Scientology column - Cecil?

I’m actually not interested in discussing Scientology much at all, its merits, drawbacks, truth, whatever. I am interested in Cecil’s truth. From the paragraph starting with, “Even Cecil has been the target of the Scientologists’ wrath” :

  1. Did Cecil (“Cecil”) really go on radio shows back in the day?

  2. Do we have a recording of His voice?

  3. Will denying Cecil’s oneness and equating Him to Ed Zotti get me wiretapped?

I just wanted to question the assertion that L. Ron believed in this shit. I mean I cannot prove he didn’t, but a number of sci-fi writers have told the story that sometime around 1949, he stated that if you really wanted to get rich, you should found a religion.

I discovered sci-fi and subscribed to Astounding (Later Analog) shortly after and I read the original Dianetics article. Even at 14 it seemed a load to me (but not, quite obviously to editor John Campbell). It is possible that Hubbard actually believed in Dianetics, I suppose, but when it didn’t catch on, he decided to make a religion of it.

There is a story that Hubbard made a bar bet with Robert A. Heinlein that he could create a successful religion. I see that there is no evidence that this happened, although that doesn’t mean that he was genuine.

Also, how does that bet work? Does he have to have X number of followers before RAH will pay up?

I like South Park’s
Scientologists Really Believe This
Flashing at the bottom of the screen. But we don’t know what Hubbard thought, although his wife seemed to believe the bet story?

Shortly after publication of the book in the very early '50s, I attended a big event at the Olypmpic in Los Angeles. They talked a good talk and brought out a “clear” who could recite an entire page from a book after only a glance. I believe it.
They went on and on, and having had a good turnout, I think they picked up some pretty big bucks. And a lot of us bought the book.
A friend and I decided to try some of what we had been taught, i.e. taking turns auditing and lying on the analyst couch mumbling.
Bottom line, neither of us got anyplace, especially when it came to trying to recall events and/or things that were said back when we were still in the womb. See, the theory was that if your father told your mother she was a stupid meatball, you, in the womb took it personally. Now you had an engram.
Normally I’d still take it personally if someone called me a stupid meatball, but if I were handing my money to Scientology, I guess calling me a stupid meatball would be well deserved.
What really got them going big was all the celebrities, because many impressionable people think celebrities are as smart as they act in the movies.
Bottom line: What all started out as a breakthrough in home psychology quickly turned into a religion for the simple reason that, heh heh, religion don’t got to pay no taxes. Get it?

Usually, Cecil shied away (and still shies away) from public appearances. He has it in his head that if his face gets known, he’ll be mobbed by crowds every time he goes to the grocery store, have his clothes ripped off, etc. as if he were a 1950s film star. So, generally, Ed went on radio shows. I can’t speak for this particular one.

Not sure who “we” is, but I don’t have a recording of Cecil’s voice.

Sounds like, as least per the article, that Cecil “called in” to the radio show. But, he was set up so I wonder if it was an actual broadcasted show.

Of course a recording of Cecil’s voice exists. It’s locked away in a vault somewhere so that, if the worst should befall him, Gnut will still be able to reconstruct him from it. The location of this vault is, of course, classified.

…and written on a piece of paper locked away in another vault, the location of which is also classified.

Yeah, there’s the story that Ed assured Cecil that the location of the second vault would be very safe, because he locked the paper with its location in the first vault.

I’m not saying I believe that story, just that I’ve heard it.

But the mind… the mind is always fascinating, and the early fight between the psychiatrists and the scientologists is a fascinating bit of social history.

The psychiatrists claimed that scientology was dangerous and damaging: this was based on a Freudian understanding of the mind. The scientologists responded that psychiatry was dangerous and damaging: this was the adult version of “Same to you. With knobs on it.”, but also a description of pre-drug Freudian psychiatry.

I’d have to say that the scientologists won that, on points. Scientology (the mind control stuff, not the organisation) is dangerous and damaging, but mostly in the way that it recapulates Freudian psychiatry, and at least (under pressure) they gave up treating mentally ill people.

Freudian psychiatry is dangerous and damaging to mentally ill people, and (because of that), psychotic people aren’t “treated” with Freudian psychiatry any more.

Both approaches were expensive, and the psychiatrists had the moral edge only because they made most of their money from rich people.

This part of the debate has ebbed away: because psychiatrists are mostly not really Freudian now, they don’t really think scientology is psychiatrically dangerous. My most recent contact tells me that scientologists still teach that psychiatry is dangerous, but without any real enemy they are just shadow boxing.

As with Hari, I started in sf a long, long time ago, long enough to have hung around with fans who knew Hubbard when. They repeated the same story, that Hubbard wanted fame and money and created Dianetics as a scam, something he announced ahead of time he was planning on doing. Campbell was already clearly nuts himself and a perfect candidate for marketing the hell out of any anti-establishment subversion.

The only fault with this is that old fans said a lot of stuff. There’s probably no more good evidence for this belief than for Hubbard making a bet with Heinlein, although the negative evidence for that is probably sufficient. (Heinlein never mentioned this, other fans never mentioned this, nobody ever wrote about it, etc.) The negative evidence for Hubbard’s announcement is that plenty of other sf writers, who would have heard the rumors at the time, were Dianetics acolytes including A. E. van Vogt (no surprise since he believed in General Semantics) and James Blish (a real surprise since he shows no other major, long-term beliefs in crankery). Campbell had a major pecuniary interest in pushing Dianetics in 1949. From 1945-1948 Ray Palmer at Amazing Stories had achieved the highest circulation of any sf magazine by pushing the ludicrous Shaver Mystery stories. Campbell could clearly see that a similar brouhaha would work wonders for Astounding. Even if he didn’t believe - and there’s no evidence for that, either - he had huge incentive to make Dianetics a household word. But van Vogt and Blish didn’t. So why risk their reputations for a silly scam?

I didn’t know enough about the history to ask that question when I had the chance, but I’d like to know the answer.

Let’s not mix up Dianetics and Scientology. Dianetics is a crank school of psychology—though I’ve often wondered whether, in the hands of legitimate scientists, the basic idea of talk therapy mediated by a lie detector might not be of some value. (And you don’t want to dismiss Freud altogether, either; even if many of his conclusions were wrong, and even if they drew him into crankery, such as his support of the insane Oxfordian cult, he was still a pioneer in the systematic exploration of the mind.) Scientology started with Dianetics, but plunged into space aliens, reincarnation, and whatnot, such as only a severely compromised mind could take seriously.

I must confess that I never before today even heard of the “Shaver Mystery”, though I’ve occasionally encountered remnants of it in fiction.

Campbell seems to have genuinely believed in Dianetics—at least for a while. But he also believed in the Dean Drive and many other crank theories. He seems to have had a taste for wishful thinking and for giving the finger to actual scientists.

Dianetics as an alternate to Freudian psychoanalysis has enough plausibility to the described mechanism (as stated by John W. Kennedy) that someone could think it a viable approach. Thinking Dianetics has some validity is not the same as buying into thetans and space aliens and paying money to join a cult. Also, smart people can be fooled, too.

Sure, smart people can be fooled - but people who know ahead of time that it’s all made up seldom are. If every fan knew that Hubbard was making it up, why didn’t they? That indicates they thought it was real and that Hubbard never said otherwise.

There is no rational basis for defending Dianetics, either. The notorious E-meter was a Dianetics device. Check the Wikipedia article. HUbbard made ridiculous anti-scientific claims from the beginning.

Medical groups attacked it from the moment it became known. They drove the Dianetics clinics into bankruptcy. Hubbard lost the rights to the name Dinetics and started Scientology about five seconds later.

There is no difference between the two. Both are pseudoscience from start to finish. You may as well defend the Dean Drive as Dianetics. Campbell was an insane crank by the 50s. I know sf fans hate hearing that, but face facts.

As has anyone who ever wondered about the mind. Unfortunately, Freudian Analysis and Dianetics, both took that question and pushed in the same direction that eventually let us to “false memories”: if you do too much internal reflection, you get lost in the mirrors.

My favorite ever psychiatrist, Milton H Erickson, took it in a direction that was helpful. He was so good that he could see what people were thinking without using an e-meter, but I think he demonstrated that in lesser hands talk therapy mediated by a lie detector could be of value.

And perhaps more importantly, religious counseling doesn’t get you charged with practicing medicine without a license.

That’s the way I heard it: Dianetics was getting blowback from the medical/psychology community, so L. Ron dressed the same ideas up as a religion to keep it out there.

Gotta love Google: the ad on this page was for Scientology.org. :slight_smile: