>From Salon.com, at:
http://www.salon.com/2013/01/17/going_clear_scientology_exposed/
<http://www.salon.com/2013/01/17/going_clear_scientology_exposed/>
The first and second bolded phrases below (bolding mine), interestingly
enough, were also my first impressions upon picking up "Dianetics" in a
Westwood bookstore and thumbing through it for a few minutes. The third
bolded section at the end is the link I see between Hubbard's craziness
and that we see in other cults.
"Going Clear": Scientology
exposed
<http://www.salon.com/2013/01/17/going_clear_scientology_exposed/>
Lawrence Wright's enthralling, meticulously fact-checked account of the
insular church and its celebrity members
By Laura Miller <http://www.salon.com/writer/laura_miller/>
Several years ago, for a series of Salon articles about Scientology, I
was asked to review the founding text of the church, "Dianetics"
<http://www.amazon.com/dp/140314446X/?tag=saloncom08-20> by L.Ron
Hubbard, first published in 1950. The book seemed so clearly the work
of a man suffering from particular and pronounced mental health issues
that I became, for the first time, curious about its author. Like most
self-help books, "Dianetics" frequently invokes case histories
or hypothetical scenarios, but unlike most self-help books,
Hubbard's stories featured an alarming amount of violence,
specifically domestic violence.
Over and over, when imagining a childhood source for an
individual's problems, Hubbard spins tales of unfaithful wives and
husbands who beat and verbally abuse them, sometimes kicking their
pregnant bellies. Perhaps we can attribute some of this to a
preoccupation with prenatal trauma; "Dianetics" insists that
fetuses can understand damaging statements made to the women carrying
them. Nevertheless, to me, the most striking thing about the book
besides Hubbard's belief that it is "not uncommon" for
women to make "twenty or thirty" attempts at a self-induced
abortion with orange sticks and other implements is its
author's assumption that such beatings are a commonplace aspect of
most people's home lives.
I wanted to find out if Hubbard had grown up amid such abuse, or had
experience of it in his adult life, so I went online to poke around.
What I found, on assorted anti-Scientology websites and discussion
forums, seemed so outlandish and extreme that I decided not to refer to
those charges at all in my review. I couldn't be sure they were
substantiated.
Scientology has involved preposterous claims from the very start
from before the very start, actually, since "Dianetics"
(published two years before the foundation of the church) promises that
a "clear" (an individual who has succeeded in using the
Dianetic "technology" to free him- or herself of all impairing
"engrams") will attain assorted superpowers. These include
healing his or her own disabilities and illnesses, as well as perfect
recall, the capacity to perform "mental computations" at
lightning speeds and various forms of mind reading and control.
Scientology's critics, on the other hand, accused Hubbard of
yes domestic violence (including an incident in which he demanded
that his second wife kill herself to prove she really loved him), to
bigamy, lying about his service in World War II, engaging in black
magic rituals and throwing followers who displeased him off the high
deck of his ship. The church has countered such attacks by flinging
accusations at its critics, from public drunkenness to adultery and
homosexuality.
The whole mess seemed like a seething farrago of bizarre fantasies,
vendettas and nightmares, indistinguishable from whatever grains of
truth lingered here and there. A phenomenally diligent and rigorous
investigator could probably sort it all out, but the Church of
Scientology is notorious for using nuisance litigation to hound
skeptical journalists to the brink of destitution and despair. Who'd
be up for that?
Lawrence Wright was, and my long preamble is all by way of explaining
why his new book, "Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood and the
Prison of Belief,"
<http://www.amazon.com/dp/0307700666/?tag=saloncom08-20> is so
invaluable. There have been other exposés of the church
including last year's fine "Inside Scientology: The Story of
America's Most Secretive Religion"
<http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00A7K68UY/?tag=saloncom08-20> by Janet
Reitman, a book Wright praises in his own but this one carries
the imprimatur of both Wright, a Pulitzer Prize-winner, and the New
Yorker magazine, where Wright first wrote about the church in a story
on its cultivation of celebrity members, as exemplified by movie
director Paul Haggis.
The church adopted its scorched-earth policy toward critical
journalists back when Paulette Cooper published "The Scandal of
Scientology" in 1971; she was subsequently slapped with 19
lawsuits, as well as subjected to a harassment campaign with the stated
intention of seeing her "incarcerated in a mental institution or
jail." What the organization did not foresee was that the
effectiveness of such tactics could never be more than short-term. So
ominous is the reputation of the Church of Scientology in this respect
that when a major news organization of legendary rigor committed itself
to an exposé, there could be no doubt that it was fact-checked to a
fare-thee-well. The result, extended to book form by one of that
organization's most esteemed journalists, is completely and
conclusively damning.
Not that Wright is the least bit intemperate in his account of the
improbable rise of Hubbard from an unimpressive career as a naval
officer and pulp science-fiction writer to a millionaire guru presiding
over a high-seas empire of slavish devotees to reclusive leader holed
up in a well-appointed mobile home. He doesn't have to be.
Hubbard's outrageous shenanigans and flagrant misdeeds speak for
themselves, so Wright need only convey the facts with a minimum of
hoopla. He strives to be fair, noting all the ways that Scientology
resembles other religions that began as suspect or fringe movements, but
he catches church spokesmen in so many lies and unearths so much
evidence of malfeasance that his caveats do tend to get swamped.
It turns out that even the craziest stuff I read on the Internet back
in 2005 is essentially true, and that the history of the church under
its current megalomaniacal leader, David Miscavige, is, if anything,
even more disgraceful. (Hubbard died in 1986.) Wright has assemble an
overwhelming number of confirmed reports of Miscavige punching, kicking
and otherwise attacking church leaders, often without warning or
explanation. He details a well-developed system of isolation and
indoctrination imposed on the members of Sea Org. (Scientology's
equivalent of a clergy), creating a population that provides the church
with virtually free labor and submits to extravagantly harsh and
humiliating punishments, such as cleaning bathroom floors with their
tongues and scrubbing out dumpsters with toothbrushes. Meanwhile,
Miscavige lives in luxury, bathed in Kim Jong Il-levels of totalitarian
hagiography, at the church's secluded base in rural Southern
California.
Wright's particular interest is in how the church courts and
coddles its celebrity members. These Scientologists are carefully
shielded from the harsher conditions and uglier aspects of the
organization. Tom Cruise, John Travolta, Anne Archer and Jenna Elfman
number among the church's most prominent trophies, as did Haggis
before he became disgusted with the leadership's refusal to
denounce an anti-gay ballot proposition in California and decided to
dig beneath the flattering, gleaming face it presents to its celebrity
members. Wooing emerging actors and entertainment-industry players was
one of Hubbard's most inspired initiatives, and the church
continues to deploy such people strategically, introducing balky local
politicians to movie stars and fostering the impression that a
Scientology affiliation will help Hollywood aspirants climb to the top
of a ruthlessly competitive profession.
I could go on and on, listing Hubbard's tall tales, paranoid
delusions and eccentricities, as well as Miscavige's brutalities
and tidbits from the famously wacky and decidedly unscientific
Scientologist cosmology. All of it makes for a wild ride of a
page-turner, as enthralling as a paperback thriller. But I keep coming
back to my original impression of "Dianetics," and the sobering
realization that one man's personal damage can, if transmitted with
sufficient charisma and intuitive skill, infect tens of thousands of
people, many of whom believe they've been helped by it.
Hubbard, as Wright acknowledges more than once, was a charmer, with a
knack for manipulating people. He knew, somehow, that there is no
behavior more likely to foster fascination and dependence than
intermittent reinforcement, enveloping approval and assurances of
future bliss shot through with unpredictable episodes of domination,
insults and terror. That is the dynamic of the abusive family, a
dynamic that prevails in Sea Org. and the hidden enclaves of
Scientology. From what Wright reports, it looks like my curiosity about
Hubbard's earliest years will never be satisfied. But now I can
make an educated guess.
