Let's Sell These People a Piece of Blue Sky: Hubbard, Dianetics and Scientology (69 page)

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 16 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 anti-social 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
personality, Suppressive Person or anti-Scientologist
⁷
: 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 any
of the listed deficiencies in himself. 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 counseling
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. He 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 anti-biotics came out of his 1972
illness. In 1978, he suffered a second heart attack. NOTs was developed to help
him recover. It is often possible to trace his obsession with a particular new
counseling “rundown” to some disability of his own.

Yet from 1950 onwards, he 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 counseled
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 12 bound volumes, with
half-a-dozen supplementary folders
⁸
) 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 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”) 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 engrams,
or ingrained responses, were rarely relieved.

Hubbard read voraciously, mostly pulp fiction.
⁹
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,
¹⁰
he complained that
the contemporary
Encyclopedia 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.”
¹¹
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 seem to have been fashioned in this way too. The original Dianetic
techniques can be derived almost entirely from three short Freud lectures.
¹²
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.
¹³
One of his staff read and summarized the contents for him.
Hubbard displayed no specialized knowledge of any subject, except of course
Scientology, and, of course, hypnotism. But he advised that we should, ‘Never believe
a hypnotist.’
¹⁴

Hubbard created a curious amalgam. Dianetics came from Freud
(with echoes of Fodor and Rank), Korzybski and possibly from certain
psychiatric, wartime work in abreactive therapy.
¹⁵
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 do they 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 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 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 proposed University of
Philosophy in Corfu); in the 1970s in Morocco and later Mexico. 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.
¹⁶
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, from 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.
¹⁷
This concept is fundamental to Scientology. He later spoke of “big beings”
existing in a ratio of one to 18 compared to “degraded beings.”
¹⁸
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 another 20 percent.
¹⁹
He categorized some people simply
as “robots,” incapable of decision.
²⁰
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.”
²¹
Psychiatrists and Christian ministers are the
Soldiers of Darkness, the suppressives, returning life after life
²²
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.”