Fuck L. Ron Hubbard and Fuck All His Clones

In preparation for this article, I went back to amazon.com. Of all the places I hate on the internet – and mark my words, I fucking despise almost every cyber-inch of this place – I might hate it the most. The imdb.com new section comes in close, but it’s fairly small. So I went through and was exposed to the people who think that Objectivism is a valid philosophy and not the solipsistic raving of an inverted Stalinist, that literature’s had enough of this gull dern fancy writin’, that scientists just operate out of a ‘naturalist’ paradigm that acts as a bias that dictates the results of their experiments, that a movie is bad because its story isn’t ‘believable,’ that it was a cop-out that Alice turned out to be dreaming, that Ann Coulter is actually a good example of a conservative and a credit to them, and so on. I’ve obviously been given no dearth of execrable human beings, and an incredible number of the merely annoying. However, in looking through all this I found the people who made me the angriest.

I thought the worst would be the Objectivists, as I despise Ayn Rand and the kitsch empire she stands for, but as I was looking into that with all the pleasure and gusto of a gynecologist examining his third gunt-bearing, Sao-Paolo-slum-filthy yeast infection of a Monday morning after a Vegas weekend with an almost-married friend left him in that state of hangover least amenable to any kind of concentration, I read a comparison between it and Scientology, worth quoting here in full. The following is from Jeff Walker’s (not that Jeff Walker) The Ayn Rand Cult:

Ayn Rand was not the first to propound an ethics for the masses based on survival as a rational being. That honor goes to fellow novelist and cult leader L Ron Hubbard (1911-1986), the science-fiction writer who founded Dianetics and the Church of Scientology. Dianetics preceded NBI[the Nathan Branden Institute]’s start-up by eight years and the Objectivist ethics by 11 years. Dianetics groups formed on campuses during the 1950's, much as Ayn Rand clubs would in the 1960's. Many who flocked to Objectivism in the 1960's had previously had some contact with Dianetics or Scientology. Dianetics used reasoning somewhat similar to Rand's about the brain as a machine. Hubbard's 'analytical' versus 'reactive' mind has its equivalent in Rand's system. Both have a higher mind reprogramming the rest of the mind. Hubbard and Rand were both extremely intelligence- and survival oriented, in the interest of a rational man. They counseled the uprooting of irrational premises (or 'engrams'). Both contended that the resulting enhanced rationality leads to greater capacity for healthy emotion. Perceptual data is immaculate for both. Both regard our often being unconscious of incoming data as the real problem. After many years of working at it, the student of Dianetics becomes a 'clear,' while the student of Objectivism becomes a full-fledged Objectivist...Both Dianetics and Objectivist psychology draw fire from the psychiatric establishment. The philosophy of each relates immorality to decreasing one's survival potential. Each claims to be science- and logic-based. Both share a benevolent universe premise...Hubbard and Rand are very much against all rule-by-force. Both assert that rational men have no real conflicts of interest. Each deplores social complexity being wielded as an excuse for introducing government regulations when it is the latter that generates the former in a vicious cycle...Each was lambasted by biographers for serious personality problems. And both figures have been denounced by former associates who claim that the leader had feet of clay and the doctrine is detrimental to its adherent's health.

As I found this on wikipedia, I decided to follow the link and read about L. Ron Hubbard, and I have the following to say: there are few people on this earth more contemptible than this man. I thought Ayn Rand and the Objectivists, with their stupid travesty of philosophy (a field I know better than the fields Hubbard pretends to play in), her bullshit personal problems, and such ridiculous incidents as the Ellen Plasil therapist one, were as personally infuriating as possible, but Hubbard quickly surpassed them. Some trite saying like ‘If you look in a dictionary under “contemptible” you’ll see a picture of L. Ron Hubbard’ doesn’t even approach the truth of the matter. Think of the most scumbaggy pseudo-science not even worthy of the name, taking advantage of the fact that almost anything in which somebody earnesty believes to be helpful will be helpful in dealing with certain mood problems for immense profit – not the worst one existing, but the worst one that could ever exist on this or any other possible world. Got that concept in mind? Name it ‘The Church of Scientology.’

We all know the Xenu incident thanks to our friends Trey and Matt, so I shouldn’t have to go into that. But what they didn’t say, among certain other idiotic details, is that this story is only available to people who have attained, through years of costly audit therapy, the title of OT III (Operating Thetan Level Three), paying $20,000 for the pleasure. That’s $20,000 in addition to what they’ve had to pay for the audit sessions and for every other level they’ve advanced – and you have to advance through the Body Thetan levels first (Lengthy Aside: For those not in the know, ‘thetan’ is Hubbard’s word for the causa sui spirit that, due to something like hundreds of billions of years of numbing, has lost its awareness of its own ability to create worlds and bridge universes and has become trapped in this one, becoming the souls of the humanoid aliens who wore clothes that ‘looked very remarkably like the clothes they wear this very minute (i.e. 1963),’ overcrowded Xenu’s galactic empire, and had to be killed off by being frozen and loaded onto spaceships that look like DC-8s, ‘except the DC-8 had fans, propellers on it and the space plane didn't’ (nevermind that DC-8s have turbines and not propellers), and finally by the explosion of H-bombs dropped into various volcanoes that actually hadn’t formed 75,000,000 years ago. After the thetans escaped their bodies, they got even more numbed and started to clump together in confusion, these being ‘body thetans,’ and only then were associated with Man. These clumps cause all of our bodily and mental problems, and Scientology claims to have cured all these problems through audit therapy (nevermind that Hubbard continued to collect disability checks from the U.S. Navy long after having found the cure to all ills). An ‘operating thetan’ is a thetan who has, through years of audit therapy, become aware of their own possibilities for being and begin to control themselves and confront Incident II, the Xenu episode, and Incident I, when, four quadrillion years ago (nevermind that this is approximately 300,000 times older than the universe is calculated to be), the thetans got trapped in our universe and were subjected to the horror of a loud snapping noise and a bright light, followed by a chariot ridden by a cherub – ‘confront’ by telepathically taking the thetan clusters through these incidents step-by-step in a paid session of audit therapy. The OT III is given, in exchange for his $20,000, an envelope discussing all this in Hubbard’s inimitable style and told not to tell anybody, since anyone who learns this too early will potentially die of shock from the information. So, whatever you do, don’t read the preceding parenthetical.) before becoming an Operating Thetan.

Now, Incident II is one of the stupidest stories ever written. As far as science fiction goes, it sucks. It sounds like it was made up on the fly with whatever happened to be nearby thrown into the story when the teller got lost because he was too stupid to follow a narrative thread. It does nothing worthwhile even as fiction. A child wouldn’t accept it, though it seems to be written for somebody with that condescending and erroneous adult fantasy of a child’s intellect. Nobody would accept a science fiction story in which everything is obviously taken from the present-day world – out of laziness rather than in an attempt at social commentary – with no excuse but ‘we subconsciously built things according to that model because we all remember the Lord Xenu Incident somewhere and are continually imitating it due to the psychic damage it caused to our thetans.’ Bullshit.

But, even as really, really bad fiction, written with prose that sounds like an asshole teaching children about the Titanic (‘it was really big. Really big. Think of something big. Our house is big, right? Well, it was much bigger than our house! Much bigger than our house combined with the houses next door. Even bigger than the Wealthington’s mansion, where daddy’s employed as a living statue.’), it’s no more than an insult to fiction and our language. And, while that’s pretty goddamn bad, it makes him no worse than any number of hack writers who try to pass off their manglings of creativity and language as shining examples – Dan Brown, for example, who’s launched an all-out attack on the detective novel – and merits no special consideration.

Where Hubbard, and all of his clones, cross the line is when they try to pass this stupid bullshit off as a religion and get people with serious problems to ‘deal’ with them by paying them thousands of dollars. Separating idiots from their money is the cowardly, ultimate act of cowardly, ultimate men. Nothing is more scummy than taking advantage of the people who most need help and an honest, not a convenient, answer to difficult problems that every human being has to deal with or live as a mental castrato. Life is hard and complex; being unhappy about it is natural and to be lived with. It is better to confront this fact than to confront clusters of body thetans. It is also much cheaper. Somebody with a problem needs this knowledge the most. He does not need one bullshit story and confession/psychotherapy sessions attached to a modified lie detector. That is not how you assert yourself and become a person. It’s how you turn depression into debt.

For showing less respect for human intelligence than Christianity, Judaism, and Islam combined, and for charging the gullible and hurt obscene amounts of money for the right to be a member of the church (that is, to express faith in Scientology), for violently assaulting man’s reasoning capacities and my treasured English language and using said assault to take the money the depressed should be using to buy things they like, for exploiting the placebo effect and the power of belief in anything, so long as it’s belief, to degrees no other human would attempt, L. Ron Hubbard and every Scientologist who’s followed in his footsteps despite knowing how incredibly full of shit he was has earned a hefty FUCK YOU. Scientology is to Christianity, a big joke in its own right, like heroin is to children’s cough syrup. There is no science and no logic. That it’s in control of much of our entertainment industry is just depressingly scary. If you hear this shit, run from it, laughing like a madman, to find a rifle and a clear shot.