Dead Rebel Of The Week
~ L. Ron Hubbard ~
Which came first?
The origin of the beginning of everything is mankind’s eternal question. No, it wasn’t the chicken or the egg, nothing so banal. (By the way, it’s the egg. Mutation of DNA, resulting in a new species, can only take place in a zygote cell in the egg.) No, really, which came first? The Church of Scientology or Ron Hubbard’s sci-fi career?
What the hell does it matter? I will tell you. This is funny, so stay with me.
Ron Hubbard was born in 1911, and was raised in a family where the father was a legendary naval officer. This meant young Ronnie spent a lot of his youth on the move, following his father around to whatever military base he was assigned to.
Doesn’t matter.
Neither does it matter that, when it was young Hubbard’s turn to defend the family honors during WWII, he did so with very little success. Sure, he became a Lieutenant Commander of his own submarine, but the official records show he was reprimanded for spending three days deep sea bombing a magnetic rock on the sea bottom, thinking it was a Japanese submarine base. He was ultimately fired after practicing water-to-land missile shelling on a deserted American island. Why he was fired? The island wasn’t deserted at all - quite the opposite - it was crawling with Mexicans, and belonged to Mexico. So, in order not to have to go to war with another third world country over some dumbass submarine officer, the US Navy saw fit to dismiss him ASAP.
None of this matters. People are born, they grow up and they die. It is what they do in between that matters.
See, Ron Hubbard was a mystery. A classic “enigma”. Fuckhead or genius, we don’t know. Regardless, he was the Man with the Plan.
But was the plan flawed by selfish greed, or was he sincerely so incredibly insane that he believed in the stuff he concocted and sold to his brainwashed legions of adoring followers?
Hubbard had fiddled around with writing half-hearted sci-fi for some time. He wrote short stories of this and that, and managed to get himself published here and there in all the right magazines. But it wasn’t enough. He wasn’t exactly a household name.
Enter 1950 and the publication of “Dianetics”. A stroke of genius, or madness… It all depends on your angle. This book was Hubbard’s take on the Matters of the Human Spirit, and how it should be healed without the “evils of modern psychology and psychiatry”. It describes how we are all old souls who were born billions of years ago, and since then have been reborn over and over through the eons, carrying with us all this emotional garbage that reflects negatively on our current life situations, unless we clear our minds and become whole. To do this you have to realize that all physical ailments are psychosomatic, and only through “auditing” shall your mind reach a higher level of painlessness, awareness and total freedom. This “auditing” is done by hooking yourself up to an “E-meter” (a dressed up lie detector) and having an auditor ask you very specifically formulated questions, while reading your reactions off a chart from the machine. Supposedly, all your past traumas can be exorcised through “clearing your mind” and getting in sync with the Scientology program through these “Audit Sessions”. All records are privy only to you, the auditor, and the rest of the Church. Hey, what’s a little privacy between friends? How can we control you if we don’t know what’s in your closet?
It’s brilliant.
It’s called brainwashing.
There are a lot of people out there who are spiritually confused but find the idea of a God on a cloud ridiculous or dated. These are modern people, with real jobs and a briefcase under the arm. They are on the go. They want to believe in something, as long as it doesn’t interfere with 9 to 5.
Enter the Church of Scientology.
After writing “Dianetics” (much of which he borrowed from “Golden Dawn” and his old buddy Aleister Crowley’s theories on this, that and everything), Hubbard started the Dianetics Foundation. He wanted to see if his theories actually worked. See, he had never actually tried them out on a living human being – he had just figured it all out on his own. People? He didn’t need no stinking people! At least not yet. Renowned psychologists vehemently denounced the bestselling book, claiming it was a complete study in lunacy and had no basis on anything substantial whatsoever. People would get hurt by following these principles.
Didn’t matter to Hubbard. He quickly abandoned the Foundation project. The “official” reason for this was because everybody he worked with there was a “communist”, but according to sources from inside the Foundation, the scientific experiments he conducted all inevitably failed.
Screw the science part. That would never get any quick results anyway.
Instead, he started the Church of Scientology, his own religion based on the teachings of “Dianetics”. All of a sudden the book wasn’t so much random thoughts on the fuckuppedness of Man, but an actual scripture of eternal wisdom to lo and behold in all its divine glory.
Fucked up? Sure, but people loved it.
Why? Because it was groovy, man! Master Hubby made us Old Legendary Beings out of Space and Time with an ancient mind – The “Thetan” – and we were all of a sudden so much more than we thought we were. And it did not even include silly angels with harps or some sulphury hell either. It was all cool and easy to understand. All our sins were in the past, and all we needed to do was to sweep them under the rug with some hi-tech mind control apparatus. Now, all these young urban professionals on the go could have their own little Religion, since it wasn’t really a religion after all. More like a Forbes Spirit Club or something. Hubbard especially targeted people who had achieved somewhat substantial financial means but still found themselves stuck in a bad place; alcoholism, divorce, death of a relative… that sort of pesky stuff.
And it cost money to be a member. Of course. Not that these people minded much. They were. after all, born and raised in a world where money talked and bullshit walked; they were all steeped in the world of Mammon. “Donations” flowed into the church, officially to further the goals and hopes of the Thought of Scientology, after a detour through Hubbard’s pockets, of course. He became filthy rich. Let the Catholic Church deal with the disgustingly poor and the terminally sick. They were not invited anyway.
The key to getting these people to hang around was to not give them the whole “in” ticket right from the start. You had to “earn” it by making your spirit a little cleaner with each “cleansing”. When the higher echelons of Scientology decide you’re ready for the next step, you will be initiated into more, and better, secrets pertaining to your personal spiritual healing. They can do this forever, trust me. There’s always “another step” on the road to salvation. That’s why you can’t call most Scientologists on the most fucked up shit their Church stands for - most of them haven’t reached that particular level yet, and the ones who have are so brainwashed they would never admit to anything anyway.
Hubbard, being a paranoid little devil – always thinking the communists, the Nazis and other scoundrels were out to get him - made sure to make this persecution mania one of the bearing pillars of his Church. Great cares were taken to outline who was with the Scientologists and who was against them. Pretty much, if you disagreed with Hubbard, you were officially labeled an enemy, an “SP” – a “suppressive person” - and, as such, your Scientology friends were highly recommended/encouraged/ordered to shun you. Effective immediately. There was no room for disagreements in Hubbard’s House.
Hubbard, also being a classic pathological liar, steeped his whole religion in the same ethics, or lack thereof. His official biography lists him pretty much as the second coming of a modern Christ, and his Herculean achievements would have made God work overtime on the 7th day. There is no end to the lies that he spun about himself. Everything from the tremendous stunts he pulled during WWII (he was fired – how screwed up do you have to be to get fired from a war anyway?), to his amazingly philanthropical travels to Asia (he was never there even once), to how exhaustingly long it took him to research “Dianetics” (he made it up as he wrote it – according to himself in private confessions). The official Scientology website lists Hubbard as a Purple Hearted war hero, and also includes statements from renowned experts on the Human Psyche, all claiming that Hubbard is right as rain. All these certified documents have been proven false in a court of law, and the persons behind them never even existed.
The whole Crowley past comes back to haunt the Scientologists every once in a while, but they steer away from that with a story about how Hubbard bravely infiltrated the Devil’s Church to expose him to the world.
Uh-huh…
So what did Hubbard do to “further the Thought of Scientology”? Easy as pie; he wrote more sci-fi books. Books that sold like a motherfucker, and brought in more people to his little Spirit Club, and more money into his accounts. It was a win-win situation.
After successfully having run his little Church, like the great Father of Spiritual Enhancement that he was, he was forced to leave the country when the shit hit the fan. His organization was investigated by US authorities and his wife (second wife by bigami) and several others, were indicted, charged and convicted as spies; enemies of the US government. Hubbard narrowly escaped with a dropped “co-conspiratorial” charge. He took his ass to Africa, but they wouldn’t take him, so he re-created his youth by making himself the Naval Commander of a little para-military Scientology Mediterranean fleet, called the “Sea Org”. He cruised the seas, looking for trouble, until he got bored, and eventually secretly slipped back into the US and to his ranch. Hubbard officially cut all ties with “his” church, but all money still trickled his way.
He died in 1986, in his home, from a stroke. The coroner arrived before Scientology Attorneys could claim the body, and the autopsy revealed massive and consistent use of psychotropic drugs. The shit that makes you fly like a fucking eagle. When this was publicly revealed, the Church of Scientology officially commended its leader for “bravely leaving the body behind to go explore the Spirit World beyond mortal confines”.
The scary part is, that after all these years after Hubbard’s death, even when he has been dragged into the light for the obvious scam and con-artist he was, his Church is still going strong. In fact, it’s going stronger than ever.
Excuse me? Your fearless leader was a stoned sci-fi writer, a pathological liar, a bigamist and an asshole. Even Anne Frank could have connected those damn dots. Hello? Anybody home, or are you all out of your fucking mind?
Take a drive through Clearwater, Florida on any given night of the week. You will find a migration of uni-sexed blank-faced people between 20 and 35, dressed in black slacks and light colored button down shirts, all making their way to heed some distant call. All moving as one. No smiles, no big gestures or loud voices. Subtle. Determined. It’s fucking freaky. Like the “Village of the Damned Part 2” or something. Or “The Yuppie Lemmings of Death”.
Where do the people over 35 go? Is there some Scientology Elephant Graveyard somewhere, littered with the bones of the 36ers and up?
Scientology always seems to draw in that particular stereotype: the attractive, but utterly sexless, successful enigmatic person with a whole graveyard of skeletons in the closet. Take a look at John Travolta, Kirstie Alley and Tom Cruise, the poster children of Scientology, and tell me they are not three Bona Fide Fuckheads. And aren’t they a little old anyway? The perks of fame, I guess.
I have a morbid fascination with organized religion, in any form, as it, to me, is baffling how Man is so willing to succumb to somebody else’s ideas of what is right and true. Scientology, in all its uptown clean cut yuppie day-dreamery, is perhaps the epitome of the most dangerous and brainwashed of all spiritual cults disguised as a “church”, since it specifically targets psychologically damaged people with money. All masterminded by a man who wanted to sell more books, make more money and who would not ever take anybody else’s word for what was true. He made up the whole world around him and even created a religion to go with it. A religion of paranoia, deceit, greed and total mind control.
Hubbard was a rebel in the sense that, regardless whether he was a genius or a lunatic, it was his way or the highway. It was more than pure luck and circumstance that lead both ways to the same place: his own personal fame and fortune.
Jesus and Jim Jones didn’t have shit on Hubbard. Dying for people’s sins and living in the jungle like some animal are vastly overrated when you can just sit back on your high horses and make people pay you to run their own brains through the Heavy Load program.
Ultimately, Hubbard created a complimentary religion, that came as an added value “bonus” with the purchase of his books, making him a millionaire and a legend in the minds of the mindless.
Or was it the other way around?
Brilliant, either way.
“Writing for a penny a word is ridiculous. If a man really wants to make a million dollars, the best way would be to start his own religion.”
- Hubbard (late 1940’s)
