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Article: The Dangerous Environment

Many people are not only convinced that the environment is dangerous, but that it is steadily growing more so. For many, it’s more of a challenge than they feel up to.1

The fact of the matter is, however, that the environment is made to appear much more dangerous than it actually is.

A great number of people are professional dangerous environment makers. This includes professions which require a dangerous environment for their existence such as the politician, the policeman, the newspaperman, the undertaker and others. These people sell a dangerous environment. That is their mainstay. They feel that if they did not sell people on the idea the environment is dangerous, they would promptly go broke. So it is in their interest to make the environment far more dangerous than it is.

The environment is dangerous enough.

At one time an idea was put forth that certain societies did not advance because the environment lacked sufficient challenge. One of those advancing the idea was English historian and philosopher Arnold Toynbee (1889–1975) who felt that areas such as Mexico did not progress for that reason. Toynbee’s idea on this, however, was born in an ivory tower environment, sitting in libraries reading books, but never going out and talking to any Mexicans.

So Toynbee pronounced with great conclusive exclamation points followed by innumerable university degrees, “The reason the Mexican does not succeed is he has insufficient challenge in his environment. The reason South America isn’t an up-and-coming industrial power is insufficient challenge in the environment. The reason the African has not progressed further in civilization is because his environment has insufficient challenge.”

What did Toynbee know of it? He spent all his time in the back end of a library, reading books written by men who had spent all of their days in libraries! That is no way to learn about life.

In the Philippines, for an added example, a bold, energetic white man arrives and he advises the native Igorots – a tribe which inhabits the northern mountainous region of the Philippines. He says, “If you will just cut a pathway from the village down to the river, then take a bullock cart down to the river in the morning and fill up a water tank and bring it back to the village, your women won’t have to be making that long walk to the river. You should engage upon this public works project at once.”

He becomes absolutely outraged that they don’t immediately act on his suggestion and he goes away, thinking, “Aha! Those people have insufficient challenge in the environment. Nothing for them to measure up to. No ambition. Not like us in the West – we have challenge in our environment.”

This man had challenge in his environment? Mama spooned Wheaties into his mouth, Papa wrote all the checks as he went through college and his way was paved in all directions with machinery and vehicles. His environment was already licked, so of course he could afford to be bold.

But what really is the environment of the Igorot as he sits by the fire, listening to the white man tell him how he has to cut a path to the river? This Igorot has a little boy, whom he loves very much, but he knows this little boy has only a slim chance of living until he is seven due to disease and bad food. He knows that when the rains come, they won’t just be pleasant light rains; they will flood every seed out of the ground and pound the fields to pieces but if he can salvage anything out of that, maybe he will live a few more months. He knows all he has to do is walk under the wrong tree and get hit by a poisonous snake, and that will be the end of him. In other words, he already knows he cannot live, so why try?

In other words, the challenge of the environment is absolutely overwhelming for many people.

But does this mean there is no challenge in the environment in the more “civilized” parts of the world? By no means. Consider the situation of a young artist from Terre Haute, Indiana, who moved to New York City. The casual observer might say that he moved because there was no challenge in his environment in Terre Haute. No, here again, the challenge was too much.

This fellow decided to become a painter in the first place because he couldn’t face working in the feed store with the same fellow who beat him up during kindergarten, beat him up during grammar school and beat him up in high school. The thought of having to work with this fellow every day was just too much challenge for him. So he became an artist, but nobody in Terre Haute bought paintings and nobody believed in what he was doing. He had no future there; he was facing continual starvation, he was unable to contribute to his community. That was a very hostile environment. So he moved to a friendlier one, Greenwich Village. He would rather starve to death quietly in Greenwich Village than be threatened to death in Terre Haute, Indiana.

We come to the conclusion, then, that any individual—whether white, black, red or yellow—if he has not been able to achieve his own destiny, must be in an environment that he finds overwhelming, and his methods of taking care of that environment must be inadequate to his survival. His existence is as apathetic or as unhappy as his environment seems to him to be overwhelming.

Why then would people go out of their way to actually make the environment appear more dangerous than it already is?

Notes

  1. The Dangerous Environment  (n.d.). scientologyhandbook.org. Retrieved 18 May 2010 from http://www.scientologyhandbook.org/SH12_1.HTM ↩

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Article: Merchants of Chaos

sp-mask-rThere are those who could be called “merchants of chaos.”1 These are people who want an environment to look very, very disturbing. These are people who gain some sort of advantage, they feel, if the environment is made to look more threatening.

An obvious example can be seen in newspapers. There are no good news stories. Newspapermen shove the environment in people’s faces and say, “Look! It’s dangerous. Look! It’s overwhelming. Look! It’s threatening.” They not only report the most threatening bits of news, but also sensationalize it, making it worse than it is. What more do you want as a proof of their intention? This is the merchant of chaos. He is paid to the degree that he can make the environment threatening. To yearn for good news is foolhardy in a society where the merchants of chaos reign.

The chaos merchant has lots of troops among people with vested interests.

And do not think it an accident that the current justice system will take a dangerous criminal, throw him into prison, make him more antisocial and more dangerous and then release him upon the society. The more crime, the more police are needed.

Ideas of this kind are found in the society to a marked degree. It isn’t just the newspaper reporter or the politician; individuals here and there also engage upon this.

A lot of people spend their whole lives as professional chaos merchants; they worry those around them to death. The percentage who do this may be as high as one out of four. For example, a housewife, operating as a merchant of chaos in her sphere of influence, thinks of her husband, “If I can just keep Henry worried enough, he will do what I tell him.” She operates on the idea that it is necessary to spread confusion and upset. But along with this goes a concern, “I wonder why Henry doesn’t get ahead?” Naturally, she is making him sick.

The truth of the matter, however, is this: the environment is not as dangerous, ever, as it is made to appear. Instead, tremendous numbers of people and vast amounts of money are manufacturing a dangerous environment. In fact, in the 1960s a huge proportion of the national budget of the United States was dedicated to atomic war. But if they hadn’t developed the threat, there would not have been one. The money that financed the horror was busy supporting the horror.

It is not to the advantage of those who get their income, appropriations or public interest from the amount of disturbance to make a peaceful environment.

A Calming Influence

Anything that tends to pacify or bring a calmed environment is resisted by the vested interest that backs a disturbed environment.

To the degree Scientology progresses in an area, the environment becomes calmer and calmer. Not less adventurous, but calmer. In other words, the potential hostile, unreachable, untouchable threat in the environment reduces. Somebody who knows more about himself, others and life, and who gets a better grip on situations, has less trouble in his environment. Even though it may only be reduced slightly, it is reduced.

[Image captions: Person walking

Newspapers can have a depressing effect on a person.

Person reading newspaper

Since they deal largely in bad news, they present a generally bleak picture of the world.

Person walking away depressed]

One can carry the bad news around with him and get a negatively distorted idea of his surroundings, which may, in reality, actually be quite calm.

Even somebody who has heard very little of Scientology has less turmoil in his environment. An individual, less threatened by the environment, tends to resurge. He gets less apathetic. He thinks he can do more about life. He can reach outward a little further; therefore he can exert a calming influence upon his immediate environment.

As that progressed forward, more and more individuals would be produced who could bring more and more calm to the environment or handle things better and better. It is only the things which aren’t handled which are chaotic. It would result in a situation where the threat of the environment would die out. This overwhelming, overpowering environment would be tamer and tamer. People would be less and less afraid. You would have more and more opportunity of handling the actual problems that exist instead of people dreaming up problems in order to make some money off of it. It would be a different society.

The merchant of chaos does not like calming influences, however. He will fight anything which lessens disturbance in the environment.

For example, a wife has her husband completely under her thumb. She keeps him worried and upset morning, noon and night.

If the husband now engages in some activity which brings more calmness to the environment, there will be repercussions from the wife. If he is less disturbed, he is less under her control. She would naturally fight the thing that was making her husband more calm.

Yet disturbance and chaos fold up in the face of truth. It is lies which keep the universe continuously disturbed. The introduction of truth into a society would produce a calmer environment with less disturbance and therefore less that could be swindled out of that society by merchants of chaos.

Notes

  1. Merchants of Chaos (n.d.). scientologyhandbook.org. Retrieved 18 May 2010 from http://www.scientologyhandbook.org/SH12_2.HTM ↩

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Scientology’s FAQ: Why has the German government tried to portray Scientology as controversial?

Q Why has the German government tried to portray Scientology as controversial?1

A Germany and, indeed, much of Central Europe, has a long and bitter history of religious intolerance and persecution, a trend which has continued into the present. Many religious and ethnic minorities have become the targets of escalating incidents of violence, xenophobia and religious discrimination.

Unfortunately, many government officials in Germany continue to fuel the intolerance. The Kohl government left a dismal legacy as far as human and civil rights are concerned. Muslims, Charismatic Christians, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Hindus, Scientologists and in some cases even Jews are among those who have been denied fundamental rights because of their race or religion. In recent years, the German government has been strongly criticized in more than 25 reports from international human rights bodies including the United Nations Human Rights Committee, the Helsinki Commission, the United States State Department, and a British Ad-Hoc Human Rights Committee composed of Lords and scholars.

In 1997, a study by the Human Rights Centre of the University of Essex, England, found that, “In Germany, democracy is used as an ideology to impose conformity. It has been dismaying to discover that the state, and some of its politicians and people, are using what are known from the past to be well-worn paths of discrimination and intolerance.” The U.S. State Reporter has criticized the German government for the “clearly discriminatory practice” of “prevent[ing] a person from practicing his or her profession of participating in public or private fora solely based on that person’s religion or belief.”

Germany is generally regarded as the birthplace of institutional psychiatry which spawned the theory of eugenics, created the first death camps and instigated the wholesale slaughter of millions. As in the United States in the early 1950s, the Church of Scientology traced the source of false reports and government attacks in Germany to psychiatric vested interests seeking to protect a multibillion dollar mental health monopoly. Operating without popular support but with taxpayer funds, psychiatric special interests regard as a threat any religion that provides man with genuine freedom without the use of mind altering drugs or similar unscientific “therapies.”

Unfortunately, some priests from the predominant Catholic and Lutheran churches in Germany have encouraged government persecution of Scientology and other new religions. Although supported through parishioner-paid government “church taxes,” the membership of these churches has been declining dramatically and so have their revenues. Rather than looking within their own organizations to find and cure the causes of declining membership, they have wrongly blamed Scientology, which continues to grow.

Fortunately, those who are upset by seeing man improve are small in number compared to the many who have followed Scientology’s invitation to “think for yourselves” and who consequently, have embraced Scientology and its efforts to create a harmonious and peaceful civilization and more freedom for the individual.

Notes

  1.  Authentic Information & Answers to Questions About Scientology: Why has the German government tried to portray Scientology as controversial? (n.d.). authenticscientology.org. Retrieved 18 May 2010 from http://www.authenticscientology.org/page30a.htm ↩

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Scientology’s FAQ: Why has Scientology sometimes been described as controversial?

Q Why has Scientology sometimes been described as controversial?1

A Like all new ideas, Scientology has come under attack by the uninformed and those who feel their vested interests are threatened. As Scientologists have openly and effectively advocated social reform causes, they have become the target of attacks. For those vested interests who cling to a status quo that is detrimental to society, Scientology’s technology of making the able more able and teaching people to think for themselves poses a serious threat.

This conflict dates back to 1950, a time when psychiatry was entrenched among the United States intelligence services and living off the fat of government grants. In May of that year, L. Ron Hubbard published Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health. Not only did Dianetics contain the first workable technology of the mind that anyone could apply, but it also labeled their “state-of-the-art” psychiatric drugs as dangerous. Moreover, it decried the inhuman use of electroshock treatment and lobotomy—then the mainstay of psychiatric “treatment”. One cannot overestimate the threat that Dianetics posed to that psychiatric establishment, both in terms of its inherent message and its unprecedented popularity with the American public; for suddenly here was a work that effectively ripped away their pretense of authority.

The response was immediate and considerable. Less than a month after the publication of Dianetics, psychiatrists on government payrolls were denigrating the book as a hoax, while admitting in the same breath that they had never even read it. A handful of influential psychiatrists used their government connections to spread lies and false reports through media and government files, escalating into an all-out attempt to close down the Dianetics foundations which had sprung up across the country and later, after its formation in 1954, the Church of Scientology. The issue was clearly financial: how long could psychiatrists continue to convince the American taxpayer to foot the bill for multimillion dollar psychiatric appropriations when Dianetics provided a means to greater happiness and ability for only the price of a book?

The attacks intensified after 1951, the year Mr. Hubbard published Science of Survival. In that book, Mr. Hubbard publicly exposed, for the first time, government-funded mind-control experiments in which psychiatrists administered drugs and electric shock to unsuspecting human guinea pigs who were then implanted, while unconscious, with hypnotic commands. Decades later, victims would receive government compensation for the injuries they suffered from such experiments. But at the time these matters were among the best-kept secrets of the U.S. intelligence and psychiatric communities.

Once again the response from the federal/psychiatric circles was considerable. At least half a dozen federal agencies, including the FBI, IRS and FDA, were brought into the effort to suppress Dianetics and Scientology.

The story of the attempts to wipe out Scientology would fill a book, but this war was effectively over in October 1993, when, after its exhaustive scrutiny, the IRS issued a series of rulings expressly recognizing that the Church of Scientology and all its subordinate churches and related charitable and educational institutions in the United States are tax-exempt organizations.

The IRS ruling, which encompassed not only every Scientology church in the United States but also several important Scientology organizations outside the United States, signified that the IRS—and the U.S. government—had formally recognized that the Church of Scientology is a bona fide religious organization and that its activities are beneficial to society as a whole.

As old lies are disproved, the controversy quickly fades and the truth about Scientology, what the Church really is and what is members do, replaces it.

And today, the Church continues to make great efforts to provide the accurate information which tells the true story and corrects the falsehoods that have been circulated in the past.

Notes

  1. Authentic Information & Answers to Questions About Scientology: Why has Scientology sometimes been described as controversial? (n.d.). authenticscientology.org. Retrieved 18 May 2010 from http://www.authenticscientology.org/page29a.htm ↩

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Scientology’s FAQ: What does “suppressive person” mean?

What does “suppressive person” mean?1

A suppressive person is a person who seeks to suppress any betterment activity or group. The suppressive person, also called an antisocial personality, works to upset, continuously undermine, spread bad news and denigrate other people and their activities. While it has sometimes been said that a suppressive person is just anti-Scientology, the fact is they oppose anyone doing better in life. Such people are not always easy to identify; however, they can be known by specific characteristics:

1. He or she speaks only in very broad generalities. “They say…” “Everybody thinks…” “Everyone knows…”

2. Such a person deals mainly in bad news, critical or hostile remarks, invalidation and general suppression.

3. The antisocial personality alters, to worsen, communication when he or she relays a message or news.

4. A characteristic, and one of the sad things about an antisocial personality, is that it does not respond to treatment or reform.

5. Surrounding such a personality we find cowed or ill associates or friends who, when not driven actually insane, are yet behaving in a crippled manner in life, failing, not succeeding.

6. The antisocial personality habitually selects the wrong target. If A is the obvious cause, the antisocial personality inevitably blames B or C or D.

7. The antisocial cannot finish a cycle of action. The antisocial becomes surrounded with incomplete projects.

8. Many antisocial persons will freely confess to the most alarming crimes when forced to do so, but will have no faintest sense of responsibility for them.

9. The antisocial personality supports only destructive groups and rages against and attacks any constructive or betterment group.

10. This type of personality approves only of destructive actions and fights against constructive or helpful actions or activities.

11. Helping others is an activity which drives the antisocial personality nearly berserk. Activities, however, which destroy in the name of help are closely supported.

12. The antisocial personality has a bad sense of property and conceives that the idea that anyone owns anything is a pretense, made up to fool people. Nothing is every really owned.

Fortunately, such individuals are a very small percentage of the population. But because society as a whole has not had any means to identify them, the amount of havoc wreaked by the anti-social personality throughout the centuries is incalculable.

Virtually all the turmoil and conflict in an individual’s life can be traced to contact with such personalities. Individual men and women can usually sort out their differences through communication if they are not adversely influenced, often unknowingly, by an antisocial personality attempting to inflame, instead of resolve, conflicts.

Notes

  1. Authentic Information & Answers to Questions About Scientology: What does “suppressive person” mean? (n.d.). authenticscientology.org. Retrieved 18 May 2010 from http://www.authenticscientology.org/page39.htm ↩

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Scientology’s FAQ: Why do some people oppose Scientology?

Scientology has at least two answers for this question.

Q Why do some people oppose Scientology?

A There are certain characteristics and mental attitudes that cause a percentage of the population to oppose violently any betterment activity or group. This small percentage of the society (roughly 2 percent) cannot tolerate that Scientology is successful at improving conditions around the world. This same 2 percent is opposed to any effective self-betterment activity. The reason they so rabidly oppose Scientology is because it is doing more to help society than any other group. Those who are upset by seeing man get better are small in number compared to the millions who have embraced Scientology and its efforts to create a sane civilization and more freedom for the individual.1

Q Why do some people oppose Scientology?

A In the first place, very few do. Of course, as noted earlier, there are those in psychiatry who have long opposed spiritual betterment of any kind, but particularly that offered by Dianetics and Scientology. Then too, behind much opposition to Scientology one will invariably find the covert work of anti-religious hate groups which feed off a false hysteria they themselves create.However, as the Church has been obliged to publicly expose, those assembled in these groups have been involved in brutal deprogrammings in exchange for thousands of dollars paid to them by gullible relatives of the victims. A large number of them have been caught in the act and gone to jail.

Interestingly, when those who are attacking Scientology lose media support and coverage, their actual numbers turn out to be a very small handful. When these same individuals are no longer connected to anti-religious deprogrammers, their actual upsets are found to be quite insignificant and are readily handled through communication.2

Notes

  1. Authentic Information & Answers to Questions About Scientology: Why do some people oppose Scientology? (n.d.). authenticscientology.org. Retrieved 18 May 2010 from http://www.authenticscientology.org/page29.htm. ↩
  2. Authentic Information & Answers to Questions About Scientology: Why do some people oppose Scientology? (n.d.). authenticscientology.org. Retrieved 18 May 2010 from http://www.authenticscientology.org/page38a.htm ↩