Hi, pluvo — I do! Though not very well. I’m good enough to s l o w l y work my way through Esperanto texts. It is pretty nifty, though. I love your avatar & nick. : )

Wow. Welcome. I will take it as a compliment!

I agree, save with the notion that Hubbard was not cruel and manipulative ‘at best’. We picked up accounts from early childhood on, researching Blue Sky and Bare-Faced Messiah and he seems to have been both cruel and manipulative by nature. As with most sociopaths, he was capable of charm, and there are still followers who spent much time with him and are sure that it was the Sea Org that sent power to his head, but how about the 1955 The Scientologist: A Manual on the Dissemination of Material, where he puts forward the notion of ruining ‘utterly’ any unlicensed practitioner by using the law to ‘harass’. He was vindictive. That he kidnapped Alexis, and kept her from her mother (whom he had tortured, as he did his first wife) for three months is hardly credible. But it happened only months after he released his world saving cure.

Power does indeed tend to corrupt (and absolute power absolutely so), but Hubbard was out to con from the very beginning. When he switched from deep trance hypnosis after DMSMH was commissioned, with no light trance work at all, he simply explained to Don Rogers that hypnosis was unpopular. The moment before they opened the doors to the first foundation, he turned to Don and said, ‘Let’s sell these people a piece of blue sky.’

He started out a pathological liar (as accounts from those who knew him in the 30s and 40s show – watch this space for more like the Forest Ackerman interview – we have plenty yet to come) with a very weak ego. He couldn’t bear criticism and longed to be adulated (forget the Code of Honour!), as many people have told me over the years (John McMaster couldn’t believe how narcissistic Hubbard was, but in that case it took one to know one). He was a sick man – physically and mentally – and a dangerous one. That doesn’t mean I don’t think he could have been redeemed. I wept at news of his death, because I had some silly idea that I might sit with him in prison and help him back to reality. Oh, well.

But as you say, and Judge Breckenridge said before us, Scientology is the ‘alter-ego’ of Hubbard, and under DM has become even more destructive. Let’s hope that the Indies continue to renounce that part of ‘scripture’ which is termed ‘ethics’ in the looking glass world of Ron Hubbard. I suspect that many will begin to adopt the underlying tech if they achieve power (as they are doing in Russia, right now).

I would agree that Hubbard despite showing signs of a serious personality disorder and having addled with self-administered drugs was ‘crazy as a bedbug’, but legally responsible for his actions.

My view is that he had a partner in crime, who supported his actions and maintained the myth of the man among people who had never met. This was the Church of Scientology.

The behaviour of the organisation was modelled on the behaviour of Hubbard, and was designed to achieve his personal objectives (money and power). The organisation has a abusive ‘personality’ that operates independent of its founder.

We are all familiar with entertainers, who start out as decent people, but are corrupted by the money and power that comes with ‘success’. They surround themselves with yes-men, completely lose perspective and begin to behave in outrageously abusive ways.

If the entertainment industry was a person, we could unhesitatingly diagnose it as a sociopath, which has a bad influence on many of the people who work within it. The same applies to the Church of Scientology.

Good people who are not mentally ill will behave in outrageous ways in
certain (toxic) social situations http://www.lucifereffect.com/

Hubbard was not a cruel and manipulative person at best. This tendency was made worse by the toxic social situation (the CofS) that he created in his own image, and the fact that he was its undisputed dictator.

Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Towards the end of Hubbard’s life, I think his creation consumed him, and spat him out. From about the point that he went to sea, the organisation was operating independently of Hubbard, and it only needed him as a figurehead.

An explanation of Hubbard’s power needs to take account not only of his individual pathology but also the social situation in which it operated.

A human being without problems is a dead human being – whether that constitutes a ‘ruin’ or not is a matter for conjecture, but we’ve all experienced trauma (most of mine came from the cult after I left, I must say!) As you say, the evaluation which is the Tech creates the behaviours it describes. It also tends to amplify existing difficulties. When I left, I could finally ask people to describe their ‘case’ and tell me how well they had been addressed. Almost everyone I spoke to admitted a peak experience in their first few days, followed by years of butterfly chasing, where the significant problems of their lives (ruins) grew worse – marriages collapsed, businesses went bust, kids abandoned the family, the normal losses of life were ignored (causing emotional upheaval when finally accepted), sadness was staved off briefly by euphoric experiences (exteriorization without perception, or ‘depersonalization’ as it is known in psychiatry), followed by the usual ‘roller coaster’ as the serotonin/dopamine production slumped post auditing.

On an unrelated note, I think it is misleading to speak of the ‘Independents’, when there are only Dependents, who, without the false promises of the cult find it hard to deal with the world. Luckily, although we may not be gods with supernatural powers, we can find profound peace by helping others and seeing them adapt to a realistic and positive view of the wonder that is life. At least when we give up on Scientology’s ‘reality’ we have some hope of making positive change, rather than perpetuating the auditing junkie behaviour.

Yes, Jodi Lane’s work is interesting. Of course, Barbara Klowdon and Jim Dincalci gave first hand accounts, and both went on to achieve the relevant qualifications in psychology to make their determinations of his mental health. The same is true for Richard de Mille – who spent three months with Hubbard, writing Science of Survival, and later became a professor of psychology. De Mille wrote to me, congratulating the analysis I gave in A Piece of Blue Sky, and supported a doctoral application for that text. Here is the relevant passage, which, as you’ll see, prefigures the notion that Hubbard’s narcissism was externalised into Scientology (first made by Judge Breckenridge in his 1984 ruling), as Lane later suggested (her supervisor, Steve Kent said that Blue Sky exceeded the standard for doctoral research and would be the foundation for all future academic enquiry):

In the mid-1960s, Hubbard began to speak of
himself as the “Source” of Scientology. Having initially acknowledged his debt
to Freud and a host of philosophers, and having handed out numerous
“Fellowships” to Scientologists for their “major contributions,” he finally
decided that Scientology was his creation alone4: “Willing as I was to
accept suggestions and data, only a handful of suggestions (less than twenty)
had long run value and none were major or basic; and when I did accept major or
basic suggestions and used them, we went astray.”

Hubbard was not truly the “Source” of
Scientology, little, if any, of his work is original. Hubbard pieced together
modified versions of pre-existing ideas. Hubbard’s peculiar genius was for
reframing ideas so they would fit neatly into his own belief system, and
articulating them in a digestible form. For example, Scientology organizations
use surveying techniques derived from Motivational Research, which was
developed by psychiatrists in the 1950s. The only text referred to by Hubbard
in this connection was Vance Packard’s “The Hidden Persuaders.” Hubbard failed
to acknowledge that Scientology survey methods derive from the psychiatric
stimulus-response techniques which Packard was attacking.

Hubbard insisted that Scientology alone
could save the world from a holocaust. Scientology would create “a civilization
without insanity, without criminals and without war, where the able can
prosper.”5 His own survival, in an environment conducive to
“research,” was therefore imperative, at least until his work was complete. In
his own words6: “the whole agonized future of this planet, every
Man, Woman and Child … depends on what you do here and now with and in
Scientology.” Hubbard believed that his was a messianic mission. To quote from
his obtuse poem Hymn of Asia, written
in the 1950s: “See me dead/ Then I will live forever/ But you will/ See/ An
Earth in flames/ So deadly that/ Not one will live/ Fail once to stem a hand
that smites/ Against me and/ I die.”

In his writings, Hubbard made a distinction
between morals and ethics. The former being based upon custom and opinion, the
latter upon reasoned “pro-survival” decisions. He advocated the pursuit of “the
greatest good for the greatest number of dynamics” (the eight “dynamics,” or
urges toward survival for self, family, groups, mankind, matter, other life forms,
spirit and infinity). If Scientology was to save the world, and if it depended
upon L. Ron Hubbard for its completion, then the “greatest good for the
greatest number of dynamics” would always include as its most significant
aspect the continued protection and support of L. Ron Hubbard.

To Hubbard, anyone who opposed or even
criticized him was evil, their opposition to him inevitably slowing the
progress of mankind. It was his published assertion that the
“anti-Scientologist” and the “anti-social personality” are one and the same.
His obsession with enemies sprang from his evident paranoia. A former Director
of the original Hubbard Dianetic Research Foundation told me of Hubbard’s
overwhelming suspicion about agents infiltrating the organization. A girlfriend
of the early 1950s said he was forever looking over his shoulder. The trait
developed, until he came to believe that the American Medical Association, the
World Federation of Mental Health, the world bankers, the press barons, and the
Western governments were all involved in a multi-million dollar plan to destroy
Scientology, and, especially, L. Ron Hubbard.

In his ruling in the Armstrong suit in
California, Judge Breckenridge called Hubbard “schizophrenic,” but was he
really insane? Avoiding the sometimes contradictory definitions of psychiatric
authorities, it seems safe to take the legal view that a madman is someone who
cannot be considered responsible for his actions. He suffers from delusions,
and has no clear sense of right and wrong. Psychiatrist Frank Gerbode, who
practiced Scientology for many years, feels that Hubbard was not schizophrenic,
but rather “manic with paranoid tendencies” (which is not a classification of
psychosis, but of tendencies towards psychosis). However, Gerbode suggests that
the best description is the lay diagnosis, “loony.” Even if Hubbard was manic
with paranoid tendencies, he was still sane in the eyes of the law, and
therefore still responsible for his actions.

Hubbard borrowed the expression
“anti-social personality” from psychiatry, where it is synonymous with
psychopath and sociopath. Professor of psychiatry Hervey Cleckley, who became
famous with his co-authorship of The
Three Faces of Eve, was an acknowledged authority on psychopaths. In his
book The Mask of Sanity, he listed 16
telling characteristics, the majority of which are found in psychopaths.

Cleckley pictured psychopaths as
superficially charming and of good intelligence. Their thinking is logical, and
has a basis in reality, which is to say they do not suffer from delusions. They
are not nervous or neurotic. They are unreliable, untruthful and insincere.
They feel no remorse. They perform anti-social acts without any real motive.
Psychopaths do not learn from experience. They have “pathologic” egocentricity,
an incapacity for love and are unresponsive in relationships. They cannot
comprehend the response generated by their anti-social actions. Psychopaths
demonstrate uninviting behavior, and tend to drink or take drugs. Finally, they
do not respond to any sort of therapy. According to Cleckley, psychopaths have
a remarkable ability to evade punishment. A psychiatrist could construct a
powerful case to support the diagnosis that Hubbard was a psychopath, or
anti-social personality. At least in Cleckley’s terms.

Of course, Hubbard had his own version of
the anti-social personality, Suppressive Person or anti-Scientologist7:
they speak in generalities (“everybody knows”); deal mainly in bad news; worsen
communication they are relaying; are surrounded by “cowed or ill associates or
friends”; habitually select the wrong target, or source; are unable to finish
anything; willingly confess to alarming crimes, without any sense of
responsibility; support only destructive groups; approve only destructive
actions; detest help being given to others, and use “helping” as a pretext to
destroy others; they believe that no-one really owns anything; and fail to
respond to therapy.

Hubbard conforms to a number of the
characteristics in both his own and Cleckley’s summaries. Hubbard’s clinching
point for the recognition of an anti-social personality was the inability of
the Suppressive to see any of the listed deficiencies in himself. There is no
suggestion that Hubbard ever saw himself as a Suppressive Person.

However, as another authority, Robert G.
Kegan, has pointed out, the traits of the psychopath are also true of many
ten-year-olds (in “The Child Behind the Mask: Sociopathy as Developmental
Delay”). Hubbard was very much an overgrown child, and it is easy to see
aspects both of his behavior, and of Scientology as projections of this
dangerous immaturity. Hubbard’s self-obsession fits neatly into the
psychopathic type known as a narcissist.

Judge Breckenridge called the Church of
Scientology Hubbard’s “alter-ego;” a perceptive comment. Indeed, the whole of
Scientology can be seen as an externalization of Hubbard’s temperament.

Scientology makes more sense when seen in
the light of Hubbard’s psychopathic tendencies, and his paranoia. His bouts of
exhilaration in the belief that he had conquered some deficiency, and his bouts
of intense and usually private depression when his deficiencies once more took
hold, created a pattern which runs throughout Scientology.

Thank you for your responses, I learn from them.

That’s the great irony of Scientology. While most people are not perfect when recruited – we all have our “ruin” – most of the problems addressed by Scientology – PTS symptoms, overt-motivators, feeling restimulated, keyed-in, other somatics, are in fact mocked up by the Scientologist – given the appearance being very real, AFTER being told by LRH one has these problems.