Arthur Ronald Conway Hubbard

The Wild Mind – Part XVI

Scientology 1.0.0 – chapter 23

“The result of … pseudoscientific imitation is to produce experts. Learn from science that you must doubt the experts. As a matter of fact, I can also define science another way: Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.” — Richard Feynman

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Science! Finally, at last, a subject that unequivocally does away with all silly superstitions and fantastical notions!

Humanity can at last heave a sigh of relief and get busy with the real world, smug in the assurance that God is finally, thoroughly, and safely dead and buried. Now that His invisible butt has been relegated to our dark past and irrevocably rendered irrelevant along with all the dangerous idiots that venerate Him, actual progress can finally be made. Huzzah!

Armed with a system that, unlike art, religion, and philosophy, does not lie nor confuse, a system that is sensible and grounded in Reason! A method that is bound to have all the answers man has sought these past terrible millennia. Finally, it can, as remarked by Dostoevsky, “shower upon him every earthly blessing, drown him in bliss so that nothing but bubbles would dance on the surface, as on a sea…”

That’s the story, anyway.

Unfortunately, the same types of deranged and resentful souls that captured actual discussions of religion, philosophy, and everything else have also captured how we think about science. As a result, today we are under attack from proponents of scientism and pseudoscience, two things that have the potential to be far more deadly and dangerous than all the twisted misinterpretations of all the ideas that came before them.

As with the “religious” flagellants of old, there are now among us those who dance marionette-like in burning streets, triple-masked, getting vaccinated at every turn, and chanting their preferred pronouns—people so very much more superstitious and plagued by even greater fantastical notions than any of our ancestors ever were. Should these have their way, demanding psychotic regimes as is ever their wont, we could all be extinct in no time. Which is, in fact, their actual goal.

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Scientism

First, a quick fact: 93% of the members of the National Academy of Sciences proudly identify as atheists. That’s proudly, mind you. Atheists are arguably far more devout than any “religious” zealot in their belief in no God, which is a very unscientific viewpoint indeed as it assumes no other dimensions of conscious reality. But worse, much worse, too many atheists are also (shudder) materialists, which brings us to…

Scientism is defined as excessive belief in the power of scientific knowledge and techniques. What that actually means is, “Forget all the other subjects, especially religion; science is everything.” Which, by extension, is just another form of authoritarianism—the snake that wears many skins.

Actually, scientism fits more or less with one definition of cult, which goes: a misplaced or excessive admiration for a particular thing.

Scientism, the view that science is all that matters, has as its clarion call: “Away with religions and superstition! Away with things that cannot be measured by yardstick, scale, or gauge! All hail ‘Science’!”

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Scientismists

The Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, Mao’s China and the CCP. Thinking of “science” as the only answer to all man’s problems inevitably leads to mischief.

Dangerous inventions, like atom bombs, and anti-human inventions, like “gain of function” viruses, are, in fact, inevitable. But this concentration on what’s objectively real to the exclusion of all else opened an entirely new can of worms as it divorced man from true meaning. Meaning had previously been more or less built into reality because too much misalignment with Natural Law so quickly got one killed. Sure, the tools of technology ease the problems of survival, but survival as what? Meat puppets? Uh oh.

But there’s a more serious problem with scientism because of the door it, in turn, opens.

Scientism is not always unscientific, as many scientismists are capable of actual science, nor is it “bad science,” since bad science is actually just no science. No, its danger is that it inevitably leads to pseudoscience.

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Pseudoscience

Away with chimaeras; for all that matters is matter! At last, we have ended the age of subjectivity and fully, and apparently irrevocably, ushered in the new era of total objectivity. But lo! In a miraculous reversal, this absolutism instead ushered in a degree of such lethal, all-encompassing subjectivity as has never been seen before: pseudoscience.

Pseudoscience, or fake science, is the field of science captured and dressed up, like a pig in lipstick, by bad actors.

Fake science looks like science, sounds like science, even feels like science, but is actually a fiction meant to fool people, especially legislators, those dupes who are needed to jam it down people’s throats, down upon the citizenry by law, as happened with the COVID lockdowns, masks, “social distancing,” and, as we are now seeing, the “vaccines,” none of which were. Actual vaccines, I mean. (One sure sign of totalitarianism is the manipulation–mangling– of language.)

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A crushing world

Possibly the main reason so many of us are convinced there is some sort of objective reality to the detriment of all other paradigms today is because the Enlightenment was so successful in trouncing subjectivity.

Enlightenment science inadvertently threw actual and true enlightenment under the atheistic, materialistic bus by overpowering the religious world and its emphasis on spiritual matters due to its success in developing new technologies and the fact that many of these technologies have been used so successfully in murdering people and stealing their stuff (war).

But there might be another, more basic reason for our modern objectivistic convictions: that what “happens” to one so often comes as a complete surprise, as is certainly the case with all accidents, small and large. If something can sneak up on you and catch you off guard (gotcha!), then it must be more real or, at least in some mysterious way, more causative than you are. For example, in an actual post-accident police report, the badly shaken driver claimed that “the tree just rushed up and hit me!”
 
Just observe the astonishment on the faces of young children when they encounter unexpected objects; it can be quite heartbreaking at times. People had previously ignored this deeply profound phenomenon of altered perception (shock), which can play a significant role in permanently reshaping people’s worldviews (and is partly what led to the development of Dianetics).

Before the Enlightenment, such accidents could be attributed to supernatural forces such as demons or gremlins. But with the new emphasis on the objective universe, such entities as demons and gremlins were “vanquished” and gave way to a cold, crushing reality—that is, the harsh, emotionally frigid, and indifferent physical universe, itself an entity that was also to eventually obtain the mantle of an enemy, to be fought and “conquered.” But this alone doesn’t “convince” one that there is an objective reality wholly separate from oneself. No, this kind of separateness, or “separatedness,” also requires the advancement of a major step for consciousness, which was to divide subjective and objective reality, called individualism.

Individualism is, and actually always has been, at the heart of all cultural and technological advancement and was at last isolated as the “missing ingredient” in social systems by the Enlightenment philosophers, as explained in earlier Wild Mind chapters. It takes an individual to properly “look” at objective reality because you have to be somewhat separate from an object to properly see it. The individual, though, being separate, can also get separated from their responsibilities to the group.

So, individualism without wisdom can go weirdly sideways and give birth to atheists and materialists who are actually so individuated from subjective reality that they somehow collapse back into it; all becomes objective, and all spirit is lost, a kind of subjective nightmare.

I mean, if there is only an objective universe, then who, I politely ask, is looking at it?

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Materialism

Materialism is the tendency to consider material possessions and physical comfort more important than spiritual values, or the theory or belief that nothing exists except matter. Same thing, really.

Material, as in the physical universe, is really good. Stuff, as stuff, is great! But it can happen that a person gets overwhelmed by it.

When the culture is to the point of nurturing reason, as happened in the 17th and 18th centuries, certain people unfortunately fixate on objectivity to the exclusion of any and all other consciousnesses; this results in “materialism.”
 
Some of us are very much more surprised by smashing into things, called engrams, than others, and it is quite likely that this is the cause of this form of mental illness

About the word engram: detractors of my father love to bandy about weird words like “engram” in order to make him look, well, weird. This tactic only succeeds because people are unfamiliar with the subject matter I’ve been writing about and haven’t encountered it previously. In fact, psychology used the word engram long before Dianetics. In psychology, an engram is a “memory trace.” It comes 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.”

In Dianetics, an engram is a past moment of pain and/or unconsciousness that may, when triggered, act upon the individual or group in the present, possibly causing irrational (non-survival) behaviours. This is a more exact definition of “memory trace,” if you will.
 
In any case, materialists find themselves in a precarious situation where they completely surrender to a subjective perspective, leading to feelings of resentment and even vengeance. This is because they firmly believe that objective reality is undeniably, irrevocably, and painfully real. Too real. Confusing? Well, yes.

Confusion is a condition far, far more of us are stuck in than is readily believed. One cannot differentiate where one is from where one was; past places and times get muddled, and keeping the subjective universe in balance with the objective universe becomes nigh impossible. To not be in confusion is to know where one is and to keep these realities in flow, moving in and out, one from the other, at will.

In other words, without a harmonious separation of and dance between the subjective and objective, you get only a subjective reality; if all reality is subjective, then all reality is subjective. On the other hand, if all reality is objective, then all reality is… again… magically, subjective. Hence confusion.

It goes like this: first, a person is living in a more or less subjective paradigm in a collectivist, religious-based society (pre-Enlightenment Europe). Then he gets more separated from this subjective worldview. Being unable to handle this responsibility, he individuates, insists on an absolute objective take on reality (materialism), then collapses back into the collective by activating an absolutist subjective reality. In a word, this could be called “ultra-collectivism” and results in extreme socialism (communism) and things a lot worse. The collectivist is quite individuated from reality, hence the need to clump together like huddled animals and vote for psychotic regimes.

You see, responsible individuals can communicate with other realities and society without collapsing into anything. An individuated person cannot. Individuation means to distinguish from, or single out from, others of the same kind, and comes from early 17th century: from mediaeval Latin individuat– “singled out”, from the verb individuare, from Latin individuus, from in– “into” + dividuus “divisible” (from dividere “to divide”). A wise and fully responsible individual isn’t obsessively or compulsively divided or separate from their society and can be counted on to cooperate sanely, whereas an individuated person is stuck in an obsessive and compulsive version of individuality and is therefore dangerous to the group by engaging in confusions such as emphasising “group identity” as opposed to individual character.

Individuation begins at 3.0 on the Scientology scale of emotions (see article, Space, Emotion, and Well-Being) and gets worse as one goes lower. Any person below 3.0 can’t handle individualism.

Regardless of how some people are “hurt by objects,” the paradigm shift that is essential to all useful investigations of matter is the realisation that there is an objective world that should be perceived as somewhat separate from oneself rather than too separate (which is what is meant by “aloof,” an undesirable form of cold detachment). A “balanced” view, one might say, is what works best to investigate anything.
 
Anyway, as both Dianetics and Scientology 1.0.0 posit, this phenomenon of bashing into stuff too often, when unresolved (uncleared), helps produce the high degrees of mental illness that afflict civilisation today.
 
Happily “outside” of matter, not collapsed or smashed into, is an extremely pleasant way to be. In Scientology 1.0.0, we refer to this as “being exterior.” Interesting, no?

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Science and the individual

Just as with art, the collective cannot do science because collectivism suffers from groupthink, a morbid form of group agreement. Every time you hear, “Scientists all agree,” you know something has gone horribly wrong.

Proper scientific papers present the findings of experiments that scientists have carried out, and then other scientists work to replicate those experiments to see if they discover the same results that might support the original findings. Such papers may appear to “agree,” but only in the way that similar patterns in nature agree; there is no “consensus” beyond the observations and the results.

This is why individualism matters so much: because only an individual is capable of breaking free of groupthink, authoritarianism, and the like. Only the individual can achieve the degree of independent thought and observation necessary to doing real science—the kind of thinking that notices things without the group’s approval.

Solomon Asch (1907–1966) oversaw a series of conformity experiments to ascertain whether and how individuals submitted to or disobeyed a majority group agreement. Though not perfect (no experiment ever is), Asch’s trials showed a tendency for most people to conform to groupthink more often than not, despite the fact that those individuals knew what they were agreeing to was incorrect. Such is the power of belonging in groups.

The group mind is animalistic and is mostly a force-based mind, while the individual mind is a reason-based mind. If you disagree too much with the group, it will either beat you up or kick you out. The rule of U.S. Constitutional law, i.e., the First Amendment, is there, in part, to ameliorate this crude phenomenon.

Although it can often go askew, especially without proper training in critical thought, the individual mind operates as a kind of independent observational platform. Although groups can and do accomplish simple reasoning, similar to the somatic reasoning of animals, the purpose of the group is that, by the use of force, the environment can be mostly brought under enough control to bring about its own survival. For the lone individual, this is indeed a very difficult thing to do in a dynamic and seemingly unforgiving world. But despite the fact that a group may contribute, one person is always the source, the de facto wellspring, of all inventions and discoveries.

I mean, the word Soviet comes from the Russian sovet, which means “council”. Union means “unity.” Soviet Union: “Council Unity”? Say no more.

And 中国共产党 means “Communist Party of China.” “Commune” means group, and “party” means a group of people united against other groups.” So, “Opposition Group Group”? Good lord, really? Say no more! And to think that my government wants to be just like them! Sad.

Anyhoo. When it was put forward that the key to discovery and invention was the individual, you got the Enlightenment.

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The X factor

Pseudoscience is nonsense parading as science. While scientism is an ideology based on the idea that all the answers to man’s problems lie in materialism, scientism is still often science in terms of praxis. It’s just never going to solve any problems other than material problems; that is to say, it will never get at any underlying (more fundamental) problems because real science, without the blinders of arbitrary ideologies, always recognises the “X factor” in all its formulations.

The X factor is a variable in a given situation that could have the most significant impact on the outcome. The “X” indicates this variable as not just unknown until it occurs but unpredictable.

Real science seeks to understand the underlying source of reality, and that lies in the field of metaphysics, which is the realm of the X factor. Any scientist who ignores or discounts metaphysics cannot be a true scientist.

Isaac Newton, possibly the greatest scientist that ever was? He was a deeply religious guy (and an alchemist) and thought the greatest man who ever lived was Jesus Christ, and Jesus was one of the greatest X factors in Western history. Sir Newton was not stupid and understood what all scientists should understand: that over the hill of science lies the valley of God. (I wish I could remember where I heard that quote; it’s a doozy.)

One of the surefire ways to appear smart and sophisticated is to be cynical and pessimistic, as atheists so often are. Three of today’s most prominent atheists are Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, and Richard Dawkins. These are smart, intelligent, and well-educated men, and we should listen to them, right? But if you do, bring more than just a grain of salt; bring the whole bag.

I mention them because twenty years or so ago, Harris’s book End of Faith (2004), Dennett’s book Breaking the Spell (2006), Dawkin’s The God Delusion (2006), and their now deceased friend Christopher Hitchens’ book God is Not Great (2007)—notice a theme here?—really added fuel to an already raging fire. There’s a very real problem with burning down religion, though.

As they are also materialists, except, maybe, Mr. Harris (not sure), they have developed a world model that is made up of only physics, which is supposed to be meaningful enough in and of itself. Well, sure, if you want to ignore the X factor as well as lose almost all sense of humour, beauty, wonder, and awe. Talk about getting hit over the head by matter, seriously! I mean, seriously.

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Metaphysics

The physical universe is referred to in Scientology 1.0.0 as the 6th dynamic (for a description of the Dynamics, click here).

In Scientology 1.0.0, the 6th dynamic is defined as not just matter and energy—which is the definition for physics—but also space and time.

The definition of physics assumes space and time, but I think things are more clear, or wonderfully strange if you will, when it’s all laid out as “MEST”—Matter, Energy, and Space, and Time—as you can’t have matter without space; and as matter is condensed energy, and energy moves, you get time: bada bing bada boom. Logically, as soon as one understands that there has to be also space and time for there to be any matter or energy, one finds themselves confronted with the footprints of spirit and infinity. This is metaphysics.

An atheist is usually a believer in logic and reason, though, and so they might be shown that a universe without spirit (represented by 0) and infinity (represented by ∞), despite being the greatest mysteries in the universe, cannot, in fact, exist at all. These are actually the two things that provide true meaning in life because, without them, there isn’t any. Life, I mean. Just because something isn’t tangible don’t mean it ain’t real.

Also, it’s probably no coincidence that those who believe that all can be explained with mathematics (or say that mathematics is how “the mind works” or something silly) have no understanding at all for 0 and ∞. Which is really strange because without 0 and ∞, nobody can do any higher mathematics either, something that should be obvious. A baffling confusion indeed.

Another way to discuss the 7th and 8th Dynamics is as creativity and the Creation of creativity. Both are X factors, as in, where does life come from anyway? Actually, forget life; where does consciousness come from?

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Summary

So, once you toss out the 7th and 8th dynamics, as happened with the Enlightenment, one has become a thoroughgoing materialist and has opened the door to scientism. Once you get that far down into the materialist/scientismist abyss, then you get the wholly subjective confusion of pseudoscience—fake science, made-up science. And… here we are, folks!

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The way out

The X factors: the 7th and 8th dynamics, 0 and ∞. Creation, art, humour, fun, experimentation, etc. etc, all lie uniquely within the breast of the sovereign individual. Although the sovereign individual is not always particularly creative, the truly creative individual, and this includes all discoverers, inventors, and true scientists, is always sovereign and always courts the often dangerous fringes of reality (which I shall get into more later).

Any society or culture that values such an individual should give him access to a workable technology of mind and spirit, if such exists, and thus rehabilitate his and her individualism. A culture that understands and values individualism will see a rise in discovery and invention—science—which, in turn, increases the survival of everyone.

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