Why are all those celebities and people falling for this scam...

Why are all those celebities and people falling for this scam? There are more believable and cheap religions in the world.

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They go out of their way to gladhand and suck up to celebrities and stoke their egos.
Some people are just born suckers and will get sucked into whatever the first thing that comes along and tells them they are special, once they are hooked then the pay-for-play kicks in.

>Why are all those celebities and people falling for this scam?
Let's be clear about something first, these days Scientology is a shell of its former glory. While notoriously secretive it's estimated as having less than 25,000 remaining members and has largely become a slush fund for David Miscavige and his lawyers.

But why did they fall for it? Because L. Ron Hubbard knew the allure of celebrity in a TV obsessed culture like America's and sought to popularize his beliefs through the use of celebrity endorsement. They sought out people who were desperate and hoping to break into Hollywood and promised them a great support network of connections to help jump-start their careers. Of course it was all a lie based on pseudoscience, but through use of slick gimmicks like e-meters they were able to fleece these desperate people and use these funds to invest in celebrity centers where actual celebrities could be treated like royalty and thus earn their endorsements. The face that they presented to these super wealthy celebrities was very different from the face presented to their overworked, overtaxed congregants and for a long time it was a highly successful enterprise which made its principal shareholders extremely wealthy.

They also engaged in tried in true gimmicks that religions have been using since the dawn of time to keep their congregants loyal, such as fostering an "us verses the world" mentality, using shame culture to keep them in line, and threatening total social alienation for apostates.

It all unraveled when two things happened: uber-high end $100,000 literature was leaked and revealed to be a whole bunch of shitty Hubbardian science fiction like the bullshit with Xenu. The other was the public revelation that the church was actively meddling in the personal lives of its celebrity endorsers and blatantly manipulating people in ways to make the church look better.

In the case of celebrities, it's more likely that they're being extorted.

Google cult tactics, especially "love bombing." Find somebody with low self-esteem and shower them with affection for a brief period of time, and they'll react very strongly and feel a sense of loyalty to the group. This could involve hooking the target up with attractive women (or men). That bond is then used to financially exploit the target: "Before we found you, you have nobody, you owe us this!"

i wonder what would happen if they found out about /r9k/

All of this, plus a lot of what gets used under the name 'Scientology' actually works and makes sense e.g. their 'e-meters' are basically just simplified lie detector machines that detect muscle tension, and if you monitor muscle tension while asking your subjects questions about themselves you're probably going to get more interesting / deeper insights into them than if you had just tried asking them questions without the machine. When people see how they've worked through some relatively deep issues in a short amount of time through these methods, they're left more susceptible to the subsequent cult tactics employed because they're both impressed and also have just let their defenses down a lot by having their personal issues get sorted out in that way. Also everything they say during that process is recorded and used for blackmail material, so if part of Tom Cruise's first sessions involved him coming to terms with his closeted homosexuality, then he'd be stuck with Scientology even if he realized after the fact that it was a scam cult.

>All of this, plus a lot of what gets used under the name 'Scientology' actually works and makes sense e.g. their 'e-meters' are basically just simplified lie detector machines that detect muscle tension, and if you monitor muscle tension while asking your subjects questions about themselves you're probably going to get more interesting / deeper insights into them than if you had just tried asking them questions without the machine.

I'm going to add to this by saying that many of the "cleansing" exercises they do are very similar to acting drills, which makes it very easy to "sell" scientology to actors because it carries over to their job.

user

There exist over 2 billion people who think a Jewish carpenter who lived 2,000 years ago was the son/avatar of a semi-benevolent eldritch abomination got executed so he could return as a zombie and save people from a fiery goat-man by accepting him telepathically as their master before feasting on bread and wine which magically turns into flesh and blood at ritual gatherings

1 billion people think a gold digging pedophile arab with epilepsy met an angel in a cave who told him the key to happiness was by praying to previously mentioned abomination 5 times a day and traveling to a desert city to kiss a big black rock before running back and forth then throwing rocks at an invisible demon

Another billion think that we're actually fragments of a cosmic being who for some reason created a bunch of lesser beings with four arms and animal heads who teach people to organize society into a eugenics program with the hope of coming back to life and joining instrumentality

500 million think that nothing is real because reasons...but not realizing you're not real makes you sad so you should think about nothing all day so you don't reincarnate as a dragon dildo

Then you have the fedoras who believe in nothing at all

And ooga boogas trying to do "magic" and fight "spirits"

wow. an alien warlord freezing billions of aliens, putting them in DC-8 starships, then throwing them in volcanos of hawaii. their souls getting brainwashed into believing those religions you've just mentioned and then those souls getting into my mind which is the reason why i feel sad sounds like a much better explanation indeed!

They don't tell you that all at once though. In fact I think they don't tell you the space opera stuff unless you've already donated over half a million dollars to them or something like that.

This. Remember that the sci-fi parts of the religion have only come to light recently and used to require a person being of a ridiculously high level in the church. Scientology used to market itself as a self-help system, and it used techniques that kind of work. So, people would come in for a few session, feel like it helped, and then started following the religion because they thought it made sense. The weird shit and brainwashing only came later.

You're not supposed to know about the alien lore until you've already paid an utter shitload of money. At that point sunk cost fallacy takes its horrible toll. Tom Cruise had a nervous breakdown when he was told (allegedly), and I imagine he isn't the only one. You don't get told until you reach OT 3 and by then you've paid 16,885 dollars or more.

>There are more believable and cheap religions in the world.

such as?

Christianity with it's cuck-tier beta code of ethics? Or Islam with it's ubermasculine warrior code that is incompatible with the neoliberal 21st century? Or Buddhism which is basically a laughingstock full of hipster millennials?

Daily reminder that they stole everything from the Gökturks and Tengrism.

>he isn't the only one

In Going Clear, that one C-level actor said he thought it was a joke and it took him a long time to realize it wasn't a gullibility test.

>Tom Cruise had a nervous breakdown when he was told (allegedly)
What do you mean by this? That they told him the Xenu garbage and he couldn't believe how much time and money he wasted to hear it?

villagevoice.com/news/why-do-scientologists-accept-the-xenu-story-6704251

>The reason Scientologists accept Hubbard's bizarre story about Xenu is that by the time they reach OT 3, they have been "remembering" their own outlandish space opera "whole track" stories during auditing, perhaps for several years.

>"I blew up a water dam that destroyed a third of the cities that were downriver of it. That would be about 300 million years ago -- but you would say something like '346,767,813 years ago' to your auditor. I think it was on some planet that started with the letter 'V'," says Chuck Beatty, and he laughs, knowing how ridiculous it sounds.

>"It was 250,000 years ago, in a space ship, and I'd gathered all these people from these planets, and I'm implanting them with mental pictures and then throwing them down to the earth, a prison planet," Lugli said. "I was the guy in charge, and I'm responsible for this prison planet. The feeling of that responsibility and what I went through freaked me out for a year."

>"At the end of a session you feel invincible," Lugli says. "You've been having planets built and destroyed. After that, you come out into this normal world and you feel like the most powerful person around because you've been traveling through space and time."

>"I did wonder if it was true," she says. But when she then ran the auditing routines involved in the level, the e-meter's needle seemed to indicate that what the material proposed -- that disembodied alien souls were hovering around her -- seemed to be confirmed. "It's weird. I don't know what to say. I didn't feel like I went through that incident, but the needle was going wild, so I had to assume that someone had."

>And Jeff's "whole track" auditing memory? "I was a navigator on a space ship, and it had this very complex navigation system that I was in charge of and I could describe it in great detail," he says. "It was just very vivid. I could see the equipment and could describe it."

"It was a status thing," Hawkins explains. "I knew probably four or five Scientologists who told me confidentially that they were Jesus."

>And in the 1980s, he remembers, "there was this fad for a while that people were all remembering that they were Nazis in World War II, and that's why things were so screwed up in their present lives," Hawkins says. "That's why they had to be so active in Scientology, to atone for what they had done in past lives."

>I've made no effort to understand others beliefs or have a basic humanities education

most of them have nothing to offer

They are already easy pickings for white supremacists