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The following message was first sent to the list ivy-subscribers,
a private Internet list available to all who subscribed to the
(on paper) clearing tech magazine, International Viewpoints.
(see http://www.ivymag.org/ or write the editor: ivy@post8.tele.dk)
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From: PJSpickler@aol.com
Date: Thu, 27 Mar 2003 01:24:29 EST
Subject: IVySubs: In the chill still of the night
To: ivy-subscribers@lightlink.com

**  ivy-subscribers relaying  **

Greetings and hallucinations --  I do some of my very best work in the dark.

  In fact, over the years, if you'll permit me to brag for a moment, quite
a few people have felt that I indeed WAS in the dark about a lot of things;
but this never erased the foolish grin that I now wear almost permanently on
my formerly handsome features, since I adopted as my slogan (personal
viewpoint), as taken from the works of none other than that great English
playwright the Bard of Avon, William Shakespeare, from his play _Midsummer
Night's Dream_, "What fools these mortals be!"  I've amended it to "What
fools these immortals be," and the corollary is "they can well afford it."

  But to continue this ignominy, I should like to remind or remember that I
first defamed the fabled IVy list starting sometime in 1998; and just about
the very first thing that I picked to write about, namely my favorite target
for invective, false data stripping, ridicule, and just some downright
old-fashioned clarification, was the famous/infamous Policy Letter entitled
"Keeping Scientology Working."  I should, for the few who will bear with me,
now that the cat, metaphorically speaking, is out of the bag, make it quite
clear that I once again intend to kick that corpse (KSW) to see if it has any
more life left in it, and if it's true, as Shakespeare said in his play about
Julius Caesar, "The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft
interred with their bones:"  and so with my old and honored friend, L. Ron
Hubbard, much of the good that he did was buried with him, whilst the evil is
alive and well, and some of it, in the form of that particular and nefarious
Policy Letter called "Keeping Scientology Working."

  All right then!  For those few hardy souls that have yet to hit the
"delete" button, fasten your seat belts and hold on tight as we take off into
that realm that IVy subscribers list is famous for, namely, the freedom to
express a viewpoint.

  This, by the way, stopped being a possibility within the Church of
Scientology at least three decades ago, and unfortunately, freedom of speech
and expression was officially de- or un-sanctioned within the Church of
Scientology as ordained by none other than the former champion of the freedom
to speak, the champion of the right, the necessity, and above all the freedom
to communicate, none other than L. Ron Hubbard.

  I think it's necessary, rational, and sane to be able to see both the
good and the evil or bad that exists in all of us, and to be able to
communicate about both sides of the coin freely without fear of reprisal.  
Where such freedoms don't exist, and there are still a number of such places
here on Planet Earth, we usually find dictatorships and tyrannies that all
stamp out freedom of speech, knowing that if they permit it they would soon
topple in the dust and die.

  One of the things that pained me greatly that came to pass within the
Church of Scientology that was written into existence by the pen of my
dearly-beloved hero and best friend from earlier times was a little piece of
madness taken from the heart of fascism and communism and also from some of
the major and more repressive religions, historically, which is the idea of
what's called the Knowledge Report, and it becomes the duty of every loyal
Nazi, Communist, Catholic, Scientologist, etc. etc., to write up any and all
things that might be considered bad for the good health of the totalitarian
regime.  Any deviance from church or political dogma is deemed to be criminal
and sinful, and by reporting your neighbors and loved ones, or just about
anything or anyone that might be suspect, you yourself can remain clean and
pure and the bad can be properly dealt with by the secret police, the GO, the
Inquisition, the KGB, etc. etc., and this came to pass within the Church of
Scientology as being a good thing.  It's called the block system, where
everyone keeps an eye on everyone and makes sure that any and all deviance is
reported to the proper authorities for handling.

  Well anyway, lest I monotheistically rant and rave on this track for too
long, let's now talk a little about KSW.  A casual reading of the Policy
Letter will quickly reveal to anyone who is familiar with the Tone Scale that
the author was writing at the tone level of Anger.  This is not to say that
anger is a bad thing, and that nothing should ever be communicated at Anger,
but allow me to remind you that when your word is law, and that the intention
of Policy is to support Purpose, if you write something into policy at 1.5 on
the Tone Scale, which is to say Anger, the primary expression of anger is
destructiveness.

  Now one might ask, "What purpose is it that the policy, the
green-on-white, of Scientology as a Church is intended to support?"  If that
Policy Letter was intended to support the purpose of clearing Planet Earth,
again, just a casual observation of just how far that purpose has gone would
reveal that that Policy Letter certainly didn't accomplish much of anything
in that direction.  One thing is self-evident in the title of the Policy
Letter, namely "Keeping Scientology Working:" first and foremost, if you have
a definition for what Scientology is, sort of on the level of "a body of
knowledge that is supported and defined by a group of Axioms," there's
nothing about that that has to do with keeping it working.  It doesn't
"work," it's not the tools, it's the definitions, the postulates, all the
things that define Scientology appropriately as a philosophy, simplified to
"the study of knowledge," and it's got nothing to do with whether it works or
it doesn't work -- that's something else.  The something else that can be
derived from what Scientology is has come to be called "the tech" or the
technology, the tools; and that IS something you can talk about when you talk
about a gradient scale of workability.  And you SHOULD talk about gradient
scales, because that's one of the best tools for understanding of something
that L. Ron Hubbard every swiped from Count Alfred Korzybski in his science
or subject called General Semantics.

  Yes, gradient scales, the idea that something isn't all black or all
white, but that there are theoretically an infinite number of shades between
those two extremes.  Anyway, so if the Policy Letter had been entitled
"Keeping the Technology Working" (KTW), that would have been a much more
correct way of putting it, and all those people who spent decades trying to
keep that amorphous and rather large body of philosophy called "Scientology"
working wouldn't be so diddled as they are now in present time.

  Over the years, from the date that that Policy Letter was first written,
I have seen very little evidence in the field, meaning of Scientology
practitioners, and practically no evidence within the Church of Scientology
as dominated by the Sea Organization, that the technology was kept more
workable, more pure, more understandable, more applicable, and more
successful
because of the things laid down in that so-called Policy Letter.

  So that I don't completely wear out my loyal and beloved amanuensis
(that's really Julie), I must soon bring this revelation to a halt for this
evening by saying that implanting, hypnotizing, brainwashing, lots of folks
into the idea that the tech will be in a better place if you turn people into
fanatics, zealots, and other aberrated states clearly and in relation to
workable technology, instead of keeping it working, turned it into an
instrument of pain and punishment and the worst attributes of self-generated
analytically-constructed Service Facsimile: something that Scientologists
could use against one another, usually at the same tone level as the creator
of this monstrosity, namely anger, hostility, and antagonism, (not high
affinity, high reality, high communication and high understanding), to make
themselves right and others wrong.

  The idea that abuses of this sort are permissible and necessary because
"Scientology, and Scientology only, is the only way and the only hope for
freedom, sanity, and survival for every man, woman, and child on this
planet" clearly is not now and never has been, and is observably, NOT the
truth.  Anyone that wants to can go on believing it can.., but it just isn't
so that the "entire future of the whole human race depends on what we do here
today," and everything we do that's harmful, stupid and counterproductive of
the best and highest hopes that Dianetics and Scientology started out with...
for a freer and saner society are, counter-intended by making these abuses
totally OK because it's expedient.  That's exactly the sort of hogwash that
fascists, communist, totalitarian dictatorships have used int he past to
justify all the horrors they have visited upon the human race.

  I would say in closing that the future of the human race doesn't depend
on Scientology or any other -ology or -ism.  I'm not here to say that I know
what it depends on, if it needs to depend on anything -- I only know that it
does have a future, and I pray nightly that it's not the one that the
latter-day L. Ron Hubbard who wrote that Policy Letter, who started the Sea
Org, the GO, etc. etc., hoped for the human race.

  With those last few kind words, I close for tonight, and re-enter the
chill still of the night, in the darkness of my tomb; and promise in my next
posting I will continue to point out further items in KSW that are false to
facts, for example the one about "no group has ever made or created
anything," and others, so that when I'm finished, my ever-increasing
popularity in some quarters will have reached a new high, whereas the
unremitting hatred of Scientology fundamentalists will, I hope, be bigger and
better than before, knowing that love is just around the corner from hate.

  Insouciantly yours,
  Philip the Fearful

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