Richard, it reminds me of the sort of things that stoned, tripping college philosophy majors talked about back in my student days. Hubbard had apparently experimenting with lots of drugs including psychedelics around the time of those lectures, so that kind of fits. And “Excalibur” was probably the result of a nitrous oxide high, which can be just as trippy, so it sort of all started with his earliest drug experience.

I also remember some of the old time indies being fascinated by such things. The ones I knew seemed like fundamentally good people, interested in truly bettering themselves and others, so it was at least a harmless scene.

PeaceMaker – Again I agree and it’s essentially where my own train of thought ended on this conversation.

One last idle thought I had was after rereading the first paragraph quoted from the tape. Hubbard says:

“The MEST universe would have you believe this is the only game there is anyplace in the whole of anything. That’s not true! Not even vaguely true.”

So it seems Hubbard is again tripping out on his idea that we are all trapped in the MEST universe. “Free floating thetans” in a parallel universe or dimension would have no bodily needs so they would need to kill time playing games! laughter

Aqua, I think Hubbard’s ponderings about such things really belong here – along with the likes of Max Heindel’s Rosicrucian Cosmo-Conception, and of course’ Crowley’s “work” (cited):

Esoteric cosmology
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_esotericism

for more along the lines of Heindel:

Esoteric cosmology
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religious_cosmology#Esoteric_cosmology

The Rosicrucian Cosmo-Conception
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rosicrucian_Cosmo-Conception

Richard, I think Hubbard sort of spoke out of both sides of his mouth like that early on – he essentially warned people about techniques of manipulation and control, and then went ahead and used them on his audience and followers. It is confusing – but then again, we’ve talked about confusion technique as yet another of Hubbard’s manipulative tools.

My take on several aspects of this, is that he actually hoped to find a few “big beings” to join him in a game in which they would enjoy the exercise power at the expense of the masses who didn’t quite get it. And early on he attracted a few candidates including perhaps most notably “Pope” John McMaster and “Captain” Bill Robertson.

But of course it turned out that in the long run Hubbard was a “tyrant” (as Ken Urquhart concedes) and could never really get along with, or tolerate, any one else as more or less an equal, a colleague or even a friend. That’s both an indictment of his hopelessly warped personality, and a red flag that his “work” really was so flawed and misguided that he couldn’t solve his own fundamental problems, much less anyone else’s.

It was always “others” doing it Hubbard, scientology or scientologists.

Another way to look at it is that Hubbard was educating his followers on the pitfalls of games so they wouldn’t fall victim to it. In other words, if I want to control people using games, why would I forewarn them? Mind games – haha

Agreed – I replied to you above before I looked at your comment here. 🙂

PeaceMaker – Good points and I agree. My MU 🙂 here is equating Game theory with games, games conditions or “maker of games” and they’re not the same subject. This is a daily blog and I wanted to “weigh in” on Mockingbird’s comment before the topic went dead.

For the casual reader, NRM stands for New Religious Movements.

Richard, game theory is just another case where Hubbard was late to the game (!) and took others’ ideas without credit – as is the case with almost everything. If you go back to the beginning of the Wikipedia article you’ll find it originates in the 1940s or earlier, and was being widely worked on and discussed in certain circles in the 1950s.

The reference to the use of the term by Heinlein is telling. Game theory is the sort of thing that likely would have been discussed in settings where Hubbard would have been present such as get-togethers of sci fi writers, where there might well have been people who’d actually worked through Von Neumann’s writings on the subject. His everyday followers wouldn’t have known of such things, and thus were impressed when he related his take on ideas like that, that he’d picked up at a cocktail party or something. I’m quite familiar with a number of Hubbard’s sources, and see signs of his having that sort of sketchy second-hand understanding all throughout his “work,” spun to make him appear knowledgeable to his credulous audience.

If you’re really interested in the subject, you could read some of the sources referenced in that article. Hubbard isn’t mentioned because his amateurish ponderings, typically shaded by his attempts to either unduly impress or control people, don’t add anything to the subject.

Richard, Hubbard may have picked up some ideas about game theory at a cocktail party or something, listening to people who had actually read something about the subject. It’s actually very math-based, and not much if all like Hubbard’s cosmological musings.

Or Hubbard’s notions might be entirely based on esoteric works like Max Heindel’s Rosicrucian Cosmo-Conception, and others of that genre. The occult, particularly the work of Hubbard’s claimed “very good friend” Aleister Crowley, was unquestionable a major source and strong influence, worthy of documenting.

Hubbard was, ironically, a poor student; it’s clear that he had only a passing knowledge of ideas and philosophies, often picked up informally, and his second (“never had”) wife confirmed that he didn’t have the patience to read and study others’ works, and relied on people like her for ideas from Korczybski’s General Semantics, for instance, that he then cribbed and plagiarized (such as for his supposed “logics”). He produced a muddle of sloppy and often contradictory material that isn’t worth studying, and even NRM “scholars” are only interested in the broad picture of Scientology, and don’t have the stomach for wading through the details of it.