scientology & celebrities

ive been reading a bit of jung lately and his thoughts on the consequences of assimilating contents of the unconscious seem very relevant to the story of scientology. namely, one possible consequence of the individual is that of megalomania (as can be clearly seen in those thom cruz videos) and in the collective being secrecy and controlling access to information. maybe ill get my thoughts together and write something up

this article!

the end where he basically narrates his confrontation with tommy davis is awes

unfortunate side effect of making me find paul haggis sort of sympathetic :/

He is horrible at everything he does, but at least he likes gay people!

i was thinking while reading it, if paul haggis is the bro who takes down scientology, does that cancel everything else out?

There are one or two things he's done I don't hate, but I think they're the ones he had the least control on the end result.

tbh i dont understand why being a guy who wrote some bad movies once makes him a piece of shit?

Due South was awesome too

because we are joking around dummy

Please don't call me names, max...

he's probably a good guy at heart but he seems like a total dweeb in that article - "as a rebel, i reject society's rules and am sympathetic to the world's underdogs, so i became a scientologist"

Yeah, that article (what I read, since I didn't finish it) made me like him even less.

sry man i got carried away :-/

EZ Streets was great

^^^he's a total idiot! anything good that comes of his life is strictly bonus

xp

It's okay man :)

http://www.graphicsdb.com/data/media/566/I_m_glad_we_re_friends.gif

KILXW

he seems like a total dweeb in that article - "as a rebel, i reject society's rules and am sympathetic to the world's underdogs, so i became a scientologist"

― congratulations (n/a), Monday, February 14, 2011 6:59 PM (35 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

yeah, totally, the way his brain works is very opaque to me, but i found his omg i was in a cult for 30+ years why didn't i leave predicament sort of compelling for some reason?

I'm fascinated by the moment where they give you the Xenu story in a manila envelope and tell you to read it and accept it without question. I bet it's made even trippier if you had heard other scientologists dismiss the Xenu story as a smear.

They probably slip you some LSD and lead you to a Universal Studio-type audio-visual theater and you think everything that is happening is real.

Those macrocephalic sea ponies are almost as freaky as scientology.

i finally read this and it's pretty amazing! there's a bunch of stuff in there I didn't know about, like Sea Org. got a philip k. dick vibe from it all. haggis is a complicated asshole, but its hard not to be like 'fuck yeah' when he says he'd want to take down the church for sea org alone. and the last line - “I was in a cult for thirty-four years. Everyone else could see it. I don’t know why I couldn’t.” - was kinda devastating. sinister cults and the people who join them are so fascinating.

I'm sure it's been said before, but it's funny $'s antipathy for psychiatry when it's basically a dumbed down Freudianism.

ya i was thinking about that. i think psychiatry is basically the competition in a way.

yeah there's a revealing moment where haggis is like, ya im in therapy now and i wish i'd started it 30 years ago

A couple of years ago I went through a thing where I read a lot about Scientology. This story stuck with me: http://www.lisamcpherson.org/. I mean obv it's only one side but I read through the whole thing including pages of hospital records and it's pretty fucked up. Clearwater, FL kinda creepy imo.

When I was in 6th or 7th grade, my best friend convinced me to steal a copy of Dianetics from the local library. We set it on fire in the woods outside Merriweather Post. He was really upset about Scientology! Looking back, this would have been around the time of the Noah Lottick suicide.

Two of our friends never received this New Yorker issue in the mail. Their theory is that their mailman is a Scientologist. Along the same lines, I wouldn't put it past an organization known to buy thousands of copies of Dianetics to boost sales to scour newstands and whatnot for copies of this issue and, er, clear them.

Two of our friends never received this New Yorker issue in the mail. Their theory is that their mailman is a Scientologist.

I think Scientologists are smart enough to have realized that the article is online in its entirety.

Suppressive Packages

That sounds like an anti-diarrheal suppository.

Friend in LA whose NYer sub just lapsed went to tons of newsstands in Hollywood and Santa Monica and couldn't find one. She suspected a buyout.

I'd just as soon suspect a sellout, though. It's kind of a big deal. Almost as big as the snorg girl.

ya i was thinking about that. i think psychiatry is basically the competition in a way.

^^^this is exactly where it comes from. In the 50s, psychiatry was very much in vogue, and especially in sci-fi circles Freud/psychotherapy/psychiatric ideas were HUGE. A cursory survey of sci-fi authors from the time (Sturgeon, Bester, etc) will show the culture was loaded with a fascination for these ideas/approaches and their implications. It was something a lot of smart, successful but still unsatisfied people were turning to, and that was L. Ron's target audience - unhappy people with money and a drive for self-improvement.

Also, the kind of old-school method acting taught in that Beverly Hills class has roots in Freudian psychology as well.

From the article:

"Dianetics, Hubbard said, was a “precision science.” He offered his findings to the American Psychiatric Association and the American Medical Association but was spurned; he subsequently portrayed psychiatry and psychology as demonic competitors. He once wrote that if psychiatrists “had the power to torture and kill everyone they would do so.”

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/02/14/110214fa_fact_wright#ixzz1E3L0UNec

Miscavige! Seems like a weird guy, right?

Miscavige immediately brought to mind the Alby Grant character in 'Big Love'.

yeah, seems like given his power in the organization, he would be this removed, pope-like presence, but the stories of him beating on people are just O_o

new yorker should reprint the feature every issue. that's how you save the magazine industry.

xp Shakey: ...and this is why psychic powers are considered SF and not fantasy. (OK, that's largely Ray Palmer's fault.) As an aside, there was a woman in the early Sixties who managed to get published simply because she had become the guru to a couple of SF bigwigs. She got an Ace Double half and a couple of stories in F&SF (all reportedly quite dire) published before fading away. Can't remember who she is--she did become a minor name in the psychic community later, though.

You are talking about Jane Roberts i think? I'm not sure about her earlier history but she had some influence on Richard Bach and knew Rod Serling.

BTW she is possibly another case, like LRH, where fictional writings got converted into a guru career. Apparently her earlier SF writings (which I have not read) are reflected in her later work as a channeler of this Seth character that you can read about in the link above.

isn't that the What the Bleep do We Know woman?

Finally finished the article. Was a little perplexed at first that the only evidence against it was testimony from ex members, but then by the end, where it was like "LRH has mutant healing powers? BOOM! No he doesn't. Some other idiotic claim? POW! Wrong!" was classy.

xpost. Jane Roberts died in '84 so she can't have been involved with What The Bleep, but her "create your own reality" schtick is not a million miles away.

xxp that would be ramtha

http://www.theawl.com/2011/02/meet-the-heroes-of-early-scientology-reporting%E2%80%94plus-a-visit-to-the-celebrity-centre