Good post – Hubbard was quite the piece of work…that’s for sure.

I happen to like Foucault, to the extent of quoting his work when I speak, as a former homeless person, to various people getting M.S.W.’s. Lacan I haven’t read, but now feel like I should. He probably doesn’t talk about the Marcabian Federation, however.

Anonymous, thank you for the very thoughtful and informative answer. I meant to reply earlier and got distracted by stuff IRL.

I get the phenomenon of Scientologists being snowed by LRH (as much as a never-in can get it, added to my experience of having been involved in a cult-of-personality post-grad situation for 4 years). But my constant state of flabbergast is really about the people that Hubbard met before scientology — before and during dianetics.

The constant refrain of Bare Faced Messiah, Messiah or Madman, the book on Parsons, and the early biographical parts of all the Scientology histories I’ve read, is that LRH was a pathological liar from the time he was a teen. And that his lies were flamboyant and preposterous and checkable.

Knowing how it ends, I’m like the audience member in the theater, shaking my head and yelling, “run! run away!”

But what I think I’ve made peace with is this: Many people saw him for exaclty what he was. We have the testimony of those acquaintances of his in the sci-fi world that became famous, and several have claimed that they never trusted him. For others, we have reported jokes that they made to his face, capitalizing on his exaggerated biography. From that sample, I’m guessing that a lot of people heard his BS, laughed about it with their saner friends, and gave him little thought and a wide berth. (I guess like most of do in our own lives, if a person has no meaningful impact on us.)

Writers are smart, but I’m betting that people recognized his inability to be truthful in all of his social sets — we just don’t hear about it b/c they weren’t famous and recorded for posterity. We know the FBI (eventually) clued in to his fabrications, and the armed forces put limits on his malingering-for-benefits scam (loose ones, but look what they were dealing with at the time).

Your points, 1, 2 and 4 add to my understanding of how the creep got away with it, along with the knowledge that there was no internet, and actual fact-checking required expensive long-distance calls, long waits for letters to be answered, etc. And STILL… I wonder that this “bag of saline vaginal rinse” lived to be 25, when his lies were so outrageous, in an era where a man’s honor was coming to blows over.

Sorry so long. I hate liars, and this is my biggest peeve with the whole Scientology origin story. I always appreciate your informative posts and replies.

A fake lie detector with a pre-arranged result> stating, you’re a seriously defective person and only the ‘chult’ can save you.

But a ‘chult’ like co$ seems to think and has gotten *away with so much* outrageous behaviour that it can continue to do so. Thanks to the Internet and an avalanche of law suits, the chult is being expose big time.
They’ve put themselves above the Law for decades and it’s only now that people are beginning to do something about it.

Actually, they were most likely from SCSU, a jock and party school just down the street from the Connecticut Org.

We had Derrida…who did you have? 🙂

I dunno, I used to run into a lot pf those Est-holes in the mid-80’s and they seemed somewhere between L Ron and Ayn Rand to me– aggressive, egotistical vacantness…
In fact, now that I think about it, Davey M’esclavage comes across more as an Est-head than a Scilon to me.