Anderson Cooper - Kind vs. Cruel | Print |
Tuesday, 30 March 2010 10:52

CRUEL TO BE KIND? I DON'T THINK SO

I just watched the first of the Anderson Cooper 360 series on Scientology, and the response of the Int staff to Anderson's questions made me recall quite vividly why I'm no longer in the Sea Org. It's a very hostile environment, where the only way to survive is to become just as hostile.

When I was at Int in a position of seniority, I was continually berated by those above me for not being mean enough to my staff. I was slapped in the face once because I wouldn't scream at a staff member for not doing a good enough job. It got to the point where I had to do ethics conditions on the fact that I was being "too nice" to my staff.

So I started screaming at staff, berating staff and generally going along with the flow in order to survive. But I was a very unhappy person, even though I was supposed to be one of the happiest people on Earth. Eventually it got to the point where I couldn't take it anymore and I left. I thought I was taking the weakling's way out at the time, but in retrospect, I realize it's one of the times I was at my strongest.

When I got out of the SO, and started working in another environment, I was shocked to see how pleasant people were to one another. I mean, how did they get anything done?

It took me at least two years to get out of that earlier mindset. Any time an employee was late for work, or did something incorrectly, I'd be very harsh on them. I never even realized it.. And I only snapped out of it when one of the people who worked for me did something that got me so upset I actually screamed at her. She looked at me with terror in her eyes, and my boss pulled me into her office to find out what could have been so horrible to have made me "snap" like that.

I cried a lot that day, and for a few days afterwards. Then suddenly it was gone. I was free of it. And I've not had a mean moment since.

That's why you see what you see with Jenny Linson, Norman Starkey et al when they are responding to Anderson Cooper's questions: They are conditioned to be hostile and cruel. That's the way it is up there.

Yet, when you read the following essay on Kindness taken from the works of L. Ron Hubbard, it goes directly against everything that they are portraying. I believe (not totally certain) that this was compiled from a lecture he gave on this subject, which I listened to on one of the many administrative courses I took while at Int. And I think it bears repeating in full, given what we're seeing right now from the management of organized Scientology:

There’s hardly one of us who hasn’t asked himself the question, “Isn’t it better to be mean?” Almost every one of us has had the feeling that we were a bit soft. We didn’t like flying into the teeth of some human being and making him or her feel bad. We’ve told ourselves, “We ought to be tougher. We ought to put up a better front; we ought to know when to snarl, know when to show the sharpened tooth.” And probably we have walked away occasionally after we’ve loaned somebody five dollars or something of the sort and said, “When am I going to learn to be tough? When am I going to learn to be hard-boiled and just stand right up to that little kid and say ‘No!’ When am I going to learn this?”

The motto behind this is “Isn’t it better to be mean occasionally? When am I going to stop being soft and be a hard, forthright, capable-of-saying-no person? I would be a much better manager. I would be a much better person if I knew when to come down with a slight slam. If I could just know, occasionally, when I should be mean, and if I just was willing to be mean, wouldn’t that be right? I should be able to just take the people out there and just sweep them aside. Isn’t there some rightness in being tough?”

One can spot times when he knows he should have been tougher—he’s sure of it. But a highly informative series of Scientology spiritual counseling procedures demonstrates that the person who is willing to confront other things doesn’t ever have to say no, he doesn’t ever have to be mean, he doesn’t ever have to be tough at all. (And by confront things, we mean face things without flinching or avoiding.) It is perfectly all right to be nice to people. It isn’t a weakness at all. As a matter of fact, if you aren’t, you’re in the soup.

You could say that the only times for which you are suffering are those times when you weren’t nice enough, when you weren’t kind enough and when you weren’t unmean enough. Those are the only times from which you’re really suffering.

It is not true that being mean gets anybody ahead anyplace. That’s really factual.

When you deny your fellow man—you say “no”; you say “be mean,” you say “be very positive”—the truth of the matter is that you are denying him communication, one way or the other.

The only thing you should ever be tough about is insisting that the other fellow ought to stand on his own feet, too. And the only way you will ever communicate that to him is to communicate it to him in a very nice way. Then he’s liable to receive it.

Being mean is simply going out of communication with things.

The individual who is kind, who is decent and who does communicate and who is nice and who isn’t averse to conversation and saying this and doing that, who is tolerant, we find gets along beautifully.

But the fellow who’s mean and who’s ornery and who’s cutting communications all the way along the line, we find he’s in the soup.

Therefore, a standard of optimum human performance would be measured on the basis of human kindness as a high and human meanness as a low.

So we know the answer at last to whether you should have been mean all those times or whether you should have been more kind: You should have been more kind.

Written by Scarlet Pumpernickel