[extropy-chat] Islamic morons win yet again

[Robert Bradbury]

On 9/29/06, Keith Henson <hkhenson at rogers.com> wrote:
>
> I presume you are aware that EST (Landmark/Forum, Lifespring(?) etc) is a
> offshoot from scientology just like scientology was an offshoot of OTO.


The OTO link I was unaware of, but in reading the Wikipedia page I can see
some similarities.  It would seem that a critical differences would include
that EST made a very large effort to expand the "initiated" (OTO seems to be
barely surviving) and EST incorporated more from Zen Bhuddism and less from
Christianity.

One basic pattern with belief systems is to build upon, retarget, spin, etc.
preexisting meme sets (witness Muslim incorporation of Christianity and
Judaism) presumably because erasing them is much harder than reinterpreting
them.

Erhard was a former scientologist and scientology considered the EST
> "technology" stolen.  They spent millions trying to ruin Erhard and (as I
> remember) did force him to leave the US.


I'm reasonably sure the "Body of Knowledge" still exists (it is copyrighted
as the OTO information set appears to be) and is still taught (see the
Wikipedia entries on the topics).  I do not believe that he left the US due
to scientology involvement as much as messy legal things like sex "scandals"
and property rights in divorces.  But how much of this "public knowledge"
was due to scientology spinning things one can only speculate.

I find it interesting that the Freemasons have recently taken to advertising
in a low key fashion on TV (presumably seeking new membership).  But it
would appear that the Christians and Muslims are the masters of distributing
and requiring repetition of their meme sets (the Bible, the Koran, weekly
masses, 24/7 TV channels, daily prayer, etc).

Which raises the interesting question -- how can the extropic and/or
transhumanist meme sets compete if they are up against such obvious
organized systems of brainwashing?  A mailing list or two, a few PhD theses
and a handful of papers are not a system likely to breech the castle walls.
If one has tribal genetics dictating few leaders and many followers and the
follower meme sets are generally emplaced at young ages then getting people
to switch camps will be rather nontrivial.

Robert
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