Sun May 25, 2008 11:06 pm by Spork
“Take Ron's 'ARC Triangle', with its Affinity - Reality - Communication, which presupposes that Communication can only occur in lock-step with 'liking someone' and agreeing with them (shared reality) and every other combination of the three. ...
Then combine that belief with the stricture against 'Verbal Tech' and, you're left with two people with a basic drive to 'agree' with each other, but, per your analysis, unable to actually compare notes on what it is they're agreeing on. The 'data' becomes an abstract third element between them both which appears identical to both, yet quite possibly represents something very different to each.
...
So, say, Scn-A maintains the validity of Ron-Concept-C; and Scn-B also agrees with RC-C. They are in high ARC, like each other and share reality, and, can communicate with each other, *until* they begin paraphrasing and intrepreting and expressing *their* individual take on what RC-C actually *means*.
For the first time, the 'agreement' begins to break down and RC-C ceases to be able to be 'all things to all people', because by comparing notes [as they might do once they leave Scn and the stricture vs ‘verbal tech’ is lifted], Scn-A and Scn-B discover that their interpretations are not only different, but, can even be completely incompatible.”
--Zinjifar, ESMB
Apparently there’s a mechanism or theoretical provision in Scientology for maintaining the illusion of a shared meaning when in fact there is no shared meaning or (in extreme cases) no meaning at all.
The ARC triangle, Hubbard informs us, is the key to “understanding”. This is ambiguous. Does he mean mutual feeling between persons, e.g. when someone says sympathetically, “I understand exactly where you’re comin’ from, man”? Does he mean understanding in the narrow sense of the comprehension of verbal meanings? Or a mixture of both – Scn-A and Scn-B reach some either-mutual-feeling-or-joint-verbal-comprehension-understanding when they communicate (duplicate each other’s particles) in a friendly way which is “real” to both (i.e. is a matter on which they agree)?
Zinjifar effectively points out that, if truth and meaning are relativized to persons, A, R and C are not jointly sufficient for mutual comprehension of verbal meanings between persons. Zinj explains how A, R and C can be present but Scn-A and Scn-B can have no idea what the other is talking about. He calls our attention to the “verbal tech” stricture, which helps ensure that Scn-A and Scn-B never “compare notes” on what they think they mean. Instead they cheerfully carry on “agreeing” about completely different things, until they finally leave Scientology and discover that their understanding was illusory.
However, the Scientologist has a response here, namely to retort that in Zinj’s example the “C” is actually absent. Scn-A and Scn-B, it might be said, _believe_ they’re duplicating each other but they’re wrong: their particles have misfired or what-have-you; they never had true ARC from the beginning (it only seemed that way) since they failed to communicate.
To this Zinj could rejoin: what then is the criterion for deciding when a duplication has actually occurred (as opposed to merely seeming to occur)? On pain of circularity the answer can’t be, “When there’s ARC between Scn-A and Scn-B” or “When there’s understanding”.
I think that at this point we’re back to square one. There can’t be any appeal to the ARC = U equation to differentiate a merely apparent duplication from a real one. Interestingly, this problem is suspiciously similar to the one raised by Zinj: how to differentiate a merely apparent case of understanding from a real one.
So far Zinj has got the upper hand. ARC looks like a smokescreen. It is useless to explain how mutual understanding, in the narrow sense of the comprehension of verbal meanings, can occur, since the latter boils down to the question of mutual duplications (partly in the terms of which ARC itself is ultimately defined). Truly, from the theoretical as well as the practical point of view, ARC is capable of producing no more than an illusion or impression of understanding (in the narrow sense).