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June 12 - June 30, 2022
SCIENTOLOGY HAD a giddy and playful air in the mid-seventies, when Haggis arrived in Los Angeles. It was seen as a cool, boutique religion, aimed especially toward the needs of artists and entertainers.
The process of induction was so gradual that things that might have shocked him earlier were more acceptable by the time he came upon them. Whenever he ran into something on the Bridge to Total Freedom that he couldn’t fathom, he convinced himself that the next level would make everything understandable.
Scientology was a part of his community; it had taken root in Hollywood, just as Haggis had. His first writing jobs had come through Scientology connections. His wife was deeply involved in the church, as was his sister Kathy. His circle of friends was centered in the church. Haggis was deep enough into the process by now to understand implicitly that those relationships would be jeopardized if he chose to leave the church. Moreover, he had invested a considerable part of his income in the program. The incentive to believe was high.
Maybe it’s an insanity test, Haggis thought—if you believe it, you’re automatically kicked out. He considered that possibility. But when he read it again, he decided, “This is madness.”
He could easily invent an elaborate, plausible universe. But it is one thing to make that universe believable, and another to believe it. That is the difference between art and religion.
JACK PARSONS EXPERIMENTED with Crowley’s rituals, taking them in his own eccentric direction. His personal brand of witchcraft centered on the adoration of female carnality, an interest Hubbard evidently shared. Parsons recorded in his journal that Hubbard had a vision of “a savage and beautiful woman riding naked on a great cat-like beast.” That became the inspiration for Parsons’s most audacious mystical experiment. He appointed Hubbard to be his “scribe” in a ceremony called the “Babalon Working.” It was based on Crowley’s notion that the supreme goal of the magician’s art was to create a
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Crowley was unimpressed. “Apparently Parsons or Hubbard or somebody is producing a Moonchild,” he complained to another follower. “I get fairly frantic when I contemplate the idiocy of these goats.” Cameron did become pregnant, but got an abortion, with Parsons’s consent, so it’s unclear exactly what this ceremony was designed to produce. (Parsons and Cameron later married and aborted another pregnancy.)
He also once tried to hypnotize Sara’s mother, after she had a stroke, to persuade her to leave her money to him.
In December, Ron and Sara moved into what Hubbard termed “a little old shack” in Bayhead, New Jersey, with eight bedrooms, near the beach.
Dianetics, Hayakawa noted, was neither science nor fiction, but something else: “fictional science.”
Identifying himself as a nuclear physicist, Hubbard published a book in 1957, All About Radiation, in which he promoted a formula he called Dianazene, a mixture of nicotinic acid and vitamins, that was supposed to cure cancer as well as sunburns. “It should be taken daily,” he recommended, “with milk and chocolate.”
trump when he thought he found the cure for covid
“Dr.” Hubbard presented himself to the curious British press as an experimental horticultural scientist; to prove it, he allowed a photograph to be published of himself staring intently at a tomato that was attached to an E-Meter. The headline in Garden News was “Plants Do Worry and Feel Pain.”
To Hubbard, Rhodesia seemed ripe for a takeover. He felt a kinship with the republic’s dashing and flamboyant founder, Cecil John Rhodes, who also had red hair and a taste for swashbuckling adventure. Hubbard believed he might have been Rhodes in a previous life, although it’s unclear whether he knew that Rhodes was homosexual.
Hubbard never really explained how he came by these revelations. “We won’t go into that,” he told the crew,
“You would say to yourself, ‘Why didn’t you do anything? Why didn’t you speak out?’ ” Eltringham later remarked. “You see, I was a true believer. I believed that Hubbard knew what he was doing. I, unfortunately, believed that he knew what it was going to take to help everyone in the world and that, even though I didn’t understand, it was my duty to follow and support what he was doing. None of us spoke out. None of us did anything.”
The totalist paradigm begins with shutting off the individual’s access to the outside world, so that his perceptions of reality can be manipulated without interference.
Lifton points out that in totalist hands, confession is used to exploit vulnerabilities, rather than to provide the solace or forgiveness that therapy and religion seek to provide.
the NERVE he has to find people “guilty” of getting an abortion after he FORCED MULTIPLE WOMEN TO GET ONE
The pamphlet opens with what is claimed to be a purloined speech given by Lavrenti Beria, the head of the Soviet secret police under Joseph Stalin, to American students studying at Lenin University, on the subject of “psycho-politics.” The term is defined as “[t]he art and science of asserting and maintaining dominion over the thoughts and loyalties of individuals, bureaus, and masses, and the effecting of the conquest of enemy nations through ‘mental healing.’ ” The text specifies how to realign the goals of the individual with those of the group. The first task is to undermine the ability of
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David Mayo was sent to the RPF. He was made to run around a pole in the searing desert heat for twelve hours a day, until his teeth fell out.
“At OT III, you find out you’re really thousands of individual beings struggling for control of your body. Aliens left over from space wars that are giving you cancer or making you crazy or making you impotent,”
The church also harassed the judge in the case, Ronald Swearinger. “I was followed,” the judge later said. “My car tires were slashed. My collie drowned in my pool.” A former Scientology executive, Vicki Aznaran, later testified that there was an effort to compromise the judge by setting up his son, who they heard was gay, with a minor boy.
The same day that Miscavige canceled Hubbard’s order, Annie showed up in a remote re-education camp, in the Soboba Indian Reservation in Southern California, that Scientologists called Happy Valley. It had once belonged to an order of nuns, who left a sign on the gate that said VALLEY OF THE SINGING HEART. An armed guard stood watch. Dogs were trained to track down anyone who tried to leave.
My idea of doing good for my body was smoking low-tar cigarettes”—but
Suzette was warned by an auditor that Guy was gay. In fact, Guy didn’t know if he was gay or not. When he joined the staff, he had to respond to a questionnaire that asked, “Have you ever been involved in prostitution, homosexuality, illegal sex or perversion? Give who, when, where, what in each instance.” He had never actually had a homosexual relationship and had been celibate for a decade; moreover, it was generally assumed that homosexuality was a false identity, a “valence,” in Hubbard’s language, and that such longings would disappear when he got to OT III.
Just as the debate in Germany was coming to a climax, in March 1997, thirty-nine members of a group calling itself Heaven’s Gate committed suicide in a San Diego mansion. They apparently had hoped to time their deaths in order to ascend to a spacecraft that they believed was following Comet Hale-Bopp. Marshall Applewhite, their leader, a former choirmaster, represented himself as a reincarnated Jesus who was receiving guidance from the television show Star Trek.
“This is not a church or a religious organization,” the labor minister, Norbert Blum, told Maclean’s magazine. “Scientology is a machine for manipulating human beings.”
“It’s really remarkable to me,” Spielberg observed, as he and Haggis walked to his trailer. “I’ve met all these Scientologists, and they seem like the nicest people.” “Yeah, we keep all the evil ones in the closet,” Haggis replied.3
De Vocht was also frightened of Miscavige. He took to sleeping with a broken broom handle. When another executive spoke up about the violence, he was beaten by two of Miscavige’s assistants and made to mop the bathroom floor with his tongue.
The detainees developed a particular expression whenever Miscavige came in, which he took note of. He called them “Pie Faces.” To illustrate what he meant, Miscavige drew a circle with two dots for eyes and a straight line for a mouth. He had T-shirts made up with the pie face on it. Rinder was “the Father of Pie Faces.” People didn’t know how to react. They didn’t want to call attention to themselves, but they also didn’t want to be a Pie Face.
Scientologists are trained to believe that whatever happens to them is somehow their fault, so much of the discussion in the Hole centered on what they had done to deserve this fate. The possibility that the leader of the church might be irrational or even insane was so taboo that no one could even think it, much less voice it aloud.
Miscavige explained that in this game the last person to grab a chair would be the only one allowed to stay on the base; everyone else was to be “offloaded”—kicked out of the Sea Org—or sent away to the least desirable Scientology bases around the world. Those whose spouses were not in the Hole would be forced to divorce. While Queen’s Greatest Hits played on a boom box, the church executives marched around and around, then fought for a seat when the music stopped. As the number of chairs diminished, the game got more physical. The executives shoved and punched one another; clothes were torn;
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According to Claire Headley, who oversaw the finances for the Religious Technology Center between 2000 and 2004, the food costs for David and Shelly and their guests would range between $3,000 to as much as $20,000 per week.
Another of Miscavige’s favorites, a Dalmatian–pit bull mix named Buster, went on a rampage one day and killed ten peacocks on the property, then proudly laid them out for all to see. Buster has also attacked various members of the staff, sending one elderly woman to the emergency room and earning Buster his own Ethics folder. Miscavige eventually had the dog taken away to another Sea Org base, even though he believed that Buster had a nose for “out ethics” behavior. The relieved staff members joked that Buster had been sent to Dog RPF.
“You’re the biggest spender in the history of Scientology,” Miscavige told him. “You should be shot.”
He says that he began working full-time in the organization when he was eleven and recalls that, along with other Sea Org members, including children, his days stretched from eight in the morning until eleven thirty at night. Part of his work was shoveling up asbestos that had been removed during the renovation of the Fort Harrison Hotel. He says no protective gear was provided, not even a mask.
Among the crew on the ship during Cruise’s birthday party was Valeska Paris, a twenty-six-year-old Swiss woman. Paris had grown up in Scientology and joined the Sea Org when she was fourteen. Three years later, her stepfather, a self-made millionaire, committed suicide, leaving a diary in which he blamed the church for fleecing his fortune. When Valeska’s mother denounced the church on French television, Valeska was isolated at the Clearwater base in order to keep her away from her mother. The next year, at the age of eighteen, she was sent to the Freewinds. She was told she would be on the
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Hubbard also blamed psychiatrists, allied with the tyrant Xenu, for carrying out genocide in the Galactic Confederacy seventy-five million years ago.
In 1996, the church sent CDs to members to help them build their own websites, which would then link them to the Scientology site; included in the software was a filter that would block any sites containing material that vilified the church or revealed esoteric doctrines. Keywords that triggered the censorship were Xenu, OT III, and the names of prominent Scientology critics.
Davis called the church and returned voluntarily from Las Vegas, where he had been hiding.5 He was sent to Clearwater, where he was security-checked by Jessica Feshbach. The aim of the check is to gain a confession using an E-Meter. It can function as a powerful form of thought control. Davis and Feshbach subsequently married.
ah true love
If these people were so reprehensible, I asked, how had they all arrived at such elevated positions in the church? “They weren’t like that when they were in those positions,” Davis replied. The defectors we were discussing had not only risen to positions of responsibility within the church; they had also ascended Scientology’s ladder of spiritual accomplishment. I suggested that Scientology didn’t seem to be effective if people at the highest levels of spiritual attainment were actually liars, adulterers, wife beaters, drunks, and embezzlers.
(The book reveals that Heinlein’s second wife, Leslyn, had an affair with Hubbard. Interestingly, given Hubbard’s condemnation of homosexuality, the wife charged that Heinlein had as well.)
hubbard is only homophobic because he has low self-esteem 🤞🏻
Meantime, Davis sent me a copy of a document that he said clearly confirmed Hubbard’s heroism: a “Notice of Separation from the US Naval Service,” dated December 6, 1945. The document specifies medals won by Hubbard, including a Purple Heart with a Palm, implying that he was wounded in action twice. But John E. Bircher, the spokesman for the Military Order of the Purple Heart, wrote me that the Navy uses gold and silver stars, “NOT a palm,” to indicate multiple wounds. Davis included a photograph of the actual medals Hubbard supposedly won, but two of them weren’t even created until after
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There is no question that a belief system can have positive, transformative effects on people’s lives. Many current and former Scientologists have attested to the value of their training and the insight they derived from their study of the religion. They have the right to believe whatever they choose. But it is a different matter to use the protections afforded a religion by the First Amendment to falsify history, to propagate forgeries, and to cover up human-rights abuses.
Belief in the irrational is one definition of faith, but it is also true that clinging to absurd or disputed doctrines binds a community of faith together and defines a barrier to the outside world.
Never have I felt so keenly the danger of new religious movements and the damage that is done to people who are lured into such groups, not out of weakness in character but through their desire to do good and live meaningful lives.
