This video is the next in my ongoing series breaking down Scientology principles and concepts and showing how the fundamental assumptions and ideas underlying these principles don’t hold up to critical thinking. In this video, we are going to take a quick and dirty look at a part of Scientology which doesn’t receive a lot of attention, even by all Scientologists, but which determines many of the decisions and activities the Church of Scientology engages in, including its abusive harassment and targeting of Scientology critics. What we are going to be looking at is a collection of guidelines and methods Hubbard wrote to teach Scientologists his own brand of logic and reasoning. The actual body of written issues this is based on is called the Data Series. There will be more videos and podcasts in the near future on this subject which will go into a lot of detail about different aspects of this. The purpose of this video is just to give a short overview and commentary on what this is all about.
Over the years, Hubbard wrote or approved thousands of policies letters which direct Scientology organizations on how to run. Some of these issues were centered around the same subject matter, such as how to handle money and banking. These were collected together, put in order and numbered and then collectively referred to as the Finance Series. There is a Public Relations Series, Executive Series, Personnel Series and many others including the Data Series.
These policies focus on the subject of logic, how to do investigations and how to find the supposed causes of things so that non-optimum situations can be resolved or optimum situations can be reinforced and made even better. Sounds like a good idea, but like everything Hubbard touched, there are so many hidden twists and turns that if you try to use this information for real, you’ll find yourself failing more often than succeeding.
The Data Series consists of 51 policy letters. These have been condensed into a chapter of the Scientology Handbook and a small booklet called “Investigations” and there is even an online course you can do which walks you through it. According to the course materials, learning how to do investigations Scientology-style will teach you three things:
To identify what makes something logical or illogical;
How to analyze information so you know exactly what to do to correct a situation; and
The skills you need to identify the actual reason behind success or failure in any aspect of life.
In this video, I’ll show you how none of these are true and how trying to apply Hubbard’s techniques on logic and investigation will in fact make you stupider and less able to solve the problems you faced with. The subject of logic can be complicated but we’re going to keep this simple. Even some former Scientologists hold on to the Data Series as useful because they don’t understand how actual logic works. Let’s break this down.
The first false assumption that Hubbard makes is a big one and in fact, is a key factor in why Scientology organizations run so poorly. In the Investigations booklet, it starts off talking about how people make goals in life but run into problems turning some of those goals into reality. It says:
“If such goals are not being attained or if one is in a situation that has deteriorated or worsened, there is a valid, locatable cause for this. This concept is one people often do not realize — things are actually caused. They don’t just happen. There are reasons behind every situation — reasons that people themselves can control.
“Without knowing this, man often relies upon ‘fate,’ superstition, fortune telling or astrology to determine his destiny or future. Many just hope vainly that nothing else will go wrong or they deceive themselves with the belief that life is ordinarily a struggle.”
Sure, sometimes people run into problems that may seem like they don’t have an easy solution, and sometimes some clever thinking can help a person figure it out. But to make the broad statement that people can control every problem or circumstance which gets in their way, whether individually or in groups, is asinine. There is very little you can do to prevent being fired from your job as the result of a hostile corporate takeover. There is absolutely nothing you can do except perhaps pray if you are a passenger on a plane that crashes. And if someone is trying to investigate how to win the lottery, I don’t think they are going to find any easy path to untold riches other than crossing their fingers and hoping they select the winning numbers. There are many situations and circumstances where we have no control over what is going on at all. To simply assume otherwise is a recipe for disaster and a setup for great unhappiness.
In fact, this kind of absolutist thinking is one of the biggest reasons Scientology fails and ends up losing members. The very top of Scientology’s Bridge to Total Freedom promises a state of being where one is “cause over life.” The idea of being in a position of being able to cause whatever you want in your life is really just an impossible dream. Everyone who pays the small fortune it takes to get to that level, realizes that they are not anymore in control of the external factors of their life than the day they first walked in to a Scientology organization. This is one promise Scientology never delivers on.
Hubbard then goes into explaining how to do an investigation by noticing something that makes one curious or that one doesn’t understand, such as if you were doing your laundry and you suddenly smelled something burning. If you investigate the burning smell more closely by say, opening up the dryer, you might find lint caught on the heating element and could readily resolve it by cleaning it out. That’s an easy enough fix, but there are many other circumstances where one simply isn’t in a position to do anything about some given circumstance. Hubbard ignores all those situations and hopes you will too.
Where things really start breaking down, though, is when Hubbard explains his ideas about logic and reason. As usual, he starts by thoroughly invalidating every attempt by earlier philosophers and critical thinkers in history:
“The subject of logic has been under discussion for at least three thousand years without any clean breakthrough of real use to those who work with data.
“‘Logic’ means the subject of reasoning. Some in ages past have sought to label it a science. But that can be discarded as pretense and pompousness.
“If there were such a ‘science,’ men would be able to think. And they can’t.”
You can see the high opinion Hubbard holds for the entire human race. To his way of thinking, he was the only person in all of history who could actually put coherent thoughts together or reason anything out. If anyone can explain to me how that is not pure narcissism at work, I’d like to hear it.
It’s very true that critical thinking is not a skill that is well taught in most schools, a fact some education professionals are trying to correct. There’s a lot right and wrong about our educational system but it’s not because we don’t understand the fundamentals of logic and reason that people can’t think. To make such a generalized statement is itself an assertion that Hubbard himself couldn’t think very well.
There are tens, if not hundreds, of factors behind any individual’s difficulties with education and thinking including genetics; culture; the care and skills of their parents; and the quality and quantity of the education available to the person as a child and then as an adult, as well as social pressures and who knows how many other circumstances. To lay the failure of every person’s difficulties with thinking at the feet of the philosophers and scientists who have worked on this subject for thousands of years is simply ludicrous. But being ludicrous is something that never stopped Hubbard.
He then makes the rather bold statement that he has figured out logic all on his own. He wrote:
“The breakthrough is a simple one:
“BY ESTABLISHING THE WAYS IN WHICH THINGS BECOME ILLOGICAL, ONE CAN THEN ESTABLISH WHAT IS LOGIC.
“In other words, if one has a grasp of what makes things illogical or irrational (or crazy, if you please) it is then possible to conceive of what makes things logical.
“There are specific ways for a relay of information or a situation to become illogical. These are the things which cause one to have an incorrect idea of a situation. Each different way is called an outpoint, which is any one datum that is offered as true that is in fact found to be illogical.”
There are a total of 14 outpoints, matched by 14 pluspoints, meaning ways in which things are sensible or logical. These outpoints pretend to be similar to logical fallacies but aren’t really. What Hubbard is really describing when he talks about outpoints are ways in which information can be relayed or viewed inaccurately. Logical fallacies, on the other hand, are breakdowns in logically consistent thinking or reasoning. Outpoints and logical fallacies shouldn’t be confused because they only sort of cross paths. Let’s look at these outpoints and I’ll show you some examples of what I’m talking about.
They are (show on one screen):
Omitted Data
Altered Sequence
Dropped Time
Falsehood
Altered Importance
Wrong Target
Wrong Source
Contrary Facts
Added Time
Added Inapplicable Data
Incorrectly Included Datum
Assumed “Identities” Are Not Identical
Assumed “Similarities” Are Not Similar
Assumed “Differences” Are Not Different
These outpoints sound a bit fancier than they really are. We won’t go through all of these, but let’s cite a few examples so you get the idea of how these outpoints are spotted.
An example of omitted d ata is leaving the street address off of a letter. It would be impossible to deliver the letter so therefore it is an outpoint. If someone didn’t show up for work, that would be an omitted worker. Anything that is left out or omitted which should be there would count under an omitted datum. The reason why the thing was omitted is not important. The fact that it is omitted when it should be there is all that counts.
An example of dropped time is telling someone to be at a party at 7 o’clock but then failing to tell them on what day the party is happening. Again, it’s an inaccurate relay of information more so than an illogical way of thinking. We aren’t dealing in basic truth here; with outpoints we are dealing with ways that information is altered or miscommunicated which can lead to faulty thinking. It would be impossible to know when to show up for the party if you didn’t know what day it was on, but that doesn’t mean you can’t think. It just means you need to find out when the party is.
An example of a falsehood is, of course, any lie or purposeful deception. The problem with this outpoint is that one has to discover the truth before one can know that it’s a falsehood. Sometimes this is pretty obvious, such as when a burger is advertised as being one thing but what you get is another. It’s not so clear when one is having something more complicated explained to him, such as how a bill becomes a law, and the person explaining slips in some whopper of a lie which sounds like it makes sense in that context. Regardless of how it’s discovered, though, any falsehood is an outpoint.
An added inapplicable datum is some piece of information which simply doesn’t belong or is in no way applicable to the current situation. For example, if you were reading a report on hazardous chemicals and there was a section on New York voting demographics, that would not fit in. Usually this outpoint is spotted when someone is throwing out tons of information in order to obscure or hide something.
An incorrectly included datum, on the other hand, sounds the same as added inapplicable, but is more meant as a wrong category or classification. Hubbard gives examples such as someone not understanding different types of cameras and so they break down and store cameras by their individual parts such as having a box of lens hoods and another box of camera backs and another box of lenses and so on. This really is just a matter of personal preference but Hubbard makes it out to be a breakdown in thinking. This particular outpoint is pretty weird actually.
Hubbard breaks down the outpoint of assuming something is true when it’s not into three different kinds of assumptions. It’s not really clear anywhere in Scientology why he’d be so ultra-specific but he says that assumed similarities are not similar whereas assumed differences are not different and assumed identities are not identical. He could have made this much simpler by simply saying that assuming anything makes an ass out of ‘u’ and ‘me’ but that probably wouldn’t have sounded as academic. The end result is the same – assuming something is simply inaccurate thinking – and that is true enough.
Hubbard then goes in to describing how to use these outpoints and pluspoints in an investigation. The assumption is that by analyzing any body of information for these outpoints you’ll find what is illogical in that situation. Hubbard says:
“1. Analyze the data,
“2. Using the data thus analyzed to analyze the situation.
“The term data is defined as facts, graphs, statements, decisions, actions, descriptions, which are supposedly true. Situation is defined as the broad general scene on which a body of current data exists.
“The way to analyze data is to compare it to the outpoints and see if any of those appear in the data.
“The way to analyze the situation is to put in its smaller areas each of the data analyzed as above.
“Doing this gives you the locations of greatest error or disorganization and also gives you areas of greatest effectiveness.”
“WE OBTAIN AN ANALYSIS OF THE SITUATION BY ANALYZING ALL THE DATA WE HAVE AND ASSIGNING THE OUTPOINT DATA TO THE AREAS OR PARTS. THE AREA HAVING THE MOST OUTPOINTS IS THE TARGET FOR CORRECTION.”
Now if you’ve been following along closely, you can probably already see why what he says here is just totally wrong. This is an example of Hubbard oversimplifying complex issues, dumbing them down to make business people around the world look like a bunch of idiots when in fact, they are faced with a myriad of difficult problems and decisions every day. Let’s walk through an example from Hubbard himself and I’ll show you what I mean.
“There is trouble in the Refreshment Unit. There are three people in the unit. Doing a data analysis on the whole area gives us a number of outpoints. Then we assign these to employees A, B and C who work in the unit and find B had the most outpoints. This indicates that the trouble in the Refreshment Unit is with B. B can be handled in various ways such as training him on the duties of his job, his attendance, etc.”
Here Hubbard is narrowing the target to an individual in the unit, a standard Scientology operating basis within their organizations. If something is going wrong, it’s because someone working in the unit is messing things up. But what if that wasn’t what was really going on? What if the trouble was with an outside supplier or fluctuations in the stock market or new legislation passed by the city council? In such an instance, this kind of analysis would be useless.
Let’s take a look at another point. This kind of analysis could not be done unless someone had a good idea of what the person or area is supposed to look like or how they are supposed to act. It wouldn’t do me much good trying to assign outpoints or pluspoints to a bunch of data related to a chemical treatment plant, because I have no idea what’s good or bad in such a scene. I don’t know which chemicals to use or in what proportions, how the machinery works, what the qualifications are for someone to run that machinery, etc etc etc. So Hubbard says that a great deal of familiarity with the area or people is necessary for someone to be able to evaluate the outpoints in it. And that leads us to the biggest problem of all with this supposed system of logic.
Human beings are not objective machines. Our education, upbringing, moral values and many other subconscious factors create biases or prejudices. There is not one person anywhere in the world who is free of these. The complexity of our knowledge and the influence of our emotions makes it impossible to view anything in a wholly unbiased or objective state. Objectivity is helped to the degree a person is not emotionally attached to something, but merely by the fact that a person is human and has had certain experiences or knows certain things will sway their judgement in one direction or another.
What’s even worse is that not only is total objectivity impossible, but research shows that we actually have a tendency to search for, interpret, favor and even remember information in a way that confirms our pre-existing beliefs or ideas. This is so common and understood in cognitive science that there is a term for this. It’s called confirmation bias.
Hubbard’s entire system is an exercise in confirmation bias, rather than a method of avoiding or negating confirmation bias. And that is why it is the most illogical system of thinking anyone could develop. Let me explain.
Before someone can do a data and situation analysis, the evaluator must first establish what Hubbard calls the “ideal scene” for the situation being evaluated. The Ideal Scene gives a basis for comparison to determine whether something is an outpoint or a pluspoint. It is a statement, usually just a sentence or two at the most, that describes the perfect or ideal operating state or condition for what is being evaluated. For example, if one were evaluating a car manufacturing plant, the ideal scene might be something like “A car plant producing a steady and viable stream of operational, well-running automobiles by well-trained and well-compensated production employees and executives, quickly correcting any deficiencies in said vehicles before allowing them to go off the line for delivery to car dealerships around the country.”
That sounds sensible enough, but what about when it comes to something a bit more controversial? What do you think L. Ron Hubbard would say the Ideal Scene for psychiatry would be? Well, before we work that out, here’s what Hubbard said about psychiatry in November 1981:
“The two nineteenth century subjects, psychology and psychiatry, do not achieve ANY good results. On the contrary, they are destructive beyond belief. They make crackpots, sexpots and vegetables when they do not outright kill.
“The greatest crime of our times is the use of psychology and psychiatry to teach little children in schools with them and manufacture crime and a whole world of immorality and unhappiness.”
So it’s pretty clear that Hubbard thought psychiatry was worse than useless. He therefore directed his organizations to do everything possible to actively get rid of psychiatry as a subject. In 1969, the Church of Scientology even organized their own front group, the Citizen’s Commission on Human Rights, with the purpose of destroying psychiatry. Hubbard’s clearly decided that the Ideal Scene of psychiatry is something like this:
“Psychiatry eradicated in every school or institution of higher learning, with psychiatrists either thrown in jail or otherwise nullified as medical professionals and the public at large educated on the horrors of psychiatry so they will not support or endorse any use of psychiatry in any form around the world.”
Given this ideal scene, any information or situation concerning psychiatry would be evaluated accordingly. And that means that if something is beneficial to psychiatry or somehow helps psychiatry to do its job better or easier or faster, it would be considered an outpoint. The only acceptable way of viewing information concerning psychiatry is to evaluate it against whether or not it helps destroy psychiatry. You see how this works?
An ideal scene is not an objective, neutral statement. It wholly depends on a person’s point of view based on their values and morals. If someone thinks all pharmaceutical drugs of any kind are destructive, then everything they see or hear or evaluate about it would be filtered through their confirmation bias. The same is true if someone thinks pharmaceuticals are beneficial or helpful.
How about someone who thought all liberals were evil and must be destroyed? How would they evaluate a situation regarding the supposedly liberal Democratic Party? What about someone who had deep liberal values and who thought that all conservatives were bad? They would evaluate the same body of information about the same situation in a wholly opposite way to the conservative. So do you have a system of logic here or do you have a system of deepening one’s innate confirmation bias?
Now we’ve covered the outpoints and how they are really just statements of inaccuracy in information, not the same as real logical fallacies where thinking is truly being done wrong. A logical fallacy is something like arguing a strawman, where a person goes completely off the subject being discussed on purpose in order to distract from the fact they have no sensible argument. Or there’s the bandwagon fallacy, where someone argues that just because a proposition is popular, it must be true. That’s not logical at all. People in groups fall for nonsense just as easily as individuals do, so just because “four out of five dentists recommend Crest” doesn’t mean Crest is the best toothpaste.
Then we’ve looked at how these outpoints are compared to an ideal scene, when the ideal scene is just someone’s individual idea of how something should be and they could be factually wrong but be totally sure they are right. All of us run into this almost every day. When someone evaluates information against their own personal idea of an ideal scene, they are really just engaging in confirmation bias. This doesn’t mean they’ll never get right answers. Even a broken clock is right twice a day.
So the last bit of this is when Hubbard combines these two things to get to the end of any investigation, which is what he calls the Why, as in W-H-Y. The whole point of doing an investigation is to find why the investigation was necessary in the first place.
Here’s how Hubbard puts it:
“One uses the above knowledge and skill to track down the real reason for the positive or non optimum situation. This is called a ‘Why.’
“Why = that basic outness found which will lead to a recovery of statistics.
“Wrong Why = the incorrectly identified outness which when applied does not lead to recovery.
“A mere explanation = a ‘Why’ given as the Why that does not open the door to any recovery.
“Example: A mere explanation: ‘The statistics went down because of rainy weather that week.’ So? So do we now turn off rain? Another mere explanation:
“‘The staff became overwhelmed that week.’ An order saying “Don’t overwhelm staff” would be the possible “solution” of some manager. BUT THE STATISTICS WOULDN’T RECOVER.
“The real Why when found and corrected leads straight back to improved stats (statistics).”
So you see here that Hubbard is looking to increase production, to keep personal production or organization-wide production going up up up. And he claimed that every reason found in any investigation done will always lead to an answer wherein something can be done to change the condition. This may be true in many circumstances, but there’s no way it’s true in every circumstance.
More to the point, finding a Why in Scientology is always limited to something that can be acted on by the person or unit under investigation. If someone is looking for actual truth, one cannot limit their thinking in any way. If you look back in history at the great discoveries made in science or almost any subject for that matter, these discoveries were the result of thinking outside the box, thinking in different ways than what came before. Or they were just accidents, not looked for or figured out but just the result of random chance. So limiting a Why to only what someone conceives can be done is an exercise in limiting discovery, not expanding it or enabling one to find new things.
Now in all fairness, this sort of evaluation or investigation can be useful in small situations where it’s pretty clear what is going on and why. I don’t mean to imply that Hubbard’s methods never work. What I’m saying is that this whole system of outpoints and pluspoints and finding Whys is unnecessarily burdensome, is not steeped in logical thought or reason and doesn’t properly evaluate errors in critical thinking. In fact, it reinforces those errors and is just an exercise in confirmation bias.
The Data Series is used by Scientology executives and managers at every level of Scientology including by David Miscavige to figure out or decide which course or direction Scientology organizations should be going. And now that you know that, it should be a lot clearer to you why Scientologists can’t think critically and why Scientology as a religious movement is such a toxic disaster on every front. Scientologists are carefully taught by L. Ron Hubbard in how to not think logically and yet believe they are doing the exact opposite. And because of their own confirmation bias, they just keep doubling down on the silliness of Hubbard’s nonsense. And that is why Scientology doesn’t work and won’t ever change or improve itself.
Thank you for watching.