LRH’s dramatic and horrific errors

If you have already met or attended scientologists, the following text will interest you (a presentation in the manner of Gilles Bouleau (TF1’s TV news!).

Lafayette Ron Hubbard, from here called LRH for short, or even Ron to be more familiar, whose main mistakes were to be born at the wrong time (1911) and in the wrong place (the USA) the worst caricature version of the Western civilization.

In fact, it was the best place so that there was REALLY SOMETHING TO CLEAN, and the best time for it looked REALLY URGENT…

The legacy of Aristotle…

Nevertheless, Ron never particularly mentioned it, but he did not escape his Aristotelian environment.

To recall, Aristotle is that Greek who lived around -350, and wrote a “Treaty of the first causes” in 14 volumes, renamed “Metaphysics” by Andronicus, the librarian of Rhodes.

How smart this Andronicus! On the one hand he avoided anyone noticing that the original title was incomplete (it should have been “Treaty of the first causes tied…” to justify the plural, because if the “first” causes are different, only one can be “first”, which shows that the Greek genius could not even count up to ONE, since he already counts several! That’s the advantage of changing the name! Its drawback is to make believe that a guy who cannot count until 1, could have written a treatise on metaphysics: an illusion that ran for more than 600 generations!

There are other reasons we know that Aristotle was not a metaphysician, in particular as regards the present text, the “inversion” of the word “nous”!

Up to him, for the Greek like Plato, this word meant the “universal intellect”, “intellect” that is to say the ability to “read thoroughly, in depth” and therefore go beyond the mere superficial appearance, and “universal” because this capability is available for everyone, and of divine nature. The Hindus called, and still call it, Buddhi, for the Hebrews it was the light of the Fiat lux of the Genesis, and three centuries later the Christians called it the Holy Spirit, “the one that will teach everything we need to know…”

Now this “universal intellect” was too metaphysical for Aristotle to understand much of it, and he decided it was a purely human faculty that would allow us to understand things individually.

The councils also get in!

This loss of the source of knowledge was to be contagious, much later, to Christianity. In his letter to the Thessalonians, St. Paul still talks about the three components of the human being (body, soul and spirit) in accordance with a universal global design, but the Fourth Council of Constantinople (869, so before the Catholic/Orthodox schism), decided the human constitution has become dichotomous! And what component has disappeared? The spirit, of course: we remain with a body and a soul, which will fit well for Descartes ten centuries later! And since the 9^th century, if you talk of a spirit you are anathema! So this council, following Aristotle, also has “lost his spirit”, a bad sign for a religion…

And the nous which had become individual with Aristotle could now be either the soul or the spirit, as it is not because one can no longer speak of something that it no longer exists. We just made a mix, a confusion, between the psychic and spiritual, confusion carved in stone for the English language since the word “mind” means either both aspects…

# The English and the beast!

For adjectives, yet, English has mental and spiritual, but let’s remain a bit with our English since it is the linguistic environment of our Ron.

The people of the Angles appeared in Central Europe in the first century, as a devil out of a box! But at that time Latin was spoken in the west, and to the Roman the words angles (anguli) and angels (Angelus) were the same, so the new tribe was made of angels descended to earth … or lower! After their fall (their downfall?), they swept to their island, Eng-land, busting in the way what they could of Scandinavian and Celtic traditions! Later they did welcome the protestant heresy and invaded the planet to colonize and replace local traditions by a philosophy even more Aristotelian than the Catholic “doctrine”.

Some even concluded that English was the language of the Beast of the Apocalypse. But it has nothing implausible since the intrigues of backward masking do seem to run only in American slang! How did the Beatles know that listening to the phrase “number nine” in reverse (on their double White album), we would hear “turn me on, dead man”? (the corpse in question is assumed to be that of Christ, according to specialists of Rock)! Even if we had computer means to know how a sentence sounds backwards, it should be provided with all possible phrases (like the “infinite” Library of Babel dreamed by Borges) and identify suitable reversals. It is much easier to seek the inspiration of those the Angles in the know…

Dianetics: crossing the nous!

No, we have not forgotten our Ron. Interested since his youth by how people could behave aberrantly, Ron quickly realized that the work of psychologists and psychoanalysts would not resolve it through their dreamlike delusions, and he sought another path, more experimental and more logical, for which he also wanted to find a name. Believing what was said of the nous, without knowing its origin was different, he called his technique Dia-netics = through the nous, through the thought….

However unlike its predecessors he has not fallen into the trap of multiple unconscious. He had noticed that aberrant behaviors were repetitive and sought for triggers. Before Freud, the vandal was called the “subconscious” by Wundt, which did not pose much problem with Ron, since the fact of not being totally aware could easily explain walking out of one’s mind! When Freud renamed this troublemaker by “unconscious” Ron did not really follow. Even less when Jung arrived at his “collective unconscious” filled with archetypes!

Question: What is this “unconscious” thing? The guy who has it or that thing itself? If the unconscious is collective, it is not the possession of a particular individual, and if it is a common and universal tank, will be able to be aware of what’s in there?

If not being conscious a property of this fiction, Ron did not see how it could be the source of aberrations, because, not being aware of anything, it had no reason to trigger anything either according to the environment of the individual.

In fact, thinking of emerging computers, Ron had distinguished two parts in his nous! One that worked well and one messing up. The messing one behaved like a calculator where we had forgotten some data in its memory, tricks which meant that the results were false:

Meanwhile Ron had arrived at a definition of intelligence as “the ability to evaluate the relative differences”? And stupidity was thus to make amalgams. As we can see, for an English post Aristotelian his definition was not far from the etymology we recalled at the beginning. In fact it is even quite directly the definition of discernment. Yet he has not called his two shades of nous “a smart nous” and “a confused nous.” He preferred to speak of an “analytical mind” and  “reactive mind” because for his therapeutic objective, it was more important that nous be catastrophic as someone that triggers absurd mechanisms after an event, than the resulting fact of mixing all. And regarding health, being sick is an aberration that can be treated as he will show healing his “followers”!

And he also managed to understand that it is not the external triggers that are the source of aberration, it is the fact that in the face of an unforeseen event (typically a threat for its body) the analytical nous decides not to be able to handle the threat and “records” it in the other nous, since this one knows how to play its automation, a capability that Ron will never find the real reason of.

He also noticed that since the reactive nous functions without knowing why, (it is the analytic nous that is conscious!), it would react to everything that is consistent with  the threat’s environment, i.e. not only to the bus that arrives at him, but the fact that a blonde is afraid for him, or a cockatoo is singing God Save the Queen behind him… And in all cases, whether the vision of a blonde or the singing of a volatile, he steps back, even without seeing the terrorist behind him whose foot he will crush!

Except that, even if this new threat does not result in an injury, it will automatically add it to the previous record, so we’ll have chains of useless and dangerous recordings.

The Dianetics therapy will therefore be to back those chains up to the original decision of the analytic nous to resign his consciousness, and once this initial decision discovered, the miracle occurs: this awareness, although belated, erases all records that accumulated and have become useless, since the analytic nous finally agreed to become aware of what it is responsible for, namely the survival of its body… So it will also know how to manage in the future.

This Dianetics debut was tracing back to the mental fetters of missed abortion attempts that had left traces in victims. What seems to have helped the spread of Dianetics by word-of-mouth for Americans. Because it was easy to contact the parents to verify the stories told by their former fetus!

But the most stunning is coming.

Stay connected, we’re not done with the “errors” of Ron…