Let's Sell These People a Piece of Blue Sky: Hubbard, Dianetics and Scientology (68 page)

Chapter Forty

“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 part of a process of self-glorification – and probably
self-deception. 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. He 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. Reveling 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.”
¹
In this statement Hubbard provided a
powerful clue to his most potent urge.

Bolitho’s book was published in 1930, and consists of 12
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 whip-lash 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 19 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
²
right at the beginning of
Scientology.

There is powerful evidence to support this thesis. In 1939,
at the age of 27, just after his failure to find a publisher for
Excalibur
,
Hubbard wrote to his first wife:

Living is a pretty grim joke, but a joke just the
same. The entire function of man is to survive. Not “for what” but just to
survive. The outermost limit of endeavor is creative work. Anything less is too
close to simple survival until death happens along. So I am engaged in striving
to maintain equilibrium sufficient to at last realize survival in a way to
astound the gods. Foolishly perhaps, but determined none the less, I have high
hopes of smashing my name into history so violently that it will take a legendary
form even if all the books are destroyed. That goal is the real goal as far as
I am concerned. Things which stand too consistently in its way make me nervous.
It’s a pretty big job. In a hundred years Roosevelt will have been forgotten -
which gives some idea of the magnitude of my attempt. And all this boils and
froths inside my head and I’m miserable when I am blocked. Let the next man
concentrate upon “peace” and “contentment.” When life was struck into me
something else accompanied it. And when I leave things in the lap of the gods
who seem to be interested in my destiny, boy, things happen!

My fight right now is to get into a spot where I can
tide across the gap until the next blaze.
Excalibur
[“The Book”] may be
fought, accepted or forgotten. I don’t care. I seem to be the only one that has
attained actual personal contact with it. Others take it mentally and seem to
be at a loss to apply it. When I wrote it I gave myself an education which
outranks that of anyone else. I don’t know but it might seem that it takes
terrific brain work to get the thing assembled and useable in the head. I do
know that I could formulate a political platform, for instance, which would
encompass the support of the unemployed, the industrialist and the clerk and
day laborer all at one and the same time. And enthusiastic support it would be.
Things are due for a bust in the next half dozen years. Wait and see...

I seem to have a sort of personal awareness which
only begins to come alive when I begin to believe in a destiny. And then a
strange force stirs in me and I seem to be completely aloof and wholly
invincible. It is the problem of “Who am I?”

Psychiatrists, reaching the high of a dusty desk,
tell us that Alexander and Genghis Khan and Napoleon were madmen. I know they were
maligning some very intelligent gentlemen. So anybody who dares say that maybe
he’s going to cut things up considerably is immediately branded as a [sic]
egomaniac or something equally ridiculous so that little men can still save
their hides in the face of possible fury. It’s one thing to go nutty and state,
“I’m Napoleon, nobody dares touch me,” and quite another to say, “If I watch my
step and don’t let anything stop me, I can make Napoleon look like a punk.”
That’s the difference ... It’s a big joke, this living. God was feeling
sardonic the day He created the Universe. So its [sic] rather up to at least
one man every few centuries to pop up and come just as close to making Him
swallow his [sic] laughter as possible.

Anyway, these are the things about which I revolve. I
can’t blame it on environment or experience, strangely enough. When I was eight
I remember figuring out how long it would take me to achieve these ends, still
saying to myself, “Who am I?” And I said it at sixteen and I’m saying it at twenty-six
even though the old cards persist in getting stacked against me and people are
often like tugs trying to shunt me into a dismally peaceful berth. A few months
of cold logic on the subject I struck upon in February have shown me that I
didn’t have it all under control. Hence I must needs slow down on my concept,
though it broadened in another way which compensates and it has some popularity
angles now which it lacked before. I guess I’m thirty percent showman after all
because I instinctively dive towards popular huzzahs. And so, quite magnanimously
for me, I gave man back his human soul and created a new explanation for
creative urge [sic] which the lads will love. Nonetheless, the things are as
true as can be.

Hubbard lusted after fame, wealth and power, and was clearly
willing to abandon moral restrictions to accomplish his ends. By his own admission,
Hubbard was a showman. He 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.”
³
Hubbard’s fraudulent claims make a
charlatan of him.

 In the mid-1960s, Hubbard began to speak of himself as the
“Source” of Scientology. Having initially acknowledged his 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
⁴
: “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.”

Hubbard was not truly the “Source” of Scientology, little,
if any, of his work is original. Hubbard pieced together modified versions of
pre-existing ideas. Hubbard’s peculiar genius was for reframing 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.”
⁵
His
own survival, in an environment conducive to “research,” was therefore
imperative, at least until his work was complete. In his own words
⁶
:
“the whole agonized future of this planet, every Man, Woman and Child ...
depends on what you do here and now with and in Scientology.” 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 life forms, 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 he 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,
especially, L. Ron Hubbard.