Arthur Ronald Conway Hubbard

Scientology 1.0.0 – chapter 7

“To be prepared against surprise is to be trained. To be prepared for surprise is to be educated.”
― James P. Carse

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Groups come into existence. As they evolve, rules are invented, and policies develop. As the group persists, it grapples with various emergencies, and new policies are formed. Over time, some of these policies become arbitrary. The arbitraries pile up, and eventually, the group dies.

So what went wrong? Why did the arbitraries pile up to the point that the group died?

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Group dianetics

Group dianetics is a detailed technology of mind that attempts to resolve the age-old problem of when individuals, groups, nations, and so on, perhaps starting out more or less free and liberal, or at least vital and dynamic, spiral, almost inevitably, into decadence, authoritarianism, and, finally, extinction. This is due to group engrams.

In psychology, an engram is a memory trace. In dianetics, an engram is a moment (or memory trace, if you will) of pain and/or unconsciousness that may, when triggered, act upon the individual or group in present time, possibly causing non-survival behaviour. From en-, into, or in, and gram, from French gramme; Late Latin gramma, a small weight; Greek grámma division, letter as a division mark (for example, “group A”); (originally) letter, from gráphein, “write.”

Engrams, in order to have their destructive power, must be hidden from the view of either the individual or the group (an interesting aspect of occultism to be discussed later). Bringing an engram properly into full view always results in the “aha!” phenomenon.

Dianetics is about how an individual’s history, undisclosed (hidden) and undiscussed, can upset that person’s life so much that they cannot live well. These past moments of upset need to be revealed, revisited, and reviewed until enough pain and upset are brought to light and “cleaned up” so that life may be able to go on to evolve and improve. This goal is called self-determinism, and the individual that attains self-determinism is called a Clear. Clear is what you are when you get out of your own way (much more on this later).

The same goes for groups; groups suffer from engrams too, so this is basically why we should study history.

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History

The word “history” comes from histōr which means “learned, wise man.”

Wisdom means, among other things, not repeating errors, which, by the by, is another way of describing the state of Clear. (To be sure, Clears continue to make plenty of mistakes in life; they just don’t repeat them as often, giving them a more optimal learning curve.)

Ever been part of a group? Well, you can’t be born without being part of a group, even if it’s just you being born to your mother in the middle of nowhere. Often, it is much more difficult to be a part of a group than it is to be a self, an individual, quite a lot more so. This is because much of what is happening in the group is generally unknown to its individual constituents. Just as you, the individual, know almost nothing about what your body is doing at the cellular level, individuals in groups often have a similar ignorance about the group, especially in the case of an emergency when things move so fast it’s all a blur.

But there are things that normally should or ought to be known in order for it to function well. If the group expects to continue to function smoothly, then its members need to understand what the history of the group is.

They say we study history so as not to repeat past mistakes, which we often do anyway because most of history is either inadequately recorded (hidden) or altered (hidden), and a lot of it is just plain wrong (really hidden). A big reason so much of our lives is like a broken record is that people just aren’t taught any of it (another way things get hidden).

As the group fails in learning its history and as arbitraries enter into its behaviours, and as these arbitraries give birth over time to further arbitraries, they pile up and up until eventually the group chokes on them and dies.

Arbitrary means unrestrained and autocratic in the use of authority. It comes from late Middle English (in the sense “dependent on one’s will or pleasure, discretionary”), from Latin arbitrarius, from arbiter “judge, supreme ruler”.

As a group experiences emergencies, decisions are made that become policy, and these policies are often arbitrary as they don’t apply to when things are normal.

An example of what’s happening right now: banks make massive profits by making bad loans and selling them to investors. The economy crashes (engram). These banks are “bailed out” by the taxpayers, and new strict regulations (arbitraries) are enforced, making it impossible for new banks to form because only the bailed-out banks can afford the lawyers needed to “obey” the new, and vastly more complicated, rules. Now we have a banking and government finance monopoly, and the economy is further suppressed from expanding. Eventually, money will either lose so much value or there will be such control over it (such as through central bank digital currency) that the population will revolt (more engrams). Then all civil liberties get cancelled so as to “regain order,” and the U.S. dies and becomes China (a whole new engram).

Dianetics applies every bit as much to groups, of whatever size, as it does to individuals: it’s to help get at the facts that ought to be known and in view by all members so that it can spot the arbitraries. In the above example, that would be discovering why the banks were making bad loans in the first place (which is actually a very interesting story).

If you can get the story straight and keep it straight, a group could survive and evolve indefinitely as an infinite game (unlike the individual, who usually has only a scant four-score years or so). This is what you want for long-term projects like republics.

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Scientology 2.0

Scientology 2.0 is the group called the Church of Scientology that grew out of the subject I’m calling Scientology 1.0.0.

The wider distribution in 1948 of 1947’s Scientology: A New Science (later renamed Dianetics: The Original Thesis) marks the start of Scientology 1.0.0.

Following its publication, numerous questions arose. People reading it wanted to know more.

So Mr. Hubbard wrote and published Dianteics: The Modern Science of Mental Health, and pow! Problems!

Not only did the book sell out with no further editions planned (the publisher just plain ran out of copies, creating an emergency), but there was, eventually, a backlash from mainstream media and the establishment: “Hubbard is a quack! He doesn’t have accreditation!” “He submitted no paper for scientific publication or peer review!” “He doesn’t have the authority and backing of the American Psychiatric Association!” All this despite the fact that for less than you’d pay for a hamburger, one could buy the book; no one was forcing anyone to read and try out the techniques for themselves, all perfectly legal. These were the first group emergencies (engrams) for what I’m referring to as Scientology 2.0, which will appear in 1981.

Engrams like this happen to every group of every kind, like it or not: they meet with various problems and do what they can to solve them, but, as often as not, these “solutions” become arbitrary, and these arbitraries stack up over time. If the group knows group dianetics, this could possibly be prevented.

The Church of Scientology does know of group dianetics, but when was the last time anything was made public, explaining to the group all the things that have happened? It’s quite likely that part of the reason there’s so much noise and nonsense all over the internet is actually an effort to correct this.

Why was group dianetics not applied, given that, having the theory and technique, it could know better? Well, one reason is the same reason almost any other kind of group would never apply it either, assuming they knew about it: because many of the emergencies being met ended up in court.

This is one of the problems with jurisprudence. To survive in court, an individual or group is rarely given the opportunity to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help them, God, for fear of inviting their own demise, so trials often only add to the confusion of the original emergency (engram). The defence attorney or prosecutor who can successfully hide information by introducing the most confusion, obfuscation, and misdirection will win the case (this is why nearly everybody hates lawyers).

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De-evolution

So, some sort of group is created, and it becomes a success. A different person or group attacks, and they sue after claiming that the aforementioned group injured them—sometimes this is true, sometimes not. The attackee, of course, claims innocence. There is, obviously, some sort of alteration or alterations involved on the part of one party or both, but it doesn’t matter to either side, the law, or the court, so long as the case is “settled,” which, of course, just adds to the original alterations (engrams).

In legal terms, this process is often referred to as “precedent,” which is meant to refer to the evolution of the law. Most of the time, though, precedent either just complicates the law (good for the lawyers) or, more often than not, confuses it (even better for the law business).

By this means, court cases all too often impugn the discovery of optimal solutions to the problems created by either successful or failed attempts by a group to solve emergencies, whether they were originally real or imagined. And thus individuals, groups, and nations devolve and eventually die.

Dianetically speaking, by altering the facts in a court of law (or anywhere, for that matter), the original emergency, which as often as not was an error and not a crime, is compounded, thus strengthening the engram and further confusing the group. This is why, for instance, health care in many countries is either dangerously incompetent, prohibitively expensive, or both.

Since only little bits of the story are ever told or altered, whether in court, in the media, or on the internet, the public looking on eventually can’t make heads or tails of it, and now the group in question has a public relations problem, regardless of whether they were in the right or not.

The public begins to protest, and the group begins to defend itself. Eventually, the group becomes more and more authoritarian (arbitrary) in an attempt to protect itself until it is totalitarian (100% arbitrary)… and then it dies. This is exactly what is happening to the United States right now.

So, this descent into legal degeneracy, though inevitable without knowing group dianetics, can be catastrophic for the whole planet. Where once the United States was a beacon on the hill for all nations, its own legal system has so diluted its own constitution as to be almost unrecognisable today.

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The conundrum

Part of the reason I am bringing up these examples of legal obtuseness is that the Church of Scientology (Scientology 2.0) has become famous for its litigative energy and fervour. Like any large, successful enterprise, it has to be legally impressive because, as groups and countries are more and more destroyed by legal shenanigans, it’s the only way to survive. But it is a game that can’t last.

As for the attackers of 2.0, I’ve seen many discussions on the topic of Scientology 2.0 where the interviewees, almost always disaffected former members and people I personally knew, conveniently omit all of their own errors and, in some cases, actual crimes, from the stories they are telling because, of course, they are completely “innocent victims.” In some cases, these “innocents” are the very people responsible for creating the emergencies suffered by the group!

Besides all that, to make things really complicated and confusing, the story of Dianetics and Scientology is intricately bound up with all the earlier stories of man’s search for truth over the past ten millennia or more, with the thousands of battles fought over belief and religion and the millions of lives spent in the effort (huge numbers of engrams).

I mean, try coming up with a programme, a therapy, to properly get at the problems of the mind and the soul (and here I’m referring to all practises of whatever stripe) and see what you run into; you won’t be bored, I assure you. If you survive, that is, because you’re going to get attacked from every side, including by your own members.

But if such a therapy, any actually useful and helpful programme of the mind and soul, is to survive long enough to get any real answers, then the story of that programme, the people and groups involved, and also those of its predecessors, must eventually be told, and told straight. (For further information regarding truth see the article on, Existence Magic.)

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The future

So, what, in fact, went wrong with Scientology?

My answer is that nothing went wrong; Scientology is here to stay. But if it is to expand and become a world technology anytime soon, it will need to apply group dianetics.

Literally nothing ever evolves without engrams; show me a smooth evolution of absolutely anything, and I’ll show you fiction.

And the story of Scientology 1.0.0 and 2.0 is a truly amazing tale that actually goes back thousands of years—an incredibly bumpy ride indeed, and we’re still on it.

Speaking of which, often, when I am talking to people who don’t like Scientology, I get the impression from them that we are discussing something sitting in some sort of strange historical vacuum, such as, “Everything is perfectly normal for thousands of years and then, yikes! Scientology!”

Everything good in history has developed from the “fringe.” Get rid of art, religion, and every radical idea we’ve ever had, and poof! No history at all.

I believe that viewing Scientology as “just a weird cult” or some kind of cultural aberration, a freak of nature, is a serious problem. This casual contempt for seemingly unusual religious practises and groups is possibly more dangerous than people are aware of and probably prevents any genuine investigation into man’s long and difficult journey to the present. As a result, this attitude might succeed in blocking the prospect of continuing solutions to man’s condition going forward.

If a person decides to believe that Scientology is weird and strange, then alright, fine, that’s their right. But they either do not know their history or choose to ignore it. Shame, though, because everything that led up to its creation is vital information, the ignorance of which can distort a proper view of reality. As for Scientologists, not knowing this history, as well as their own, can create an “echo chamber,” which could also inhibit their evolution.

Scientology 2.0 will eventually figure out a way to update itself one way or another, and that will make it more accessible to the world at large. Then perhaps Scientology 3.0 will actually come into existence, and 4.0, and so on infinitely.

But for that to happen, there would need to be a rigorous application of group dianetics.

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Next up: I just mentioned the engrams accumulated during the evolution of mankind over the past ten thousand years or so. In the next twenty-odd articles, I’ll attempt to discuss a little about religions, magic, the occult, and so on in an effort to convey to the reader not just how necessary such things are for evolution but how tragedy and the resulting arbitraries have interspersed all these mighty changes. I’ll also try to show that the greatest engrams of all are alive and well today in the forms of political ideologies, scientism, materialism, and pseudo-science, which are, in fact, cults in the most pejorative sense of the word.

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