I frequently get asked in America why India’s caste system, a pre-feudalistic division of labor that assigns one’s line of work at birth, has persisted into the 21st century. I typically answer: the need of the privileged upper castes for cheap labor. But there is an even more tragic explanation, as I discovered during a recent visit to New Delhi while talking to Maya, the dalit or untouchable — the lowest of the four castes — who has serviced my family for 35 years. Maya herself clings to her caste because it still offers her the best possible life in India.

What’s puzzling about the caste system is that it endures without legal force. Unlike slavery, where whites actively relied on authorities to maintain their slave holdings, the caste system is an informal, self-perpetuating institution.

How? Consider Maya’s story.

Maya assigned herself to our house in 1977. We had no choice. If we wanted our trash picked up, bathrooms scrubbed and yards cleaned, Maya was it. Indians find dealing with other people’s refuse not just unpleasant, but polluting. Hence only dalits are willing to do this work, something that both stigmatizes them and gives them a stranglehold on the market. And they have transformed this stranglehold into an ironclad cartel that closes all other options for their customers.

When Maya got married at 16, her father-in-law paid another dalit $20 for her wedding gift: the “rights” to service 10 houses in our neighborhood, including ours. Maya has no formal deed to these “rights,” yet they are more inviolable than holy writ. Maya’s fellow dalits, who own the “rights” to other houses, can’t work in hers, just as she can’t work in theirs.

Doing so, Maya insists, would be tantamount to theft that would invite a well-deserved beating and ostracism by the dalit community. No one would help a “poacher” or attend her family functions like births, weddings or funerals.

This arrangement has guaranteed Maya a monthly income of $100 that, along with her husband’s job as a “gofer” at a government lab, has helped her raise three children and build a modest house with a bathroom, a prized feature among India’s poor. But Maya’s monopoly doesn’t give her just money. It also hands her clout to resist the upper-caste power structure, not always for noble reasons.

None of Maya’s employers dares challenge her work. Maya takes more days off for funerals every year than there are members in her extended family. Complaining, however, is not only pointless but perilous. It would result in stinking piles of garbage outside the complainer’s home for days. Every time my mother gets into spats with Maya over her sketchy scrubbing, my mother loses. One harsh word, and Maya boycotts our house until my mother cajoles her back. Nor is Maya the only sweeper, or jamadarni, with an attitude. All of New Delhi is carved up among Maya-style sweeper cartels and it is a rare house whose jamadarni is not a “big problem.”

But the price for this clout is the loss of inter-caste acceptability. Segregation has loosened considerably among the first three castes. But dalits are allowed to socialize with other castes only if they abandon trash-related work. Otherwise, every interaction involving them becomes subject to an apartheid-like social code.

Some of Maya’s houses, for example, have separate entrances that allow her to access bathrooms without having to enter the main house. Although the families have formed a genuine bond with her and treat her generously, plying her with lavish gifts during festivals, there are limits. They give her breakfast and lunch, but in separate dishes. Sitting at their table, sharing a meal, is forbidden. Not even my mother’s driver, a higher caste, would visit Maya and accept a glass of water, even though he is poorer than she.

Maya is resigned to such discrimination, but not her oldest son, 36. He holds a government job, works as a sales representative for an Amway-style company and dreams big. He is embarrassed by his mother and lies to his customers about her work. He makes enough money to support Maya and wants her to quit, but she will have none of it. She fears destitution and poverty more, she says, than she craves social respectability.

But the choice may not be hers much longer.

Upon retirement, she had planned to either pass her “business” to her children or sell it to another dalit for about $1,000. But about six months ago, municipal authorities started dispatching vans, Western-style, to collect trash from neighborhoods, the one service that protected Maya from obsolescence in an age of sophisticated home-cleaning gadgetry.

Maya and her fellow dalits held demonstrations outside the municipal commissioner’s office to stop the vans. They finally arrived at a compromise that lets Maya and her pals collect trash from individual homes and hand it to the vans for disposal. But Maya realizes that this arrangement won’t last. “I got branded as polluted and became unfit for other jobs, for what?” she wept. “To build a business that has now turned to dust?”

Her son, however, is pleased. He believes that this will finally force his siblings to develop skills for more respectable work instead of joining their mother. But Maya shakes her head.

And she might be right. Post-liberalization, the most dogged and determined dalits are able to escape their caste-assigned destiny and get rich. But for the vast majority, as Maya says, opportunities are better within the caste system than outside it.

When that changes, the system will die, but not until then.

http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/what-consciousness-is-not

The suspicion is arising, as any New Ager might have suspected, that consciousness, pace neuroscience, won’t ever clarity itself. We can’t be sure of the future of research here, but the situation has not changed since the nineteenth century, when a number of critics saw the coming of reductionist nescience.

That is over a century, and not deep breakthrough on the ‘hard question’. It might helpt to adopt an ‘operational’ (qua Buddhist) approach, that is, to consider what we can do with consciousness, via the power of attention, and to see if we understand its latencies, which come to us operationally (meditation, and meditation in action, are variant statements of this, usually forgetfully clicheed yogic/buddhist mantras) as consciousness is jumpstarted to a higher octave, self-consciousness.
Even as the cult of scientism starts to attack buddhism, the collapse of the neuroscience pretense (hasn’t happened yet) looms at the ‘end of science’ (in the correct sense of that, for and by scientists).

The multiplicity of these questions is to be entirely expected, given that consciousness is, as Chalmers puts it,

an extraordinary and multifaceted phenomenon whose character can be approached from many different directions. It has a phenomenological and a neurobiological character. It has a metaphysical and an epistemological character. It has a perceptual and a cognitive character. It has a unified and a differentiated character.

And that’s just for starters. The mystery of consciousness is a network of mysteries, touching on the mystery of ourselves, the mystery of the intrinsic nature (if any) of the non-conscious world, and the mystery of our knowledge of ourselves, the natural world, and the human world atop it. If there is such a thing as a First Philosophy, the philosophy of the conscious mind is it. It is the ground in which every other branch of philosophy takes root.

Considering the profound importance of these questions, Chalmers’s latest book, The Character of Consciousness, ultimately turns out to be a disappointing sequel, especially given his track record of taking on the conventional wisdom that the answers to these questions are likely to defy. But it is worth considering this book at some length; for given David Chalmers’s distinctive sobriety and thoughtfulness among a field of philosophers committed to reducing its chosen subject nearly out of existence, it is striking how much his work still falls prey to the same fundamental errors. The book will thus serve as an instructive case study not only in how befuddling are questions about the mind, but in how stuck is the philosophical rudder of the prominent thinkers who study it, and how adrift they have floated.

Like Hindus, Buddhists, Jews, Christians, Sikhs and secularists, some Muslims have undoubtedly been violent and intolerant, but the new exhibition at the British Museum – Hajj: Journey to the Heart of Islam – is a timely reminder that this is not the whole story. The hajj is one of the five essential practices of Islam; when they make the pilgrimage to Mecca, Muslims ritually act out the central principles of their faith. Equating religion with “belief” is a modern western aberration. Like swimming or driving, religious knowledge is practically acquired. You learn only by doing. The ancient rituals of the hajj, which Arabs performed for centuries before Islam, have helped pilgrims to form habits of heart and mind that – pace the western stereotype – are non-violent and inclusive.

In the holy city of Mecca, violence of any kind was forbidden. From the moment they left home, pilgrims were not permitted to carry weapons, to swat an insect or speak an angry word, a discipline that introduced them to a new way of living. At a climactic moment of his prophetic career, Muhammad drew on this tradition. Fleeing persecution in Mecca in 622, he and the Muslim community (the umma) had migrated to Medina, 250 miles to the north. Mecca was determined to destroy the umma and a bitter conflict ensued. But eventually Muhammad broke the deadly cycle of warfare with an audacious non-violent initiative.

In March 628, to general astonishment, he announced that he was going to make the hajj. This meant that he had to ride unarmed into enemy territory, yet 1,000 Muslims accompanied him. The pilgrim party narrowly escaped being massacred by the Meccan cavalry, and eventually entered the sacred territory of Mecca where they simply sat down beside their camels and refused to move. Knowing that they would lose all credibility if they slaughtered pilgrims on this holy ground, the Meccans negotiated a truce and Muhammad accepted humiliating conditions that filled the Muslims with dismay. But the Qur’an proclaimed that this apparent defeat was a “clear triumph” because, like Jews and Christians, the Muslims had acted in a spirit of peace, self-restraint and forbearance. Two years later, hostilities ceased and the Meccans voluntarily opened their gates to the prophet.

Clearly the Qur’an did not despise Jews and Christians; this affinity with “the people of the book” was also central to the Muslim cult of Mecca. The Arabs firmly believed that they, too, were children of Abraham, because they were the descendants of his eldest son Ishmael – a regional view shared by the Bible. It was said that Abraham and Ishmael had rebuilt the Ka’bah, the sacred shrine of Mecca, when it had fallen into disrepair, had dedicated it to their God, and then performed the rites of the hajj. Many Arabs thought that Allah, their high God, was the God worshipped by the people of the book, and Christian Arabs used to make the hajj pilgrimage to the Ka’bah alongside the pagans.

The Arabs had no conception of an exclusive religious tradition, so they were deeply shocked when they discovered that most Jews and Christians refused to consider them as part of the Abrahamic family. The Qur’an still urged Muslims to respect the people of the book and revere their prophets, but decreed that instead of facing Jerusalem when they prayed, as hitherto, they should turn towards the Ka’bah built by Abraham.

Like Abraham, who had not belonged to a closed-off cult, they would take no pride in an established institution and, as Abraham had done, focus on the worship of God alone. Hence the Muslim hajj is all about the Abrahamic family – not Muhammad himself. Pilgrims re-enact the story of Hagar and Ishmael, symbolically returning to the era that preceded religious chauvinism.

Alas, all traditions lose their primal purity and we all fail our founders. But the British Museum’s beautiful presentation of the hajj can help us understand how the vast majority of the world’s Muslims understand their faith. Socrates, founder of the western rational tradition, insisted that the exercise of reason required us constantly and stringently to question received ideas and entrenched certainties. The new exhibition can indeed become a journey to the heart of Islam and also, perhaps, to a more authentic and respectful western rational identity.

Hubbard insisted that the principles of Dianetics had nothing to do with ‘any mumbo-jumbo of mysticism or spiritualism or religion’. He assured readers that ‘Dianetics is a science; as such, it has no opinion about religion, for sciences are based on natural laws.’ Throughout the United States, people formed Dianetics clubs and helped each other to become ‘clear’: in this state, they would be free of all compulsions, neuroses and delusions, see colours vividly for the first time, appreciate melody, perform complex mathematical calculations and recall every moment of their lives. Hubbard was so confident of the merits of his electro-psychometer, a device used to detect hidden trauma by measuring galvanic skin response, that he asked the American Medical Association to investigate his new tool. The medical establishment showed no interest. In a review in the Nation, the kindest thing the psychiatrist Milton Sapirstein could say about Dianetics was that ‘the author seems honestly to believe what he has written.’

Hubbard took the rejection badly. When his followers were arrested for practising medicine without a licence, he complained that the United States made it ‘illegal to heal or cure anything’. He began to reconsider the distinction he’d made between psychology and spiritual practice. In a 1953 newsletter he wrote that the process of uncovering repressed memories through auditing is ‘perhaps allied with religion, perhaps a mystic practice and possibly just another form of Christian Science or plain Hubbardian nonsense’. The following year, embracing what he called the ‘religious angle’, he opened the first church of Scientology in Los Angeles. The electro-psychometer was no longer used as a diagnostic tool but became instead a ‘valid religious instrument, used in Confessionals’.

In The Church of Scientology, one of only a handful of academic treatments of the subject, Hugh Urban is less interested in the experiences of Scientologists than in the legal processes and semantic twists through which a set of beliefs becomes a religion. A professor of religious studies at Ohio State, Urban is interested in secrecy in religion, and in this book he chronicles the way Hubbard reacted to legal and political challenges to his authority by attempting (largely successfully) to conceal his theories from the public. Had he stuck with his original conception of Dianetics, his practices could have been investigated and judged according to scientific standards. A religion, on the other hand, can turn self-help platitudes into a scarce and privileged resource; criticism can be dismissed as intolerance, or persecution.

Like any therapy, Scientology appealed to people searching for a story that would explain why they hadn’t made the most of their lives. Hubbard’s disavowal of medicine required only slight adjustments. He replaced the term ‘brain’ (and tentative references to its architecture) with ‘spirit’ and ‘soul’, and expanded his concept of time. If a patient (called a ‘pre-clear’) couldn’t remember being abused, an auditor would encourage her to think about her experience in the womb; if she couldn’t recall any trauma there, she was urged to reflect on previous lives, in other galaxies, spanning hundreds or thousands of years. Through their recovered memories, pre-clears were initiated into the Scientology mythos, which hinges on the story of an intergalactic dictator called Xenu who 75 million years ago collaborated with psychiatrists to massacre a population of aliens whose tortured essences now inhabit the bodies of humans.

Scientology quickly became one of the loudest (and least articulate) voices in the anti-psychiatry movement of the 1960s – a time when doctors still had unfettered authority to administer drugs to unwilling patients. (The first international edition of the Scientology magazine, Freedom, showed horned devils performing lobotomies.) To Scientologists the ‘psychs’ were conspirators who wanted to take over the world. The new church’s survival depended on the claim – born of rejection and disappointment – that only religion is equipped to study the mind.

But Hubbard never let go of the dream that the world would become explicable through science. Since he lacked credentials, he defined his practice in the vaguest terms: ‘All we want is something with a high degree of workability, that’s all any scientist needs.’ Science was a perspective rather than a method. The proof that Scientology worked was Hubbard’s own life. In his book Mission into Time, he claimed he had finally triumphed over his unconscious; he now remembered ‘with certainty’ every moment of his existence. ‘The small details of it like what I ate for breakfast two trillion years ago are liable to go astray here and there,’ he wrote, ‘but otherwise it’s no mystery.’

Hubbard had begun exploring the redemptive possibilities of science in the 1930s and 1940s, when he was writing the voluminous short stories that appeared – he produced nearly 100,000 words a month – in Astounding Science Fiction, the most popular US magazine of its kind. His stories were crass, overdetermined and breezy; his heroes morally, mentally and physically superior to the rest of humanity. He had an exalted sense of his creative powers, but in any case held that artists were higher beings, superior to the ‘raw public’, which had been ‘booby-trapped’ into believing in a single reality.

Hubbard’s novel Typewriter in the Sky, published in 1940, tells the story of Horace Hackett, a writer who turns his best friend into a character in his own novel. Every time Hackett makes a creative decision, his friend’s reality changes: he moves helplessly through scenes, ‘swept along by a force which was wholly invisible and untouchable’. At the end of a long day’s work, Hackett muses, glass of Scotch in hand, that ‘the way you feel about stories sometimes. It’s – well, sort of divine.’ The story ‘comes bubbling out of us like music’. ‘When I go knocking out the wordage and really get interested in my characters,’ he continued, ‘it almost makes me feel like – a god or something.’

Soon Hubbard began interpreting that power literally, and many of his colleagues lost interest in his work. An extract from Dianetics was published in Astounding Science Fiction in 1950 and, according to Judith Merril, a frequent contributor, it became a ‘line of demarcation’. She saw it as marking the end of the magazine’s golden era: instead of using fantasy to pose questions that challenged social norms, it now prescribed fantastic solutions that were increasingly out of touch with the world.

Hubbard’s most devoted readers were absorbed into his fan-fiction empire; as they remembered their past lives, they became characters in his catch-all narrative. At each level of the process they attained new knowledge that enriched the fictional universe for them. The promised denouement was ascension on earth, a prospect that Hubbard regularly elaborated by writing new chapters, or ‘doctrine’. The religion would create a supremely rational species capable of all sorts of amazing feats – healing the sick, communicating with plants, levitating.

Hubbard gradually came to terms with years spent writing science fiction. It had once been a liability, not to be much discussed, but as he began to consider himself a religious leader he came to see his writing years as a productive phase of ‘research’. Thanks to science fiction, he had discovered an age when men could transcend the boundaries of the physical universe. ‘It … concerns actual incidents,’ Hubbard wrote. The only problem was that in his novels he had the timeline wrong: ‘The science fiction writer’s memory is faulty, and he gets himself all restimulated and so forth, and he doesn’t remember straight. Some of them remember it quite well, but then they reverse their time … and put it all into the future.’

Scientology might be dismissed as an overgrown vanity project, were it not for its 26-year battle with the Internal Revenue Service. The organisation filed more than 2200 suits against the IRS (claiming harassment and violation of First Amendment rights, among other things). Eventually, in 1993, in a $12.5 million settlement, the IRS, worn down by lawyers’ fees, granted Scientology tax-exempt status. The tax authorities have become a litmus test for whether a religion in America is authentic. ‘The complex legal and extra-legal battles between the church and the IRS,’ Urban writes, ‘have been central to the shifting definition of religion itself.’ In Britain, Scientology is not recognised as a religion or as a charity, but it is a not-for-profit organisation and as such is exempt from VAT. Only the Royal Navy officially designates it a religion.

Urban takes no position on whether or not Scientology should qualify as a religion; he argues that religion is a form of discourse, which Scientology has carefully mastered. In lectures, books, radio broadcasts and promotional movies, Scientology rebranded itself with references to the superhuman and the eternal, though the purpose of the redefinition was material. Tax-exempt status came as a financial boon, and meant the church could exercise tighter control over copyrighted materials. Religion, Hubbard told his colleagues, would attract more ‘customers’. ‘It is a problem in practical business,’ he explained. ‘Psychotherapy treats the past and the brain. We’re treating the present-time beingness. And, brother, that’s religion, not mental science.’

In the course of the 1960s and 1970s, Scientology gradually fashioned itself as a sect of Christianity. Offices were transformed into churches and were required to display ‘visual evidences’ of spirituality, including crosses, altars and creeds. Auditors, renamed ‘ministers’, wore black suits, silver crosses and clerical collars. A minister, Hubbard wrote, ‘should dress in a way that does not upset the accepted stable data of what a minister looks like’. The church also sent out ‘Messianic Surveys’ to identify qualities the public wanted in a messiah, such as honesty, happiness and justice. The shift was resisted by many members, particularly science-fiction fans, but Hubbard assured them he was interpreting religion in broad, humanist terms: ‘Before you say, “Religion, grrrr,” think of that – it is a practical religion and religion is the oldest heritage that Man has.’

Urban does not argue, as other writers have, that it was all a financial ploy, though he agrees that getting rich was a powerful motivating force. He places Hubbard in a line of science-fiction novelists who thought of reality as a ‘collective fiction created by our own continual agreement that it appears to be real’. As Hubbard saw it, the ability to create one’s own reality was a divine kind of freedom; he compared this ‘creation and management of universes’ to ‘a writer sitting at his desk’. ‘He’s pounding a typewriter,’ he said in a 1952 lecture. ‘So what’s he doing? Inventing time and space and energy and matter.’

Hubbard’s romantic vision of artistic creation became the basis for Scientology’s recruitment of Hollywood celebrities – Tom Cruise, John Travolta, Juliette Lewis, Kirstie Alley, Peaches Geldof – who serve as evidence that the religion makes the ‘able more able’. Even William Burroughs, during his brief stint in the church, was featured in Freedom bragging that he’d become a more imaginative writer and dismissing the notion that artists healed of their neuroses and compulsions would be bereft of inspiration. (He later became a prominent critic: ‘Scientology is a model control system, a state in fact with its own courts, police, rewards and penalties. It is based on a tight in-group like the CIA.’)

Hubbard had frequently compared life to a game, and he didn’t want to be ‘playing some minor game in Scientology. It isn’t cute or something to do for lack of something better.’ The game hinged on the idea that we can choose what we perceive to be ‘true’, and discard everything else as an illusion. Yet soon Hubbard’s postmodern religion strove to become a ‘real’ one. His followers – among them hippies as well as educated and ambitious young people – surprised him with the intensity of their belief. Hubbard told a group of doctoral students in Philadelphia in 1954 that his followers were more convinced of Scientology’s cosmology than he was. ‘I’m just kidding you mostly,’ he said. ‘I don’t believe any of these things and I don’t want to be agreed with about them … All I’m asking is that we take a look at this information, and … let’s see if we can’t disagree with this universe, just a little bit.’

Hubbard recognised that people’s sense of reality was easily enough undermined, and from there replaced – a process also known as brainwashing. Urban avoids the controversies and crimes that have shaped Scientology’s public image – he doesn’t consider them part of his remit – but in leaving out details about the church’s more sordid traditions, he gives only an incomplete view of the afterlife of Hubbard’s ‘rather postmodern view of the self and of reality’. Numerous reports in the past two decades, especially those in the St Petersburg Times (Scientology has its headquarters near St Petersburg in Florida), have used interviews with defectors to document the way the church became a horror show for some of its members. The reports include allegations by former Scientologists, many of whom signed billion-year contracts with the church, of mental and physical abuse, harassment, kidnapping, forced isolation, manual labour and starvation.

Scientology claims to fulfil modern psychology’s fantasy of direct access to the contents of the mind. Some pervasive deception just beneath the surface – what is commonly thought of as normal life – must constantly be confronted and dispelled. Members prove their devotion by submitting to ‘security checks’ while holding an electro-psychometer:

Have you ever had thoughts you were embarrassed about?
Are you guilty of anything?
Do you collect sexual objects?
Have you ever had any unkind thoughts about L. Ron Hubbard or Scientology?
Do you think there is anything wrong with having your own privacy invaded?
Do you deserve to be free?

Individual expression was streamlined as members adopted a generically scientific lingo. Verbs were ‘pressured into service as nouns’, as Hubbard put it, and new terms brought into being: love was renamed ‘affinity’, an irrational person an ‘aberree’, an evil one an ‘SP’ (for Suppressive Person) and bad PR was now ‘Entheta’. The new language didn’t leave room for ambiguity, so there was little need for adjectives or adverbs.

Urban details Hubbard’s obsession with surveillance, and attributes his paranoia to the influence of the Cold War. ‘Scientology is best understood not as a counter-cultural rejection of mainstream America,’ he writes, ‘but rather as the fulfilment (if perhaps exaggeration) of many American concerns.’ Just as the Protestant ethic emerged naturally from early modern capitalism, he argues, Scientology, with its corporate hierarchy, reflected the preoccupations of a hyper-technological, late capitalist society mourning the loss of privacy.

But Hubbard suffered from paranoia before it became fashionable. In the 1940s and 1950s he sent letters to the FBI, complaining that Communists were going to attack him, that Russians were stealing his work, that a stranger had broken into his apartment and given him a 100-volt electric shock. ‘Appears mental,’ an FBI agent wrote on his file. His paranoia created a world in which nothing was trivial. The paranoid person ‘logically weaves all events, all persons, all chance remarks and happenings, into his system’, a character in Philip K. Dick’s story ‘Shell Game’ explains. Paranoia functioned as a religious worldview, and bound his followers into a community.

The crusade against the IRS soon became the justification for a wide range of crimes, which only intensified the church’s paranoia. Scientologists hired private detectives to spy on IRS agents, in the hope of discovering unsavoury habits – alcoholism, adultery, violation of housing codes – to publicise. In the mid-1970s, members infiltrated IRS offices – one Scientologist had landed a job as a clerk – and stole 30,000 pages of documents relating to the church, including reports critical of Hubbard. One of the stolen memos documented a meeting in which IRS officials discussed changing the agency’s definition of a religion, a court recently having ruled that Scientology met its criteria. The church’s caper was eventually uncovered, and 11 accomplices, including Hubbard’s third wife, were sent to prison. Hubbard, named as an unindicted co-conspirator, spent the rest of his life in hiding.

Urban has written elsewhere that the history of religions in the 20th century is the ‘privileging of the mystical, secret, elitist aspects of religion’, often to the neglect of the mundane. More than any other new religion, Scientology has used secrecy as a source of power. Urban shows that it has been ill-equipped to handle the challenges of the internet age: the ‘haemorrhaging of information online’ is the ‘greatest single threat faced by the church in the 21st century’. Official doctrine, including the revelations formerly available only to those who had reached the highest level of Scientology training (and paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to get there), is freely available on the internet to those who have never taken a course. Over the past decade, according to the American Religious Identification Survey, membership has dropped by roughly 20,000. Defectors have chronicled their disenchantment online, and the Xenu story has circulated widely. One of Hubbard’s biographers, an ex-Scientologist, told Urban that this may be the ‘last generation of Scientologists’.

Hubbard anticipated the need to control his religion’s history, making it sensational, rapidly paced and thematically tidy. The only way to handle a journalist is to ‘give him a story that he thinks is a story,’ he wrote. The church, following his lead, now cites the long history of threats to the church (a form of ‘inquisition’) as a proof of the religion’s authenticity. Under the leadership of David Miscavige, Hubbard’s successor, the church has responded aggressively to the online publication of confidential materials, treating hackers as a new enemy, as threatening as psychiatry. It reframes attacks on Scientology’s sealed materials as an assault on the freedom of religion itself. ‘If we get involved in a war where we feel our survival is threatened, we will dedicatedly fight,’ Miscavige said in a rare interview. ‘But I think any dedicated institution, especially a religious organisation, will do that. That is the history of religion.’