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December 17 - December 30, 2018
Hubbard evidently believed in his own theories, which amounted to a formalization of his intuitive methods of emotional manipulation.
Hubbard named psychoanalysis, hypnosis, and Christian Science as his major influences,
Christian Science, Catholic miracle shrines, voodoo practices, native witch doctor work, and the witch methods of European tradition, as well as modern psychology’s teachings.”
JWC on dianetics' influences
a truly weird book, alternately compelling and incomprehensible, with an inconsistent tone that reflected its rushed writing and production.
(Dianetics)
Their departures marked the first public defections from the foundation, and Hubbard, who was becoming paranoid, responded by claiming that he had pushed them out when they tried to grab power. He believed that he was being watched by the American Medical Association and the CIA,
He encouraged an atmosphere of suspicion, with offenders sent away for intensive auditing,
LRH
He remained abusive toward Sara, and she finally left with the baby. Hubbard, who was drinking heavily, ranted that he had seen evidence of a conspiracy
Hubbard also found time to phone Sara, who recalled, “He said that he had cut [Alexis] into little pieces and dropped the pieces in a river and that he had seen little arms and legs floating down the river and it was my fault, I’d done it because I’d left him.”
His interviewer concluded that Hubbard was “a mental case.”
dianetics had not made the founder thereof into a stable personality.”
A year after it was founded, the Hubbard Dianetic Research Foundation was in ruins.
Campbell’s faith in dianetics, if not in Hubbard, remained unshaken.
What had been lost was the foundation, which Campbell had played no small part in destroying by his encouragement of Hubbard’s paranoid fantasies.
The film threw out nearly all of Campbell’s story,
he lacked the patience to be a true scientist,
JWC
he never conducted obvious tests on either version, and he resisted calls to do so,
JWC
Garrett, a bearded Texan who was known within the science fiction community as a drunk and a sexual predator,
Despite his interest in the mind, he was blind to Garrett’s personal problems,
JWC
he called van Vogt, who had sacrificed so much for the foundation, “a heavy foe of dianetics . . . for years, although pretending to be involved in it.”
LRH
According to multiple witnesses, over the previous decade, Hubbard had uttered some variation on the statement “If you want to get rich, you start a religion.”
If founding a religion had been his plan from the beginning, he had approached it in a very roundabout way.
tenth of all revenue was channeled to Hubbard. He
By all indications, he believed in his work.
Resigning publicly from the church, which he continued to control in secret,
Hubbard was drinking heavily, taking pills, and working on the most audacious—and lucrative—story of his career.
tales of his past existence driving race cars in the Marcab civilization, a society exactly like that of America in the fifties.
Hubbard was growing increasingly abusive—offenders
New Zealand, the socialist economy of which Heinlein dismissed as “a fake utopia.”
NZ in the 50s was socialist? Maybe by US standards.
Bob’s going to induce considerable anti-patriotism in a lot of readers by telling a story from the viewpoint of a hundred-percent dedicated patriot.”
JWC on RAH (Starship Troopers)
Although he insisted that he was only trying to raise questions, his fiction was growing undeniably more didactic.
RAH
Campbell felt that it broke its contract with the reader: “I thought I was getting a saga—and I got a sermon.
On RAH's Glory Road
He claimed that his views had remained consistent, while the rest of the country had moved to the left, but this was disingenuous at best—his
RAH
Heinlein was also willing to overlook problematic positions—such as Goldwater’s vote against the Civil Rights Act—if they were packaged with the security policies that he favored.
His extramarital activities made him more confident, but he wasn’t about to leave Gertrude, who had given birth to their first child,
IA
Asimov decorated his office with images of rocket ships and stickers that read “Genius at Work” and “Great Lover.”
he did nothing to change his behavior.
IA (sexual harassment)
Harlan Ellison remembered, “Whenever we walked up the stairs with a young woman, I made sure to walk behind her so Isaac wouldn’t grab her tush.
At another publisher, the women found excuses to leave the building whenever he was scheduled to visit,
IA
Asimov thought that it was generally agreed that he was “harmless,” and that his attentions toward fans were usually welcome:
if his treatment of women was often inexcusable, or worse, it did little to diminish the affection in which he was held by other men,
Asimov, who was not yet fifty, published his hundredth book.
Heinlein’s and Hubbard’s superficial influence on Manson was largely a testament to the cultural position that they had attained.
Manson represented the psychopathic fringe of an impulse toward transformation in the face of overwhelming cultural change, and science fiction provided it with a convenient vocabulary—as
Heinlein is] much more concerned with selling his philosophy of sexual promiscuity than in writing science fiction tales.”
JWC
it was in the sixties that his attitudes about race, which until then had formed an unspoken backdrop to his work, rose poisonously to the surface.
JWC
For a man who took pride in questioning the beliefs of others, Campbell’s opinions on race were horrifyingly unexamined.
“The Negro does not learn from example.”
JWC
Campbell’s views also began to infect the magazine.
“Slavery is a useful educational system; it has a place in the development of a race, just as the tyranny of parents has a place in the educational development of an individual.”
JWC
he was arguing that blacks and whites had different bell curves for intelligence.
JWC
