Today the Jesus and Mo artist has reprinted a cartoon from 2008 (I didn’t know it had been going that long), with a link to Tom Cruises’s Scientology babble that is amazingly stupid. First the cartoon:
It’s odd that Mo shows such self-awareness, or maybe he’s just completely, ironically oblivious. At any rate, below is the very famous Tom Cruise rant on Scientology that the artists links to. For a long time it was removed from YouTube under threat by the Church of Scientology (why on earth would they want such a video extolling their faith removed?), but is now back up. If you haven’t seen it, do watch it in its entirety. It shows the lunacy of not only the faith (really, no crazier than most other faiths), but of Cruise himself, whose crazy eyes illuminate his crazy words.
What arrogance! If you know the Scientology lingo, you’ll recognize words like “orgs”, “KSW” (“keep Scientology working”), Dave Miscavage (the off-the-rails head of the Church), “SP” (“suppressive person”: a church enemy), “tech” (the Church’s method of training its brainwashed adherents), and so on.
This reminds me.
Somebody asked Billy Graham about a religious cult. His definition of it is so appropriate for christianity, but he did not realize it.
He’s here to help. Thank LRH.
If religion is the opium of the masses then Scientology must be the LSD.
+1
Bwahahaha +1
…and the LDS are only a short step behind that.
PCP masquerading as bootleg Molly, is even more like it.
Blimey, Tom Cruise, the thing really is a big and dangerous thing. We gotta recognize the thing for the thing it is and get together to fight the thing for the thing is going down. You gotta see the thing, know the thing, make the thing nothing.
That’ll be $1 million. x
Theramin Trees on YouTube recently posted an excellent video on how cults use cognitive dissonance to achieve their goals:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IaUhR-tRkHY
Lots of worthwhile stuff on his channel.
This is an excellent video!!!
I highly recommend it.
Indeed. Though I could never take my eye off of the creepy baby in the corner.
I definitely recognized my fundamentalist upbringing in this video. I also found myself recognizing certain non-religious groups too, groups that enforce a strong in-group/out-group dynamic, that ostracize critics, that label anyone not completely on board with the group ideology as evil, etc. Religions are are just the most obvious form of this kind of manipulative group, but not the only form. It’s (become?) the norm for politics, and I can think of a few atheists groups who strike me as fitting the bill also.
Quite often I found myself thinking that’s just like this group or that group. One time was the investment thing – how many times do you hear someone say they’re been studying the Bible for x years etc, for example.
I’m glad he put the bit in about grounding your beliefs in evidence, because often some of the things are also what religious groups say of atheists.
Nice vid
Yes — excellent video. I’m only half way through, but he does a good job of including some of the standard reactions of skeptic-types as problematic — simply labeling cult members stupid and brainwashed actually plays straight into the hands of cult leaders.
I’m not sure if it was deliberate, but the advertisers who worked on The Secret very effectively repelled skeptics while hooking in the vulnerable. I had to force myself to watch just the first five minutes of it — I can’t manage more. I watched it slowed right down, virtually frame by frame and was stunned by how carefully they’d framed to hook people in. It included subliminal images (more revealing of their intentions, I think, than effective) of money, people being burned to death, (to trigger fears) all kinds of father figures and the usual sexual imagery… It was made to look like Rhonda Byrne was in bed with Albert Einstein, etc…
I wrote a bit about it on my blog, but as far as I know none of the professional skeptic organizations took the trouble to analyze it more closely, which I think is a pity, given it’s the most successful spiritual scam for ages.
New Age teachers have figured out a way of running a kind of free-form cult — not as restrictive as Scientology, but with a softer version of many of the elements – partial social isolation for eg. I see it like the difference between colonizing a country (Scientology) and merely setting up a puppet government in a supposed democracy (New Age teachers). The latter *all* run pretty much an identical business plan.
Very interesting!
I’ve never really looked into subliminal messaging but have always been skeptical. Is there good evidence that indicates that it is effective?
I wrote a few blogposts about it in The Secret, focusing more on what it revealed about their motives than its possible effects. I understand that it’s been enormously over-hyped, but depending context might have some effect. What The Secret did very effectively though was disarm critical thought by using emotion — telling how Byrne’s father died, and then her young daughter gives her a book about the law of attraction with a note saying “Mama this will help”. Then the rest of the marketing presents it as Byrne sharing this gift with you, and you being invited to share this gift with all your friends — aka viral marketing.
Thanks for the video. I’m so impressed I’ve signed up as a Patron, and will work my way through the rest of the videos over the next few weeks.
It is disturbing to see people like Tom Cruise, so vigorously devoted to such nonsense even when the entire history of the poorly imagined and awfully written mythology of the cult is a matter of recent modern record. Not to mention how ethically reprehensible so much of the behavior of so many of the key figures in the cult has so often been, including the founder and the organization as a whole.
The first thing that comes to mind is simply that Tom Cruise is an idiot. Satisfying as that is it is unlikely to be accurate. There is certainly more to it than that. The scary thing is that people can be raving idiots about the foundational beliefs that they base their self image and world view on and at the same time otherwise be a high functioning successful member of society. And that that is pretty common.
Though I know it intellectually I can’t for the life of me really understand why some people need to believe in something like gods or magic so badly that they can bring themselves to believe such ridiculous crap.
I suspect that one of the main reasons people seem to need to believe such crap is our innate difficulty in understanding how to make sense of the nonmaterial — by which I mean things like thoughts, values, emotions, virtues, goals, and longings. You can’t see them or pick them up like rocks. They can’t be easily defended against a radical or malevolent skepticism. So what are they? And don’t they deserve special treatment by self and others? Aren’t they the foundation of who and what you are, and want to become? Well then.
Once you’ve mixed up what I’m calling the ‘noble nonmaterial’ with the spiritual realm, then the need for faith becomes self-evident. Stop believing in Scientology (or Christianity or Hinduism or Something Higher) and you lose ALL the higher somethings that make life worth living. It’s all connected. Threaten one, you threaten them all. Our defense mechanisms kick in.
You say my beliefs are absurd and make no rational sense? Well, love doesn’t make any rational sense either — so no problemo. Bullet-proof.
I don’t rule out the “Garbage In, Garbage Out” principle, but it is notable what a strong social element there is in such beliefs, which makes me think it’s not just a question of picking up bad info or a speculation multiplying out of control. There’s also a moral component to it, which is really weird when you realize that morality can’t possibly affect the truth or falsity of a statement, any more than the degree one wants it to be true or false can affect it.
I suppose one crude way of putting it would be that loyalty to a belief system is treated as loyalty to a coalition, be it family, clan, tribe, club, nation, or any kind of movement. This would be relevant if loyalty was the difference between life and death (or direct reproductive success), and if loyalty and similarity of worldview strongly correlated. It might make a decent if provincial proxy rule, because the logic would work like this:
If you’re loyal to a group, then you more or less do everything together, see the same things, learn the same things, and act on the same assumptions. Therefore, a side effect of loyalty would be a similar worldview. If you live in an environment where the correlation between them is powerful, then one’s worldview can be an indirect indicator of how loyal or committed one was to another person’s life.
Therefore, in the right environment where one’s survival and reproductive prospects depended on loyalty to others, a species might evolve that used similarity of worldview as a convenient shorthand for loyalty. Since, in this environment, a clashing worldview would be a genuine correlate for a conflict of interest, it might be worthwhile to use worldviews as a shortcut to understanding.
The price, of course, is that this becomes unhelpful in a radically different environment like the modern world, where most of your survival needs will hopefully be met regardless, and where similarity of worldview doesn’t necessarily equate to loyalty. You end up with a species that treats commitment to a creed as if it were commitment to a group, and that treats commitment to a group as if it were life or death, because to their distant evolutionary ancestors it probably was commitment to a group and it probably was life or death.
Hence commitment to a creed = commitment to a group = life or death. Then you add, say, an evolutionary time lag by having the environment change faster than the evolutionary process can respond, to make this assumption no longer optimal and out of place.
I think there is substantial truth to this. During my journey out of religion I noticed something that I summarized, with a bit of hyperbole, this way: “All human communication is propaganda”. What I mean by this is that people devote almost no effort to determining what is true. Truth, for most people, is some kind of given. Even when they seem to be talking about something like, say, the existence of God, they are really just verifying tribal membership. All of the talking is basically about sussing out loyalty, determining if the person you are talking to can be trusted, is on your team, is a part of your tribe or not. It’s all “defector detection”, in the terminology of game theory. Now this is a bit of an exaggeration, of course. A lot of communication is banal, “pass the pepper”, or “there is a bush full of berries over that hill”. But a huge chunk of communication that seems to be about ideas and truth and understanding are really just propaganda. If you are genuinely interested in figuring out the truth about some topic (existence of God, utility of gun control, you name it), you will find it exceedingly frustrating to talk to most people, because that simply is not their communication goal. Their goal is to reinforce tribal bonds. When my parents sit around and gripe about Obama, they have 0 interest in examining, or even knowing, what Obamas policies and actions are. The point of griping about Obama isn’t to convey information about Obama, about politics, or anything else, but merely to affirm something like tribal membership. Again, this is a slight exaggeration, but I think it works as a first guess.
Of all of my dozens of meat-world friends, I have precisely two who I think are genuinely concerned with figuring out the truth of all the things they might claim to believe at any moment. Of course, these people have changed their minds several times over the years, as they learn new information, as they consider arguments. This makes them seem unreliable and unprincipled to most of my other friends!
This is one of the things that makes science so unique. It’s really only in science that the bulk of non-banal (“pass the salt”) communication shifts from propaganda purposes to attempting to suss our reality. “I don’t know”, becomes not a suspicious signal of dubious loyalty but merely a call for more information.
It certainly does uncomfortable but necessary things to my self-awareness. For one thing, the more I learned about cognitive biases and fallacious arguments, the more I’d notice my own violations: tendencies towards ad hominem, especially if I was annoyed or angered by a response; a failure to fully read up on a topic before discussing its premises; a tendency to read books or visit websites with a similar worldview and avoid other kinds; even an increased awareness of how awful my memory could be in recalling mundane events, much less emotionally coloured ones. This is also something that the books on cognitive biases and websites on fallacious arguments will helpfully prepare you for: no one is immune to such distortion, at least not all the time.
“All human communication is propaganda” – hyperbole, but not by much. 😛 And “defector detection” is such a good term that I’ll have to save a copy of it for future use. 🙂
It is consistent, though: aspiring to intellectual integrity leads to a bizarre kind of conditional (dis)loyalty towards ideas in the particular. Think of how we say that we’d “abandon” evolution if counterevidence came in, whereas “creationists” refuse to admit, or simply can’t see how they can admit, when their idea is unsupported by the facts.
Hats off to your two friends! They must be a rare breed indeed.
The really weird part is when, even after I notice such violations in logic and reason, I’d come up with a plausible-sounding counter in my own mind. Ad hominem was merely “casting doubt on the credentials of the arguer”; not reading other viewpoints was “just a pragmatic response to lack of time and quality of information”, and so on. “Persistent” doesn’t begin to describe it.
I think the group belonging is key. It’s not just belief in gods and the supernatural, but beliefs about anything that you tie your identity up in. Many people have turned their politics into the same kind group identity: sealed off from criticism or correction from empirical experience, dividing the world into good and evil. Some of the worlds most successful political movements are indistinguishable from religious cults save for their invocation of the supernatural. Why, I think there are even some groups of atheists today who have fallen into the trap of creating an us-vs-them world that is manipulative of members in precisely the way that religions are (shun anyone who questions orthodoxy, paint any doubters as evil, deploy all of the cognitive dissonance tricks mentioned in the video posted in #5, etc.).
It’s the wedding of certain cognitive flaws with our (I think) innate need to belong to a group (tribe) that gets us, and the specifics are largely just decoration.
You all, gluonspring, reasonshark and Sastra, have made excellent points and said some things that I would have liked to say, better than I would have been able to. But, I think Tom Cruise and Scientology are outliers, examples of something more going on than the excellent points you all have made. Scientology is very new, does not have a significant presence in any society, and is viewed unfavorably by nearly everyone except other Scientologists.
Perhaps it is merely the combination of people with certain personality and or cognitive features that leave them more susceptible than the average person to being recruited by effective cult leader types.
It almost certainly requires individual inclination, yes. On the Big Five personality test, they might be unusually high in “open-mindedness”. Remember the saying about brains falling out.
The world is complicated enough to admit lots of contributing factors, but I don’t think they’re particularly unusual in that regard, at least not compared with other coalitions. Most of those things you mention are true for almost any beginning group – I might call them “cult” – since they all rely on a degree of clique mentality. For instance, it doesn’t particularly matter that they are “viewed unfavorably by nearly everyone except other Scientologists”. That would probably help rather than hinder the group mentality!
I nearly made the same point but decided to cut it for brevity.
I think it does. The average person will either be born into a group or if seeking a group tend to favor groups that are larger and more respected. There certainly are people that are attracted to groups that are small and viewed unfavorably by most. People that want to be seen as rebels perhaps. Such people are far from rare but they aren’t typical. Most people would rather stick with the comfortable tried and true. I’d bet, though, that the rebel characteristic(s) is good material for cults / beginning groups.
I don’t think there is necessarily something unique in the Tom Cruises of the world compared to a devout Catholic, for example. It could merely be varying degrees of expression of typical human traits. But degrees do matter.
For most, isn’t it that they have been brought up with those beliefs, and the beliefs are so deeply inculcated that the people just can’t imagine themselves (or others!) *not* believing?
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In the case of long established religions, and other ideologies & beliefs, of course. But I am talking about Tom Cruise and Scientology specifically, and any other cases that fit the mold of fanatic believer of new cult. For example, I’m pretty sure that Tom Cruise’s parents were not Scientologists.
*quick look*
Looks like Tom’s parents were probably Catholic. Apparently he considered becoming a Catholic priest early in life.
Well, that tells you something about him …
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Completely coincidentally, I’m sure, the Catholic seminary has long been known to attract a disproportionate share of closeted, self-loathing gay men. They hope the vow of chastity will protect them from the sin of acting on their desires.
Aww Maverick, what happened to you?
Hasn’t been the same since Goose failed to eject and Iceman graduated top aviator.
“true believers can spot it in others, but they never recognize it in themselves”
A) Introspection is an unreliable source for knowledge.
B) luckily we are better in judging others.
Someone should inform Tom of A.
“It’s odd that Mo shows such self-awareness, or maybe he’s just completely, ironically oblivious.”
I think it was clearly the latter. To me, that’s what makes the comic funny – his total lack of self-awareness.
This is when a conspiracy theory might actually be sane. Say, the idea that Cruise & the upper echelons of the “church” were all part of huge scam* to control people and bilk them out of their wealth, property, etc.
*Well, they are, of course, but in this scenario I mean that they’re aware of it and purposefully aiming to deceive everyone they can.
I’m not sure Tom Cruise is that good of an actor!
Maybe that’s because you saw his Razzie-nominated performance in “Cocktail”?
I managed to miss that one.
I must admit, he has been in some movies that I like. I wouldn’t categorize him as an awful actor, he is OK. But it usually always seems as if he is acting, something better actors are able to avoid. Even when he is not supposed to be acting, for example interviews, it seems as if he is.
Hell, at least he didn’t go completely off the rails movie-wise like his Scientology cohort John Travolta did with that awesomely bad movie adaptation of ole El Ron’s epic(ally bad) science fiction magnum opus Battlefield Earth.
I sobbed after Born on the Fourth of July. Coulda been the material, though.
If you watch him in the video, what’s noticeable is that there are large sections of it where he seems to be, basically, acting. He lifts lines from his own films, and looks and attitudes from his own characters, most often Ethan Hunt, and then uses them in his spiel. I think he’s only half-aware he’s doing it.
It’s quite amusing to hear him say “I will not hesitate” with the same fierce, driven, ruthless look he uses when playing a license-to-kill secret agent, only he’s talking about helping someone who’s sprained their ankle in the park or something.
Hah! I just briefly mentioned the same thing just above right before reading your comment.
It is one of the things about him that makes me wonder about his relationship with reality.
Seemed like 9 minutes of talking, throwing out a few lines of disconnected thought and basically saying nothing. The guy said nothing. At one point I thought maybe it’s an add for Nike shoes – just get out there and do it. Maybe a poker game – your either in or out.
I agree. I seemed as if he was really high and thought he was making sense or maybe someone just hit him in the forehead with a ball bat.
Just intellectually vacant and as Jesus and Mo said – idiot.
Couldn’t watch more than a minute of the clip. Cruise’s content-free babbling is bad enough, but the Mission Impossible theme song (playing annoyingly loud over his spiel) made the clip unbearable.
I honestly think things like Nike advert slogans were racing through his brain at that point, along with all his favourite action movie lines, and he was piecing stuff together free-association style. I don’t think he’s enormously bright.
Scientology is more dangerous than some religions (but not all) because:
(a) it seems to have a very authortiarian structure to prevent apostasy.
(b) it is virulently opposed to (clinical) psychology and psychiatry and
(c) explicitly promotes psychological pseudoscience and pseudotechnology.
You know when an insult to the brain tells you a lot about how the brain works. Knock this bit out and you can’t smell, damage another bit and you lose all sense of time. I think the same can be said for people who are religious, in particular those who believe in scientology. What does it tell you about how Tom Cruise’s brain works knowing that he believes in scientology? I think this is a fruitful approach- trying to learn something out of all the BS, rather than simply pronouncing all of them as idiots (well they are but ……)
If you’re looking for more background or explanation, the motherlode for past and current information on the ongoing comedy/tragedy of the cult of scientology is Tony Ortega’s website, the Underground Bunker, at tonyortega.org.
A former editor of Village Voice, he has literally been posting stories daily for years, including coverage of court cases, interviews with ex-members, and the latest efforts by those still “inside”.
Also very good is “Beyond Belief: My Secret Life Inside Scientology and My Harrowing Escape”, by Jenna Miscavige Hill. Her parents, high up in the church, were mostly absent. She was recruited into “SeaOrg” and placed in a sort of boarding school boot-camp. At the age of 11 or so, she was the “medical officer” for everyone there, including adults! One of the things they don’t seem to believe in is childhood.
Besides the catch words/phrases used by Cruise mentioned, I think I heard “out ethics”.