Although it happened something like thirty-five years ago, I distinctly remember the scene. A young girl with a brown pony tail, sitting on a wooden bench, looking at me with contempt. I was in elementary school (I think) and she was probably in her early twenties.
I had just started my first course in Scientology. My parents were and are Scientologists, so of course I would at the very least be introduced to it. (In their defense, they are great people and we have a great relationship. Whatever goes on in their sessions seems not to have negatively affected them or our relationship, so more power to them.)
All I was asked to do in this introductory session was to read something then have a discussion about it. I don’t remember anything about what I read, likely because I didn’t read much of it. But what I do remember is being scolded.
“That’s why you’re bored. You don’t even know what basic words mean.”
This young lady asked me why I didn’t read it and I said something like, “I was bored with it.” She told me I was bored because I didn’t understand what I was reading. To show me how much I didn’t understand, she asked me to define the word, “the”. Like any young kid, or really any adult, I couldn’t come up with a definition of “the”. To which she told me, “That’s why you’re bored. You don’t even know what basic words mean.”
Apparently, my inability to define “the” was holding me back from understanding anything I read. Luckily for me that was the end of my Scientology course work as far as I can remember. I do remember telling my mother how this girl scolded me and my mother was annoyed at her.
But I don’t think it was this young lady simply being a poor teacher. I think this was the strategy.
On Fundamentals
Today, as a father to two young children, I find a lot of joy in helping them academically. Playing swords and dollies is a duty, but if they want to practice homework and educational workbooks, I’m all over it. I love that stuff.
My son is well on his way to being a great reader, and now it’s my daughter’s turn to start down that path. The first reading book I ordered via a friend’s recommendation focuses on two basic sight words imbedded in stories: “the” & “and”.
Now I’m no education expert, but it seems to make sense. My daughter can easily understand the pictures of characters which accompany words in the basic sentences, but you can’t draw a picture of “the” or “and”. These are fundamental words with concepts that when she learns, can help build confidence and then link other words together.
Fundamentals, like foundations, are used to set the basic framework for building a whole host of ideas on top of them. And that is why the young lady in my Scientology experience asked me to define “the” as opposed to any other word she could have asked about. She didn’t ask me to define “bear” or “table”. I could have come up with something coherent, just as my child who cannot yet even read could do that today.
Asking a child to define something fundamental which they never would have thought to define but use as a concept every day is a tactic. Once they are caught not being able to articulate what the basic word means, they are put off balance, just as any adult may be.
What this young lady was doing, whether she knew it or not, was to make me question the most fundamental aspects of how I understand language. From there, I would be in a position to rethink a lot of things and be introduced to new fundamental ideas that could then shape how I view everything. I’d be made to feel vulnerable and unsure of what I knew, which would prime me for an introduction into new ideas as I sought to reconcile that anxiety.
This is in large part why it’s so important to pay attention to what we are teaching children. Or, what our schools are teaching children.
Fundamental concepts about the world, or humanity in particular, shape the way we view everything built upon those foundations. Pay attention to attempts to redefine basic concepts or words. We’ve already seen this with “racism”, which is now being defined as “power plus privilege”. Now we are seeing it with the fundamental redefinition of sex and gender as if they are completely unattached from any underlying reality or nature.
It’s a cult tactic used for thought reform.
Thought Reform
What these cults or large thought reform movements tend to do is redefine fundamental words and concepts that latch onto well established and accepted ideas. They act like parasites that take over their host and change a few things to achieve a different end. The language is familiar (justice vs. social justice) so it’s easy for people to make the seemingly short leap, but they are not the same thing.
And it doesn’t stop with just word reformations.
Dr. Robert Jay Lifton wrote about “brainwashing” during Mao’s Cultural Revolution in China. What he did was interview former prisoners as they were released from years of Chinese Communist re-education. He broke out the tactics into twelve steps. The first two steps are sure to sound familiar.
The first step was an “Assault Upon Identity” which would use a person’s denial of their “crime” as evidence of their guilt.
The second step was “The Establishment of Guilt”. As one of his interviewees described it:
“What they tried to impress on you is a complex of guilt. The complex I has was that I was guilty….I was a criminal — that was my feeling, day and night.”
Anyone who has read or is familiar with Robin DiAngelo and White Fragility is familiar with these tactics used in her literature and live sessions. Any white person who denies that they are racist is assumed to be even more racist because of their denial. They are then criticized (struggled) into at least tacit agreement, then told to “do the work” of reassessing everything they thought within the newly introduced frame of racism.
They are all thought reformers.
Just going along to get along may seem like an easy way to get your kids through the days and weeks, but the lasting effects of undermining their basic understanding of the world will have lasting effects.
The anxiety that later accompanies our children's concepts of the world and how much it doesn’t match their real-life experience will be worse than the task of fighting these tactics today. It won’t get any easier. It will only get harder the longer you wait.
As a parent, there is no greater duty than the health of your children. Providing them with a world view that empirically matches their experience of it is crucial. Kicking the can down the road and hoping that they will figure it out isn’t a tactic. It’s an abdication of responsibility.