by Bruce S.Thornton // FrontPage Magazine
The HBO documentary about Scientology, “Going Clear,” is a must-see. Not so much because it exposes Scientology as a moneymaking, totalitarian cult, something most people already have known for 50 years. More useful is the film’s description of Scientology’s ideas, techniques, and tactics, for they bear an eerie resemblance to contemporary Progressive belief and practice.
The first dimension of Scientology, as its name suggests, is scientism. This is the notion that human identity and behavior both individually and socially can be understood and hence manipulated as successfully as real science understands and manipulates the material world. Because of that success, genuine science has immense authority and commands respect that scientism attempts to expropriate. That’s why L. Ron Hubbard, Scientology’s founder, dressed up a retooled Freudianism and space-alien mythology with new technical-sounding jargon and dubious technology. Hence neologisms like “scientology,” “dianetics,” or “ingram,” hence the “E-Meter,” a glorified carnival attraction with knobs and dials replete with numbers and oscillating needles that supposedly identify and measure psychic trauma. This patina of scientific objectivity made Scientology attractive to potential recruits who had failed to find answers to their psychic discontent in traditional religion or in psychotherapy.
Scientism has similarly characterized Progressivism from its beginnings. The core conceit of progressives is that traditional knowledge and wisdom are inadequate for understanding human nature and solving the more complex problems created by industrialism and new technologies. Those problems needed “sciences” like sociology, economics, and psychology: “The great triumph of modern psychology,” Walter Lippmann wrote in 1914, “is the growing capacity for penetrating to the desires that govern our thought.” Thus we need government by the elite “hundreds who are wise,” as Woodrow Wilson put it in 1887, and “enlightened administration,” as F.D.R. called it in 1932. Politics should no longer be, as the Founders envisioned, about leaders of virtue, experience, and wisdom governing within the Constitutional order that protects political freedom from conflicting factions and clashing “passions and interests.”
Rather, progressives prefer technocratic rule based on “scientific” knowledge, not to protect freedom, but to achieve utopian goals like “social justice” and “equality.” Like Scientology’s “auditors” who possess the secret, “scientific” knowledge that can enlighten and improve the neophytes, progressives assume that their ideological opinions are the fruit of reason and science. As people of objective knowledge and respect for facts, they think they are better able to rule than those still mired in ancient superstitions like religion or even common sense, the masses who are “selfish, ignorant, timid, stubborn, or foolish,” as Wilson wrote, or “stupid,” as Obamacare architect Jonathan Gruber said, or who “get bitter” and “cling to guns and religion,” as Obama sneered.
Given the assumption that their ideology is really science, progressives dress up their subjective and frequently irrational prejudices in pseudo-science. Contrived statistics are a favorite device, for numbers with decimal points appear objective and inarguable. There’s the false claim that women earn only 77% of what men make, or that 20% of college co-eds suffer sexual assault, or that 97% of scientists endorse anthropogenic global warming. These numerical confections, like the dancing needles in the E-meter gauge, imply that these issues are no more a matter for debate than are the law of gravity or the spherical earth. Of course, in reality such statistics are camouflage for ideological, not scientific beliefs.
But to progressives, they are scientific facts, so anyone who disagrees is either hopelessly ignorant or willfully evil, blinded by bigotry or in thrall to religious superstition. This explains the nastiness of progressive attacks on those who disagree with them, the quick recourse to ad hominem smears of the sort that appear only on the conservative fringe. Just as Scientology defames critics and defectors with false accusations and character assassination, so too progressives frequently hurl epithets like “racist” at those who criticize Obama, or indulge preposterous tropes like the “war on women,” or throw ugly names like “denier,” redolent of Holocaust denial, at anyone who questions that anthropogenic global warming is a scientific fact rather than a hypothesis. And progressives are eager to use the power of government and institutions like the IRS and college administrations to silence and stigmatize those who oppose them.
This explains another similarity: the rationalization of opposition as a conspiracy of the malignant evil against the enlightened good. Nothing bespeaks the cultic mentality like the belief that a “vast right-wing conspiracy,” as a newly announced presidential candidate has put it, rather than the failure of progressive ideology and policy, explains their opponents’ criticism. Scientology is famous for its aggressive use of this conspiratorial rhetoric to deflect inquiries into its practices, blaming them on cabals of doctors and psychologists angry at Scientology for challenging their lucrative monopoly on mental health. So too we hear progressives harping on and on about the “Koch brothers” or the “Israel lobby” or “big pharma” or “big oil” or the “1%,” all those “malefactors of great wealth who defraud and exploit the people,” as the 1936 Democratic platform put it.
Finally, and most important, is the “great leader,” the messianic figure, the transformative personality whom no one must doubt or criticize, and whom the faithful must defend and protect. For Scientology it is founder L. Ron Hubbard, a mythic figure whose alleged intellectual talents and achievements have nothing to do with the real man. One of the spookiest moments in “Going Clear” is the footage of Tom Cruise and current Scientology honcho David Miscavage saluting a gigantic picture of Hubbard in a scene evocative of Orwell’s 1984.
As for progressives, they have a long history of romances with dictators, from Mussolini in the 1920s to Mao in the 1960s and Fidel Castro today. This preference for a strongman reflects the progressive belief that their utopian aims require a vigorous centralized power unimpeded by the will of an ignorant “people.” Thus no matter how many murdered, imprisoned, or tortured, the “revolutionary” hero, the messiah bearing the new knowledge of “social justice” is worshipped by progressives, who will viciously attack Israel for dispersing mobs with rubber bullets, even as political prisoners in Cuba or Venezuela are tortured and silenced. To paraphrase Sylvia Plath, every progressive “adores a fascist, the boot in the face.”
So too have progressives viewed Barack Obama ever since he came upon the political scene in 2004. No other presidential candidate or president has been larded with so much hyperbolic praise and inflation of his mediocre abilities, from Chris Matthews’ tingling leg to David Brooks’ awe at The One’s perfect crease in his trousers. Nor has any other candidate or president been spared scrutiny or investigation as much as Obama has. Much of his history remains as mysterious as his college transcripts, and what we do know comes from his semi-fictional memoirs. Meanwhile the media have been complicit, like good cult-members, in protecting the image and burnishing it when necessary, ignoring inconvenient facts like Obama’s long friendship with race-baiter Jeremiah Wright and ex-terrorist Bill Ayres, winking at his blatant abuses of executive power, and letting pass gaffes and blunders that would have kept the media frenzied for weeks had a Republican committed them. We’ll soon see if Hillary Clinton is afforded the same adoration and studied indifference to her lack of achievement and her personal scandals.
Progressivism under Obama has finally transformed from a political movement into a cult. Fact, reason, argument, and evidence are fruitless against the blind certainty and commitment to dogma that characterize the progressive mind. The only thing to do about progressives is expose their absurdities, and then beat them at the polls.
URL to article: http://www.frontpagemag.com/2015/bruce-thornton/l-ron-obama-and-the-church-of-progressivism/
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Brilliant description and analogy, although did L. Ron ever have the power to give nuclear weapons to jihad crazed mullahs?
Kerwin,
L. Ron lectured continuously against nuclear proliferation and the income tax, and the IRS.
This was one of the reasons they came after him when he was doing “dianetics.”
Do some reading and you will see that L Ron was not a stupid man, no where near it.
I’ve read many of his books, as I have a good friend who is an ex scientologist and has the
entire library, or most of it. He has let me borrow about 10 of the books he says are great reads
no matter what. He was right. One of them is “The Science of Survival.” Excellent.
Just google L. Ron Hubbard, anti nuclear congress and you’ll see he was preaching in DC against nukes in the early 50’s.
This is the first reply that I have ever gotten. Thank you. I may be dating myself, but my college roommates were discussing L. Ron before he became famous. Back to the actual point of my original comment: Progressive religion is infinitely more dangerous than L. Ron could ever be.
L. Ron Hubbard was listed as an indicted co-conspirator in the government’s successful prosecution of 11 top Scientologists, including Hubbard’s wife, Mary Sue, for their program called “Operation Whitewash” in which Scientologists where told to use their jobs, positions, theft or subterfuge to try to steal and/or replace government records in order to sanitize LRH’s reputation. Most of this focused on stealing a series of crazy letters Hubbard had written to the FBI.
Hubbard also lectured that he was a nuclear scientist, which was patently false, as he failed the only course he ever took on the subject in college, before dropping out. He also claimed he had buried gold all over planet Earth in previous lifetimes, and set out to find it, but never did. To judge Hubbard correctly, though, I think you really need to look at his BIG promises. You DON’T get perfect health when you go clear. You DON’T gain super powers as a Scientolgist “Operating Thetan” (which Tom Cruise claims to have, BTW). These promises are just the sales and marketing hype that entice the gullible into the system of totalitarian hypnosis that underlies all of Scientology.
At his essence, LRH was a story-teller who told enough colorful stories to attract a following, whose devotion satisfied Hubbards’s megalomania, which he manipulated till it evolved into a full cult of sycophantic worshipers. Interestingly, LRH also had a very Nazi-like description of his critics. The “Suppressive Person” (SP) is to a Scientologist what the Jew or non-Aryan was to a Nazi.
Another way Scientology and National Socialism were alike is in accepting and basing their own operating policy on occult magical beliefs. The inner circle formed around Hitler followed magical thinking of a utopian Aryan/Nordic mythology which had some reference to the lost city of Atlantis. These beliefs manifested in the deadly notion of racial purity, eugenics and the horrific “Final Solution.” And like the Nazi final solution, LRH once wrote that all the SPs on the planet, around two and a half percent of the population, should be destroyed without mercy or guilt.
We see propaganda and hypnosis in the realm of climate alarmism, too. That’s why I sometimes call modern climate “scientists “Climate Scientologists.” Like LRH, they’re attempting to advance a narrative and gain believers, and part of that program includes trying to brainwash school children who will later be incapable of critically evaluating the truth of a highly complex, natural system.
A note of correction to Mr. Thornton. I suspect that close to 97% of scientists WOULD accept AGW on some scale or another. AGW is sort of like short-hand for recognizing that CO2 does have some effect on atmospheric temperatures. But what many of those 97% don’t accept is catastrophic AGW. You need to add a ‘C’ to the acronym, making it CAGW. Each of the 4 terms is important and leaving one off makes it easier for semantic infiltration to occur. Without the catastrophe, there is no need for alarm. If you know climate alarmists, it’s all about the ‘C.’ They’re pimping the catastrophic, unproven feedback, not the tiny little bit of AGW that humans might be, and indeed, probably are causing.
I need to make one correction and expand on another point I made.
The Scientology operation intended to sanitize Hubbard’s reputation by stealing and/or replacing government documents was called Operation Snow White, not Whitewash. AND many documents were targeted, not just his crazed letters to the FBI. Other documents included Hubbard’s military records, which categorically disprove Hubbard’s claims of being wounded, blinded, and of being a war hero. When these claims go, the most enticing claims about healing and expanded ability that Hubbard made in his book ‘Dianetics’ go with them. Hubbard was indeed, a consummate liar.
This is not a defense of Scientology, but an exposé of Science with a Spiritual dimension, written by me.
WHEN WE LEARN TO MOVE MOUNTAINS
New science is old reality. There seems to me to be plasma-state anomalies all connected, but the commonality of connection escapes me beyond the observation we can manipulate some materials in a plasma state through mere thought. Everyone’s talking about it and I’m the last to learn of it. You want to be an alchemist too?
If I had to phrase a term for the commonality state shared in these videos it would be “the materials’ state of zero point flux-flowing resonance” … aka their superconducting characteristics. The term Flux and/or flux-flowing is used here in the same sense as used by David Hudson about 46 minutes into his viral video on ORMUS…our quantum-level, infinite energy feed that keeps atomic particles vibrating and running for ever off the aether of empty space. Some elements and compounds superconduct. They lose 4/9ths of their mass to an alternate dimension, lose 4/9ths of their gravity as the material disconnects from our dimension, all the atoms vibrate in the same two dimensional plane acting as one atom creating a Meissner effect that blocks out 100% of outside magnetic fields and…..wait for it….the material seems to communicate…like for real!
CHINA PURPLE – A COVER STORY FOR ANNOUNCING NEW ENERGY?
From the made-for-TV movie: Netflix: “China’s Terracotta Warriors.”
In this serious science movie about “China’s Terracotta Warriors,” near the very end (49-minutes) of the museum curator’s discussion of the paint used to cover part of the Terracotta Warrior’s colorful uniform, a bomb shell scientific release is made concerning the paint known as “China Purple.”
“China Purple” is a paint containing an oxide of lead that when energized with intense light (high energy light) …. Oh by the way….transforms from three dimensional molecule into a two dimensional wave pattern that has properties that will CHANGE SCIENCE AND THE WORLD. I’m guessing this occurs at the material’s flux flow resonance level of super conductivity, probably a Class 2 Superconductor… Source…Netfix “China’s Terracotta Warriors.”…. towards the last 10 minutes of the film. The movie does not discuss measurable changes in mass in relation to transformation of material from three dimensional physical molecule into exotic 2-dimensional wave energy. Nor can they measure the mass while super conducting as physicist Hal Putoff’s paper suggests.
BRILLIANT PHYSICIST HAL PUTOFF’S PAPER
However my conjecture is the movie just did not want to take the time to talk about the mass transformation, it was too exotic a discussion to start late in the film. There seems to always be suppressive government classified defense secrets connected to anything that makes gravity decrease. The movie seems to represent a public relations introduction of formerly black-ops (Ref video published April 8, 2015 “Dr Steven Greer, Council For Interplanetary Relations Announcement) physics subject of antigravity, time dilation, and zero point energy (free energy) while hiding the subjects in plain sight behind the oh-by-the-way casual mentioning of nano-technology computer manufacturing circuitry improvements that “might” enable better computer performance. And that’s the end of the movie? A real cliff hanger.
HAL PUTOFF’S PAPER
According to Hal Putoff’s paper referenced in the David Hudson’s, Ormus Video, this superconducting wave energy state has to be corrected by a 5/9ths correction factor to account for its loss of measured mass (it will weigh 5/9ths of its original weight ….56% of original weight while superconducting). 5/9th’s correction exactly matches David Hudson’s laboratory annealings…then return to 100% on cool-down back to room temperature.
Putoff’s Paper referenced in the David Hudson video starting at 46-minutes into the video states that “Gravity is not a separate field.” That gravity is produced by the interaction of electrons, protons, neutrons, and particles with the quantum level vacuum energy of space. The exotic research in “China’s Terracotta Warriors” is mentioning to the public the same findings as David Hudson in the David’s ORMUS video, aka Monoatomic Gold. These exactly coincide With Potoff’s predictions. Of course, the museum curator’s off hand comment carries the patina of real science, while David Hudson’s real science carries the patina of Farmer John and the Oak Ridge Boys telling a story.
MONOATOMIC GOLD
Monatomic Gold (aka Monoatomic Gold) apparently transforms when annealed and measured by thermal gravimetric analysis, to 5/9ths its normal state. 46- minutes into video. THE DAVID HUDSON VIDEO
Then finally this video panel of prominent whistleblowers:
THE WHISTLEBLOWER VIDEO
“Round Table Discussion Saturday Secret Space Program Conference, 2014 San Mateo,” published March 9, 2015
Go 1-hour and 28-minutes and 50-seconds into the whistleblowers video and pick up on the comments made on the subject of “Plasma”.
The Whistleblower video panel members state that some high energy plasma states react to the experimenter’s “intentions.” In other words “What we think, impacts beyond ourselves!” Again evidence that what we think and feel alters directly the world outside us.
Those who study ancient alchemy often come to the similar understanding that the philosopher’s stone is the inner spirit and once found, mountains can be moved….but the is a catch***
COLD FUSION
And a fourth source: “Brian O’Leary On The Corruption Of the Secular Science World – Free Energy and UFO’s” … That consciousness intention effects the outcomes in cold fusion experiments.
I can’t fully pin down the common feature among these videos except to speculate that various elements (of the platinum group) and class 2 superconductors, seem to open a channel to another dimension when annealed and brought to their state of flux-flowing resonance where some higher authority or the material’s own characteristics, meld with human consciousness or perhaps both access the Akashic plane of infinite intelligence through using the material, that enables one to communicate with the material so as to allow the material to express itself along with its properties in ways the thinking mind requests, depending on the “intension” of the conscious being imparting the request. Each substance has its own unique expressions. That’s as close as I can come to what’s apparently being conveyed in all these videos, sometimes directly, sometimes indirectly conveyed. In the case of monatomic white powder gold, however it super conducts at body temperature! David Hudson does’t say mindful intent alters the metal’s state. Hudson states instead that if the monatomic gold is ingested the human itself will super conduct and have elevated mental powers and body functions including mental telepathy, mind reading, intuition so intune with the cosmos as to see the future with high degree of accuracy, and not have to eat to live in normal good health. Hudson has dropped off the YouTube pages and is overseas running human trials. If you start hearing a voice in your head an no one is with you, maybe ask “Is this you David?”
THIS IS ALCHEMY
***The practice of expressing your “Intent” upon a material to actually achieve a given out come, would seem to reach deeply into the human soul and test one’s very character challanging you and drawing you quickly to a brink. Ultimatley either the grace of purity or the entrapment of passion will place the alchemist in the throes of the free will choice: To be either in service to others or to be in service to self? Thus forcing a supreme and singularly important personal spiritual choice. And when those others you are serving are found to have become corrupted, what then?
I remember quite well when,in the 1950’s, the science fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard wrote that he was tired of writing for a few cents a word. If you want to be rich in the United States, he asserted, the best thing to do is invent a religion.
This was no hidden document it was in one of the major sic-fi mags. That someone can in advance announce that he intends to con people, then con them and yet get them to believe him, has astounded me these sixty or so years.
If there is anything further we need to convince us that mankind is not perfectible, I don’t know what it is. Nonetheless, I am certain further proofs will always emerge and be ignored as ever. Our Adversary is ever on the prowl.
I love to see a Dr Thornton column. My fervent hope is that Obama will live long enough — after his stint as ruler-of-the-world UN Secretary General — to realize that he has been an abject failure with no accomplishments other than precipitating the downfall of the west. There will be a school of historians, however, who will say that he was the One who foresaw that downfall and acted accordingly.
And yes, Clinton will probably get the same treatment. The Republicans should have preempted the smart “post-racist” set by persuading Colin Powell to run. Now they need to preempt the “post-sexists.”
Colin Powell is a progressive and a traitor to the Republican party. We would have gotten “Obama-lite” with General Powell.
Another excellent article that strips that rotten facade of Progressives and their, “egalitarian” motives.
Dr. Hanson, I have a question that I hope you might answer. ISIS and other jihadi groups see American Blacks in prisons, as a key group that can be recruited to their cult. This would create a 5th column that would place terrorists in our midst, if successful. I believe that their is a dearth of history written on the vast extent of the enslavement of Africans by Arabs in the pre-Islam era and after the creation of Islam. From what I have been able to read, the number of slaves sold by Arab slavers far outnumbers the slaves sold to the West through West Africa. Slavery has continued openly in the Arab world, especially to the Gulf States, right up to the present day. I found a youtube video created in the early 1970’s of a slave market in Zanzibar captured on film via a hidden camera. If this knowledge could be disseminated to a larger audience the attraction to Islam by US black prisoners might lose a major part of it’s attraction that might stop the creation of a 5th column in the USA. The challenge would be to get this information through the mainstream media filter. I know you are a busy man, but any thoughts on this?
Always have to wonder about these guys who rummage around and use ‘science’ and want to be some sort of technical tailors for humanity. They probably think the jargon gives them an intellectual cachet.
Scientology looks to be a religion in the human ‘construction’ industry with the bricks used to build it having the texture of ‘materialistic’ marshmallows…;-)…
Excellent article! I would like to point out, though, that the “Law of Gravity” is still a subject for debate. Many people have a fundamental misunderstanding about the nature of science. In real science, everything is debatable. Scientists are supposed to be skeptical. Newton’s law of gravity was overturned about a hundred years ago by Albert Einstein. It should now be called “Newton’s approximation of gravity for things that have mass and low velocity.” Unfortunately, that is harder to say. Newton’s formula works for things that we all encounter near the surface of the earth. It does not work for large masses, for light, and for high velocities. In his lifetime, Newton was aware that it could not explain the orbits of Mercury and Venus. It is this flaw of thinking that science is settled on anything that causes people to suspend the normal skepticism that they were born with. So instead of demanding the proof that science requires, they just accept what they are told by someone in a white lab coat, thinking that they would not be able to understand the details anyway.
Excellent article by Monsieur Thornton,
Vous ête un des meilleure chroniqueur du Web.
Happy Week End.
Yes, progressivism is a cult but is there a similar cult on the right? The Bush’s promised fiscal restraint but delivered the opposite when in office. We were told that the Bush’s had smart foreign policy advisors but the result of 41 ending the first gulf war with dangling demands was 43 inserting the US military into Iraq for a decade. Bush 43 doubled the size of the Education Department. Perhaps the myth is that there is a Right. Let me just say that if Jeb is the Republican nominee, then I will not vote for president since it is better to elect someone with a well-defined ideology and witness its logical consequences than to have ideological confusion.
Yes, the Democrat party is running a cult. That is why they always win. Sure, conservatives have the arguments and facts on their side, but arguments and facts are no match for a vision of a very tainted New Jerusalem. ISIS can beat them, ISIS probably will beat them, but conservatives won’t.
Of course the Islamic fundamentalists are very socially conservative. Curious, what?
They can cling to their science, I will cling to my Savior, Jesus Christ. I like old time religion, than you. It’s the one constant in the universe that trumps the limits of human knowledge and science every time. Proverbs 3:5-6: Trust in the LORD with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding. In all your ways submit to Him, and He will make your paths straight. Could it be any easier?
With regard to the “or that 97% of scientists endorse anthropogenic global warming”, that´s something that is barely answered, and I wonder why.
I read the original report.It was not 97% of papers, but 97% of papers THAT STATED a position about global warming. But here comes the best: with regard to the rest, they contacted them to know which was their position regarding “global warming”. Part of them supported global warming, part of them said there were not enough evidence neither to support nor to deny it.
I don´t remember exactly the numbers AFTER consulting the scientists that didn´t state a position in the paper (so I could be wrong), but I think they were about 2/3 supporting global warming, 1/3 stating there were not evidence enough, and very few ones denying it. But for some reason that didn´t reach the headlines, and I´m talking about the original paper.