Ignorance Enthusiasts

[mockingbird]

A year or so after I got out of Scientology I ran into an interesting behavior that I have seen more than a couple times from ex Scientologists. I was perhaps naively approaching the issue of reluctance in others.


I thought that if someone put forth a question the simple thing to do was tell them what subjects and sources address their questions. Lots of subjects outside Scientology exist and are far more developed than Hubbard ever portrayed them as in Scientology.


Hubbard's doctrine is packed with statements degrading psychology, psychiatry, logic, neuroscience, medical science, physics, chemistry and mathematics and other subjects. He portrays them as primitive and backwards and loaded with false ideas and harmful lies.


So, when I ran into ex Scientologists that frequently asked questions about themes addressed by subjects I discovered outside Scientology I foolishly answered several questions.


One occurrence is a strong example of several things and I will recount it as best I can recall and change the name of the person involved to protect her privacy. If she sees this she will probably know it's about her.


I ran into a second generation Scientologist who spent significant time, perhaps hours, many days on Facebook wondering about issues regarding her mother and what being in Scientology did to her mother and how it affected their relationship and how the treatment she received from Scientology organizations affected her. I will call the questioning daughter Sara and her mother Marg. Sara rejected Scientology and Marg had some admiration for Hubbard and belief in the methods or experiences she found in Scientology.


Sara spent time almost every day wondering about the nature of Scientology, how being in affected her and her mother and similar questions. She was quite adamant that she had unresolved issues regarding Scientology.


I saw this for several weeks and simply told Sara she could read a few books. I think I recommended True Believer by Eric Hoffer, Cults In Our Midst by Margaret Singer, Freedom Of Mind by Steve Hassan, Take Back Your Life by Janja Lalich, A Theory Of Cognitive Dissonance by Leon Festinger, Age Of Propaganda and perhaps a couple more.


I think I described the subjects each book addresses and what answers they may provide.


Okay, she blew up at me and said, "No one has time for all that", now bear in mind that Sara is a grown woman who has found the time to spend hours online going over her personal life again and again and in Scientology likely spent dozens or hundreds of hours in Scientology indoctrination and auditing.


It struck me as strange that someone would be upset or even perhaps tortured over questions about the years they spent in Scientology and completely unwilling to even try reading books at all to understand the possible answers to what happened to them.


I have since learned some ex Scientologists after hundreds of hours spent in Scientology indoctrination never want to pick up a book again or the ideas that Hubbard repeatedly expressed about other subjects being overly complex, confusing and ultimately useless may have stuck with some ex Scientologists more than they realize.


And people in general don't know how much subjects like psychology and neuroscience have progressed over the last few decades and that subjects like propaganda analysis, rhetoric and logical fallacies even exist, let alone their level of development.


In reading books on these subjects I discovered hundreds of ideas with strong scientific evidence that are contrary to folk psychology, assumptions about the mind many of us hold and pass along.


So, if someone has those assumptions it is easy to see why they won't read any books on the mind because they feel they already understand it.


I have also run into people that feel reading books on things like the mind, hypnosis, logic. cults, rhetoric and so on is looking into rabbit holes and missing out on life. Hmm. So, all the writers like Stephen King that read many books and write are acceptable as are academics who often read hundreds of books and keep studying in their fields for years , but somehow someone trying to understand Scientology is not right.


Odd, judgment. I think it's odd that ultimately some people are not just choosing to not read anything to learn but go on and on claiming to wonder about issues with plenty of books available on them but see anyone pursuing knowledge as somehow doing something wrong.


Ultimately Sara chose to shower me with insults and I was not insulting her at all. She peppered comments with insults and stretched her remarks to the point of saying untrue things about me.


When I was talking to someone else she chimed in to call me a worshipper of academia. Interesting insult.


It reminded me how comedian Chris Rock has remarked on asking some folks if they read and getting the response "no, I keep it real" proudly. Chris Rock responded "yeah, real dumb" in disgust.


He saw the liability in celebrating a lack of learning and abandonment of reading. He realized glorifying a life without education is inviting not just ignorance but disaster. If you don't read you are just as limited as if you can't read and people that can't read are extremely limited in life. And regarding recovery from Scientology or learning hundreds of subjects you are practically crippled.


I don't think everyone else has to pursue reading to the degree I have or even close. But I would be lying if I said that most people wouldn't benefit from reading some books to understand the world and themselves better. We all have different degrees of literacy and intelligence and will get varying degrees of benefits from different books but you certainly get zero benefit from the books you never read.


I just want you to understand that the ignorance enthusiasts in encouraging people to not even try to understand things ensures they won't to the degree they listen. Don't listen to them. If you know you have a genuine interest or even mild interest in a subject or a need a subject could potentially help I encourage you to find out the terms or concepts or even the name of the subject or subjects that could be right for you and pursue them. It may change your life, it's certainly changed mine.

 

[DagwoodGum]

WHY I'M CHOOSY ABOUT WHAT BOOKS I BOTHER TO TAKE THE TIME TO BURY MYSELF INTO
Many books are written by very ordinary people because that's what they do for a living - write books. They're under pressure from their publishers to produce saleable books because that's what drives their industry.
Some pretty good pretenders of vast knowledge are out there, writers such as Hubbard. Some people are skeptical about how much viable knowledge can be squeezed out of such commercialized pablum.
Hubbard complained that writing for a penny a word is no way to get rich, to do that one needed to hatch out a religion.
So what does one do, not read their books?
I'd say that in the aftermath of my Scientology experience I've become real choosy about what I funnel into my mind because anyone can pretend and make quite a living out of their frivolous pretenses of higher knowledge.
What I find is that truth can be found in peoples entirely voluntary (un-paid) jottings on the internet and one can search according to defined subject criteria without falling prey to works of vast nothingness, though plenty of rhetoric and illusions of knowledge. But I have found much disillusionment in so many commercial abominations that lend me to seek out the crib notes version at times where someone who has far greater patience than I waded through the vast fields of chaff looking in earnest for grains of wisdom and distilled it down to pass it along to me in a fraction of the time that it took that far more patient man to ferret it out when too often there was nothing worth passing on from such commercialized pablum & tedious pretenses of "higher knowledge".
On YouTube I often find distillations of otherwise long-winded exercises in sentence building through which I can determine how much time I'm willing to spend reading a book that I would otherwise have little familiarity with for the sake of determining whether I'll be rewarded or once again, greatly disappointed.
Though I do tend to be jaded now as to how much of my time I'm willing to give up in diving into such sizeable works that seem to have 100 times the volume that it should take to adequately pass along that particular subject to me in uncluttered clarity. They need to fill pages in order to have a work large enough to justify printing it as a book you know. They are under the gun from their publisher but that doesn't obligate anyone to toil in their sea of rhetoric searching for substance.
Dianetics being a perfect example of that and what I now avoid like the plague.
I'm just very choosy now and often push forward on reading a book mainly when a like minded friend recommends it to me. Otherwise the internet gives me access to the worlds collective library of thought and perspective that enriches my life in ways my ancestors never even dreamed.
Books can be the source of second hand ignorance through contagion of aberration if one chooses the wrong books. Cults are full of avid readers of sheer & utter bullshit so I would say that just reading books is not automatically the answer.

 

[Lynn Fountain Campbell]

Oh, yes! Willful ignorance drives me bananas, when all you have to do is google it and find tens of thousands of links to more information. But yes, it does take some well-developed BS detectors to separate the wheat from the chaff and also not to glom onto ideas that reinforce what you already believe.

But I think that if you're really looking for truth, you'll get there eventually.

 

[DagwoodGum]

But I think that if you're really looking for truth, you'll get there eventually.

That's what I like to see, an ex Scientologist who still believes that truth remains knowable and if one persists one may will get there eventually!
I believe that the worst thing that Scientology did to so many people is that it collided with them head on, on their road to truth, knocking them senseless with no further interest in its pursuit. And that is a true tragedy my friend.

 

[I told you I was trouble]

I believe 'the truth' differs for each person, which may be why anyone who arrives here to 'lecture' or 'help us' sometimes finds it difficult to fit into ESMB ... and especially so if they don't ever join in with the general chat and laughter and appear to automatically reject other viewpoints or any discussion at all, unless it happens to suit his current thought pattern @mockingbird.

Many of us are quite happy to just accept that we were conned and walk away and perhaps choose to spend our precious time doing things that are almost certainly better for us than dwelling deeply on the cult, 'the truth' and why we got sucked in in the first place ... according to someone who wrote a book, but was never involved in scientology.

Having said that, I love spending time (here) laughing and chatting with people that I know understand how the cult operates because there are not many people walking this earth that understand it as we all do.

I don't need to write a tome on my each and every thought, try and ram it down the throats of others and then grizzle and complain because they object or ignore me.

 

[DagwoodGum]

I believe 'the truth' differs for each person, which may be why anyone who arrives here to 'lecture' or 'help us' sometimes finds it difficult to fit into ESMB ... and especially so if they don't ever join in with the general chat and laughter and appear to automatically reject other viewpoints or any discussion at all, unless it happens to suit his current thought pattern @mockingbird.

Many of us are quite happy to just accept that we were conned and walk away and perhaps choose to spend our precious time doing things that are almost certainly better for us than dwelling deeply on the cult, 'the truth' and why we got sucked in in the first place ... according to someone who wrote a book, but was never involved in scientology.

Having said that, I love spending time (here) laughing and chatting with people that I know understand how the cult operates because there are not many people walking this earth that understand it as we all do.

I don't need to write a tome on my each and every thought, try and ram it down the throats of others and then grizzle and complain because they object or ignore me.

I agree with what you've said here and the only thing I'd add is that I've come here in large part to learn from what other ex's know and experienced that I do not or did not. And I'm not interested in 3rd person accounts of what someone has read in an avalanche of books because I'm not of the point of view that just because someone can write page after page, chapter after chapter that they necessarily know anything and I'm cautious because it's so easy to be misled by slick wordsmiths such as LRH. And someone else's second hand account of what they read that was supposedly written somewhere can be all out of context and misleading. I welcome those who recommend sources for me to follow up on but I have to read it myself in order to be certain of how the author meant what they had written. But at my age. turned 63 during the Ides of this past March, I've had so much experience that I'm still processing that I can't be bothered with a lot of 3rd person narrative.