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Believing Their Own Lies: Difference between revisions
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** Possible subversion? L-Ron himself never intended Scientology to be an ''actual'' religion. He wrote it as a '''science fiction novel'''. So this is a case of ''other people'' believing someone's lies.
*** He supposedly wrote it to win a bet with fellow sci-fi author Robert A. Heinlein, on whether a sci-fi writer could actually start a "cult of personality" around their works. Supposedly, ''[[Stranger in A Strange Land]]'' was Heinlein's attempt. The story goes that Heinlein backed off when he was that it was ''working'', while Hubbard [[As You Know|did not]]. The rumor dates from over a decade before the Manson Gang murders and People's Temple incident highlighted how abusive personality cults actually were, eventually leading to the discovery that the supposedly "good" personality cults of Stalin and Mao were actually much worse than propagandists made them seem at the time. There is no proof of the bet, though there are several witnesses who overheard their discussion (or claim to have). In any case, Hubbard himself quickly acclimated to his new role as cult leader, and many of Scientology's most successful practices (especially the "Attack the Attacker" policy that causes most of the controversy) were instituted on his explicit orders. Whether Hubbard ever came to actually believe in his own lies is debatable, but he certainly came to believe that profiting off the actions of the literal cult he created was perfectly ethical, regardless of the lives they destroyed in the process, as long as it remained legal.
* [[Those Wacky
** To glue the new enemy to the old one, Nazi propaganda made up [[Josef Stalin]]'s imaginary 3rd wife
*** Unusual in that this particular fairy tale survived longer than its authors — after the war she eventually turned into either "''secret'' wife", "''Dr.'' Rosa Kaganovich ''Stalin''" and even "mother" of Yeltsin's wife, or (in other branch, more responsive to the lack of evidence) Stalin's mistress. As the variations of this mythological character multiplied with time, now we have Roza Lasarevna/Moseevna/Mikhailovna Kaganovich, a sister/daughter/niece of Lasar Kaganovich, and/or also his personal doctor who poisoned him and became the cause for the last purge during his life, but at the same time vanished tracelessly. There was even a study ''How a Legend became a Woman: the Story of Rosa Kaganovich, Stalin's Secret Wife'' ("This presentation is dedicated to the problem of mythological versions of the biographies of political leaders" - you can find English abstract [http://www.helsinki.fi/aleksanteri/english/news/events/2012/visitorseminars_spring_2012.html on the site of University of Helsinki]).
** Historian Ian Kershaw wrote extensively on the so-called "
* Using this makes for the most effective lies. A person will generally continue to exhibit "tells" as long as they continue to think of their lies as lies. Once you ''genuinely believe'' that your lies are true, your behavior will no longer suggest anything otherwise.
* [http://www.fair.org/blog/2011/02/16/wait-the-iraq-wmd-stuff-was-a-lie/ This] belated punchline to the old "404 - WMD not found" joke.
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