I am starting to think L. Ron Hubbard wasn't conning people.

I am fascinated by cults, and the biggest, craziest one of them all is, of course, Scientology. I have been browsing through the OT levels, and man that stuff reads like the Time Cube website.

For those who would like to look into the Seekrits:

OT Levels (from Wikileak)

Warning: PDF. (Pretty damn flaky)

Warning: Contains copyrighted UFO cult material.

Aside from the Xenu wackyness, it is filled with weird word drills like:

We must survive
We mustn’t survive

We can survive
We can’t survive

We should survive
We shouldn’t survive

I do create
I don’t create

I can create
I can’t create

and on and on for pages and pages and pages like that in Hubbard’s own nearly illegible hand.

WTF?

At this point, I gotta say, I think the dude really believed what he was talking about. Is there a psychological disorder, maybe listed in DSM IV, for people like Hubbard, or the Time Cube guy, who go on and on talking about absolute nonsense? What was he suffering from?

Full Disclosure: IANAS

I seems to me many religious leaders fall into what the DSM IV might categorize as Grandiose Delusional Disorder–essentially a subtype of paranoia. Delusions are characterized by the inability to separate reality from fantasy.

Curiously–and I’ve seen this often–delusional people aren’t necessarily totally dysfunctional, and they often think straight except for their one little relatively well-compartmentalized delusion. So L could have been pretty “normal” except for the nutty Scientology stuff. Even shrinks would have trouble deciding whether the delusional piece was a scam or simply a very clever person. One might even say that the individual himself might be hard-pressed to know what he truly believes.

It is my personal opinion that there is sort of a delusion gene(s) which renders some people either gullible or frankly paranoid, or somewhere on that spectrum. And I think it’s pretty common. Thus do we see the masses buying into various religious constructs which seem to the outsider to be clearly internally inconsistent. In some sense, for me, the leaders of those various religions are simply the extreme expression of the same fundamental human (genetic) tendency. A modern ED physician looking at Joseph Smith or L Ron Hubbard would likely have him committed for psychiatric evaluation, and the same could be said all the way back through inventors and promoters of every great (and not so great) religion.

And I’m not baiting anyone here, so don’t bite, except in a different thread or something, but right now based on my observation of human behaviour, the biggest cult is not scientology, but AGW Alarmism. Note that the elements of behaviour are independent of what germs of truth underlie the core tenets, so this is not an effort to inject or sidetrack the thread; it’s simply an observation on my part of human nature and this need for a Great Cause.

There’s also the fact that, during the writing of the OT stuff, he was, according to his own admission, ‘drinking lots of rum and popping pinks and greys’. I think that might have been a contributing factor…

I’d also add that people who have enough money or power or some other method of surrounding themselves with nothing but sycophants and who do so, have a history of becoming progressively more imbalanced over time. Michael Jackson being a more recent example.

Hm, not so certain about Siddharta …Buddhism is a pretty person internal religion. Seems to concentrate on improving your soul so you can go on, and not so much about donating everything to your church leader. Actually they encourage you to give your belongings to those who need them [more or less, Im not a buddhist, just casually read about it.]

I think ElRon was crazy… like a fox! He always made references to the gullibility of his followers… “we have a new way of making slaves”…“if you want to make a million, start a religion”. He knew what he was up to.
The real mystery of $cientology-despite the thousands of people who have achieved the state of"clear", none of them seem to be the geniuses that Hubbard said they would be.
$cientology remains a cult, whose members are constantly defending their bogus “religion”.

It does seem that way to casual readers, but my mother-in-law is strong evidence that they are just as much a money religion as the next. I don’t have any problem with it except that in my mother-in-laws case she rather neglects all things not bhuddist.

I do not know much about L Ron Hubbard,but all religions were started by some human being,people are drawn to a belief that fits their own needs or desires. What some of the purposes were is questionable,but different people are looking for something to cling to that they feel will help, and seem satisfied no matter what . All religions have a way of keeping people in line, some use fear, some a promise of life after death, some a better life now. As far as I know any one who is a Scientoligist can leave any time but then there are some like radical Islaam that threaten one with death if they leave, and some like some Christian religions with eternal suffering in a Hell. Religion can be for a person’s good or detriment depending on the circumstance.

(by CP: )
A modern ED physician looking at Joseph Smith or L Ron Hubbard would likely have him committed for psychiatric evaluation, and the same could be said all the way back through inventors and promoters of every great (and not so great) religion.

Assume for a moment that Buddhism (or Hinduism) does not exist as an established religion.

A young man is brought to the ED by his wealthy parents. He has given up all that he has and has created a construct where the relief of suffering is achieved through a succession of rebirths into various beings ranging from the inhabitants of hell to gods, depending on the acceptability of the previous existence.

If he could care for himself and was not a danger to others, he would not be committed–my literary license there–but he would, in fact, be diagnosed as delusional and be referred for psychiatric evaluation.

The thing that makes religions acceptable is the quantity of people believing a particular construct, along with some sort of weight given purely on the basis of historical acceptance. I put it to you that Buddhism is no less nutty than the rest and its founder no less delusional than the inventors of other religions, even if the recommended lifestyle itself is somehow more palatable.

Well, in the east its very social and in some countries the de facto state religion. Monks live together, they have community roles, etc. While meditation can be seen as personal, the religion itself is fairly social.

In Buddhism theres a strict division between laity and monks. A lay person does not need to give up their items or do these grandiose things associated with pop-culture buddhism. A monk does, but a monk will not usually be accepted by a temple or community without expressed support of his parents, amongst other things. No one is really encouraged to go into some life of poverty without formal admission into monkhood which involves not only parental consent, but education, practice, etc. In some countries like Thailand, young men become monks for a set period of time and it is considered good fortune for the parents to have a son like this.

As far as L Ron. I never believed him or any successful cult leaders were pure scammers. They believe their ideas almost as much as their followers. They’re just more socially savvy and more sophisticated than their followers. They quickly learn that it pays and eventually engage in even more abuses. Theyre probably all suffering from at least one serious mental illness.

The question of whether the leader of a religious group is sincere is simply irrelevant to the question of whether the claims of the religion are true. Compare this to science. Suppose it was discovered that Einstein made up relativity as a joke. How would that affect whether it was useful (or “true,” whatever that may mean for a scientific theory)? Worry about truth. Trying to figure out the sincerity of the people making the claims is a waste of time.

:slight_smile:

Yeah, that “If you want to make a million …” quote is pretty damning. I can only imagine what contempt Hubbard must have privately felt for all the gullible folk who swallowed his SF fantasies whole. Did he start to believe his meanderings as he aged? It’s certainly possible. But I think he always knew deep down that he was peddling bullshit.

He was only a second-rate SF author in the first place. Now if one of the greats had started a religion, Asimov, Herbert, Vance, Heinlein, etc, that would have really been something to see. What tales and theologies they would have spun!

I do give Hubbard credit for one thing though. He will certainly be remembered as one of the great conmen of the 20th century

Do we have good evidence that he made those statements? I’ve encountered the claim that he never said the “make a million” thing.

But surely the Buddha did not make up what now seems to be the crazier stuff there. As I have always understood it, anyway, the belief in reincarnation in various forms was already part of the culture he grew up in. What he added was the notion that it is a bad thing to be reincarnated (because all life is suffering) and that if you do things right you can actually avoid being reincarnated. Maybe some of contemporaries would still have thought that crazy, but it is not nearly as crazy as the whole reincarnation as animals, etc., stuff can sound to a modern secularist.

Much the same can probably be said about Jesus, who was only pushing a variant form (of which there were many) of the Judaism of his time. He invented hardly any of the stuff that atheists find objectionable. Apart from him saying that he was the son of God (if he really did, which is dubious) I can see no reason for thinking that Jesus was either crazy or a scammer. (If there was a scammer involved in the rise of Christianity, it was surely Paul.)

More modern examples of this sort of thing, where we have much more information about the person, and what went on, would be people like Martin Luther or John Wesley. They were religious innovators, but does anyone seriously think they were either crazy or scammers?

What is different about Scientology (and that makes it different even from something like Mormonism) is that it was developed out of a tradition, science fiction, that, although rather cultish in its fandom, had never previously presented itself as being about the truth of things at all. Furthermore, Hubbard was already known as a writer of what does not pretend to be anything other than science fiction. That makes it difficult to believe that Scientology was not originally a consciously devised scam (though I do not discount the possibility that the strain of keeping up the pretense may have driven Hubbard somewhat crazy, so that he eventually came to at least partly believe it.)

There are claims that Hubbard believed himself to be the reincarnation of Cecil Rhodes, and that this is why he tried to get Scientology into Rhodesia/Zimbabwe. And that he believed he had, in an earlier life, buried a treasure in the Mediterranean, and spent a lot of time on his ships actually loking for it. It seems likely enough to me that he did believe some of the hokum he came up with. I can’t ring myself to believe that he believed *all * of it.
As for making up religions – this is one of the hallmarks of Golden Age science fiction (and proof to me that those trying to write bios of l. on weren’t themselves science fiction fans – none of them mention it). Campbell did write a story in which a fake religion is created as a cover for a scientific end. It was entitled “All”, but it wasn’t published until after his death, in the collection The Space Beyond. He told Heinlein the outline, offering to let him write it himself and Heinlein wrote “Sixth Column” (later republished as The Day After Tomorrow, based on it. It’s infinitely more readable than Campbell’s, but not one of Heinlein’s better efforts. A handful of American scientists use super-science under the guide of a religion to defeat Asian (Japanese, apparently) invaders. Asimov used the idea of science/technology hidden as religion in his origina; “Foundation” stories. Most of them with this twist appear in the first of his trilogy, entitled simply Foundation.

So if you want to see what his contemporaries came up with – get their books, and you;ll see. It’s not surprising that someone actually did try to start a religion based on “scientific techniques”. In fact, the idea of a “Science of the Mind” was pretty common in that group, too - Campbell had written about it himself, and Heinlein had written in his stories about turning the "Soft sciences harder. Read, for instance, in “If This Goes On…” about the way they codified and engineered advertising copy and political messages so as to target people’s gut reactions.
As for Hubbard’s saying “The way to make a million isn’t to write fiction at a penny a word, but to start your own religion”, that’s been hashed out on these Boards before, and there have been websites devoted to it. The only serious challenge has come from the Scientologists themselves, but I wouldn’t believe Scientologists about anything. Sam moscowitz, the SF historian, reported that he’d heard Hubbard say it, and so have many others. Again, though, given the sorts of stories written and discussions people could be expected to have in the editorial offices (especially about authors’ pay rates), I wouldn’t at all be surprised if more than one author didn’t say that. Given that he actually did so, I’d really be surprised if Hubbard hadn’t.

just a slight hijack.

At the time L Ron was was convincing Campbell etc, there were small ads in the SF mags
( and other 'zines, I imagine ) concerning the Rosicrucians.
The blurb said, IIRC, " Have you lived before?"…

Whatever happened if you answered these ads?

Who were these modern Rosicrucians?

BTW, I have a sketchy knowledge of old Rosicrucianism; this hijack is about those small ads.

I can’t seem to trace anything about them.

And Hubbard *at first *tried to “sell” dianetics as an alternative therapy, in opposition to psychoanalysis (“Dianetics: the Modern Science of Mental Health”; this is still refelected in Scientology’s intense enmity against medical psychiatry). When that was not at all well received and ended up with bankruptcies and investigations of quackery, he moved on to doing his thing under the overt banner of religion, probably taking notice that the bunco squad doesn’t go after churches for promising impossible things.

Cecil addressed this a while back

Harlan Ellison claims to have been there whene Hubbard invented Scientology and talked extensively about it in a magazine interview in 1978:

I don’t think Hubbard believed a word of it himself.