Namby Pamby Pantywaist Dilettante

The Worst Thing A Scientologist Could Dream of Being

This post is in response to the July 10, 2025 poll. Be sure to get your votes in on this week’s poll.

One policy that is drilled into every person’s head from the minute they enter Scientology is Keeping Scientology Working. It is the first thing every person reads on every course they take no matter how far they go in Scientology.

By the time a person has finished a few courses in Scientology, they are able to quote large portions of this policy verbatim. If they are like me, they even dream portions of it. It is probably the single most important policy in all of Scientology. It also says what Hubbard wants it to say within the first two pages. The rest is just lots more of Hubbard droning on.

Having stated the importance of it, it’s now time to point out just how blind we were as his followers. This policy, which we were force fed over and over and over and over ad infinitum was seven pages long. It is a perfect example of a giant red flag. It should have caused me to jump and run from the beginning.

it was continually reissued after its original issue in 1965, each time with a note that the whole reason Scientology was having problems was because they weren’t obeying this policy. But why the reissues? It was already in everything we read. Reissuing it didn’t make it work better.

Plus, as with Hubbard’s other writings, he couldn’t be concise. Although I don’t condone the rules, had he stopped after giving the ten rules to Keeping Scientology Working, the people who were trying to do it would have had the roadmap they needed.

But he had to say what rules he felt weren’t being followed. There’s another 1/2 page. Then he takes credit for every “discovery” ever made in Scientology. After that, he wastes a few pages telling people how they are doing it wrong.

Then he gets to the showstopper. I can honestly say in the history of all my education, there is only one time I read the phrase namby pamby pantywaist dilletantes. And I was forced to read this way too wordy policy hundreds of times more than I wanted.

But in private situations, we used the phrase quite differently. Because we were exposed to that phrase on an almost daily basis as Scientologists, it became an integral part if our every day vocabulary. We would use all or parts of the phrase to denigrate others. Sometimes this was jokingly, often not.

Some of the iterations of this phrase that my group integrated into their vocabulary were:

• He’s such a dilettante,
• Don’t be so namby pamby,
• What a pantywaist,
• Quit dillettanting,
• Don’t pantywaist about it, and
• You’re a namby pamby whiner.

These are just the ones that come to me off the top of my head. Hubbard’s writings tended to make the people reading them a more and more insular group because only the other people who read them understood what they were saying.

His coining of words and phrases made people think they were part of something bigger because they communicated on a different level. Scientology was just an immersion into a fake foreign language. Because of that, I’ve spent over 100 hours compiling a glossary of Scientology terms and phrases.

It’s been an eye opener for me, 40 years out, to realize just how much deprogramming I still need. But think about it: The policy every single person in Scientology is forced to read at the start of every course basically tells the person they don’t have the choice to leave.