ONLY TIGERS SURVIVE: SCIENTOLOGY

Crusade. The scientology sect is advancing beyond Western Europe. Notes on the Opium of Elites

By Jurgen Meier

[This article published in: Freitag 03. 1/18/2008 is translated from the German on the World Wide Web, www.freitag.de/2008/03/0803/301.php.]

Scientology is a pseudo-ideology that aims at “the complete suppression of individuals.” These strong words were heard in 2007 from a Hamburg politician whose initiative sought to prohibit the organization. That may be difficult. In April 2007 the European Tribunal for Human Rights explicitly recognized scientology as a religious community. The organization tries to spread “intellectual, humanistic or similar values,” the judges declared. On September 24, 2007, Spain’s national court of justice granted scientology the right to be registered as an officially acknowledged religious community.

On November 5, 2007, Portugal officially recognized scientology as a religious organization. On December 3, 2007, the South African tax authority described scientology as a charitable organization… “Crusade Europe” reaps fruits. Scientology is on the advance. In 2007 there were more than 1500 scientology centers, missions and churches worldwide. New groups were founded in Afghanistan, Nigeria and Bahrain so scientology is represented in 163 nations with more than ten million members. This does not include the “splinter groups” of former scientology gurus that are loyally devoted to their intellectual father Hubbard.

Portugal opened its arms for the Hubbard managers. The high revenues from newspapers, publishers and courses are not taxed as in all countries where scientology is recognized as a church. Portugal even recognizes its “ministers” and categorizes its marriages as equal to civil marriages. These “ministers” even have the right to hospital visits; their proposals for scientology-holidays are given attention by the state.

Perhaps all Portuguese will celebrate Ron Hubbard’s birthday on March 13 as a national holiday, joining collectively to the “Hubbard electro-meter,” a “religious remedy” used during the church confessions, as Hubbard writes, to transform “Entheta into Theta.” In other words, turbulences are removed from a person’s life or are not re-stimulated. An auditor does not try to heal anything. He simply raises the pitch. In scientology-slang, the hard drive of the “confessors” must be wiped out and reprogrammed. That would be a holiday of irrationalism!

The reason and intelligence of people should be destroyed. This corresponds to the reality of present-day capitalist countries and cannot be prohibited. As Erich Fromm would say, scientology fits in the world of the “marketing character” and the “unproductive I-orientation.” Scientology is the glorification of an American ego-trip. Life is a “game”! Everyone plays for himself! Everyone can be a winner! No one must die! Everyone can live eternally! Wars are only “parts” of this game! Hubbard’s “religious philosophy.” As he calls his teaching, has to be implanted in the brains of the “clan” through courses to victoriously survive wars and death.

This charlatanism or fraud that calls itself “modern Buddhism” has nothing in common with “positive religion” (Hegel). Its name is compounded of scientia, Latin for science, and logos, Greek for reason. Scientology is neither scientific nor marked by reason. The name scientology does not raise any religious claim. Whether Moslem, Christian or Jew, a God exists for everyone who can be believed and whose revelation can be lived. For scientology, there is no God before whom all persons are equal. Hubbard’s “tone scale” is not a divine revelation like the “Ten Commandments.” It divides life into worthy and worthless life. A woman who ventures to abort her child skids to 1.1 on this scale. The strict scientologist is at 4.4: “Easy births can only be expected for women who are relatively high on the `tone scale,’” Hubbard writes.

An example reveals the praxis of this ideology. The state-enterprise “Perrn-Motors” with its 3000 workers is led by scientologists connected with the central office in Los Angeles. Hubbard colleges have opened here as in the “Perrn-machine shop” where workers are trained to win in the capitalist competition. “Only tigers survive,” scientology says and demands a kind of tax for training workers pocketed by its economic branch, the World Institute of Scientology Enterprises (WISE) in Los Angeles.

Alexander Gurieu, head of the Perrn provincial administration, is trained in scientology. Perrn could soon be the first city of millions managed and manipulated by scientology. Scientology saturates Russia with an ideology that prospers to the delight of American capital and carves the Russian population into individual “players” who should not develop any common ideas about the state, nation, class and society. In Moscow, Ron Hubbard was awarded an honorary doctorate. A hospital with 400 beds was established according to his “Narconon methods,” driving out alcoholic Russians “Entheta” with hours and hours of sauna visits, overdosed vitamins and many “Hubbard readings.” God does not occur here, only money, mammoth money.

To fulfill this goal, more and more German personal consulting firms are oriented in the principles of Dr. Steven Reiss, the scientology-neo-positivism with the corporation EAMS (European Academy for Motivation System) with headquarters in Switzerland. The corporation was brought from Ohio to Europe. “Power (influence, performance, leadership and control)” is the first of the 16 “Reiss life motives” that push people into a pattern as in “Hubbard’s Tables of Rating People.”

The professor from Ohio has merely polished Ron Hubbard for Europe and liberated his tables from much American trash. The goal of this philosophy whether decorated with Reiss’ or Hubbard’s packaging is the same. Only a “high degree of self-knowledge or occupationally relevant personal values, goals and motives” can optimize “one’s leadership skills.” How do I gain motivation and make correct personal decisions?” “How do I optimally form teams?” asks the Berlin personal consulting firm Mannroth that bases its daily manipulation activities on Dr. Reiss and implements Hubbard’s goals. Unscrupulous managers should understand their “job” as a “game” in which those are ruined who feel no “power”-motive but are glad to improve their miserable life with the “one-euro job,” not to mention those persons who out of poverty flee from Africa across the Mediterranean to survive.

Reiss and Hubbard actualize neo-positivism and prevent insight in the totality of life. There is no one reality here existing it itself. The person is not understood as either a generic common being or an individual. Everything is ruled by the “Thetan.” Nature as a category of existence independent of humankind with whom the working person relates is negated because all thought and action is geared to manipulation of others and oneself. How can my state, my firm, my product or my “team” be the winner? How can I be the victor in the “game” of competition? That is the central question of scientology-neo-positivism. Therefore it gains influence in all capitalist countries. Science should serve the goal of universal manipulation. Science should not contribute to really deepening knowledge of reality. Thus scientology denies reality as an objective category because reality is always subjective as all neo-positivists and scientologists teach. For that reason, one’s perspective is crucial, not the processes of things and human relations hidden behind the phenomena of one’s perception.

Through bombastic terms, scientology seeks to convey scientificness. “As there is an empty breadth, there is also an empty depth,” Hegel would comment on these intellectual bubbles. The neo-positivists are not capable of his dialectical method. Exploitation, oppression and war are only “games” for scientologists; the social totality counts for nothing. But as everybody knows, games are always encounters of individual persons, not of nations or classes. In a genuine game, the social reality of people is ignored. In a game, fun and delight occur when the ambition of the player drives him or her to improve techniques and methods to become a winner. What brings delight in a game is often inhuman and deadly in life. Reality is not a game. Reality is a totality of natural and human-social processes. Life and death, climate, hunger, anxiety, fear, pleasure, love and reason are involved here. No neo-positivism is needed regardless of its garment to think and act humanly in this totality but rather a clear methodical view of these realities. Dialectical thinking is sought and a focus that understands we are intensively influenced by the economic categories in this totality of social existence, not by a “Thetan,” energy or some other world spirit or extra-terrestrial.

[for the Wikipedia article on Hubbard’s “Tone Scale”, cf. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tone_scale.]

[for the Wikipedia article on “Thetan,” cf.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thetan.]