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Scientology protest that I interrupted on March 1, 2024
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Case in point here: the way the term "mentally ill" is used (even with these people) is in a derisive, degrading way and is loaded with stigma, so preventing a young woman from that plight which would inevitably entail certain diminished quality of life coupled with the high mortality rate, should be considered as mitigating circumstances in Lisa McPherson’s case.
The mental health system can be exploited by abusive people as a way to silence victims of trauma. The first asylum type institution was opened by the Pennsylvania Quakers in 1751 and it would’ve been intended to be a sanctuary facility for recovery. Institutions have notoriously been developed with good intentions but would experience a degradation due to expedience. Psychiatry as a whole became corrupt and patients who were, in reality, being abused & tortured were the source of the data gathered to create the series of the Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders which is a book about labeling people who’ve suffered trauma in their lives so they can understand that nobody really gives a rat’s ass.
Sigmund Freud had his theory with id, ego and superego and would also use the label of hysterical; but his work is also included as study material in the field of psychiatry. The traditional Quaker religion (or actually it’s "Society of Friends") has in it’s fundamental tenets that everyone has a "spirit of light" and aside from that it’s about an individual & personal relationship with the Creator. A famous Quaker was Benjamin Lay, who’d stand out in east coast rainstorms with one foot bare to protest slavery. (Benjamin Franklin printed Lay’s anti-slavery literature. One of my great-great g’pa’s was named after Benjamin Franklin and was Irish Catholic.) So whatever political standpoint that the Quakers take on in current world affairs isn’t the subject here, but in their migration to this continent they were escaping persecution and threats of being burned at the stake. There was also the "Universal Friend" in the colonial era who was a bit zealous, you could say, & started the colonies’ first "doomsday cult" around the time of some heavy Canadian wildfire smoke & soot fallout in May 1780. The point is that L. Ron considered humans to have a spiritual nature and that was what I could identify with when reading his "thesis" (as I thought of it). He validated the idea that a person may have been subjected to trauma. I appreciated his effort in the work.
Any human institution is going to have its share of skeletons in the closet. If the young man had actually read the book then he’d have a much more impervious position in his advocacy. What ever happened to: "Know thy enemy" ~Sun Tzu. & "An idea isn’t responsible for the people who believe it". ~Don Marquis
Moreover, I should make it very clear: The way these people involved use demeaning language, ridicule, and mock (me, in this case) would absolutely never be tolerated (for very long) within the mental health system. If they talked that way to another patient in a psychiatric hospital they’d be isolated in a locked "observation" cell. (Of course just about everyone would exclaim that they’d wouldn’t let that happen to them ... but they’d be all about forcing Lisa into the system ... It’s always all about having a contrivance for a Kafka-trap agenda to scapegoat people who are smart & compassionate.)
Shock (electroconvulsive) treatments† are used to this day (& I have a website on that issue) but they’re not protesting that. The cultural assumption is that medicine is always benevolent & ethical. (It’s a "Just World" ideology.) The reason I got so upset is on account of what happened to Miki Alexander Manigault. If it were me in his position I would’ve stopped and looked to see if the domain name that was being spelled out to me was real ... give a person the benefit of doubt.
See also: The Wikipedia article for "Fundamental attribution error".
†I told those protesters that a man out of the computer tech (GNU/Linux) community was subjected to ECT and that was Matthew Weatherford, an austic savant, and he set up an intranet with payroll software when working for a cable television station.
Note: This happened a couple days before I walked by the first time. He deliberately wants to interact with police, many of them do. In my advocacy involving friends of mine in social/human services fields, the fact that there’s good & bad ever—present in any human endeavor, even in our gov’t, is a reality that we can only strive to improve. There are people who are vulnerable, disadvantaged, less fortunate, etc., who might need the police response. I’m not going to try to watch this all again, but at one point (maybe not included in the clip below) the protester said that it was up to him to take care of himself (& not rely on police) and it’s common attitude but in my experience the very same people will be the first to be calling police to report somebody looking sketchy. If I started vandalizing his car he’d be dialing 911 in a heartbeat! (Oh, & of course I must’ve never had a bad experience with police in my life or else I’d be all about hating on them. I once spoke with a city police officer hours after he killed a young man who committed patricide in front of him. It’s so easy to hold oneself as always morally superior when you’re not even twenty-five years hold and make a living by protesting.
I meant to include this clip too, mainly to clarify the point I was/am making. I was never ignorant of the controversy and related history involved but I’m not one to completely disregard somebody’s work. When I read the book, Dianetics, decades ago that I knew was written by a popular science-fiction writer (← oh, that should have been my first clue, right?), I thought he went off on kind of a tangent toward the end, but he used a word, "engram", as he was explaining his take on psychology. To be transparent here, the best I can define the term is that it describes a thought or memory which leads to more thoughts/memories and inevitably will cause emotion when a person isn’t actively involved with anything else which would increase their anxiety. That may not be something that some people could relate to, or admit to relating to, anyway. It isn’t difficult to figure out then what the idea is behind "clearing", but of course anything to where another person gets to be involved with that level of another person’s privacy (personal memories) there is opportunity for abuse & exploitation, extortion, etc. What people don’t stop to consider about Lisa McPherson and others involved with Scientology is that people seek the cult out for reasons of their own. It’s quite probable that the person experienced trauma in their life and they’re wanting something more (however the word is defined for these purposes) which regular religion, or other spiritual pursuits, didn’t seem to provide. The person shouldn’t be taken advantage of, I agree with that, but again, the fate of Lisa McPherson would’ve been tragic if she ended up in the mental health system. Of course that’s speculation on my part and against what is presumed ... but again... case in point, the term "mentally ill" is never used as a compliment. These protesters are upset because they couldn’t mock & ridicule Lisa. If she would’ve been taken into a psychiatric hospital then she would’ve been officially "mentally ill" but then an argument could be that she would’ve been prescribed medication and if she took it then nobody would be all the wiser. That ideology is based on ignorance, though. Most people would avoid a mental hospital like the plague but yet figure other people should be estatic about the ordeal. I kept bringing up the issue with electroconvulsive treatments and asked those protesters why they didn’t protest that issue? It’s just not as cool & popular. This young man’s mother was calling him while he’s out protesting on account of a dead woman instead of making his own babies & nobody stops to wonder why!
I did want to mention that the other ironic or interesting thing about Dianetics is that, in a way, L. Ron’s take on metaphysics is like a commercialized, secularized version of Quaker tenets (I might’ve covered this already), but is a bit similar to another controversial figure (if you follow psychology field discussions), Sigmund Freud, with his ideas of id, ego, & super-ego where L. Ron description of human soul or spirit (I’m going by Wiki article here since it’s been decades since I read the book) is that it’s like a low-grade soul and the point is (IMHO) that the anomaly exists where humans are known to do things strangely out of character ... & no, I’m not trying to defend any kind of harmful or dangerous aberration, but Lisa McPherson gives U.S. a wonderful example with her running around bare naked after crashing her car. Nobody discusses the fact that she would’ve been coerced to talk about the event to just about anybody who wanted to interrogate her and it’s insanity to assume that every person who is in the position to prod her really cares about her psychological well-being ... she could’ve very well came up with a different way to describe her behavior and then labeled "delusional" as result. In any event, I might as well point out that (just in the off-chance anybody ever reads this) that the behavior Lisa was exhibiting is indicative of prior trauma ... best way to quantify the kind of actions is by considering that she felt dehumanized (for whatever reason). She was a vulnerable person, is what she was trying to convey. There are many events that have caught public attention where people died in mysterious circumstances and were completely alone ... or sometimes not, but there were unexplainable factors (think mountain climbing incidents), that make more sense if it’s remembered that human beings are a quirky lot ... there’s like a ghost in the machine, if you will. Society of Friends basic tenet is that every human has "spirit of light" (or soul or spirit) but doesn’t have complete physical control of "their" body, and I add that last part in to coincide with the spiritual concept which I’m describing that is, in fact, shared across varied disciplines or cultures (whatever word fits best there). It’s not lost on me that in contemporary society there’s much about Christianity that’s ignored, mainly about anything that doesn’t reinforce some bigoted (the word I’ll use here) pseudo-history that is subject to change with every network packet emitted from those on up high & all that. (St Paul received a liberal education, which would’ve included philosophy existing in those times. Mary Magdalene was the actual author of the Fourth Gospel, and the Cross was an X-shape, two poles lashed together.) The misunderstandings that could be helpful for people to know about are buried under mounds of discarded protest signs (or whatever).
Photograph of my old department crewmembers & I displaying our
Battle Efficiency Award onboard the now decommissioned USS Wabash AOR-5
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~ James Madison
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The biggest danger to our rights today is not from government acting against the will of the majority
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Wrong will be done as much by an all-powerful people as by an all-powerful prince.
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Because it is a distortion of being more fully human, sooner or later being less human leads the oppressed to struggle against those who made them so. In order for this struggle to have meaning, the oppressed must not, in seeking to regain their humanity (which is a way to create it), become in turn oppressors of the oppressors, but rather restorers of the humanity of both. ~ Paulo Freire
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The Wrong Way Home : Uncovering the patterns of cult behavior in American society | by Arthur J. Deikman, M.D
ISBN 10: 0807029157 ISBN 13: 9780807029152
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