Responsibility is an important topic in the world of scientology. The concept has enormous impact on the thinking of scientologists, and it is the foundation upon which much subsequent scientology belief and practice is based. Especially the very important elements of scientology that dictate YOU are responsible for anything bad that happens to you. You “pulled it in.”
When something goes astray in scientology, it is NEVER the fault of the organization. That is a blameless entity that can never be questioned as an extension of Hubbard himself. He was beyond fault. If the end result of your auditing is you curled up in a fetal position, crying your eyes out, or thinking about jumping out of a 10th floor window, it is not because anything was done wrong by the auditor, nor is there anything wrong with the “tech,” it is something YOU did that caused this. Though internally, there will be finger pointing, cramming and a trip to ethics for the auditor for having “red tagged” a pc, you will not be told this, and they won’t give you your money back or take any responsibility (despite what they try to foist off on you). Responsibility, like “pulling it in” is a concept used to control you. When it comes to applying it to L. Ron Hubbard or David Miscavige or the organization, suddenly there are other explanations. Hubbard didn’t suffer setbacks, media takedowns or heart attacks because he “pulled it in”, but because of SP’s trying to destroy him. The organization never takes responsibility for having delivered faulty tech previously when they announce “new breakthroughs.” They don’t refund people for their errors, instead they compound the crime and force everyone to pay again to re-do what they did that is supposedly now “out tech.”
The most basic concept of Responsibility comes from Advanced Procedure and Axioms, Hubbard’s 1951 book where he begins to outline new procedures to replace Dianetics after he lost the copyrights through bankruptcy court. In fact, right in Chapter 1 he completely dismisses Dianetics with this: “Engrams are effective only when the individual himself determines that they will be effective.” That is NOT what it says in Dianetics. Though it is pretty much what he said when he finally decided he had made a Clear in the 1960’s because they realized they were “mocked up their reactive mind.” No longer able to sell Dianetics, in 1951 he offered alternate processing to increase the “self-determinism” of individuals. He expounded on service facsimiles and other things in this book, though it is before the term scientology was even used.
But the most significant chapter of the book covers the subject of Responsibility, and I include the first two pages of the chapter here. The last para on the first page is the reference that is given to scientologists repeatedly to persuade them to “take responsibility” for whatever problem or complaint they have. Pity Hubbard operated on the “do as I say, not as I do” model.
this crap from Hubbard is CLASSIC Projection. HE was never able to take responsibility in his life for his actions so ran this on everyone else to keep attention off of HIS irresponsibility
If a psychiatrist’s patient jumped out the 10th floor window, you can be damn sure the Scienos would blame it on the evil psych!
Yet, when a scieno does it, it’s because of his evil purposes.
Yes. I think you are correct. The Scienos would blame it on the psych. But only from the 10th floor down to the 1st floor.
They would blame the jumper for what happened from the 1st floor down to SPLATT!!! They would claim that the jumper pulled that in.
But that would be one Hell of a lot of SPLATT to pull in. Don’t ‘cha think?
KER PLUNK!!
This also extends to PTSness and Suppression.
According to Hubbard, a PTS is one who has allowed himself to be suppressed. He has agreed to be suppressed, whether in whole or in part.
But the CoS will still order you to disconnect from a declared SP, regardless of whether you are actually PTS or not.
They will still scuttle away into their orgs and pull the blinds down when an SP walks by.
They will still haul you into ethics for giving a platform to an SP or for posting to a forum where SPs comment.
These actions demonstrate an institutional value that scientologists are so inherently weak and pathetic, they cannot make good choices.
This is not a good advert for what they’re selling.
I’m going to say something controversial:
The concept of Full Responsibility works.
It works very well.
BUT!
And this is a big “but”…
It only works if everybody ELSE is willing to be fully responsible.
See what I mean?
If everyone – and I do mean EVERYBODY – operated on this concept of full responsibility, well, we’d be creating paradise. There would be nothing that couldn’t be worked out. No evil, no ill, no problem could long exist in an environment wherein EVERYONE in it assumed full responsibility for whatever occurred.
The problem is that if only a PORTION of the everybodies operates this way and the rest DON’T, then the “I am fully responsible” people are going to get creamed!
Operating this way – responsible for everything and everyone and everything that happens or doesn’t happen on all dynamics, is a greased track to misery and slavery and insanity UNLESS EVERYONE is operates this way.
Alright, now, can I write a Success Story? 🙂
I don’t get it. 🤯 What would “full responsibility” even look like, in practice? As an absolute, it’s oxymoronic/unobtainable – its application is dependent on any number of variables (eg. individual morality, ability and circumstances/MEST). So there are inherent shades of grey before we’ve even started. Aka degrees of responsibility.
More importantly, words like evil, ill and problem are subjective. You would first need everyone to agree to your terms (which, by extension, would include your ethics/morality, politics, even religion). That’s creepy af, imho.
mwestern, I agree with you. “FULL Responsibility” practised by each of us and all of us is impossible, a utopian ideal. Unobtainable.
In writing what I did I erred in assuming that it was understood that this was and is impossible.
My point was that IF it WERE possible earth would be a paradise because WE, individually and together, would be creating it that way.
And then, I also didn’t point out that with only SOME people striving to practice full responsibility and the the rest NOT practicing it and instead sitting back and playing the blame game, “Full Responsibility” in that scenario actually a suppressive mechanism, a controlling mechanism perpetrated on those practicing it by those not practicing it!
In brief I agree fully with all your points and my comment was a mere musing along the line of “what if”.
No worries. My point was simply that, in practice at least, it sounds more dystopian than utopian.
I understand.
mwestern, you couldn’t be more correct. “Full Responsibility” for everyone is a utopian dream, totally impossible. In my comment I assumed that this was understood. M
My first point was that if it WERE possible – which it isn’t – but IF it were possible for each of us, individually and together, to apply this datum and be fully responsible for everything there would be heaven on earth, utopia, paradise because each of us singly and together would be actively, at all times, creating it.
My other point was that “Full Responsibility” when only practiced by SOME and not others is at best unworkable and at worst extremely suppressive and cruel and unfair to those practising it because it allows rest to skate by, finger point and blame.
In other words if you and I are interacting on some level, if we are in a friendship or some other close continual association, and you are by dint of great awareness and ability practicing “Full Responsibility” and I am NOT, but instead sitting back and letting YOU be responsible for whatever happens (mistake-wise) and not taking any responsibility (for anything that goes wrong) MYSELF, well then that would be an extremely suppressive relationship – to YOU. VERY harmful to you – it would damage you.
And your points about agreement on many variables i.e, individual morality, and what words like “evil” mean, etc. are of course totally on the money – there would have to be 100% total agreement between everyone on many , many variables!
My comment was just a mere musing. It wasn’t fleshed out as it ought to have been.
Aqua, I think that was a fine “Success story”™.
Thanks, Jere 🙂
While not exactly on topic, at the mission where I started scn the Ethics Officer had a sign posted on the wall behind her desk which read, “You Are Responsible For Your Own Condition”. At the time it made sense and maybe it saved her some time not wasted on dealing with petty upsets and squabbles. In scn lingo it wasn’t “too steep a gradient” for what came next for some people depending on what post they held .
“Full Responsibility” = Gonzo Gaslighting!
You eejit meatsack, you unethical twat, you wanking bank!
YOU ARE CAUSE; hand over your money, your dignity, your critical
thinking skills and common sense, and your “self-determinism”.
NOW you are-causatively, of course-a fucking slave…
Cha ching!
Unless you follow the 3rd Dynamic “line” to the letter, they accuse you of being ‘other determined’ when in reality you’re just not THEIR other determined.
Exactly 🙂
At any given time:
Whatever YOU want that they DON’T want or care about
OR
Whatever you DON’T want that THEY want =
“Other Determined”…”Dilettantism”…”Other Fish To Fry”.
Well, since leaving Scientology I’ve been frying plenty of other fish, quite tastily, thank you, cult!
I think at least a good part of the con-job the organization ran on its own staff that “only weaklings needed to get up the bridge”, not these tough-ass Sea Org members who had “competence above case-gain” was this:
If the staff member got up the bridge, he’d see there was no “there” there. Instead he was given the perpetual hope that someday he’d make it.
These little gems like “full responsibility for every damn thing” was a good cork in the bottle when too much “WTF” was leaking out of it.
“…a good cork in the bottle when too much “WTF” was leaking out of it.”
Priceless truth, it describes scientology ‘ethics’ to a T.
scn ‘ethics’ is just another word for punishment for any random reason, or none. You merely had to catch the wrong person on a wrong day to be subjected to it. I even got hit (in the EPF for suggesting that our standing on the top of 20-foot high ladders wasn’t the safest way to clean the ceiling of the CW bank building, that we should have a harness just in case. No, no one fell to that hard marble floor as far as I heard, but I’ve since thought up a half dozen safer ways the job could have been accomplished. Had someone gotten hurt, it would have been deemed THEIR fault, their responsibility.
What I wonder is how anyone can read that drivel and get ANYTHING out of it. Especially since in Sci you don’t have anyone ‘preaching’ anything to you…you just have to figure it all out yourself. That’s one thing I think most non Scientologists don’t understand. There is no ‘service’ where a leader preaches his or her beliefs to a crowd. The ‘classes’ do not consist of a teacher and student. It’s just a room full of people reading this kind of dreck and trying to make some sense of it. If you have a question all you get is “Which word did you not understand?”. So I believe there is a huge percentage of OT’s and public’s that have no damn clue what Hubs was talking about. They’ve learned how to get that floating needle and that’s all that’s all that matters. As I had said many many times…I understand the words perfectly it’s when they are put together in these sentences that they make no sense.
I was wondering the same. If you have read any half decent books before reading Ron, I would assume you could tell just by the style of his writing that this is pure drivel. Writing is thinking. To write well is to think clearly. This is the exact opposite.
So how are scientologists initially pulled into this? Is it because they are told over and over again that these texts are in fact THE MOST meaningful in the world? Does everyone think they will get it soon (just a few more words to learn)? Maybe many were not exposed to good writing before reading this?
I never read DMSMH in its entirety. I’m not convinced many others did either. Some of his other books were better/more readable. And he was kinda witty at times in his lectures. Regardless, if you’re a) unhappy/desperate or b) a spiritual seeker, you’re unlikely to apply logic and reason in your search for answers. And once you get onto a course or into a session, it’s a whole different ballgame. It can actually be rather fun and exciting. Intro courses such as the HDS/HDA, STCC, HQS, etc, are all largely practical and don’t require a huge amount of study. And a smoothly-run auditing session can indeed be therapeutic for some. Many people have pretty big, life-changing “wins” at the beginning (no matter how illusory). Once you’ve bought in to it, it’s pretty easy to make the rest of it “work.” It’s not hugely dissimilar to any other faith, in that respect.
The solution to ideological entrapment is logic. Any reasoned evaluation would expose serious logical fallacies (and mis/disinformation), diminishing its power and significance.
All the right words in a random order make no more sense than a million monkeys typing randomly. Ron had a great idea from his viewpoint: Make the students create some semblance of sense out of the word salad he presented to them. That way, he didn’t have to review, much less edit, his timeless prose; not that his ideas would be any more workable had they been presented coherently.
It got pretty close to ‘preaching’ when we had to listen to those old, faded lectures he’d give at St Hill or on the Apollo. AND we had to listen to the tapes on decrepit “Wallensuck” tape decks. They started out low-quality and got worse as time and misuse took their toll.
Thinking you understand the dreck is the trap, reinforced by the people around you pretending the same.
Pulling his words apart, and spotting the inconsistencies, the banal obvious (Survival is key!), and the utter nonsense (Life is a static!) helps escape the trap.
When you’re told it’s profound TRUTH, you’re primed to find SOMEthing that seems ‘true’ in it somehow. When you have a ‘supervisor’ stalking the reading room, asking what WORD you misunderstand is keeping you from understanding the self-evident truth, the effort to find (or manufacture) a ‘truth’ is doubled. After a while, it becomes second nature. What a WONDERFUL scam that is!
Great post. This is why “tech” seems to work apparently. The person keeps “mocking up” his own crap and try to get get rid of it. Eternally.
Remember…it is always your fault!
He tried to convey the idea that he followed a Buddhist line. But this has nothing to do with the concept of karma.
L.Rhum was very money hungry, a true materialist, nothing spiritual. Simply a charlatan.
Yup! We mocked it up to the specifications of the ‘tech’, then “erased” it to the specifications of the ‘tech. Full circle.
Early 2000s, Dave Miscavige ordered that everyone in Golden Era Productions read that chapter three times a week. When I escaped I still had a folded-up copy of it stuffed in my pocket.
I particularly liked this part:
With this philosophy in place the higher-ups can do no wrong. Convenient for them.
In practice this all boils down to a kind of magical thinking that is quite dangerous. If my cancer diagnosis was my fault because I had critical thoughts or something, why take the chemo? All I need to do is write up my misdeeds and “take responsibility” for them. When that doesn’t work and you are literally dying, change your mind an try some treatment – probably too late. A very common sequence with die-hard Scientologists.
It makes for a kind of blind recklessness too, if you can’t get in an accident because you are “taking full responsibility” for the road and the lights and the other drivers etc., why not speed all the time and run every red light? The magic of “full responsibility” will pull you through – until it doesn’t.
An old friend used to always say “How are you making it go?” instead of “How’s it going? He thought he was very clever but in reality there are many parts of life that you can’t control no matter how hard you screw up your eyes and make a strong postulate. It is important to take responsibility for those things you really can control, see about getting and holding that job or taking care of that pregnant girlfriend. So the idea is not entirely wrong. Hubbard just took it to ridiculous extremes as always.
So everyone is “responsible” —EXCEPT the scientologists, of course.
how convenient! They wre just “following orders”, of course.
“One acts and seek to negate his responsibility for such action by placing the ‘reason’ at another’s door.’ (APA, page 57, para 5, sentence 2) And as above.
Well Ron, back in 1951 you did a better job of responsibility by saying that when things didn’t work that you had it wrong and I give you credit for that . However by 1965, with KSW, you asserted that the tech was exact and ‘right’ and henceforth and forever (my alteration) right. You also stated you were Source, which puts you right at the top of responsibility for Scientology and the tech. And 100% results.
I see a shift from 1951 to 1965 that does not put you in a good light. You went from taking a (good) share of the wins and failures of scientology to the opposite. You put all tech ‘failures’ onto the auditor/pc and you abrogated your responsibility in the matter. You became a self-determined opposition terminal to your former self.
Many of us left scientology when we stopped getting gains, and refused to be ‘blame bait’ to your military goons. Looking at scientology today (2021) you would see an ‘other-determined’ organization that would make you nauseous, not proud.
“…Looking at scientology today (2021) you would see an ‘other-determined’ organization that would make you nauseous, not proud.”
I don’t know about that Jim. Personally I think Hubbard would be more jealous than nauseous. Jealous of Miscaviage for doing exponentially better in the money making department by taking the original con and running with it. He altered the ‘tech’, created a wealth of real estate holdings the cult didn’t even pay for and implemented a massive fundraising scheme without even delivering any “services”, the ultimate ‘out-exchange’. And the marks are still buying it in droves. The ‘tech’ the ol’ grifter was utter bullshit that he pulled out of his ass as he went along, but at least he was delivering something even if it is ultimately nothing.
“…Looking at scientology today (2021) you would see an ‘other-determined’ organization that would make you nauseous, not proud.”
Can that be emphasized enough?
This is definitely one of the definitions used to trap you in. So so much more can be said on this topic of responsibility and scientology.
Correct ,it’s all about control.
Knowing the fact that product is fake and one is glued to Cult as long as you keep the hope alive.
However failure is eventuality.
What then ?
How to control damage?
It requires a mechanism to shift focus from fake product to irresponsible person
This a common phenomenon with all Cults.
Compared to that a person can be religious on sliding scale from liberal to moderate to conservative.
But a Cult has two categories believer or non-believer. You are in or out.
They can not afford followers on sliding scale as it take control away from them.
That’s why Cults are short lived and cannot last enough to celebrate a century , unless they get isolated and create a self-sufficent community with no foreign cultural influence for atleast 50 years.
About all that can be said of scientology and responsibility is that they take no responsibility for the damage they do to themselves and others.
MIS-definitions, rather, as El Con famously redefined words to suit his immediate needs, even when that disagreed with his earlier redefinitions.
And it was up to the student to fill in the blanks somehow.🤪
Hubbard’s comments about responsibility explains why Scientology is an unnecessary distraction so staff have no need to go up the bridge. A Sea Org member is OT.
Oh wait do you have money? Then it is vitally important for your eternal salvation to go up the bridge and do the OT levels.
Having money required the registrars to relieve you of that responsibility. Can’t have THAT!
“One can control nothing without assuming full responsibility for it.” I guess that’s why the co$ controls nothing much to speak of. They take no responsibility for anything except collecting cash.
Responsibility, as used by the Hubster, is just another brain teaser used to get the PC to buy into the $cieno scam. If you can buy Hub’s attempt at thought control, you might buy into past lives and the bad Sci-Fi of Marcabs and Farsec and any other BS the Hubster throws out.
“buy into it” quite literally, Zee.
Excellent research , Mike. One of your best postings and the right length for a blog.
Personally I never paid any attention to this “full responsibility” stuff that Hubbard talked about..
It was very easy to get around all of that BS. Hubbard’s ideas about Ethics were also stupid. Anyone
could see he was adrift in space. Hubbard lost his Dianetics trademarks for one simple reason. Blavatsky had already established before Hubbard that the Human Race was sort of derived from a giant race of mosquitoes. It becomes very clear when you actually see the blood sucking. Secondly, any one who seriously studied middle ages theology could easily see that Xenu was actually nothing but toxins that were left in space during creation. Toxins have no consciousness. It is stupid to handle them with comm or exorcism. Xenu was handled with mental purification. Stupid Hubbard never read
Pythagoras in full and would have learned it all from him. This has all been verified. Thirdly, Hubbard’s
use of the anti-Christ story was false and childish. The Book of Revelations was an afterthought to the Bible, and should have been left out. The author who was from an island off the coast of Greece, misinterpreted the story of Atlantis. Revenge has no part in actual theology. Atlanteans lost the ability to predict the future due to the filling of their voids which was so described by Blavatsky. So in the end,
Scientology was a wayward path not ever explained by Hubbard. Hubbard was so stupid he was picking up all the wrong interpretations. Rest in peace Tubby you really were a work of “art”.
What did one expect from a professional con artist? No entity is blameless. (I should have an SP declare for that. I know that the OSA goons are reading this.)
The OSA goons MIGHT be reading, but they have other fish to fry before chasing after and harassing mere blog participants. They probably realize that an SP declare would give most of us relief rather than terror. We’re CLEAR of that threat and the false ‘ethics’ it rode in on.
Well Hubbard predicated the whole bridge to total freedom on assigning blame to first our “reactive mind” that we had to erase and then blaming thousands upon thousands of body thetans stuck to us that caused us to do irresponsible things. So, L. Ron was preaching on both sides of his mouth. And once he was named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the Snow White,IRS bust his days as a responsible founder of the most ethical group on the planet were numbered.
Hubs talked a great game, but he walked an entirely opposite direction. It seemed that his power as a sorcerer was measured by the number of people he enslaved, how many women he “raped without them knowing it”.