What did L. Ron want?
January 15, 2015
A review of GOING CLEAR, by Lawrence Wright
WHAT WE’VE learned about Scientology from Lawrence Wright’s excellent Going Clear is even more extraordinary than what we knew already. Riffing and improvising like a madman, L. Ron Hubbard constructed a multibillion dollar movement out of his own deranged, dissembling, confabulating brain. This hog- faced charlatan, wife-beater and all-round lunatic somehow summoned the charisma to transform his own ad hoc pulp fiction-infused ramblings into a powerful religious cult. To give him credit, he had the imagination and chutzpah to see it through.. but what the hell was he thinking? What did he mean to get out of it?
What did L. Ron want? It feels like Scientology, like the Cult of Ayn Rand, is designed for aspiring Alpha Males (and sometimes Females) looking for the psychological ballast that will push them towards the stratospheric highs their colossal egos believe they deserve. Hubbard clearly wanted to be dominant, alpha. He wanted as many sexual partners as he could muster. He wanted explanations for the voices in his head. He wanted his paranoia to be vindicated. He wanted to be heard and heeded. Was he satisfied in the end? Was he hell.
Wright dutifully goes through the arcana and foundation myths. You learn about Xenu and the prison planet of Teegeeack (otherwise known as Earth), which has been overrun by the Suppressive souls of degenerate Thetans. “Hubbard never really explained how he came by these revelations,” says Wright, who is a master of ironic understatement.
L. Ron then orders underlings to walk the plank or push peas around the decks of the Sea Org boats with their bloodied noses, locks kids in freezing holds without any food, and generally behaves as if every one of his little whims must somehow become law, no matter how cruel, nonsensical or even insane it might be. One episode in Morocco is the most extraordinary of all, with Scientologists somehow at the centre of a brutal coup d’etat.
The astonishing thing about it all (and the thing that Wright always comes back to) is why on earth anyone would even think of going along with any of this. Why wasn’t L. Ron and all his Thetan crap not simply laughed out of every room that was unfortunate enough to have him? Charisma, credulity, the need to believe, the desire to hotwire one’s way to heaven: these are all different ways of looking at the same sort of phenomenon that explains everything from Muhammad to Hitler to Aum Shimriki to Falungong to the massacres at Georgetown.
In his book Philosophical Darwinism, Peter Munz wrote that religious knowledge has nothing to do with truth and more to do with social cohesion, and a community with social cohesion will - all other things being equal - last longer than one without it. This would suggest that Scientology is unlikely to go away.
The spirit of tolerance requires me to say that Tom Cruise and John Travolta and Anne Archer and whoever the hell else have the right to believe whatever it is they want to believe, and they have an equal right to squander their life savings on worthless “auditing” procedures designed to rid them of the billion- year old spirits of space aliens. When it comes to having the right to subject their children to such arrant piffle and poppycock, it becomes harder to defend, but the same can be said - and has been said - about the Catholics.
But when Scientologists plant fake evidence linking their critics with terrorist threats, when they dig through their critics’ bins or entrap them with prostitutes or drugs, when they go out of their way to bully and persecute their critics with the express aim of getting them arrested or committed to mental institutions, then religious tolerance starts to hit its limits.
And so, you can believe in the tyrant Xenu or the archangel Gabriel or the prophet Joseph Smith if you want, but there is absolutely no excuse or justification for what Hubbard or his disciples did to the author Paulette Cooper. After the attack on Charlie Hebdo, it goes without saying that religion does not give you a free pass, and does not exempt you from criticism or from the standards of civilised society.
