- By Citizen Correspondent John Duignan
- Date Posted: 09/11/07
There are moments in life, coincidences, which have the potential to utterly
change the direction and meaning of your existence. Of these I have had several;
they have all marked me in various ways, but none more so than that fateful late
afternoon in Stuttgart, Germany, when an attractive and rather aggressive young
woman blocked my path and accosted me with the interrogative; "Do you have a
good memory"?
This story aims to serve a dual function: Enlighten
those who may be susceptible to seduction by mind and life control cults and to
provide a sense of hope for those who may be so entrapped. A tertiary purpose is
to encourage the reader to seek wisdom and direction from the vast array of
knowledge available at our finger tips - thanks in part to Google and ultra-fast
broadband, you can read incisive works on psychoanalytical and sociological
thought by Fromm and Jung, Russell's seminal 'Analysis of mind' lectures to the
philosophic revolutionary ideas of the enlightenment.
It is among these that you will find true wisdom and real answers to the
questions and uncertainties that have driven so many into the gaping maw of
deceptive pseudo religion.
To the informed, Scientology evokes a visceral revulsion, and with good
reason. Cruise, the empty headed fanatic, stirring up collective nausea on
national TV, personifies the true core value of Scientology to the man in the
street. Lisa McPherson's emaciated corpse, the true facts of her agonizing
demise hidden under a cloud of Church generated obfuscation. 'The exhibition of
death', a C-grade horror movie set, toured around the world by the Church in a
vain attempt to obliterate two hundred years worth of neuropsychiatric and
psychological research and insight.
To the yellow coated Scientology Volunteer Ministers, guaranteed to appear at
the site of any national disaster, like the proverbial vulture, in a hopeless
endeavor to pass off recruitment and the conceited effort to gain positive media
response as 'help'; in actuality, they tend to get in the way of qualified
professional rescue and emergency personnel, while wasting valuable resources
that could otherwise be passed onto the victims of disaster.
Church of Scientology anti-psychiatry demonstration
in Edinburgh, Scotland,
June 2005.
Professor
Erich Fromm would have diagnosed the cults' founder, L Ron
Hubbard, as suffering from an extreme form of Narcissistic
Personality Disorder. So warped was his condition that he
not only founded a religious body to honor him and his thought,
but further, formed a virtual military unit to protect him
and his 'works', execute his orders and pretty much pander
to his every whim.
There
is no doubt that he was a powerful individual and, at least
before his increasing mental instability got the better
of him, had bucket loads of charm and great intelligence.
But these virtues were contorted, perverted, by his illness.
In an all too brief moment of clarity in the early 1950s,
he asked for psychiatric help, but ran away before he could
be adequately assessed and treated.
A
thread that runs right through all of Hubbard's lectures
and writings from the early years of the cult to his last
incoherent broadcast in 1979 is that of impending doom.
He paints a bleak picture of our everyday lives. Our minds
are subject to our barely contained, violently irrational
subconscious, and the civil cohesion we see around us is
a mere shallow pretense. Hubbard gives us to believe that
our social order is run by a small clique of Machiavellian,
fascistic bankers, politicos and media moguls plotting to
subvert our liberty and freedom.
One
could be forgiven for objectively viewing his world view
as an expression of severe paranoia. It would be laughable
except for the fact that all cult members were gradually
inculcated into this exact outlook; we viewed the world
around us with mistrust and apprehension.
Scientology sign. Photo: Dwinning's
photostream
It was just one of many mechanisms employed to keep us obedient and fearful
of leaving.
The
organization operating under the brand name 'Scientology'
and later on Hubbard's own militant 'praetorian guard' The
Sea Organization, where I spent twenty years of my life,
were born out of Hubbard's pathological desire to take fiction
out of its context as entertainment, and place it into the
realm of actuality. In this fashion he hoped to rewrite
the miserable reality of his life.
This
deeply flawed individual failed at everything he attempted
to put his hand to. His only modicum of success was his
much touted brilliance as a science fiction writer. The
reality was that he wrote rather garish and poorly constructed
short stories for about eight years during the nineteen
thirties for a cheap throwaway medium, the pulp fiction
magazine. He also wrote pornographic texts; this was an
aspect of his literary career his church publicity officers
kept under wraps.
Hubbard
signed up for the Navy in 1940. Here he found himself in
vast organization, a complex bureaucracy that he could play
to suit his own ends. He never saw action, most of his war
being spent in training institutions, hospitals and on leave.
The brief period where he was actually allowed command of
a small submarine chaser ended in disaster when he ordered
his crew to fire live rounds at America's ally, Mexico.
He was relieved of command and put under close supervision
as a navigator on a Liberty ship; he signed himself into
hospital complaining of ulcers and conjunctivitis the day
before the ship left for combat in the Pacific theatre.
World
War II was over, the troops had come home.
The
youngsters that had previously devoured pulp fiction during
the mid 30s had grown up and were focused now on building
lives in a newly prosperous America. There was now little
or no market the fiction magazine.
Hubbard
was out of a job. Working off his 1939 premise that the
way to make a million dollars was to start a religion, Hubbard
dug up his unpublished manuscript, the science fiction novel
'Excalibur'. This novel concerned a galactic overlord called
Xenu, who banished millions of his subjects to the 'prison
planet' Earth. It was around this 1930s era manuscript that
Hubbard created what we know today as Scientology.
He
was enough of a pragmatist to realize that the story of
Xenu and the fate of the banished aliens would not entice
the masses to part with hard earned cash; he needed a hook,
and thanks to Freud and a few party tricks, found one. He
called it Dianetics and its brief popularity rode on the
back of a wave of a renewed interest the mind, mysticism
and self exploration.
Dianetics
was concocted from a mixture of vicious mind-control techniques
and scrambled versions of both Freudian and Jungian psychoanalysis.
It was developed and expanded upon over the years, and eventually
became part of an apparently vast body of 'research' that
Hubbard called 'The Tech' (as in Technology) which he made
available to his followers; for a price. Trained in this
lethal 'therapy', these unqualified mental practitioners
were brainwashed into believing they were the vanguard of
a new civilization, one that would eventually overwhelm
the institutions of state, learning and religion with Hubbard's
brand of social obedience, and thus avert the coming apocalypse.
Driven by their leaders incessant haranguing, they formed
what we know today as 'The Church' of Scientology.
Hubbard
had been practically kicked out of Washington University's
School of Engineering, where he was a sporadic attendee
between 1930 and 1932. As he developed the 'philosophy'
of Scientology, he thought it would be helpful if he acquired
a Ph.D, and he did, for about $250 US. I will cite a passage
from Dr. Christopher Evan's pithy volume on the religion,
'The Cult of Unreason' - The Cult of
Reason:
"As for Hubbard's doctorate, it was awarded, one learns,
from the magnificently styled `Sequoia University of California'
- an establishment which you will search for endlessly the
standard list of American universities, but which used to
be well known to quacks on the West Coast as a degree mill
where `qualifications' could be bought for suitable sums.
There
is some evidence, as it happens, that L. Ron has had occasion
to regret his involvement with the diminutive faculty of
the Sequoia University, for his bogus Ph.D. has been frequently
brought up by unkind critics as a stick to beat him with
- and one for which he can find no ready defence.
On
8 March 1966, possibly tiring of suffering on behalf of
this valueless embarrassment, but with a typically flamboyant
gesture, he took an advertisement in the personal column
of The Times, `resigning' his degree in the following words:
"I,
L Ron Hubbard of Saint Hill Manor, East Grinstead, having
reviewed the damage being done in our society with nuclear
physics and psychiatry by persons calling themselves `Doctor',
do hereby resign in protest my university degree as a doctor
of philosophy (Ph.D.), anticipating an early public outcry
against anyone called `Doctor'; and although not in any
way connected with bombs or `psychiatric treatment' or treatment
of the sick, and interested only and always in philosophy
and the total freedom of the human spirit, I wish no association
of any kind with these persons and do so publicly declare,
and request my friends and the public not to refer to me
in any way with this title."
With
this characteristic piece, which it is impossible not to
admire, he partly sealed a crack in his armor, at the same
time cleverly taking the opportunity to pound psychiatrists,
his perpetual antagonists.
Having
considered the Founder of Scientology's scanty academic
background, we now pass on to inspect other interesting
claims which have helped to bolster his image as a man of
wild and far-reaching talents. The claims are many and apart
from the obvious, and quite unchallengeable, one that he
is a writer, he is also often referred to as an explorer,
a naval war hero, a philosopher, a master mariner and, most
extraordinary of all, `one of the prime movers in the US
effort of getting man into space'.
What
of Lord Xenu and the 1939 manuscript ?
This
became part of the mysterious Scientology 'holy of holies',
the secret knowledge that would only be revealed to the
follower after years of extensive conditioning and parting
with large sums of money. Hubbard built various myths around
this 'level': One would attain superhuman abilities, read
minds, operate as a conscious unit outside the confines
of the body, become aware of 'past lives' and so on. It
was a hook that Hubbard used, and indeed, the 'Church' today,
uses to keep the sycophant paying money, donating time or,
in the case of Hubbard's military, their whole lives, to
the cause.
I
escaped the cult just over a year ago, having been an ultra
orthodox member of its militant inner circle for twenty
years. Contrary to their rather shallow propaganda claims,
it was neither a healthy nor life enhancing experience.
During
my last year in the cult, I was involved in wide ranging
plan that involved among other things, the infiltration
of a relatively important local government institution.
I was already sitting on several influential committees
and it was really only a matter of time before I would be
able to manipulate this democratic institution to the advantage
of my own, very undemocratic, hierarchical and quite frankly,
criminal operation. It is ironic that my subversive mission
provided the key to my waking up, seeing Scientology for
what it is, and escaping.
I
had been more or less cut off from the real world since
1986: Access to TV, Internet and other media has always
been discouraged, but since 1990, Internet use for the Sea
Organization member, with the exception of those in the
intelligence and policing branch, has been strictly verboten.
My
work granted me considerable latitude with regard to typical
organizational rules and restrictions, and the fact that
I was in a rather senior position a long distance from the
cult HQ in Sussex, gave me unprecedented freedom. Because
I was involved in the educational and social field, I had
to read up on the various theories I was being exposed to:
Fromm, Jung, Freud and Dr. Perry. Additionally, I had to
do considerable internet searches to trace key targets for
the purposes of my mission.
Exposure
to such material had the effect of developing my critical
thinking faculties, and I began to spot huge holes in Hubbard's
'philosophy'. One evening I 'Googled' the word 'Scientology',
I began reading. I stopped at five the next morning due
to exhaustion, but I was exhilarated, I had hit a gold mine
of information. I came across posts, essays and exposes
of the cult, very often from colleagues I had known over
the years and who had disappeared into that murky realm
outside of Scientology.
It
was a terrifying experience to walk out into the real world,
with nothing to show for my slavish devotion to the cult.
Twenty
years of sixteen-hour days and seven-day weeks takes its
toll. I had nothing to show for myself, just the clothes
on my back, I was unknown to any social services and was
in a country that was not my own, this and facing up to
the lies and distortions that had been drummed into me over
the years was difficult.
The
Scientologist describes the world outside as 'the wog world';
the unenlightened humanoid is a 'wog'.
The
cult member who 'falls from grace' and leaves the church
is described as a 'degraded being', destined for a short
pain-filled life and reincarnation as a lunatic, handicap,
street kid or some other form of degraded creature. This
is not very encouraging to say the least.
As
is typical of many ex-cult members, I suffered a period
of acute suicidal depression, which I survived thanks to
Hubbard's and Scientology's biªte noir; Psychiatrists
and psychologists.
In
my new life outside of that psychotic cult, I have found
love, encouragement, compassion, real peace and a sense
of contentment that I did not think possible while moving
up Hubbard's torturous 'Road to total freedom.'
