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How someone rational comes to believe very strange things

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How someone sincere and rational comes to believe very strange things.

Thanks to Tony Ortega, the journalist who gives us current coverage on the Church of Scientology (CO$), I found his reference to an old and great article by
language expert S.I. Hayakawa that reviewed L.Ron Hubbard's book, Dianetics.

Jon Atack: The best thing ever written about the language traps in Scientology’s Bible, ‘Dianetics’

[tonyortega.org]

Professor Hayakawa wrote about science fiction, specifically pulp science fiction suggesting special dangers for both writers and readers who lacked an ability to
care about the distinction between the concrete and the abstract, non-fiction vs. fiction.

Corboy suggests that this might well apply not only to writers and readers of science fiction but also those who market or are exposed to theosophical systems, anthroposophy, fantasy novels, perhaps those who expose themselves to material online and become self radicalized.

Here is Hayakawa's article:

[www.lisamcpherson.org]

Here are some excerpts from that article:

Quote

When done well, the value of the genre is that, in treating the remotely possible or conceivable as if it had already occurred, it helps prepare the reader for the shape of things to come. (Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, for example, was written in 1869.) But good science-fiction is not too common. Much of it today is written hastily and according to formula, to meet the unceasing demands of the pulps.

I have long felt that there are dangers to the writer as well as to the reader in pulp fiction. It did not occur to me until I read Dianetics to try to analyze the special dangers entailed in the profession of science-fiction writing. The art consists in concealing from the reader, for novelistic purposes, the distinctions between established scientific facts, almost-established scientific hypotheses, scientific conjectures, and imaginative extrapolations far beyond what has even been conjectured. The danger of this technique lies in the fact that, if the writer of science-fiction writes too much of it too fast and too glibly and is not endowed from the beginning with a high degree of semantic self-insight (consciousness of abstracting), he may eventually succeed in concealing the distinction between his facts and his imaginings from himself. In other words, the space-ships and the men of Mars and the atomic disintegrator pistols acquire so vivid a verbal existence that they may begin to have, in the writer's evaluations, 'actual' existence. Like Willy Loman in The Death of a Salesman, he may eventually fall for his own, pitch.

Of course, there is nothing wrong with literary imaginings as such. Even Frederick Rolfe ('Count Corvo'), one of the great paranoids of literary history, who in Hadrian the Seventh pictured in vivid and dramatic detail his daydream of overcoming his enemies and traducers and being elected Pope, presented his imaginings as a novel. In other words, Rolfe remained a novelist; he never came to believe that he was the Pope.

Hubbard, however, goes farther. The slick craftsman of mass-production science-fiction, mustering his talents and energies for a supreme effort, produces - and what could be more reasonable? - a fictional science. Had Dianetics been presented as fiction - as, let us say, the discovery revealed to our hero, Dick Savage, by the mysterious scientist, Dr. Vladimir Nemo, in the spring of 2013 A.D. in the Cosmic Ray Solarium of the fashionable Olympia Hotel in Lhasa, now a favorite summer resort for wealthy American poets and commissars - it might have been, like other ingenious science-fiction, good entertainment. It might even have stimulated scientific imagination, as no doubt Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea stimulated the imaginations of naval architects and engineers.

('Dick Savage' 'Dr. Vladimir Nemo' -- Hayakawa has invented some sci-fiction characters for purposes of comparison -- C)

But in the book Dianetics, Hubbard does not write as a novelist. He is, he says, a scientist. He has discovered - nay, created - a new science of the human mind which, in one swell foop, renders obsolete the psychological gropings of Wundt, James, Pavlov, Kraepelin, Charcot, Janet, Freud, Jung,
Adler, Lewin, Thorndike, Kohler, Moreno, Reik, Menninger, Masserman, Rogers, and all the work of the neuropsychologists to boot. Of this new 'science' of dianetics, Hubbard's book says (his italics), 'The hidden source of all psychosomatic ills and human aberration has been discovered and skills have been developed for their invariable cure.' This sentence appears on the first page of the book, of which the opening sentence has been widely and derisively quoted by reviewers: 'The creation of dianetics is a milestone for Man comparable to his discovery of fire and superior to his inventions of the wheel and arch.' 2

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