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THE PSYCHOPATH - The Mask of Sanity

C

Cat's Squirrel

Gold Meritorious Patron
I feel I have to disagree here. I read "The Mask of Sanity" at university and also studied Hubbard's description of an SP, and I don't think they're the same thing. Cleckley's psychopaths seem to be more morally (and socially) stupid than the fear-driven low cunning that characterises SPs.

A better parallel IMO would be Scott Peck's "People of the Lie", which was written in about 1983 though I don't think Peck was aware of Hubbard's definitions and work in this field.
 
Dulloldfart

Dulloldfart

Squirrel Extraordinaire
Div6 said:
According to John Atack, Hubbard cribbed most the the SP data from The Mask of Sanity by Hervey Cleckley, M.D..

(According to Piece of Blue Sky: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/Library/Shelf/atack/bs4-1.htm)


That book is available for download as a pdf from here:

http://www.cassiopaea.com/cassiopaea/psychopath.htm
Click to expand...

Cleckley lists on p. 338/9 the characteristic points below, and in the subsequent pages amplifies the points, but less than a page each so it's not a whole lot of reading to do. I've numbered his points and compared them to Hubbard's. It's not a good match at all.

C1. Superficial charm and good "intelligence" [no match]
C2. Absence of delusions and other signs of irrational thinking [no match]
C3. Absence of "nervousness" or psychoneurotic manifestations [no match]
C4. Unreliability [no match]
C5. Untruthfulness and insincerity [no match]
C6. Lack of remorse or shame [=H8]
C7. Inadequately motivated antisocial behavior [no match]
C8. Poor judgment and failure to learn by experience [no match]
C9. Pathologic egocentricity and incapacity for love [no match]
C10. General poverty in major affective reactions [no match]
C11. Specific loss of insight [no match]
C12. Unresponsiveness in general interpersonal relations [no match]
C13. Fantastic and uninviting behavior with drink and sometimes without [no match]
C14. Suicide rarely carried out [no match]
C15. Sex life impersonal, trivial, and poorly integrated [no match]
C16. Failure to follow any life plan [=H7 somewhat]

Hubbard lists the characteristics of an SP as:

H1. Speaks in generalities [no match]
H2. Deals in bad news and invalidation, no good remarks [no match]
H3. Stops good news; relays/worsens or invents bad news [no match]
H4. Doesn't respond to treatment, reform or psychotherapy [no match]
H5. Surrounded by cowed, ill associates or friends [no match]
H6. Selects the wrong target [no match]
H7. Can't complete a cycle of action [=C16 somewhat]
H8. No remorse or shame [=C6]
H9. Supports only destructive groups; against constructive groups [no match]
H10. Supports only destructive actions; against constructive actions [repeat of H9! no match]
H11. Helping others drives him berserk; can only destroy in the name of help [repeat of H9! no match]
H12. Bad sense of property: no-one owns anything [no match]

So unless I'm missing something here, Hubbard didn't rip off those points mainly from Cleckley.

Paul
 
Div6

Div6

Crusader
Thanks for the analysis\data. I just started looking in to it, so this is helpful.
 
S

sallydannce

Gold Meritorious Patron
I am also de-constructing the antisocial traits Hubbard published in 1966.

Cleckley's sociopathic "traits" don't match identically with Hubbard's "list", but if you look outside of this I found that Cleckley was the man that popularised the terms "sociopath, antisocial". Cleckley's first book on the subject came out in 1941 and further editions came out, 1950, 1955, 1964 and later in 1976 & again 1988.

In 1957 a movie was made called something like "The three faces of Eve" which was based on Cleckley's work. This brought the subject into popular culture. Articles appeared in magazines, etc. It was not some "academic only" subject.

Hubbard, IMO, was definitely influenced by Cleckley's work. However he twisted it so much that at first glance one cannot recognise it and therefore assign plagiarism.

There seems to be other "ingredients" to Hubbard's "antisocial traits" work. It may come down to simply his imagination being thrown into the mix.

I am still working on this. Science of Survival is my next stop.

This is an interesting subject as the PTS/SP tech is the key to so many other controlling practises that Hubbard instigated. It became a platform.

Looking forward to sharing ideas on this.
 
Voltaire's Child

Voltaire's Child

Fool on the Hill
It seems to me that if someone had a large percentage of the antisocial traits Hubbard outlines, that this would be someone not so good to be around.

I do think he was too quick to "see" SPs, though.

I also want to say that I object to not reporting PTSness being a "crime" - which, in the ethics book, it is. This ology is supposed to empower people, yet they are babysat every step of the way in a manner reminiscent of Soviet era Russia.
 
S

sallydannce

Gold Meritorious Patron
Hubbard's antisocial traits and surrounding data seems to me to miss some vital information. I got more useful and workable knowledge from reading Robert Hare (he expands Cleckley's theories). I say this because I have now addressed a real sociopath in my life using Hare's work. I spent years in scientology getting nowhere with Hubbard's "tech" on this. All I got was more & more introverted. I know a real sociopath who fits only a few of Hubbard's antisocial traits but fits 98% of Hare's sociopathic traits. Go figure.

Hubbard took a dash of this and a dash of that to create a totalitarian system. The antisocial traits he delivered in 1966 were all about protecting scientology from his paranoid perception of the "enemy". They were a reaction to the governmental interventions that were growing worldwide at that time.

Personally I found the PTS/SP "tech" one of the heaviest methods used on me to "pin" me to the group think. It blinded me to what a true sociopath is like (which would have included Hubbard). To me it is like he constructed this labyrinth to hide himself in and put the attention on anyone who disagreed with him/scientology.

Hubbard's antisocial traits, etc, are designed to get a person to see the world in an "us & them" manner, which was Hubbard's plan. They rope off a person's ability to see past that. To live a real life, a full life, one must be able to see in a very broad way.
 
C

Cat's Squirrel

Gold Meritorious Patron
Yeah, so do I although (maybe by happy coincidence) I did get a big win on the cycle I did in the Church too based on this data.
 
Div6

Div6

Crusader
sallydannce said:
Hubbard's antisocial traits and surrounding data seems to me to miss some vital information. I got more useful and workable knowledge from reading Robert Hare (he expands Cleckley's theories). I say this because I have now addressed a real sociopath in my life using Hare's work. I spent years in scientology getting nowhere with Hubbard's "tech" on this. All I got was more & more introverted. I know a real sociopath who fits only a few of Hubbard's antisocial traits but fits 98% of Hare's sociopathic traits. Go figure.

Hubbard took a dash of this and a dash of that to create a totalitarian system. The antisocial traits he delivered in 1966 were all about protecting scientology from his paranoid perception of the "enemy". They were a reaction to the governmental interventions that were growing worldwide at that time.

Personally I found the PTS/SP "tech" one of the heaviest methods used on me to "pin" me to the group think. It blinded me to what a true sociopath is like (which would have included Hubbard). To me it is like he constructed this labyrinth to hide himself in and put the attention on anyone who disagreed with him/scientology.

Hubbard's antisocial traits, etc, are designed to get a person to see the world in an "us & them" manner, which was Hubbard's plan. They rope off a person's ability to see past that. To live a real life, a full life, one must be able to see in a very broad way.
Click to expand...


I would like to hear that story at some point (in bold).

One glaring thing is that Hubbard immediately positoned "AntiSocial" with "AntiScientologist". That is the mis-director in this that essentially indicated that if you were against Scn then YOU MUST be anti-social. Nice little mine field there.

But this whole area grew out of the anatomy of a problem, (postulate - counter-postulate) and the fact that a person with a PTP will get no gain.

For example, a guy just maxed out his cards to "get in session". He has a PTP of how is he going to pay it back? Does he get gain? No. Then he must "have overts", or be "PTS". But what the CoS will NEVER acknowledge is that THEY were the ones with the counter-postulate! They created the condition.

And to compound the felony, there is a tape (I believe it is "Talk on a Basic Qual, or Briefing to Review Auditors) where he talks about this, and how Qual is supposed to clean it up in review.

Anyway, it is insane, and is a primary cause of the CoS'es current NCG.


Oh. and I should say I did do a FULL PTS rndn and Suppressed Person Rundown to it's EP of the antagonistic person "making peace". THAT was a major win for me. So I do think it has some value properly applied.
 
C

Cat's Squirrel

Gold Meritorious Patron
Yeah, when I was in the Church I was told of someone up country (in Britain) who committed some sort of financial crime to pay for Scientology services. It was only after I left that it occurred to me that the CofS had contributed to that through their outrageous prices.
 
M

Moonchild

Patron with Honors
On the "psychopath" issue: A few months ago I had an interesting conversation about all this stuff with an old pal of mine from my "long-haired hippy" days who is now a child-psychologist....a damned Freudian if you please...:whistling:

In his world it seems that a commonality that exists among many/most/all such cases is that the person has voided himself of his own conscience, i.e., his sense of right and wrong, moral conditioning etc., and simply conducts himself to his own advantage irrespective of damaging consequences to others.

The point being that other behavioural phenomena are adjuncts and extrapolations of this basic condition.
 
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Smitty

Smitty

Silver Meritorious Patron
comment to sallydance

sallydannce said:
Hubbard's antisocial traits and surrounding data seems to me to miss some vital information. I got more useful and workable knowledge from reading Robert Hare (he expands Cleckley's theories). I say this because I have now addressed a real sociopath in my life using Hare's work. I spent years in scientology getting nowhere with Hubbard's "tech" on this. All I got was more & more introverted. I know a real sociopath who fits only a few of Hubbard's antisocial traits but fits 98% of Hare's sociopathic traits. Go figure.

Hubbard took a dash of this and a dash of that to create a totalitarian system. The antisocial traits he delivered in 1966 were all about protecting scientology from his paranoid perception of the "enemy". They were a reaction to the governmental interventions that were growing worldwide at that time.

Personally I found the PTS/SP "tech" one of the heaviest methods used on me to "pin" me to the group think. It blinded me to what a true sociopath is like (which would have included Hubbard). To me it is like he constructed this labyrinth to hide himself in and put the attention on anyone who disagreed with him/scientology.

Hubbard's antisocial traits, etc, are designed to get a person to see the world in an "us & them" manner, which was Hubbard's plan. They rope off a person's ability to see past that. To live a real life, a full life, one must be able to see in a very broad way.
Click to expand...

Spot on observations sallydance. A very good book to read it Robert D. Hare's "Without Conscience". Also check out the Hare Psychopathy Index. I have never met anybody with a majority of Hubbard's SP characteristics most of the time. But I have met a few very troublesome people with a majority of the 20 characteristics Hare describes, and strongly so. Actually a couple of them were highly placed corporate scientology executives. I wonder what that means?
Smitty
 
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