated mantra. Invent new jargon for everything, even if it explains nothing. Makes ya sound authoritative-like.

 

But, lest we unjustly accuse that hack Hubbard of originality, even his "free your mind (by repeating our catchphrases)" schtick's been done to death. Pre and post-Christian Persian monotheism (or monolatrism, there's your word of the day) went heavy on revelations, complete with good/evil dichotomies, but gnosticism especially springs to mind, as Hubbard's "thetans" seem lifted wholesale from Mani's notion of divine light trapped in demonic darkness to yield our human, material existence, complete with the dianetic "bridge" as gnostic reawakening back to one's purportedly divine nature. Quantifying this transition in levels of thetan-ness is again merely an adaptation of general religious holier than thou informed superiority to an audience at least marginally aware of scientific rigor.

 

Setting aside Remini's constant insitence on Scientology's special kind of evil, viewing it as just another religion predicts an interesting development in the following decades. See, the original prophet croaked back in '86, and if Hubbard was just a ruthless fabulist and profiteer indifferent to the misery he caused so long as the donations kept pouring in, his successor became more and more actively sadistic by the decade. By driving away some of his followers, combined with many second and third-generation Scientologists** being more mentally capable to look beyond their abusive cult upbringing, this provided our current flood of entertaining stories from former insiders. But to my surprise, a few of the show's interviewees actually claim to be practicing Dianeticists despite having left the church. Should've seen it coming. The new religion's gradually rounding out its first century, the prophet's dead, and his successors are staking out their claims.

Scientology's seeing its first schism.

But while we can all wonder and shudder at what Mahayana Hubbardism will look like, another look back at fourth century Christianity suggests one likely outcome in the near future. From what I gather, while his predecessors or opponents (Origen, Pelagius, Donatus) were busy trying to prune away bad priests or stressed personal agency, the individual's aptitude and necessity for self-improvement, Augustine of Hippo (you remember, the "just war" guy?) consolidated power by stressing the importance of consolidation itself, of avoiding schisms (usually by eliminating dissenters) and reinforcing hierarchy. Salvation comes only down through the offices of the church. Doesn't matter if the priests are bad (or if the Sea Org's stuffed with sadistic pricks) because the lessons they teach will save your soul. Doesn't matter if you're not improving as a person, because divine grace via the church will save you. Never mind how. Trickle-down faithonomics. Don't sweat the details. Just obey. And that shit stuck. Just look at which name in this paragraph's a saint and which a heretic.

Call me crazy, but I fully expect that after a decade or three of schisming (they're sitting on literal billions upon billions of funding; they can weather Rinder and Remini's little tantrum) Scientology will acquire a unifying figure preaching... preaching. That self-improvement crap was good to lure in an educated core and establish the brand, but now the faith must expand and engulf. It needs obedience, not self-analysis, control not self-control. It needs divine grace, passed downward through the hierarchy, wine and crackers. The only question is who gets to be Scientology's Augustine, a reformed heretic claiming that The Church itself contains an ineffable grace by which the lower orders are cleansed.

Come on, Leah. Don't ya wanna be graceful?

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* Yes, sometimes such nests are even necessary to incubate valuable new thought to which the public is not yet amenable.

But don't hold your breath.

** This also explains the Sea Org's eventual outlawing of reproduction. When actively recruiting, the recruitment process itself winnows the available pool of converts down to the receptive. But a new generation lacks that guarantee of mindless receptivity, what with recessive traits, random mutations, embryology and adolescent rebellion. And they're positioned dreadfully close to those skeletons in your closet. The offspring of your most faithful can be your greatest liability. It's just another spin on monasticism: you want illiterate peasants producing more illiterate believers, not the scriveners with access to original scriptures.