On Wed, 17 Oct 2001 12:42:10 GMT, cep@at.com (cep) wrote: >From: "Icee" <icee@planet.nl>
>Newsgroups: nl.scientology
snip >
>Thank you for showing yourself to me and to everybody else
>for that matter in the way I intended.
>It was obvious from the beginning that I had to go, but I just
>wouldn't go silently until
snip This has probably gone too far to repair but is worth discussing anyway. I have been really wondering about the root of so much infighting in the last few months. It is not important to name them, but there is an exceptional number going at the moment. Why? As usual I turn to E-P. We are wired up psychologically in ways that helped our ancestors reproduce for the last several million years. As an example, only real reason we pair bond is to raise children. There is a well known instability in couples who do not have children after about two years because we are to some extent descendants of people who did not stay in infertile unions. The fact that people don't want to have kids or more kids at the rational level has nothing to do with such deep underlying psychological processes. This is in conflict with the (advantageous for children) psychological tendency to stay pair bonded, so it is not at all automatic. Evolution of such things is sloppy, a botch job as Dave Bird puts it. Likewise, we are descendants of people whose tribes split when they got big enough. This number we know to be not more than 150 people and depending on the environment can be somewhat lower. From what has been observed among primitives, such splits are often vicious affairs where minor matters get blown into fights that split the tribe-- accomplishing something good for the genes. It is now understood that the vicious fighting serves a purpose, to inhibit people from staying in one too large group. While it has no formal organization the a.r.s community takes on the human default characteristics of a tribe. I don't think anyone could deny that the number of people involved in the fight against scientology has recently risen way above the level at which tribes split. This is a good thing even if it causes squabbles. Though it is a deep part of our evolutionary history, we have figured out ways to override this tendency of groups to get in fights and split up. Hierarchal organization permits large coherent social groups to exist. Unfortunately, there are problems using the tried and true methods for larger organizations because the hierarchal group scientology will put maximum effort into attacking organizations--as we have seen with CAN and the LMT. There might be some method to split the a.r.s tribe into different part of the ecological "territory" of taking bites out of scientology i.e., the psychological reward territory. Or perhaps if people understood the root causes of these fights we might be less affected by them. Your thoughts on the problems created by the critic community getting so large would be highly appreciated. Keith Henson