Scientology Logic 17

Logic 17 - Those fields which most depend upon authoritative opinion for their data least contain known natural law.

If a scientist comes along and gives an authoritative opinion about the stress bearing capabilities of concrete and then the bridge that was built using this opinion falls down, it is clear his opinion was wrong. The fields of physics and engineering are fields containing a great deal of known natural law so the accuracy of authoritative opinions can rapidly be established and thus these fields suffer less than most others from this disease.

But what about art? "That is a great painting," asserts one man. "It's a piece of crap," asserts another. Then an art critic gives his authoritative opinion and the picture becomes worth millions. How can that be? It is because there is little or no known natural law in the field.

What about the field of the mind? In the 19th Century there was a well known disease called "Brain Fever". If you look up the term in a current dictionary it now has a meaningful definition, but in the 19th Century it was used as a catch-all to explain any kind of "mentally fevered" reaction or state. As a Sherlock Holmes fan I can recall three stories where characters had "brain fever", it seemed to be a combination of nervous breakdown and fever - very handy for a writer who needed a character to be incapacitated for a while. Of course now we know there is no such thing as "brain fever" as it was defined back then.

Earlier than the 19th Century everyone knew that mental derangement was cause by demonic possession and the cure was exorcism.

We look back at these ideas which were put forward by the very best authorities of the time and perhaps we shudder at the thought of how the poor patient was treated or perhaps we laugh at the idiocy of it. The thing to realize is that the field of the mind contains no known natural law and so "authorities" can get away with such nonsense.

Of course nowadays we are so advanced in this field that we know for certain that all mental derangement comes from a chemical imbalance in the brain. And instead of paying lots of money to exorcists to remove the demons we pay lots of money to psychiatrists and pharmaceutical companies who provide addictive mind-altering drugs to cure the imbalance. I wonder what they'll be saying in a hundred years about that authoritative opinion?