The Urban Redneck
There is no other way to put this: if you believe and repeat the corporate-owned media narrative on Scientology (and pretty much anything else), you are ignorant. Sorry. You just might be an Urban Redneck.
I always find it cute when some Rasta beanie—who has just dropped $120,000 on a degree in Postmodern Maoist Interpretive Dance, has been pronounced “educated” and has now embarked upon an exciting lifetime career making lattes—confidently asserts that I’m a sucker because I study Scientology. Wow…
I grew up in a town full of rednecks that mocked people who valued learning, had ambition or who worked toward a better life. You’d have to come from that sort of place to really appreciate the type. Yet the closer you get to urban centers, where people consider themselves more sophisticated, you find the same type: the urban redneck. Sure, they have different accents and modes of dress, even different incomes, but the thinking is the same, i.e., “There is nothing wrong with me; there is something wrong with anyone who doesn’t think like me.”
The mental matrix of this urban redneck grows out of a single premise: “I’m always right.” “If I’m thinking it, saying it or doing it, it must be right because it’s ME!” If the urban redneck ever does a 180 in his or her thinking, everyone had better follow along because they are now even more right. They see themselves as the model for what should be “normal,” and anyone deviating from that model must be shot down. The urban redneck will believe anything you tell him as long as it feeds his concept of a superiority based on little or nothing.
When the urban redneck finds a toehold in the corporate-owned news media or the entertainment business, you get the angry and sarcastic comedy or news stories spewed at anyone who is not like him. Because of his unshakable confidence in his opinion, the urban redneck creates an Alpha male aura through verbal bullying. He will ridicule, lie and harass. He will do anything except tell the truth about anyone who goes against his view of humanity.
He doesn’t set out to lie, it’s just that the truth isn’t ever his concern. Rather, he’s worried about maintaining his self-appointed office as the Director of the Department of “Normal.”
Currently some very gifted insult-comics use ridicule of everything and everyone to command a very subtle obedience in thought from their audience. They’re funny as hell right up to the point where they nearly turn a bunch of nice middle-class college students into brown-shirted Nazis (and don’t think that’s an exaggeration).
The media narrative takes a few isolated oddities and individuals and creates a false picture of an entire religious philosophy. Any history buffs out there will know that this is exactly what the Nazi media did and the German people were suckered into believing it. Worse yet, they acted upon it. It is in fact what is happening here and now, and it’s where we finally sit as a society. Anyone who doesn’t follow the corporate-owned media narrative becomes a second-class citizen. Less than human. “Untermenschen.”
Urban rednecks see themselves as the model for what should be “normal,” and anyone deviating from that model must be shot down.
The fact is that anyone would be hard put to find a single human being who became more broadly and better educated than L. Ron Hubbard. In his quest to improve human ability, he applied engineering principles to philosophical, religious and mental traditions dating back millennia to discover any and everything that worked toward that improvement. In my view, you could not gain a better initial exposure to the various areas of human knowledge than you can through Scientology. An exposure based on fundamental principles, not “authority,” and spanning everything from science to the humanities.
The fact is that Scientologists as a group, while caring little about “opinion,” care a great deal about knowledge and discovery of any type. There is nothing we love better than to see people learn to think and analyze for themselves so they can escape the shackles of authority-based learning and obedience to arbitrary doctrines.
Photos by: Leonard Zhukovsky / Kathy Hutchins / 360b / Shutterstock.com
