Sometimes the harassment came to us on the street, as zealots tried to mess with our heads while we hawked our magazines. Sometimes, there’d be a bunch of un-ordered pizzas that would show up that we’d have to pay for, or one time, in Toronto, a truckload of sand that was nearly dumped on the front lawn of the Chapter.
At one point, they even tried harassing phone-calls. But since we knew the same head-tricks they did, they had to cope with wry ripostes about how they’d clearly had part of their reactive banks restimulated, or had missed a few engrams on the time-track. Perhaps, we’d suggest, they’d overpaid for poor auditing?
Temporarily, the calls stopped.
As an organisation, the Church of Scientology is paranoid and sociopathic. It litigates against anyone who criticises it, and litigates and litigates some more. In both the US and Canada, it’s been caught infiltrating government departments charged with enforcing laws that could have impacted the Church’s activities. On TV and in court, its representatives tell bald-faced lies, and usually very odd ones, too.
And so on.
The denial of service attacks on Scientology websites by the Anonymous (or Anon.) group this past weekend stirred mixed feelings. Some critics of Scientology dislike Anonymous using tactics of the kind they find abhorrent in the Church. On the other side, Fox News’ coverage, to cite one example, is somewhat sympathetic to Scientology, implying the Church is a genuine spiritual community harassed by mean-spirited misfits, when the reality is closer to the reverse.
I don’t think the Church deserves one shred of sympathy, since it has told lies about itself for nigh on 60 years. For a start, it’s no more a ‘church’ than is Microsoft: it’s a major business. It speaks in dulcet tones about teaching people to take responsibility for their own lives, by denying any responsibility for the grief it pulls down on itself. But that said, there’s the darker side of denial of service attacks, or hacking into sites an individual or group dislikes.
Clearly, it sets a precedent. I’ve occasionally come across self-professed Thelemites who espouse crude redneck philosophies, and selectively quote the Book of the Law to back them up. If Thelemic sites and discussion groups, already sometimes inundated with porn spam, have to deal with denial of service attacks or websites being taken down as a consequence of the crude, nasty views of a bunch of misanthropes, where are we then? Online security is beefed up, attackers penetrate the security, security increases.
We’ll all end up as paranoid as Scientologists. Scientology as a therapeutic practice is, I’ve always maintained, effective. Like Qabalah, from which some of it derives, it effectively uses counter-intuitive thinking and intriguing but effective terminology to make its adherents identify what they are, and are doing, in any given moment. I’ve long believed the specific methodology tends of itself to induce a sense of floating paranoia, rather than the much-vaunted condition of Clear: it isn’t conducive to acceptance of what we are and where we’re at, but rather turns existence into an endless confrontation. In other words, it feeds paranoia. Hubbard built paranoia into his system, which is brilliant, incisive and deeply exclusive of outsiders.
And when it’s applied to the legitimate concerns of the wider world that’s confronted with a “Church” that finds the need to attack every criticism and every critic, we get the bizarre behaviour documented in so many news reports and media exposes, of the type crowding YouTube this week.
Thus, we get the lamentable, disturbing but ultimately predictable antics of the Anonymous activists. Scientology has effectively defeated the U.S. Internal Revenue Service, the F.B.I. and a bunch of other bureaucratic acronyms that would intimidate almost all of us. The law of balance means that from now on, it is perhaps going to face guerilla tactics just as low and nasty as its own.