Scientology
Hubbard’s official biography, which has been rigorously promoted by the Church of Scientology, presents him as a modern-day Ulysses: a restless explorer and spiritual seeker whose youthful adventures led him to the far corners of the Orient, where he visited Buddhist lamaseries, befriended Manchurian warlords, and even lived for a time with bandits in the hills of Tibet.
Significantly less glowing assessments of Hubbard can be found in a number of court transcripts, affidavits, and even some of Hubbard’s own early writings, which present the founder of Scientology as a fabulist whose claims contained certain embellishments, together with, in many cases, outright fabrications.
For Ron, an only child, it was an exciting but alienating way to spend his childhood, and loneliness would remain an issue throughout his life. “When I was very young, I was pathetically eager for a home,” Hubbard wrote in the early 1940s.
Harry Hubbard, as the journalist Russell Miller noted in his critical yet comprehensive biography of Hubbard, Barefaced Messiah, was “a deeply conservative plodder, a man ruled by routine and conformity.” Ron Hubbard, by contrast, was a dreamer who saw himself as the hero of his own adventure story
Hubbard viewed himself as a young Jack London; he penned swashbuckling accounts of his (greatly embellished) heroics in his journal, and later projected his fantasies onto fictional (and often, like him, redheaded) heroes: sailors, spies, pilots, soldiers of fortune. He had a sponge-like ability to absorb facts and details about the places he’d visited, no matter how briefly, and he wrote breezily, “as if he was a well-traveled man of the world,” Miller noted, and “a carefree, two-fisted, knockabout adventurer,” not the gawky, freckled teenager he actually was.
In 1929, Hubbard entered Swavely, a preparatory school in Manassas, Virginia, in anticipation of what his parents hoped would be his next step: the U.S. Naval Academy.
But appointment to Annapolis was not to be—terrible at math, Hubbard failed that portion of his entrance exam and was also discovered to be nearsighted, instantly disqualifying him from becoming a cadet.
The following summer, Hubbard chartered an aged four-mast schooner, intending to lead an expedition around the Caribbean in search of pirate treasure.
He promoted the trip as a research and motion-picture voyage—he dubbed it the Caribbean Motion Picture Expedition. Placing an ad in local college newspapers for “adventurous young men with wanderlust,” he managed to recruit some fifty other students to go with him, at the cost of $250 per person.
Hubbard, however, maintained that the trip had been a great success, even telling his college newspaper that the New York Times had agreed to buy some of the group’s photographs.*
The ability to spin a setback as a triumph was a quality that would define Hubbard throughout his life.
He was an immensely charming young man whose stories, while sometimes dubious, were often, by virtue of his own salesmanship, utterly convincing. Garrulous, with self-deprecating humor and a ready wit, he attracted people like a magnet and made them believe in his dreams. What’s more, he seemed to believe in them himself. A naval commander named Joseph Cheesman “Snake” Thompson had imparted to the youthful Hubbard a crucial bit of wisdom: “If it’s not true for you, it’s not true.” Hubbard took that as a motto. “If there is anyone in the world calculated to believe what he wants to believe,” he later said, “it is I.”
he tried his hand at freelance journalism but soon gave it up for mass-market fiction, action-packed stories that constituted one of the most popular forms of entertainment in the 1930s—a precursor, in many ways, to TV. Published in cheap, dime-store magazines known as “pulps,” the narratives generally featured hearty, adventurous men who’d fly spy missions over occupied Germany, engage in battle on the high seas, or romance weak-kneed women held captive in enemy forts—a perfect format, in other words, for Hubbard to express his own lusty sensibilities.
Frank Gruber, a writer of western and detective stories, recalled one New York get-together during which Hubbard, then twenty-three, regaled a group of writers with tales of his adventure-filled life. Fascinated, Gruber took notes. “He had been in the United States Marines for seven years, he had been an explorer on the upper Amazon for four years, he’d been a white hunter in Africa for three years … After listening for a couple of hours, I said, ‘Ron, you’re eighty-four years old, aren’t you?’”
It was a joke, but Hubbard, as Gruber recalled, “blew his stack.”
For years, the Church of Scientology has maintained that Hubbard, who would later give himself the self-styled rank of Commodore, was a “master mariner” and a fearless war hero.* This was an image Hubbard carefully nurtured, boasting to fellow sailors of his lengthy experience on destroyers.
But Hubbard’s naval records show that he had an inglorious wartime career. Boastful and often argumentative, with a propensity for having his “feelings hurt,” as one superior noted, he was a behavior problem from day one.
Depressed and suffering from ulcers, Hubbard spent the rest of the war drifting from post to post, taking part in various training programs, serving as the navigator of a cargo ship, and studying for several months at the School of Military Government at Princeton.
There, Hubbard would later claim, he healed himself of not just ulcers, but of war wounds that had left him “crippled and blinded.”* He also, according to his later statements, did groundbreaking research into the workings of the human mind.
The affirmations went on for pages, as Hubbard repeatedly avowed his magical power, sexual attractiveness, good health, strong memory, and literary talent. He would make fortunes in writing, he affirmed. “You understand all the workings of the minds of humans around you, for you are a doctor of minds, bodies and influences.”
Hubbard, like the Freudian disciple Otto Rank, believed that the “birth trauma” lay at the root of many contemporary neuroses and psychosomatic ills.
On May 9, 1950, Hermitage House published Hubbard’s book Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health. Weighing in at a hefty 452 pages, it opened with a dramatic statement: “The creation of Dianetics is a milestone for Man comparable to his discovery of fire and superior to his inventions of the wheel and the arch.”
Painful or traumatic moments are recorded in the reactive mind as lasting scars, which Hubbard called “engrams.”
These, Hubbard asserted, are the source of many present physical and psychological problems.
To get rid of them he advocated a new therapeutic process called “auditing.”
To get rid of them he advocated a new therapeutic process called “auditing.” In an auditing session, a patient was led through a series of commands intended to call up the minute details of an engramatic incident.
The first questions might deal with a recent problem—an illness or injury, perhaps. But with each request for “the next incident needed to resolve this case,” the patient, lying on a couch, eyes closed, would become aware of incidents farther and farther back in the past, all the way to what Hubbard called the “basic-basic,” or prenatal incident.
Once that had been identified, the subject would be asked to “run,” or reexperience, the incident numerous times until its impact was neutralized.
This form of therapy was not new. In the late nineteenth century, Sigmund Freud and the psychoanalyst Josef Breuer had used similar techniques in their early treatment of hysteria, often hypnotizing patients to uncover buried memories and lead them to relive traumatic incidents, a process known as “abreaction” therapy.
“But what especially aroused my criticism was the fact that not a few traumata were simply inventions of fantasy and had never happened at all.”
After World War II, the American system of mental health care was stretched as at no prior time in its history, the result, at least in part, of the tremendous psychological damage caused by the war and the specter of the atom bomb. In 1946, Veterans Administration hospitals had some forty-four thousand patients with mental disorders. By 1950, half a million people were being treated in U.S. mental institutions, a number that would increase dramatically by the middle part of the decade, when psychiatric patients were said to account for more beds than any other type of patient in U.S. hospitals.
Though psychiatry was not a new discipline, there were still only about six thousand psychiatrists in the United States in 1950, most working at mental hospitals. Few options existed outside these facilities for those needing mental health care. Only six hundred or so psychoanalysts (practitioners of the most popular form of outpatient therapy at the time) were available; they practiced psychoanalysis, a technique based on Freud’s theories, which usually required a commitment to years of therapy involving multiple sessions per week, at a cost of time and money that most people could not afford.
In southern California, home of all things new and experimental, it became particularly popular with avant-garde members of the Malibu Colony and other artistic enclaves. Some Los Angeles booksellers, in fact, reportedly had so much trouble keeping Dianetics in stock that, fearing a run on the books, they began to sell Dianetics under the counter, offering it only to those who asked for it by name.
Some of Hubbard’s own colleagues found the book’s premise preposterous and its prose almost unreadable. “To me, it looked like a lunatic revision of Freudian psychology,” said the writer Jack Williamson. Isaac Asimov was less generous. “I considered it gibberish,” he said.
But many others found them comforting. Perhaps the greatest attraction of Dianetics was that it offered concrete answers. The vastly complex problems of the human condition could be solved not through prayer, or politics, or through the work of great philosophical teachers, but through the application of a set of basic scientific techniques. The foggy, fuzzy precepts of psychoanalysis could be replaced by straightforward, foolproof actions that could be practiced at home, by anyone. The result of successful Dianetics therapy, Hubbard promised, would be a person liberated from all aberrations, infinitely more powerful and free; according to his system, this person was known as a Clear.
For a man with no prior business experience, L. Ron Hubbard proved very adept at turning Dianetics into a phenomenon. Weeks before the book was published, Hubbard and Campbell had set up a training school, the Hubbard Dianetic Research Foundation, across the Hudson River from Manhattan, in Elizabeth, New Jersey. As the book’s popularity grew, devotees made the trek to the so-called Elizabeth Foundation to be trained as licensed Dianeticists, or practitioners, for which they received a certificate. Soon Hubbard had opened similar Dianetic Research Foundations in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Honolulu, and Washington, D.C. Each center offered a similar package. A five-week course, priced at $500, including lectures and demonstrations (often delivered by Hubbard personally), would turn a starry-eyed fan into a “professional auditor,” as Hubbard called those who, having completed the course, often hung a shingle and began seeing clients. A one-on-one session at one of the foundations with a Dianeticist cost $25. More aggressive therapy, offered in ten-day processes known as “intensives,” could be had for between $600 and $1,000, depending on the experience level of the auditor.
For all the talk about a “poor man’s psychoanalysis,” Dianetics was turning into a pricey undertaking. One $25 session with a Dianeticist cost $10 more than many psychiatrists at the time charged for a consultation. The ten-day intensive cost more than thirty times that amount.
Now struggling to maintain control of a ship that was sinking fast, Hubbard grew intensely paranoid, sniping at foundation officials for minor infractions and accusing his staff of using irregular, non-Hubbard-approved methods, or “Black Dianetics,” as he called them. The New Jersey Board of Medical Examiners began an inquiry into the activities of the Elizabeth Foundation, as it was apparently practicing medicine without a license. Feeling persecuted, Hubbard began to believe that some of his students might be spies. His fears worsened when Look magazine published a scathing article in December 1950, in which the head of the famous Menninger Clinic, a leading psychiatric hospital, denounced Hubbard as a charlatan and condemned his techniques as potentially harmful.
Hubbard by now had many other problems to worry about. Because the existing foundations were in shambles, he had accepted the offer of a wealthy supporter named Don Purcell to leave Havana and start a new Dianetic Research Foundation in Wichita, Kansas, which he did. But Purcell was not prepared to assume the debts of the other foundations, particularly not the Elizabeth Foundation, which closed its doors for good at the end of 1951, hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt. In 1952, a court ruled that the Wichita Foundation was liable for the Elizabeth Foundation’s debts. Purcell implored Hubbard to file for voluntary bankruptcy, which he refused to do. Left with no choice, Purcell held an emergency meeting of the Wichita Foundation’s board of directors in February 1952, which voted to go ahead with the bankruptcy proceedings.
Furious, Hubbard resigned from the board and sued Purcell for mismanagement, breach of faith, and breach of contract. To no avail: the court auctioned off the foundation’s assets, which Purcell bought for just over $6,000. Hubbard launched a bitter campaign to discredit Purcell, accusing him of accepting a $500,000 bribe from the American Medical Association to destroy Dianetics.
It was no use. Purcell owned Dianetics; Hubbard was left without rights to any part of his creation, including its name. His great scientific adventure, it appeared, was at an end. Hubbard needed to reinvent himself, once again.
It had been developed by an inventor and Dianeticist named Volney Mathison; having heard Hubbard talk about the problems he was having with identifying incidents of heavy emotional charge by simply questioning a patient, Mathison came up with an apparatus that would give an auditor “deep and marvelous insight into the mind of his preclear,” as Hubbard put it. This simple black box with adjustable knobs and a lit dial measured galvanic skin response—the tiny electrical fluctuations under the surface of the skin that occur at moments of excitement, stress, or physical pain.
According to Hubbard, the term derived from the Latin scio, meaning “study,” and the Greek logos, meaning “knowing.” Scientology is thereby defined as “the study of knowledge.” Hubbard’s followers would come to refer to it in slightly different terms: “Knowing How to Know.”
If Dianetics had revealed “the exact anatomy of the human mind,” Scientology went further, allowing its practitioners to discover the anatomy of the human soul. Hubbard called that entity the thetan (theta, Hubbard said, meant “life”) and said it represented a person’s “true,” or innate, self, which was wholly separate from the body, the mind, and the physical world.
Thetans, Hubbard explained, existed long before the beginning of time and had drifted through the eons, picking up and then discarding physical bodies as if they were temporary shells. Bored, they created the universe. But after a while, they got trapped in that creation. During the lengthy course of their history, which Hubbard called the “whole track,” they had been implanted, through electric shock, pain, or hypnotic suggestion, with a host of ideas, some positive, like love, and others contradictory or negative—such as the ideas of God, Satan, Jesus Christ, and political or bureaucratic government. Eventually they came to believe themselves to be no more than the bodies they inhabited—Hubbard called them “theta beings”—and their original power was lost.
The goal of Scientology, Hubbard said, was to restore that power, which was the purpose of Scientology auditing. Thanks to the E-meter,* which for starters would enable people to recover buried memories, this form of therapy would be far more precise than Dianetics auditing.
Hubbard had begun to promote the myth that his life had been one of sober exploration. According to this revision of his biography, he had wandered the world to gain understanding of the human mind and spirit, and had written science fiction as a way to fund that extensive “research.” He now claimed to have spent a full year at Oak Knoll Naval Hospital, where he had access to the whole medical library, including the records of former prisoners of war. He met these men and began to treat their psychological wounds, holding consultations on a park bench. He claimed that in 1949, while spending time in Savannah, Georgia, he had continued this research by volunteering at a psychiatric clinic.
This new organization, a “clinic” of sorts, would see clients and pay the HAS a percentage of its proceeds, which would go to cover costs. All they’d need to make “real money,” he noted, was ten or fifteen preclears a week, who might easily be convinced to pay upwards of $500 for twenty-four hours of auditing. Shrewdly, Hubbard anticipated that the more they charged, the more popular they might become. Hubbard told O’Brien that he’d seen it happen. “Charge enough and we’d be swamped.”
“Perhaps we could call it a Spiritual Guidance Center,” he suggested to O’Brien. Hubbard described installing attractive desks, outfitting the staff in uniform, and hanging diplomas on the wall. With that, they could “knock psychotherapy into history,” he said. A “religious charter” would be necessary to make it stick. “But I’m sure I could make it stick.” After all, they were treating the spirit of a person, he said. “And brother, that’s religion, not mental science.”
“Churches were by far the most trusted institution in American life [in the 1950s]—ahead of schools, radio and newspapers, and the government itself,”
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.
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.
“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.
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
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.
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.
In February 1965, Hubbard wrote a seven-page manifesto titled “Keeping Scientology Working.” This was his Sermon on the Mount, something Scientologists consider a sacred document, which in future years would serve as both an instruction manual and a rallying call to legions of idealistic believers.
In it, Hubbard declared himself the sole creator, or “Source,” of Scientology’s technology, negating the work done by his many collaborators, and defined his movement as the salvation of the human race. His followers were charged with a divine mission to “hammer out of existence” any philosophy or technique that might compete with his own.
