PART NINE:
SUMMING UP
Scientology's may be the most debilitating set
of rituals of any cult in America.
- CONWAY and SIEGELMAN,
"Information Disease," Science Digest,
January 1982
CHAPTER ONE
The Founder
It can be said with more than a little truth
that a society is lost when it loses its greed, for without hunger as a whip - for power,
money or fame - man sinks into a blind sloth and, contented or not, is gone.
- L. RON HUBBARD,
"Greed," Astounding Science Fiction, April 1950
L. Ron Hubbard was an opportunist who lied
consistently about his past, as partbs9-1.htm of a process of self-glorification. He was an
arrogant, amoral egomaniac. Incapable of admitting his mistakes, he continually created
scapegoats. The pure motives of his followers were exploited to build a secret mountain of
cash. Hubbard was an outright plagiarist, who eventually could not bear to acknowledge
anyone else's originality. He had a supreme distrust of the motives of all of humanity,
despite his bland generalizations about man's basic goodness. This goodness would only be
revealed after the individual had achieved some unspecified state of "OT."
Hubbard was a paranoid, power hungry, petty sadist who paraded his inadequacies through
ever more frequent tantrums. Revelling in his disciples' adulation, he spent his last
years in seclusion, surrounded by sycophants. He had an alarming ability to keep all the
many compartments of his life and his past separate, even, so it seems, in his own mind.
Nonetheless, such a complicated man cannot be confined in such tidy definitions. Although
the facts form a comprehensive picture, perhaps we have only caught glimpses of the man
behind the many masks.
In February 1983, in written replies to Rocky
Mountain News journalist Sue Lindsay, Hubbard said his favorite non-fiction book was Twelve
Against the Gods, by William Bolitho, adding, "the introduction is particularly
good." In this statement Hubbard provided a powerful clue to his most potent urge.
Bolitho's book was published in 1930, and consists of
twelve short biographies. Its central point is that "adventure is the vitaminizing
element in histories both individual and social." Bolitho lauded the adventurer above
all others. His twelve chosen adventurers were Alexander, Casanova, Columbus, Mahomet,
Lola Montez, Cagliostro (and Seraphina), Charles XII of Sweden, Napoleon, Catiline,
Napoleon III, Isadora Duncan and, for topical reasons, Woodrow Wilson. Judging by the tone
of the book, had Bolitho written a new edition in the 1940s, Hitler would very probably
have replaced Wilson. The following quotations are all taken from the "particularly
good" introduction, and clearly state Bolitho's basic thesis:
The adventurer is within us, and he contests
for our favor with the social man we are obliged to be .... We are obliged, in order to
live at all, to make a cage of laws for ourselves and to stand on the perch. We are born
as wasteful and unremorseful as tigers; we are obliged to be thrifty, or starve or freeze.
We are born to wander, and cursed to stay and dig... all the poets are on one side, and
all the laws on the other; for laws are made by, and usually for, old men . . .
The moment one of these truants breaks loose,
he has to fight the whole weight of things as they are; the laws and that indefinite
smothering aura that surrounds the laws that we call morals; the family, that is the
microcosm and whiplash of society; and the dead weight of all the possessors, across whose
interwoven rights the road to freedom lies. If he fails he is a mere criminal . . .
. . . the adventurer is an individualist and an
egotist, a truant from obligations. His road is solitary, there is no room for company on
it. What he does, he does for himself. His motive may be simple greed.
However, as Bolitho said, "these are men betrayed
by contradiction inside themselves." With his casual reference to Twelve Against
the Gods, Hubbard gave his own betraying contradiction: it is a glaring admission of
his deep-seated aspirations. His readiness to laud the book shows that he saw nothing
reprehensible in Bolitho's sentiments. The quoted passages give concise expression to the
underlying pattern of Hubbard's whole life, and to his self-image. Hubbard considered
himself an adventurer, a man above morality, who steadfastly followed his goal. It is
possible that Hubbard read Bolitho's book when it was published (he was nineteen at the
time), and took it as his model. His mention of it in 1983 was not the first. He had
already praised it, in a 1952 lecture, at the very beginning of Scientology. 1
There is powerful evidence to support this thesis. In
1938, at the age of twenty-seven, just after his failure to find a publisher for Excalibur,
Hubbard wrote a long letter to his first wife. Hubbard told Polly he had received a unique
insight into the nature of reality. His understanding made him superior to all of
humanity. He was utterly single-minded in his objective: to be remembered in future
centuries as the equal of his heroes Napoleon Bonaparte, Genghis Khan and Alexander the
Great, even if every word he wrote was lost. He had no other purpose, and became depressed
when he was thwarted; but in the throes of the mysterious power which stirred in him, he
felt absolutely unbeatable. He spoke of the possibility of becoming a demagogue, a great
political leader. He also admitted to his craving for applause.
Hubbard lusted after fame, wealth and power, and was
clearly willing to abandon moral restrictions to accomplish his ends.
Hubbard was a natural entertainer, able to captivate
some people with his charm. It often took prolonged, close contact for those so charmed to
see that he was arrogant, extravagant, eccentric and a liar on a grand scale. Even then
many continued to believe in his genius.
Hubbard can be dismissed as a fabulist, a compulsive
storyteller, whose exaggerations were harmless. But he was far worse than this. His
avarice coupled to deliberate deceit became outright fraud. Hubbard plainly made
fraudulent claims about himself and his supposed research. He also made fraudulent claims
about the money gathered ostensibly to further the publicized aims of Scientology. This
was not harmless puffery: it was conscious deceit designed to make him ever more famous,
influential and wealthy. The poverty and suffering of those believers who sustained his
opulent life-style must also be taken into account.
Although Hubbard single-mindedly pursued his ambition,
he may well have believed throughout that he was doing good. Nonetheless, he laid his
"road to truth" on a foundation of lies. Hubbard's long hours and obvious
absorption in his work support the view that he believed in the efficacy of his
"Technology." Bolitho's idea that "the magician must believe in himself, if
it is only as long as he is spouting," falls short of the mark. Martin Gardner, well
known adversary of parapsychology in general and Ron Hubbard in particular, made a germane
observation: "Cranks by definition believe their theories, and charlatans do not, but
this does not prevent a person from being both crank and charlatan." Hubbard's
fraudulent claims undoubtedly make a charlatan of him.
In the mid-1960s, Hubbard began to speak of himself as
the "Source" of Scientology. Having initially acknowledged a debt to Freud and a
host of philosophers, and having handed out numerous "Fellowships" to
Scientologists for their "major contributions," he finally decided that
Scientology was his creation alone: "Willing as I was to accept suggestions and data,
only a handful of suggestions (less than twenty) had long run value and none were
major or basic; and when I did accept major or basic suggestions and used them, we went
astray." 2
Hubbard was not truly the "Source" of
Scientology; little, if any, of his work is original. Hubbard pieced together modified
versions of existing ideas. Hubbard's peculiar genius was for reframing such ideas so they
would fit neatly into his own belief system, and articulating them in a digestible form.
For example, Scientology organizations use surveying techniques derived from Motivational
Research, which was developed by psychiatrists in the 1950s. The only text referred to by
Hubbard in this connection was Vance Packard's The Hidden Persuaders. Hubbard
failed to acknowledge that Scientology survey methods derive from the psychiatric
stimulus-response techniques which Packard was attacking.
Hubbard insisted that Scientology alone could save the
world from a holocaust. Scientology would create "a civilization without insanity,
without criminals and without war, where the able can prosper." His own survival, in
an environment conducive to "research," was therefore imperative, at least until
his work was complete. In his own words: "the whole agonized future of this planet,
every Man, Woman and Child . . . depends on what you do here and now with and in
Scientology." 3
Hubbard believed that his was a messianic mission. To quote from his obtuse poem Hymn
of Asia, written in the 1950s: "See me dead/Then I will live forever/But you
will/See/An Earth in flames/So deadly that/Not one will live/Fail once to stem/A hand that
smites/Against me and/I die."
In his writings, Hubbard made a distinction between
morals and ethics; the former being based upon custom and opinion, the latter upon
reasoned "pro-survival" decisions. He advocated the pursuit of "the
greatest good for the greatest number of dynamics" (the eight "dynamics,"
or urges toward survival for self, family, groups, mankind, matter, other lifeforms,
spirit and infinity). If Scientology was to save the world, and if it depended upon L. Ron
Hubbard for its completion, then the "greatest good for the greatest number of
dynamics" would always include as its most significant aspect the continued
protection and support of L. Ron Hubbard.
To Hubbard, anyone who opposed or even criticized him
was evil, their opposition to him inevitably slowing the progress of mankind. It was his
published assertion that the "anti-Scientologist" and the "anti-social
personality" are one and the same. His obsession with enemies sprang from his evident
paranoia. A former Director of the original Hubbard Dianetic Research Foundation told me
of Hubbard's overwhelming suspicion about agents infiltrating the organization. A
girlfriend of the early 1950s said Hubbard was forever looking over his shoulder. The
trait developed, until he came to believe that the American Medical Association, the World
Federation of Mental Health, the world bankers, the press barons, and the Western
governments were all involved in a multi-million dollar plan to destroy Scientology and,
most especially, L. Ron Hubbard.
In his ruling in the Armstrong suit in California,
Judge Breckenridge called Hubbard "schizophrenic," but was he really insane?
Avoiding the sometimes contradictory definitions of psychiatric authorities, it seems safe
to take the legal view that a madman is someone who cannot be considered responsible for
his actions. He suffers from delusions, and has no clear sense of right and wrong.
Psychiatrist Frank Gerbode, who practiced Scientology for many years, feels that Hubbard
was not schizophrenic, but rather "manic with paranoid tendencies" (which is not
a classification of psychosis, but of tendencies towards psychosis). However, Gerbode
suggests that the best description is the lay diagnosis "loony." Even if Hubbard
was manic with paranoid tendencies, he was still sane in the eyes of the law, and
therefore still responsible for his actions.
Hubbard borrowed the expression "anti-social
personality" from psychiatry, where it is synonymous with psychopath and sociopath.
Professor of psychiatry Hervey Cleckley, who became famous with his co-authorship of The
Three Faces of Eve, was an acknowledged authority on psychopaths. In his book The
Mask of Sanity, he listed sixteen telling characteristics, the majority of which are
found in psychopaths.
Cleckley pictured psychopaths as superficially
charming and of good intelligence. Their thinking is logical, and has a basis in reality,
which is to say they do not suffer from delusions. They are not nervous or neurotic. They
are unreliable, untruthful and insincere. They feel no remorse. They perform anti-social
acts without any real motive. Psychopaths do not learn from experience. They have
"pathologic" egocentricity, an incapacity for love and are unresponsive in
relationships. They cannot comprehend the response generated by their antisocial actions.
Psychopaths demonstrate uninviting behavior, and tend to drink or take drugs. Finally,
they do not respond to any sort of therapy. According to Cleckley, psychopaths have a
remarkable ability to evade punishment. A psychiatrist could construct a powerful case to
support the diagnosis that Hubbard was a psychopath, or anti-social personality. At least
in Cleckley's terms.
Of course, Hubbard had his own version of the
anti-social personalities, Suppressive Persons or anti-Scientologists: they speak in
generalities ("everybody knows"); deal mainly in bad news; worsen communication
they are relaying; are surrounded by "cowed or ill associates or friends";
habitually select the wrong target, or source; are unable to finish anything; willingly
confess to alarming crimes, without any sense of responsibility; support only destructive
groups; approve only destructive actions; detest help being given to others, and use
"helping" as a pretext to destroy others; they believe that no one really owns
anything; and fail to respond to therapy.
Hubbard conforms to a number of the characteristics in
both his own and Cleckley's summaries. Hubbard's clinching point for the recognition of an
anti-social personality was the inability of the Suppressive to see in himself any of the
listed deficiencies. There is no suggestion that Hubbard ever saw himself as a Suppressive
Person.
However, as another authority, Robert G. Kegan, has
pointed out, the traits of the psychopath are also true of many ten-year-olds (in
"The Child Behind the Mask: Sociopathy as Developmental Delay"). Hubbard was
very much an overgrown child, and it is easy to see aspects both of his behavior and of
Scientology as projections of this dangerous immaturity. Hubbard's self-obsession fits
neatly into the psychopathic type known as a narcissist.
Judge Breckenridge called the Church of Scientology
Hubbard's "alter-ego," a perceptive comment. Indeed, the whole of Scientology
can be seen as an externalization of Hubbard's temperament.
Scientology makes more sense when seen in the light of
Hubbard's psychopathic tendencies and his paranoia. His bouts of exhilaration in the
belief that he had conquered some deficiency, and his bouts of intense and usually private
depression when his deficiencies once more took hold, created a pattern which runs
throughout Scientology.
Hubbard had promised a release from stimulus-response
behavior through Dianetics, yet most of his work was itself a predictable response to some
immediate threat. The Guardian's Office came into being as a consequence of Lord Balniel's
1966 question in Parliament. The "technology" of counselling was an ongoing
attempt to cure Hubbard's own ailments. Various early techniques designed to cure what
Hubbard called "terror stomach" were surely an attempt to relieve his ulcer.
Despite Dianetics, his ulcer, his poor eyesight and his bursitis persisted. In the 1960s,
he suffered periodically from pneumonia, probably worsened by his drug abuse, definitely
worsened by his chain-smoking. He promised that OT3 would cure such respiratory problems;
it certainly did not work for him. Hubbard suffered from a catalogue of disabilities.
No matter how much Tech he developed, he continued to
suffer from the same difficulties, both mental and physical. Various prescriptions for
mega-vitamin therapy, and a bizarre (and potentially dangerous) bulletin about antibiotics
came out of his 1972 illness. In 1978, he suffered a second heart attack, and NOTs was
developed in an attempt to assist his recovery. It is often possible to trace Hubbard's
obsession with a particular new counselling "rundown" to some disability of his
own.
Yet from 1950 onwards, Hubbard was to insist again and
again that he had the solution to all human problems. When the method of the first book
failed to Clear anybody (despite the claims that 273 people had been counselled and many
Cleared as part of an exhaustive research program), new methods were released. Alphia
Hart, who published his own journal after leaving Scientology in 1953, called the device
"This is It," and suggested that each claim should be carefully dated so that
"This is it! 1955" could be distinguished from "This is It! 1959," and
so forth. There were tens of Clearing procedures, all promoted and sold as The Answer, and
all superseded after a few months. Nibs Hubbard says his father produced a new technique
every six months. The Technical Bulletins of Dianetics and Scientology (available
in twelve bound volumes, with half a dozen supplementary folders) prove the truth of his
assertion.
Hubbard seems to have believed himself cured every
time. There are a series of excuses built in to Scientology to explain each failure, and
to justify Hubbard's relapses. These are enshrined as "correction lists" and
"rundowns." Where all of these fail, the individual is given "ethics
handling" (something Hubbard certainly never received!). The final solution for any
failure to improve is that the individual who has received, and paid for, all of these
correction lists, rundowns and handlings is a "no case gain case," that is, a
Suppressive Person.
All of these responses to stimuli accumulated to
become Scientology. They are the incidents (or "engrams," perhaps) which make
Scientology: procedures designed to solve Hubbard's own immediate problem, and then used
on all Scientologists, whatever their difficulties. Nothing written by Hubbard could be
removed from the literature without his approval, and he was too busy churning out new
material to revise old, so these ingrained responses were rarely relieved.
Hubbard read voraciously, mostly pulp fiction. There
is nothing to suggest that he studied any serious subject in depth. It is doubtful that he
read much Freud, or Korzybski (he claimed Heinlein had explained Korzybski to him, though
his second wife, Sara, says she did). He read popularizations. In a lecture on study he
complained that the contemporary Encyclopaedia Britannica was too difficult for
him, it was written by experts for experts, so he used the pre-World War One edition. In
what appeared to be a joke, he said he intended to use children's textbooks in future.
This parallels his self-confessed method of story research, described in a 1930s article
called "Search for Research." He would read the Britannica entry, and
then skim through any readily available books referred to in the entry's bibliography. The
story had to be written in a couple of days, so research had to be fast. Whole sections of
Scientology also seem to have been fashioned in this way. The original Dianetic techniques
can be derived almost entirely from three short Freud lectures. Hubbard's statements about
Buddhism also show a lack of study. In fact, he only started to incorporate what he
believed to be Buddhist ideas in the early 1950s, after he had been given an extensive
library of mystical and religious books. One of his staff read and summarized the
contents. 4 Hubbard
displayed no specialized knowledge of any subject, except of course Scientology.
Hubbard created a curious amalgam. Dianetics came from
Freud (with echoes of Fodor and Rank), Korzybski and possibly from certain wartime,
psychiatric work in abreactive therapy. The origins of Scientology are in Aleister
Crowley's Magick, a smattering of schoolboy science, demon exorcism and science fiction.
The Sea Org derives directly from Hubbard's naval experience; not only does it have
uniforms, ranks and campaign ribbons, but also Fitness Boards, Committees of Evidence,
Compliance Reports and Commendations. These diverse elements were rounded out with touches
of behavioral therapy, Chinese brainwashing techniques, references to Machiavelli (Hubbard
said The Prince was one of his favorite books, and even claimed to have written
it), and possibly some acquaintance with Gustave le Bon's crowd psychology. All of this
disparate material was synthesized through the personality of L. Ron Hubbard.
Hubbard spent his life searching for one particular
experience. From the early 1950s, he had insisted that "exteriorization," or
out-of-the-body experience, was the crucial element of Scientology. He was convinced that
he had such an experience in 1938, under the influence of nitrous oxide, which led to the
writing of Excalibur. Hubbard desperately wanted to repeat that experience and, according
to those who audited him, was never able to do so, despite his glib claims about
Scientology techniques which would readily and rapidly produce
"exteriorization." Hubbard published numerous techniques, and, of course, made
elaborate claims for their efficacy. Indeed, the stated purpose of Scientology is to
create a "stable" exterior state, whereby the individual consciously achieves
immortality.
Having decided in 1952 that most science fiction is
actually a recounting of real past-life experience, Hubbard's own preoccupations as a
science fiction writer became the cosmology of his religion. He was an egomaniac who
generated an egomaniacal philosophy, which had at its core the belief that whatever
happens to others is their own fault. Whatever happened to L. Ron Hubbard was the fault of
a great Conspiracy. He advocated personal responsibility to his followers, but almost
uniformly failed to practice what he preached.
The most alarming aspect of Scientology is the barely
concealed thrust towards world domination. Sea Org members are told that when
World War Three finally happens, they will be the only group which is well enough
organized to take over. At various times Hubbard and his followers have courted different
governments - in the 1960s in Rhodesia (for which he wrote a proposed Constitution), and
in Greece (with the would-be University of Philosophy in Corfu); in the 1970s in Morocco
and later Mexico, where members of the government opposition travelled to Florida for
counselling. China and several African nations have been approached, with offers of help
with educational policy. Ron Hubbard would have liked to rule the world. He believed, and
said, that benevolent dictatorship is the best political system, and saw himself as the
only natural candidate. His successors possibly suffer from the same conceit.
In the mid-1970s while in Washington, DC, Hubbard
inaugurated a secret project to find out all he could about the "Soldiers of
Light" and the "Soldiers of Darkness." The notion that people are born
either good or evil and engage in a cosmic spiritual war can be found in Zoroastrianism,
and in the Dead Sea Scrolls of the Essenes, whence it found its way into certain Gnostic
Christian sects. In the early 1950s Hubbard had talked about people being
"players," "pieces" or "broken pieces" in the
"game" of life. This concept is fundamental to Scientology. He later spoke of
"Big Beings" existing in a ratio of one to eighteen compared to "Degraded
Beings." Separately from this estimate, he said that Suppressives make up two and a
half percent of the population, and Potential Trouble Sources (PTSes) who are in their
sway a further 17.5 percent. He categorized some people simply as "robots,"
incapable of decision. In short, there are a small number of "players," some
Soldiers of Light, some Soldiers of Darkness. They are engaged in an eternal battle, using
the "pieces" and "broken pieces" to achieve their ends.
In confidential issues, Hubbard dismissed Christian
teaching as an "implant." Psychiatrists and Christian ministers are the Soldiers
of Darkness, the suppressives, returning life after life 5
to torment the degraded beings, robots, and PTSes, and destroy the handiwork of the
Soldiers of Light. Of course, by Hubbard's standards the Soldiers of Light were those
individuals currently in favor with the Scientology Church. Hubbard is their Emperor, the
"Source." Hubbard believed in the Nietzschean Superman, the OT or Big Being and
the right of the "good" and the "just" to abuse the "evil."
Most of Hubbard's thousands of followers regarded him
as more brilliant than Einstein, more enlightened than Buddha, and quite as capable of
miracles as Christ. Perhaps there was a more sinister motive underlying Hubbard's actions.
Some Taoists believe that human beings can achieve immortality by becoming the focus of
worship; some of the Roman Emperors had a similar belief. The deification of Hubbard seems
to be taking place in the Scientology Church throughout the world. Maybe he thought he was
gathering up all of his devotees' shed body-Thetans so that he could use them for magical
purposes (in his secret Affirmations, Hubbard asserted that elemental beings were
completely in his power). Given his fertile, and often juvenile, imagination, and an
awareness of his duplicity, it is hard to decide what Ron Hubbard really did believe.
Hubbard was a fabulist and a mesmerist, a spinner of
both tales and spells. A charismatic figure who compelled the devotion of those around
him, despite his cruelties and eccentricities. Some who worked with him say he was
"compassionate." On the Apollo he was seen working remarkable hours on
Preclear folders. He spent thousands of hours lecturing and writing about Scientology.
He also masterminded, organized and directed a series
of crimes on an international scale, yet escaped punishment completely. Unless his belief
in karma (carefully repackaged in Scientology) turns out to be true.
FOOTNOTES
Sources: Bolitho; Hubbard
letter to his first wife, 1938.
1. Philadelphia Doctorate
Course 16, transcript, p. 145
2. Organization Executive
Course vol. 0, p.35
3. ibid.
4. Interview with witness
5. HCOB, "Pain and
Sex," 26 Aug 82 |
