This book had a personal fascination
for me as I've been compared to L. Ron Hubbard.
O.K. It was facetiously by my flatmate,
who has been known to refer to me as L. Ron and his Church of
Wanketology, and by an impassioned atheist on a discussion board who
saw some similarity between some of my beliefs and those of
Dianetics. Perhaps this sort of thing happens to all authors of
self-help literature, even when, as with myself, they have no “followers" let alone their own empire as Hubbard did.
To me, the story of Scientology is a
compelling cautionary tale also because I was for a few years a
student of another individual (who shall remain nameless) who, like
Hubbard, claimed to have achieved a scientific understanding of human
nature which could save the world. He came to believe that he had a
special ability to perceive the truth and to think holistically.
Unlike Hubbard, or myself, he is a scientist who accumulated a vast
body of evidence for aspects of his theories. And, also unlike
Hubbard, he did not turn his campaign to save the world into a
money-making scheme. He did sue his critics, but unlike Hubbard and
his successor David Miscavige, he did it with the honest intention of
correcting misperceptions about himself and his followers. Hubbard's
avowed strategy was to use legal action as a method of intimidation.
The reason I mention these things is
that my experiences have led me to think a lot about how the
individual who wishes to play a role in the psychological healing of
society should behave. My own writing has been a product of my
personal struggles and what I have learned from others. To some
extent it is an expression of things I have been trying to give
rational voice to since my teens, to some extent it is a response to
my would-be guru friend and to some extent it is a synthesis of the
ideas of others which have been important to me.
My experience with my friend, however,
greatly affected my presentation of my ideas. To my mind, he went
wrong in two key ways. He stopped questioning himself and thus
allowed his theories to become a dogma and he came to view himself as “a prophet" and became intolerant of dissent in his
organisation. Thus he became surrounded by a small group of people
who, I believe, if it were a question of trusting themselves or
trusting him would trust him. He's no Hubbard. His organisation has
remained small and presumably had little impact on society. But in
the case of Hubbard we can see these problems writ large. Not wanting
to fall into this trap, I reminded myself that I might not be the
best judge of my own ideas. I view an idea much like a potentially
beneficial virus. It is something which, if it proves useful, will
spread and take on a life of its own irrespective of the individual
in whose mind it first appeared. If we have to put too much effort
into persuading people of something then perhaps it is because it is
not true. So I did two things to correct for these potential
problems. I emphasised in the presentation of my writing that I make
no claims that anything I say is necessarily true and that I claim no
authority of any kind. And I gave myself a dismissive pseudonym –
Joe Blow – so that, in the perhaps unlikely event that my writing
strikes a major chord, there can be no cult of personality. Hardly
anyone knows who I am. In this way, any ideas I present stand or fall
on their own, and there is no need for me to try to maintain some
kind of control over how people respond to them, something which,
while it may have made Hubbard a rich man, was inseparable from his
life of paranoia and criminality. He died a broken man, hiding from
the authorities.
Wright does a brilliant job of making
the phenomenon of Scientology understandable by placing it in its
historical context, giving due attention to the complexity of
Hubbard's personality and the impressive scope of the dogma he
created and showing, through the experiences of ex-members, most
notably screenwriter/director Paul Haggis, an insight into the
movement's appeal as well as how it went badly wrong for so many.
The search for understanding of human
nature and an effective form of therapy for the human race was the
most important task before us in the late forties when Hubbard
developed his theory of Dianetics and it is still the most important
task before us today. But Hubbard was certainly not in a position to
achieve this single-handedly, which is what he believed he could do.
His methods were not bad methods - introspection, imagination and
automatic writing. When psychology is the area of enquiry there is no
such thing as objectivity. We have to use our mind to understand our
mind. The object and the subject are the same. It is even
questionable whether we can be truly objective even in areas as far
from ourselves as physics and chemistry. The human dilemma is that we
are so insecure in ourselves that we are always looking for
reassurance in the phenomena around us. If our neurosis makes us
competitive then we see more competition than cooperation when we
look at the natural world. If even there we cannot be unbiased how
can we look honestly into ourselves? And yet we must. We must
understand our disease - the psychological disorder which has been
with us since before recorded history. In our insecure state we try
to tell ourselves we are not sick. We look for some precedent in the
rest of nature for our aggression, our pathological competitiveness,
our oppression of our fellows, our greed. We can try to excuse our
patriarchal behaviour by pointing to alpha male chimpanzees, or our
wars by pointing to territorial disputes between hungry groups of
animals, etc., but we have to hunt pretty hard and ignore an awful
lot to present this flimsy case. There is no precedent in the rest of
nature for the sickness which has pushed us to the brink of
self-annihilation. When Hubbard came up with Dianetics the imminent
threat seemed to be nuclear war. Would Dianetics (later Scientology)
save us from blowing ourselves up? That may be less on our minds now,
but our population continues to grow exponentially while we are
caught up in addictions which are fast destroying our life-support
systems and we have an economy completely dependent on fostering
those unsustainable addictions. We are in deep shit. The need for
rapid psychological healing and resultant cultural change of the most
revolutionary kind is far greater than it was in Hubbard's time. And
this is part of what makes the story of Scientology such an important
one. If we wish to achieve something we must learn from other's
failed attempts.
If Hubbard had invented Dianetics in
our day it would almost certainly not have flourished as it did in
his time. There is too much competition. There is a New Age guru on
every corner. But in the 1950s there was almost no counter-culture.
It's not hard to see why some intelligent individuals believed that
Dianetics was the only hope for human survival. What else was there?
There was psychiatrist Wilhelm Reich, who probably had the deepest
genuine understanding of the human dilemma, what he termed “the
emotional plague", but he would die in 1957. I can't think of
anyone else who had a grand radical vision for the rehabilitation of
the human race.
The problem we have in understanding
ourselves is one of honesty. If we can think honestly there is no
great mystery about the basics of human behaviour. If we do something
we are capable of being aware of why we do it. But we grow out of the
habit of thinking honestly early in our lives, and this is at the
heart of our problem as a species. To the degree that we can be
honest with ourselves, introspection is an essential way of learning
about ourselves. But the free exercise of the imagination, and
techniques like automatic writing (which Hubbard appears to have used
frequently) are ways in which we can sometimes short circuit the
mind's self-censorship and dishonesty. Others sometimes make use of
psychoactive drugs.
The key problem with Hubbard's attempt
to excavate some grand understanding of human nature and
psychological therapy from his own imagination was that he appears to
have been a pathological liar. Exploration and honesty are the two
things needed for this project. Hubbard was pretty brave and
enthusiastic about the former, but he fell down on the latter. And
where things went badly wrong is that life and society provided him
with no reality check. There were plenty of people who needed to
believe that someone could lead them out of the human dilemma. What
we believe often has more to do with what we need to believe than it
does with logic or reason. I know from my own experience of psychosis
how easy it is to believe something, even something ludicrous,
because of the power with which it bursts into the mind. But I had
reality checks in the form of everyone around me who realised I was
crazy, not to mention anti-psychotic drugs. If I had been like
Hubbard, surrounded by disciples hanging on my every word, I might
still believe those things now. I learned that, while the imagination
is inescapably prophetic, it speaks in symbols not facts.
Where conventional religion explained
the unprecedented nature of the human disease by introducing the
supernatural – we were cursed by God or possessed by evil spirits –
Hubbard introduced science fiction – our bodies are a place of
exile of extraterrestrial beings. It is important to keep in mind,
however, that the most bizarre aspects of his explanation were kept
secret from initiates until they were already integrated into the
movement and had experienced, or felt they had experienced, benefits
from its therapy.
If Hubbard's ideas of therapy had
absolutely no practical value then it is doubtful his movement would
have taken off. But he borrowed ideas from Freudian psychotherapy and
adapted them into a kind of fast food equivalent of psychoanalysis.
Freud put forward the credible idea that when we have a block in our
memory it is because of an association with something unpleasant,
possibly a memory of a bad experience. Hubbard turned this into a
crusade to produce “clears", individuals whose traumatic
blocks had been removed, allowing them, among other things, to have
total recall of everything they had experienced in their lives. He
announced a lot of “clears", none of whom showed any signs
of such recall or any other special abilities. Desensitisation is a
major part of the Scientology strategy, and this is something which
has a proven track record in conventional psychotherapeutic practise
for the treatment of phobias and obsessive compulsive disorder. I
think the appeal of Scientology can probably be summed up by a
combination of potentially effective techniques (including the kind
of positive thinking also preached by people like Anthony Robbins),
show business razzle-dazzle with e-meters etc., and community. You
might get better therapy from a university-trained psychotherapist,
but it would be a private process, you wouldn't be a member of a
therapy community.
Wright gives a disturbing account of
the sick goings on amongst the Sea Org, the clergy of the Church of
Scientology – including the inflicting of punishment in the form of
imprisonment and virtual slavery. While some members make a break for
freedom, most accept their punishment as justified. Perhaps the
development of such a culture shouldn't surprise us. Scientology
lures people in by playing on their insecurities. While emotional
insecurity turns some of us into paranoid control freaks, more often
it leads us to seek some sense of security through submission to
authority. Perhaps the most reliable indication that someone is
emotionally healthy is that they interact on a basis of equality with
all of their fellows. It would be surprising if a society which set
out to attract the insecure didn't end up a kind of perfect storm of
dominance and submission. Of course this would not be the case if it
was the Bridge to Total Freedom it claims to be.
It is never enough to simply criticise
toxic social institutions. To do so can play into their hands. They
can portray this as persecution. And it does us little good to
distance ourselves from such institutions as if we were superior to
those who comprise them. We need to understand them, because it is
only full understanding which can bring healing. Wright places the
story of L. Ron Hubbard and the religion he gave birth to into its
social and historical context, and he makes no attempt to deny
anybody's experience. We read of horrific abuse of power, we read of
space opera become dogma, we read of any number of fabrications and
hypocrisies, but there is no attempt to exclude the possibility that
many Scientologists have gained benefits from the church's therapy
techniques, whether those benefits come directly from the techniques
or from the placebo effect. In fact this element is necessary to an
understanding of the relative popularity of the movement.
Some see L. Ron Hubbard as simply a
clever con artist - a snake oil salesman who hit the big time. This
is not the Hubbard we encounter in Wright's book. We find a deeply
flawed and tormented individual who made a desperate attempt to find
understanding of human nature and a method to heal our propensity for
self-destruction. Wright gives plenty of evidence to back up the view
that Hubbard believed in the essence of his dogma for the whole of
his life. This doesn't preclude an addiction to wealth and power or a
complete inability to live by or realise the supposed benefits of
that dogma. One could make a comparison with the upper echelons of
the Catholic Church where hypocrisy, corruption, extravagant luxury
and abuse of power do not preclude the possibility that those who
behave in this way may genuinely believe they are God's
representatives on Earth. Hubbard was an addictive personality - and
part of what he was addicted to was his own delusional belief system.
This is also the story of Scientology's
attempt to seduce Hollywood and of the thuggish rule of Hubbard's
successor, David Miscavige. If you want to gain some insight into how
John Travolta and Tom Cruise became Scientology's poster boys, you
will find it here.
Lawrence Wright tells his story like a
novelist, but the thoroughness of his research and the fact that he
is such a skilled devil's advocate, makes this a powerful expose
which will no doubt do great and necessary damage to the Church of
Scientology.
