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Tribalism within Scientology

PirateAndBum

Gold Meritorious Patron
The other thing - about the root cause in gangs being money runs almost 100% against the majority opinion on this board - Hubbard's bridge is a failure to make a one size fits all approach to mental / spiritual growth. How many posts have their been posts exposing the bogus nature of Hubbard's claim, yet suddenly, I am supposed to believe the one size fits all - money is the root cause of gangs?

Which horse are we riding here?

Mimsey
Care to rephrase? I see sentences but I fail to connect the dots between them. There are dots right? Apples and potatoes Mims.

Which Horse? Hobby?
 
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JustSheila

Crusader
The other thing - about the root cause in gangs being money runs almost 100% against the majority opinion on this board - Hubbard's bridge is a failure to make a one size fits all approach to mental / spiritual growth. How many posts have their been posts exposing the bogus nature of Hubbard's claim, yet suddenly, I am supposed to believe the one size fits all - money is the root cause of gangs?

Which horse are we riding here?

Mimsey
Money was also Hubbard's motivation.

But yeh, we can probably add power and domination of others as another motivation for Hubbard and gangs.
 

HelluvaHoax!

Platinum Meritorious Sponsor with bells on
The other thing - about the root cause in gangs being money runs almost 100% against the majority opinion on this board - Hubbard's bridge is a failure to make a one size fits all approach to mental / spiritual growth. How many posts have their been posts exposing the bogus nature of Hubbard's claim, yet suddenly, I am supposed to believe the one size fits all - money is the root cause of gangs?

Which horse are we riding here?

Nobody posted that money is "the cause of gangs". The discussion was about money being the principle reason ghetto gangs stab, shoot & murder each other.

Besides, it's sooooooo confusing why gangs sell drugs. It must be some other reason besides money.

It's sooooo confusing why bank robbers rob banks. It must be some other reason besides money.

Soooo confusing why counterfeiters print fake money. It must be some other reason besides money.

This world is sooooo confusing, why just yesterday I was at Starbucks and there was an employee pushing buttons on a cash register and a man handed her money. I don't have any idea what that that employee was thinking or trying to do, no clue why they were pushing buttons on a cash register or why the man handed her a ten dollar bill. It must be some other reason besides money.

Nobody really knows what the hell that whole Starbucks thing is all about and we are hoping you will post some articles about where Starbucks buys its coffee beans from so we can get to the source of all this mysterious stuff.
 

TheOriginalBigBlue

Gold Meritorious Patron
This reference and link to the New Yorker article about Trump and Tribes was the original gist of this thread’s OP. The article is using the concept of Tribe to portray Trump supporters as unthinking followers. The article then conflates George Orwell’s writing about Nationalism with the word Tribe. Trump is then portrayed as a power hungry Nationalist in the meaning of George Orwell. We are expected to accept these premises at face value and then proceed onto the rest of the thread’s notion about tribes in Scientology without questioning the motives and associations implied in the New Yorker article. We will notice that there is an implied moral superiority assigned to anti-Trump tribes in the article.

I find it interesting that Marxism is against patriotism and national pride and loyalty when it doesn’t serve their purposes but after Marxism is firmly ensconced, all the factions that it created to undermine Nationalism are expected to become Marxist Nationalists. We will note that when Marxists first started to redefine the meaning of “Tribe” in the fields of sociology and anthropology they didn’t use “Gang”. The problem with “Gang” is it has an inherently negative connotation whereas “Tribe” is ambiguous enough to imply positive or negative connotations to factions under Marxism at will.

This reminds me of Scientology’s saying that anyone can be a Scientologist and continue to practice any religion as a Scientologist - all the while steadily cutting off all other beliefs and practices that are not Scientology the deeper one becomes involved with Scientology. Leftists are presented as the “Open” party accepting of everyone all the while shutting down all opposing opinion and activity that doesn’t align with their ideology. That is exactly what this New Yorker article seeks to do and in this respect Scientology does very much practice the divisive Marxist ideology of “Tribe”.

http://www.forum.exscn.net/threads/tribalism-within-scientology.48634/

In the link below, the referenced New Yorker Article, discusses tribalism in politics - it has some bashing of both sides, but overlooking those, it makes some interesting points. It breaks down American politics into 7 factions and it discusses the problem with identification with a tribe, assuming the positions of the tribe as a deterrent of having to think. If Scientology is about anything it is controlling thought.

https://www.newyorker.com/news/dail...s-insights-into-tribalism-in-the-age-of-trump

We live in a time of tribes. Not of ideologies, parties, groups, or beliefs—these don’t convey the same impregnability of political fortifications, or the yawning chasms between them. American politics today requires a word as primal as “tribe” to get at the blind allegiances and huge passions of partisan affiliation. Tribes demand loyalty, and in return they confer the security of belonging. They’re badges of identity, not of thought. In a way, they make thinking unnecessary, because they do it for you, and may punish you if you try to do it for yourself. To get along without a tribe makes you a fool. To give an inch to the other tribe makes you a sucker.

Lonely dissent used to carry a certain prestige in politics, even if few people had the stomach for it. When Senator Wayne Morse, of Oregon, cast a nearly solitary vote against his Democratic President’s Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, in 1964, he did not win the love of his fellow-senators, but he at least earned a grudging admiration. It was an honorable thing to stand on your own. Today, it’s mocked as feckless, or reviled as near treason. Jeff Flake’s Senate colleagues despise him—the Republicans for temporarily breaking with his tribe, the Democrats for being too weak to follow through.

Everything in American politics today entrenches tribalism: our winner-take-all elections, the dehumanizing commentary on cable news and social media, the people we choose to talk to and live among. The trends are not new, but they’ve dramatically accelerated and intensified under a President who rules by humiliation because he lives in fear of being humiliated.

I’m using “tribalism” to refer to what George Orwell, in an essay he wrote at the end of the Second World War, meant by “nationalism”: “the habit of identifying oneself with a single nation or other unit, placing it beyond good and evil and recognising no other duty than that of advancing its interests. . . . The abiding purpose of every nationalist is to secure more power and more prestige, not for himself but for the nation or other unit in which he has chosen to sink his own individuality.” Our tribes are competing for power over the state, the media, public opinion, the verbal battleground. When politics becomes a perpetual tribal war, ends justify almost any means and individuals are absolved from the constraints of normal decency. People who would never tolerate cruelty or lying or even ordinary impoliteness in their children cheer every excess of their leaders, none more so than President Trump’s.
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Enthetan

Master of Disaster
The other thing - about the root cause in gangs being money runs almost 100% against the majority opinion on this board - Hubbard's bridge is a failure to make a one size fits all approach to mental / spiritual growth. How many posts have their been posts exposing the bogus nature of Hubbard's claim, yet suddenly, I am supposed to believe the one size fits all - money is the root cause of gangs?

Which horse are we riding here?

Mimsey
As others have noted, the desire for money is the major cause of gang violence.

As for the cause of gangs: why do people join groups (whether you call the group a gang, a tribe, a team, or a company)? They join because they think they can accomplish their goals better or more easily as part of a group, then as individuals.

Why do gangs form in the "inner cities"? Mostly, I think, for protection against the other residents of the "inner cities". When government protection can't be counted upon, you join with others for mutual protection.

Why can't the gang members rely upon police protection? Well, when you are engaged in an illegal activity as your means of making money, calling the police is not an option. So when a rival gang steals your drugs, or won't pay up for drugs delivered, or they delivered bad drugs, then you have to enforce your displeasure upon them through private means, which generally means having people from your gang shoot up people from the other gang which did you wrong.
 

guanoloco

As-Wased
Well...behind all the money and power is sex. We mustn't forget this, you silly push-button response circuits. SEX.

Ron gorged on it.
 
Moving on - in the below video, Joe Rogan interviews William von Hippel who is a professor of psychology at the University of Queensland. His new book "The Social Leap" is available now via Amazon.

William discusses how we evolved from a chimp like predecessor - we, as a race were king of the rain forest, but began to find ourselves living on a savanna. In a rain forest, the chimp is the top dog - Jaguars don't try to chase them up trees - they are amazingly agile, their bodies, their pects, are built for climbing - no animal is a match for them in that environment.

But in the savanna - they have no trees to climb. They evolved a different survival strategy: group defense. One of the things that happened by the time they were homo erectus, they walked upright, their musculature was no longer built for climbing - there was more lateral agility and strength. They could throw things extremely well - like rocks. A chimp has to use two hands to throw a ball for example. He goes into when the Portugese invaded some island, had armor, cross bows etc, and were badly defeated by the rock throwing natives. Boy - could the Dodgers use a few of them.

Back to the savanna - the next big evolutionary step was the ability to kill a distance. Fighting off lions with knives is a really dangerous proposition - the first man out is likely a gonner. But pelting a lion with rocks a from a distance, you could drive him /her off in relative safety.

So we find this ingrained behavior in which co-operative action is a survival trait that evolved millions of years ago. A trait, I will wager, is behind tribal co-operation. This trait, BTW, is something, that chimps don't really have.

I am about 3/4 hour in, just past an interesting discussion about why we have larger sex organs compared to the apes, and how having large balls is important, as a survival mechanism, for some species - when the female goes into estrus the male who can put out the most sperm can wash out the previous male's sperm. Then they launched why testosterone levels drop when a male gets married and further drops when she starts popping out kids...

Now, they are into how and why Homo erectus's brains have doubled in size, from their previous doubling in size, the amount of frontal brain needed to fashion stone tools ( a lot really)

Enjoy - Mimsey

Homo erectus (meaning "upright man") is a species of archaic humans that lived throughout most of the Pleistocene geological epoch. Its earliest fossil evidence dates to 1.8 million years ago (discovered 1991 in Dmanisi, Georgia). Wiki

homo-erectus.jpg


 
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TheOriginalBigBlue

Gold Meritorious Patron
I am about 3/4 hour in, just past an interesting discussion about why we have larger sex organs compared to the apes, and how having large balls is important, as a survival mechanism, for some species - when the female goes into estrus the male who can put out the most sperm can wash out the previous male's sperm. Then they launched why testosterone levels drop when a male gets married and further drops when she starts popping out kids...
Has somebody discovered the lost chapter from Dianetics? Just when I got Hubbard's disgusting pseudo-medical mental imagery all flushed out. Do Scientologists become interested in this stuff because of Dianetics or do they become Scientologists because they gravitate to this kind of stuff? TMI
 
Has somebody discovered the lost chapter from Dianetics? Just when I got Hubbard's disgusting pseudo-medical mental imagery all flushed out. Do Scientologists become interested in this stuff because of Dianetics or do they become Scientologists because they gravitate to this kind of stuff? TMI
What turns it on, turns it off - go listen to the pod cast and recover your unrestimulated self.:biggrin:

This guy's premise makes a lot of sense, I believe he has done field research, he's not talking out his ass. Example - he was discussing a dig of a Homo erectus site some millions of years old, and they were surprised to find piles of different stone chips in different locations. The piles were of big pieces in one location, medium in another and fine chips in another. If one person were making the flint points, you'd have one pile of mixed chips. This site is evidence of division of labor. Quite a step up from the previous hominids.

Enthetan - In his book about tribes, Sebastian brings up the Iroquois having a parallel form of leadership - during times of peace the women elected a leader, called the sachems who had complete control of the tribe, but in war, the war leaders took over, and "their sole concern was the physical the physical survival of the tribe. They were not concerned with justice or harmony or fairness, they we only concerned with defeating the enemy." Any peace negotiations were the prevue of the sachems.

Mimsey
 
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An interesting article:

Biological Leninism

How these tribes form, and how a leader can select for members who will give him absolute loyalty.
Um, it has some... um... well look at this:

"The point again is, that you can’t run a tight, cohesive ruling class with white men. They don’t need to be loyal. They’ll do ok anyway. A much easier way to run an obedient, loyal party is to recruit everyone else. Women. Blacks. Gays. Muslims. Transexuals. Pedophiles. Those people may be very high performers individually, but in a natural society ruled by its core of high performers, i.e. a white patriarchy, they wouldn’t have very high status. So if you promise them high status for being loyal to you; you bet they’re gonna join your team. They have much to gain, little to lose. The Coalition of the Fringes, Sailer calls it. It’s worse than that really. It’s the coalition of everyone who would lose status the better society were run. It’s the coalition of the bad. Literal Kakistocracy."

I looked it up: A kakistocracy (/ˌkækɪsˈtɒkrəsi, -ˈstɒk-/) is a system of government which is run by the worst, least qualified, or most unscrupulous citizens.

And:
There’s a reason why there’s so many evil fat women in government. Where else would they be if government didn’t want them? They have nothing going on for them, except their membership in the Democratic party machine. The party gives them all they have, the same way the Communist party had given everything to that average peasant kid who became a middling bureaucrat in Moscow. And don’t even get me started with hostile Muslims or Transexuals. Those people used to be expelled or taken into asylums, pre-1960. Which is why American Progressivism likes them so much. The little these people have depends completely on the Left’s patronage. There’s a devil’s bargain there: the more naturally repulsive someone else, the more valuable it is as a party member, as its loyalty will be all the stronger. This is of course what’s behind Larry Auster’s First Law of minority relations: the worse a group behaves, the more the Left likes it.

What the hell does this have to do with tribes?

Mimsey
 

HelluvaHoax!

Platinum Meritorious Sponsor with bells on
--snipped--

What the hell does this have to do with tribes?
ANSWER: Everything.

You can't see the tribe because you are IN the tribe.

Forest. Trees.

Same exact reason that Scientologists are the LEAST aware people (on this planet[sup]1[/sup]) of what Scientology is. The "knowing how to know" folks are always the last to know.

PRO TIP: Blow the tribe and the there will be a miracle of biblical proportion--the blind shall see again, lol.


[sup]1[/sup] In all fairness, we have yet to standardly survey Scientologists living on other planets.

.
 
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Enthetan

Master of Disaster
Um, it has some... um... well look at this:
Yes, it has some politically-incorrect observations.
I looked it up: A kakistocracy (/ˌkækɪsˈtɒkrəsi, -ˈstɒk-/) is a system of government which is run by the worst, least qualified, or most unscrupulous citizens.
Yeah. So? You want me to give you a list of the corruptions of various Democrats, including Ted Kennedy, the Clintons (a long list), and so on?
What the hell does this have to do with tribes?
It's central to the idea of tribes, as in how does one create and perpetuate loyalty to the tribe? Why does one choose to become part of a tribe, rather than seeking success as an individual? Try reading it again.

On the subject of Political Correctness, he has another article

The purpose of absurdity

which contains a story which Scientologists may find interesting, in light of how David Miscavige came to power:

Well the emperor died out of the capital, so nobody knew. The only ones who knew were his prime minister, Li Si, and his close minister Zhao Gao, who may or may not have been a eunuch. Well apparently Zhao Gao didn’t like the crown prince Fusu very much. He had reason to think that Fusu hated him, and would execute him as soon as he became emperor himself. So Zhao Gao gets Li Si and says “hey, dude’s dead, we’re the only ones who know. Fusu doesn’t like you either, so why don’t we get this kid Huhai and name him successor?”
Take a look at the whole story at the link, and notice the similarities to events in the 1980's in Scientology. Including the Don Larson expedition.
 

TheOriginalBigBlue

Gold Meritorious Patron
I don't have a problem with an interest in tribes as part of a serious anthropological discussion or trying to interpret Scientology in terms of tribes. I do have a problem with the deliberate attempt to introduce the subject with a postmodernist reinterpretation of what tribe means in a political context at a time when relativists want to define a given political orientation in a way that serves their attainment of power. I also do not like the way this postmodernist dig was introduced into the thread and then an attempt is made to confer validity to this obvious insertion of identity politics by association with legitimate anthropology. There are two distinctly different ideas presented in the OP. One is Tribalism as Postmodernist Identity Politics and the other is Tribalism as Anthropology. Postmodernist anthropologists deliberately set out to conflate the two just as this thread does.

I seriously doubt Hubbard could have gotten as far as he did were it not for postmodernism. By the 1950s and especially the 1960s the culture was steeped in relativism and we did not apply strict objective standards to our acceptance of his ideas. I think this is the greatest common denominator in people who become Scientologists and retain an adherence to Hubbard's ideas long after they become alienated from the organization. I fully expect postmodernist Scientologists to remain postmodernist exes. I expect that because postmodernism is in great part by definition the deliberate distortion of the language to serve the attainment of power and it is so pervasive that many postmodernists have no idea they are postmodernists. Hubbard's distortions of the language are entirely postmodernist relativism and just as postmodernists feel compelled to distort the meaning of "Tribe" Hubbard distorted the meaning of "Groups". He too leaned heavily on the valid field of anthropology as a subject to lend credibility to his reinterpretations.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2018

/11/steven_hayward_dissects_the_left_behemoth.html

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If objectivity is impossible, if language is subjective or corrupt or determined purely by power-relations, if common deliberation is actually not possible, then it raises a stark question: Why exactly are we having this conversation? More importantly, how are we having this conversation?

The radical skepticism of critical theory should be contrasted with oldfashioned Socratic skepticism. Socratic skepticism begins with the famous axiom, “I know that I know nothing,” which is meant to indicate a complete openness to being, a quest that begins always with the question, “What is. . .” about everything.
10
Postmodern skepticism evinces the exact opposite: I know that nothing can be known. Few postmodern thinkers say this very directly or necessarily think this explicitly, but when you try to take in the layer upon layer of the complications critical theorists lay down in the path to understanding anything, it amounts to the same thing.
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https://www.britannica.com/topic/postmodernism-philosophy

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Postmodernism and relativism

As indicated in the preceding section, many of the characteristic doctrines of postmodernism constitute or imply some form of metaphysical, epistemological, or ethical relativism. (It should be noted, however, that some postmodernists vehemently reject the relativist label.) Postmodernists deny that there are aspects of reality that are objective; that there are statements about reality that are objectively true or false; that it is possible to have knowledge of such statements (objective knowledge); that it is possible for human beings to know some things with certainty; and that there are objective, or absolute, moral values. Reality, knowledge, and value are constructed by discourses; hence they can vary with them. This means that the discourse of modern science, when considered apart from the evidential standards internal to it, has no greater purchase on the truth than do alternative perspectives, including (for example) astrology and witchcraft. Postmodernists sometimes characterize the evidential standards of science, including the use of reason and logic, as “Enlightenment rationality.”

he broad relativism apparently so characteristic of postmodernism invites a certain line of thinking regarding the nature and function of discourses of different kinds. If postmodernists are correct that reality, knowledge, and value are relative to discourse, then the established discourses of the Enlightenment are no more necessary or justified than alternative discourses. But this raises the question of how they came to be established in the first place. If it is never possible to evaluate a discourse according to whether it leads to objective Truth, how did the established discourses become part of the prevailing worldview of the modern era? Why were these discourses adopted or developed, whereas others were not?

Part of the postmodern answer is that the prevailing discourses in any society reflect the interests and values, broadly speaking, of dominant or elite groups. Postmodernists disagree about the nature of this connection; whereas some apparently endorse the dictum of the German philosopher and economist Karl Marx that “the ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class,” others are more circumspect. Inspired by the historical research of the French philosopher Michel Foucault, some postmodernists defend the comparatively nuanced view that what counts as knowledge in a given era is always influenced, in complex and subtle ways, by considerations of power. There are others, however, who are willing to go even further than Marx. The French philosopher and literary theorist Luce Irigaray, for example, has argued that the science of solid mechanics is better developed than the science of fluid mechanics because the male-dominated institution of physics associates solidity and fluidity with the male and female sex organs, respectively.
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Because the established discourses of the Enlightenment are more or less arbitrary and unjustified, they can be changed; and because they more or less reflect the interests and values of the powerful, they should be changed. Thus postmodernists regard their theoretical position as uniquely inclusive and democratic, because it allows them to recognize the unjust hegemony of Enlightenment discourses over the equally valid perspectives of nonelite groups. In the 1980s and ’90s, academic advocates on behalf of various ethnic, cultural, racial, and religious groups embraced postmodern critiques of contemporary Western society, and postmodernism became the unofficial philosophy of the new movement of “identity politics.”
 

guanoloco

As-Wased
Yes, it has some politically-incorrect observations.

Yeah. So? You want me to give you a list of the corruptions of various Democrats, including Ted Kennedy, the Clintons (a long list), and so on?

It's central to the idea of tribes, as in how does one create and perpetuate loyalty to the tribe? Why does one choose to become part of a tribe, rather than seeking success as an individual? Try reading it again.

On the subject of Political Correctness, he has another article

The purpose of absurdity

which contains a story which Scientologists may find interesting, in light of how David Miscavige came to power:


Take a look at the whole story at the link, and notice the similarities to events in the 1980's in Scientology. Including the Don Larson expedition.
How very interesting. I never thought there was any point of Caligula appointing his horse as a Roman consulate other than sheer madness...but it appears that there's a method to the madness after all.
 

Enthetan

Master of Disaster
How very interesting. I never thought there was any point of Caligula appointing his horse as a Roman consulate other than sheer madness...but it appears that there's a method to the madness after all.
As a way to smoke out people who weren't willing to back him 100%, it was brilliant.

I think the Don Larson mission in Scientology was similar. Come in, make lots of dictatorial noise, see who objects, who might become a nucleus of opposition, and then declare them and get them off the lines. It ensures that those who are left would not challenge DM's authority later.

If you crank the oppression level to 100 all at once, you have rebellion. But if you crank it to 10, carefully see who is less than fully supportive and get rid of them, then crank it to 15 and repeat, you gradually eliminate potential opposition while not creating a critical mass of opposition at any one time.
 

guanoloco

As-Wased
As a way to smoke out people who weren't willing to back him 100%, it was brilliant.

I think the Don Larson mission in Scientology was similar. Come in, make lots of dictatorial noise, see who objects, who might become a nucleus of opposition, and then declare them and get them off the lines. It ensures that those who are left would not challenge DM's authority later.

If you crank the oppression level to 100 all at once, you have rebellion. But if you crank it to 10, carefully see who is less than fully supportive and get rid of them, then crank it to 15 and repeat, you gradually eliminate potential opposition while not creating a critical mass of opposition at any one time.
Reminds me of boiling a frog alive. The frog in this instance is the greater body of Scientology stooges...thee and me.
 
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