Inside Scientology (9 page)

Hubbard spent the next six months laying the groundwork for Scientology's evolution as a religion. On February 18, 1954, a Scientologist named Burton Farber filed incorporation papers in Los Angeles for the Church of Scientology of California, considered by Scientologists to be the first official Scientologist church. L. Ron Hubbard, the adventurer and science fiction writer turned scientist and philosopher, was now the founder of his own church.

Hubbard then set about creating a worldwide spiritual corporation. Individual Scientology organizations, or franchises, would become churches (though members would refer to them as "orgs"). Every church would cede 10 percent of its gross income to a larger organization, the Hubbard Association of Scientologists International (HASI), also known as the Mother Church, a so-called religious fellowship,
according to its incorporation papers, which also sold to the franchises books, E-meters, and tapes of Hubbard's teachings. The HASI was incorporated in England and controlled by L. Ron Hubbard—who also controlled every church of Scientology, in practice. But each separate org had its own shadow president and board of directors, which allowed them to appear, at least on paper, independent. "Hubbard had learned from his mistakes," wrote the former Scientologist Jon Atack in his 1990 history of the Church of Scientology,
A Piece of Blue Sky.
"He was not on the board of every corporation, so a check of records would not show his outright control. He did, however, collect signed, undated resignations from directors before their appointment." Perhaps more significant, Hubbard also controlled the bank accounts of these organizations.

Hubbard presented Scientology to the public as a true religious movement—complete with an eight-pointed Scientology cross, wedding and funeral rites, and an ever-growing catalog of "scripture," which according to Hubbard's decree was the true status of his writings. Auditing sessions were often referred to as "confessionals." In future years, Scientology officials would be referred to, and ordained, as "ministers," complete with clerical collars.

To sell his new faith, Hubbard used the techniques of modern marketing and advertising; from his newly created Hubbard Communication Office, he directed his followers to aggressively spread the word. "If advertised products don't have good word-of-mouth they don't sell," Hubbard admonished them.
How that word-of-mouth was created changed, depending on the locale. To tap into the loneliness and disconnectedness of city dwellers, Hubbard instructed one of his British followers, Ray Kemp, to advertise this offer, together with a phone number, in the London evening newspapers: "I will talk to anyone about anything." "We were inundated with calls," Kemp later recalled. "Everyone from potential suicides to a girl who couldn't decide which of three men to marry."

In both England and the United States, Hubbard exploited fear and concern about polio by encouraging his followers to run ads in the paper stating that a "research foundation" was looking for polio victims willing to try out a new cure. A similar ad was used to attract those suffering from asthma and arthritis.

Another technique Hubbard advocated was scanning the daily papers to find anyone who'd been recently "victimized one way or the other by life" and then, "as speedily as possible [to make] a personal call on the bereaved or injured person."
Auditors, Hubbard said, were perfectly within their rights to call themselves either "researchers" or "ministers."

Once a person arrived at the church, Scientologists presented themselves in one of two ways, depending on the nature of the potential recruit: as members of a humanitarian movement or as students of a new science that could expand the person's mind and horizons. Wishing to make sure that, unlike Dianetics, Scientology would never slip from his control, Hubbard created strict and aggressive policies to curtail the actions of independent operators, those who aimed to use Scientology outside the sanction of the organized church. There would be no negotiation with such "squirrels," as Hubbard called them. Instead, he recommended legal action as a way to shut them down. "The law can be used very easily to harass, and enough harassment on somebody who is simply on the thin edge anyway ... will generally be sufficient to cause his professional decease," Hubbard explained. "If possible, of course, ruin him utterly."

The founder of Scientology earned a modest $125 per week for his labor. But he also earned a commission from the sale of E-meters and training manuals—sold through HASI—and received royalties from his books. Lectures also provided him with income. The Church of Scientology hosted weekend seminars, called "Congresses," at which Hubbard would give a talk and occasionally audit members of the audience. Congresses could be highly lucrative: one in the late 1950s was said to earn more than $100,000 in a single weekend.
Whatever Hubbard made from these appearances was pure profit: the church paid his expenses and also provided him and his growing family—between 1952 and 1958, Mary Sue gave birth to Diana, Quentin, Suzette, and Arthur—with a house and a car.

In 1956, the Church of Scientology's gross receipts were just under $103,000. By 1959, the church was making roughly $250,000 per year. Hubbard received about $108,000 during the four-year period of 1955–59, much of it earned after he stopped drawing his $125 per week salary and was paid instead a percentage of the Church of Scientology's gross profits.

This exceeded the salary of the president of the United States at the time, and it also outstripped the earnings of many Fortune 500 executives. But Hubbard did not see wealth as inconsistent with righteousness, and the years he'd spent advancing his own interests now served him particularly well. Hubbard had always looked at his fiction writing with a commercial eye; early on he'd analyzed how much money could be earned from various genres and pursued the most lucrative course. Now he looked at Scientology through a similar lens.

Hubbard envisioned a church that was organized in a strictly top-down structure, which merged science, religion, and successful business practices. Efficiency would be the main marker of success. "The prosperity of any organization is directly proportional to the speed of its particles—goods, people, papers," Hubbard said.
The standard method of therapy—namely, the spontaneous interaction of patient and therapist—was grossly inefficient, in Hubbard's view. Even Dianetics had relied too much on human interaction. Scientology would streamline the process of enlightenment.

The local org was, as Hubbard designed it, a full-service operation, tightly structured to facilitate the "processing" of clients as efficiently as possible. A sales team, known as registrars, met with clients (often simply called PCs, short for preclears), discussed their needs, and then recommended a product, usually an "intensive," a package of auditing sessions. The registrars procured payment on the spot. From there, the client moved to the service delivery team, led by a case supervisor who worked with the auditor to design and oversee the client's process. Ethics officers, who were responsible for disciplining and rehabilitating wayward clients, handled any problems within the organization. Another department, known as the "Public Division," would supervise outreach and fundraising.

Into this structure flowed the money received from paying customers, which in turn funded not only the smaller organizations but also the Mother Church, which licensed the orgs to sell and market Scientology services and also monitored their sales and membership statistics. From the 10 percent tithe that each franchise paid to the Mother Church, Hubbard took a 10 percent cut.
How much the founder made from Scientology during this period was unknown to the membership at large. He often claimed to invest far more in Scientology than he earned; on the other hand, he boasted to friends that he had more than $7 million stashed in Swiss bank accounts.

With this structure in place, Scientology would grow into "the McDonald's hamburger chain of religion," as Jon Atack described it,
with independent franchised churches springing up all over the world. Hubbard's doctrine, known as "standard tech," was marketed and ultimately trademarked. Church officials would later compare Scientology's trademarks (each one "a symbol which assures the public of a certain quality,"
in the words of one Scientology attorney) to Coca-Cola's.

While this might have been an off-the-cuff statement, Scientology did, in fact, mimic certain features of the Coca-Cola Company. Its orgs functioned as processing plants, churning out an identical product at every site worldwide. As the years went by, some of its core doctrine would be referred to not as sacred teachings but as "trade secrets."
The Church of Scientology would go to court to protect its proprietary rights over this material: litigation, in fact, would become its hallmark.

When Scientology made its debut, few in the mainstream took it seriously. In one of the first articles about Hubbard's new spiritual science, published in
Time
on December 22, 1952, the magazine laid out the predominant view of the newly self-designated "Dr." Hubbard. "Now, the founder of still another cult, he claims to have discovered the ultimate secrets of life and the universe, and to be able to cure everything, including cancer," the article stated. "His latest ology is compounded of equal parts of science fiction, Dianetics (with 'auditing,' 'preclears' and engrams), and plain jabberwocky."

It did not help Hubbard's reputation that his latest books struck many as even more implausible than
Dianetics.
Hubbard's 1951 book,
Science of Survival,
laid out a theory of human behavior based on eighty emotional "tones," or levels, ranging from +40.0 (serenity of being) to –40 (total failure). The higher up the tone scale a person was positioned, the more emotionally and spiritually alive he or she would be. A tone, Hubbard said, affected a person's overall attitude or vibe, as well as the ability to communicate and to relate to others; it even determined a person's smell. People with body odor, Hubbard noted, were invariably lower on the tone scale than those with none; the same held true for those with bad breath. "The body is normally sweet-smelling down to 2.0"—the tone of "antagonism"—"but begins to exude chronically certain unpleasant effluvia from 2.0 down."
But as people were audited "up" the tone scale, they would most likely lose these embarrassing traits.
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In his 1952 book
The History of Man,
Hubbard ventured away from the psychological into what could easily be read as pure fantasy. But Hubbard began the book by telling readers it was "a cold-blooded and factual account"
of the past sixty trillion years of their own existence. Homo sapiens had a genetic line that confirmed much of what Darwin laid out in his evolutionary theory, Hubbard said, but Scientology helped fill in the blanks by explaining the various phases of development through the prism of engrams. Some engrams on the evolutionary chain could be traced back to a mollusk-centered era, dominated by a deadly incident known as the Clam. Auditing a person on this incident could be dangerous; simply asking this question—"Can you imagine a clam sitting on the beach, opening and closing its shell very rapidly?"
—could cause the person severe jaw pain. "One such victim, after hearing about a clam death, could not use his jaws for three days. Another 'had to have' two molars extracted because of the resulting ache."

Elsewhere in
The History of Man,
Hubbard described engrams that arose from traumas suffered during the Paleogene and Neanderthal eras, and finally, as they affected modern humans. He explained that thetans moved from body to body, arriving after the death of one body at a halfway house called an "implant station" where they were deluged with pictures—"stills of vacant lots, houses, backyards"—which served as what Hubbard called a "forgetter," erasing the thetan's past life and thus priming it to receive its next body. Some of these stations, Hubbard added, were on Mars.

The FBI was a recipient of another genre of Hubbard's writing. The founder of Scientology had maintained his correspondence with the bureau since denouncing his associates and his wife as Communists in 1951. Though he continued to view attacks upon Scientologists as the defamations of "Communist-connected personnel,"
as he wrote in one letter, Hubbard had become increasingly antagonistic toward psychiatrists, who, he seemed to believe, were intent on destroying him. In one 1955 missive, he reported that several Scientologists had gone "suddenly and inexplicably insane," an event that he believed had nothing to do with Scientology counseling. Rather, an "LSD attack" launched by a psychiatrist intent on doing harm had caused this misfortune. LSD, Hubbard noted, was the "insanity producing drug so favored by the APA."

By the autumn of 1955, the FBI had received so many similar letters from Hubbard that they stopped responding. "Appears mental,"
one agent wrote on a rambling Hubbard missive of this kind. But Hubbard was undeterred and persisted in sharing with the U.S. government what he considered his groundbreaking discoveries.

In April 1956, the FBI received a pamphlet titled "Brain-Washing: A Synthesis of the Russian Textbook on Psychopolitics," which Hubbard told them was the Church of Scientology's reprinting of what "appeared to be a Communist manual."
The bureau examined it and concluded that its authenticity was doubtful "since it lacks documentation of source material and Communist words and phrases."
It was widely assumed that Hubbard had written the booklet himself. He was also thought to be the anonymous author of a pamphlet called "All About Radiation," signed by "a Nuclear Physicist and a Medical Doctor."
The text promoted a vitamin product called Dianazene, claiming it could treat and prevent radiation sickness, as well as certain cancers.
The Food and Drug Administration, having been given a copy, investigated these claims. In 1958 the FDA confiscated, and then destroyed, a shipment of twenty-one thousand Dianazene tablets, which Hubbard was selling as a substance that prevented radiation sickness.

In the wake of the Dianazene seizure, authorities increased their scrutiny of Hubbard's activities. As his FBI file thickened by the day, the CIA also decided to open a file on his burgeoning organization. But making their way through the tangled morass of ad hoc corporations and shell companies that composed the Church of Scientology proved daunting. In addition to more than a hundred churches of Scientology, various other groups existed as part of the web, with names like Hubbard Guidance Center, American Society for Disaster Relief, Society of Consulting Ministers, and Academy of Religious Arts and Sciences. By the end of the 1950s, Scientology had grown into a tremendously complex network of businesses, not all of which were churches; all, however, sent money to the Mother Church. Figuring out how the whole conglomerate worked was, then as now, nearly impossible.