A million dollars was a ***huge**** sum in the 1950s. L Ron was thinking big.
Thought for the day:
"To tell men that they are equal has a certain sentimental appeal. But this appeal is small compared with that made by a propaganda that tells them that they are superior and that others are inferior to them."
Karl R. Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies: The Spell of Plato -
Volume 1, page 96 Princeton University Press, 1966
My hunch is that no matter what its doctrine or methods, a cult offers members a promise of becoming special or assurance that one is superior versis those who do not see the appeal of the cult -- or are put off by it.
Am wondering whether what Karl Popper termed a closed society has some useful similarties with those of cults.
And this is important, because a closed society will be incompatible with an open society.
If a cult meets the criteria of a closed society, a cult's demand that its views be treated in a 'balanced manner" and thus in open society is not good faith - an closed, cultic society will eventually try to take over the open society that naively gives it permission to make inroads. For an open society has something the cult leaders will fear and try to suppres - access to information about the cult - and an open society will offer other and perhaps more appealing options than those provided by the cult.
A bit more on Karl Popper's ideas on closed vs open society
of [
www.iep.utm.edu]
(quote)In fact, (Popper) said, the view that some collective social entity—be it, for example, a city, a state, society, a nation, or a race—has needs that are prior and superior to the needs of actual living persons is a central ethical tenet of all totalitarian systems, whether ancient or modern.
Nazis, for instance, emphasized the needs of the Aryan race to justify their brutal policies, whereas communists in the Soviet Union spoke of class aims and interests as the motor of history to which the individual must bend.
The needs of the race or class superseded the needs of individuals.
In contrast, Popper held, members of an open society see the state and other social institutions as human designed, subject to rational scrutiny, and always serving the interests of individuals—and never the other way around. True justice entails equal treatment of individuals rather than Plato’s organistic view, in which justice is identified as a well functioning state."
The needs of the race or class superseded the needs of individuals. (Popper quoted from above)
Word substitution
The needs of (SGI) supersede the needs of individuals
Back to our discussion of SGI and congratulations to all who left that closed, cultic society and are now happily in open society once again.