L. Ron Hubbard Part II

 

In the Church of Scientology era

By 1954, the IRS recognized the Church of Scientology of California as a tax-exempt organization and by 1966; the Washington, D.C. Founding Church of Scientology received tax-exempt status nationwide. The Church of Scientology became a highly profitable enterprise for Hubbard, as he was paid a percentage of the Church's gross income. By 1957 he was being paid about $250,000 (equivalent to US$2,712,085 in 2023). His family grew, too, with Mary Sue giving birth to three more children—Quentin on January 6, 1954; Suzette on February 13, 1955; and Arthur on June 6, 1958.

"The purpose of the suit is to harass and discourage rather than to win. The law can be used very easily to harass"

L. Ron Hubbard

Hubbard was notorious for his policies of attacking his perceived enemies. Nibs recalled that Hubbard "only knew how to do one thing and that was to destroy people." Hubbard told Scientologists to "Don't ever defend, always attack", encouraging them to find or manufacture evidence and to file harassing lawsuits against enemies. Any individual breaking away from Scientology and setting up his own group was to be shut down. Most of the formerly independent Scientology and Dianetics groups were either driven out of business or were absorbed into Hubbard's organizations. Hubbard finally achieved victory over Don Purcell in 1954 when the latter, worn out by constant litigation, handed the copyrights of Dianetics back to Hubbard.

After dealing with Purcell, Hubbard turned his attention to attacking psychiatrists, who he blamed for the backlash against Dianetics and Scientology. In 1955, Hubbard authored a text titled: Brain-Washing: A Synthesis of the Russian Textbook on Psychopolitics which purported to be a secret manual linking Psychiatry and Communism written by a Soviet secret police chief. Hubbard founded the "National Academy of American Psychology" which sought to issue a "loyalty oath" to psychologists and psychiatrists. Those who opposed the oath were to be labelled "Subversive psychiatrists"; while those who merely refused to sign the oath would be labelled "Potentially Subversive". Hubbard denounced psychiatric abuses, writing that psychoanalysis had been "superseded by tyrannous sadism, practiced by unprincipled men". Wrote Hubbard:

Today men who call themselves analysts are merrily sawing out patients' brains, shocking them with murderous drugs, striking them with high voltages, burying them underneath mounds of ice, placing them in restraints, 'sterilizing' them sexually and generally conducting themselves much as their patients would were they given the chance.

In 1956, Hubbard released Fundamentals of Thought, which teaches that life is a game and divides people into pieces, players, and game-makers. The following year, Hubbard published All about Radiation, which falsely claimed that radiation poisoning and even cancer can be cured by vitamins. In 1958, amid widespread interest in the Bridey Murphy case, Hubbard authored Have You Lived before This Life? A collection of past life regressions.

In 1958, the U.S. Internal Revenue Service withdrew the Washington, D.C., Church of Scientology's tax exemption after it found that Hubbard and his family were profiting unreasonably from Scientology's ostensibly non-profit income. In the spring of 1959, Hubbard purchased Saint Hill Manor, an 18th-century English country house formerly owned by the Maharaja of Jaipur. The house became Hubbard's permanent residence and an international training center for Scientologists.

That year Hubbard learned his son Nibs had resigned from the organization, citing financial difficulties. Hubbard regarded the departure as a betrayal. Hubbard introduced "security checks”, a structured interrogation using the e-meter, to identify those he termed "potential trouble sources" and "suppressive persons". Members of the Church of Scientology were interrogated with the aid of E-meters and were asked questions such as "Have you ever practiced homosexuality?" and "Have you ever had unkind thoughts about L. Ron Hubbard?"

Since its inception, Hubbard marketed Dianetics and Scientology through false medical claims. On January 4, 1963, US Food and Drug Administration agents raided American offices of the Church of Scientology, seizing over a hundred E-meters as illegal medical devices, thousands of pills being marketed as "radiation cures", and tons of literature that they accused of making false medical claims. In November 1963 Victoria, Australia, the government opened an inquiry into the Church, which was accused of brainwashing, blackmail, extortion and damaging the mental health of its members. Its report, published in October 1965, condemned every aspect of Scientology and Hubbard himself. The report led to Scientology being banned in Victoria, Western Australia and South Australia, and led to more negative publicity around the world. Public perceptions of Scientology changed from "relatively harmless, if cranky" to an "evil, dangerous" group that performs hypnosis and brainwashing. Scientology attracted increasingly unfavorable publicity across the English-speaking world.

Hubbard took major new initiatives in the face of these challenges. By 1965, "Ethics Technology" was introduced to tighten internal discipline within Scientology. It required Scientologists to "disconnect" from any organization or individual—including family members—deemed to be disruptive or "suppressive". Scientologists were also required to write "Knowledge Reports" on each other, reporting transgressions or misapplications of Scientology methods. Hubbard promulgated a long list of punishable "Misdemeanors", "Crimes", and "High Crimes".  At the start of March 1966, Hubbard created the Guardian's Office (GO), a new agency within the Church of Scientology that was headed by his wife Mary Sue. It dealt with Scientology's external affairs, including public relations, legal actions and the gathering of intelligence on perceived threats. As Scientology faced increasingly negative media attention, the GO retaliated with hundreds of writs for libel and slander; it issued more than forty on a single day. Hubbard ordered his staff to find "lurid, blood sex crime actual evidence [sic] on [Scientology's] attackers". The "fair game" policy was codified in 1967, which was applicable to anyone deemed an "enemy" of Scientology: "May be deprived of property or injured by any means by any Scientologist without any discipline of the Scientologist. May be tricked, sued or lied to or destroyed."

Newspapers and politicians in the UK pressed the British government for action against Scientology. In April 1966, hoping to form a remote "safe haven" for Scientology, Hubbard traveled to the southern African country Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). Despite his attempts to curry favour with the local government, Rhodesia promptly refused to renew Hubbard's visa, compelling him to leave the country.  Finally, at the end of 1966, Hubbard acquired his own fleet of three ships. In July 1968, the British Minister of Health announced that foreign Scientologists would no longer be permitted to enter the UK and Hubbard himself was excluded from the country as an "undesirable alien". Further inquiries were launched in Canada, New Zealand and South Africa.

In the Sea Org era

Enroute to the volcanic island of Las Palmas, Hubbard wrote "OT III: The Wall of Fire", about the evil lord Xenu who uses hydrogen bombs and volcanoes to murder his enemies and imprison their souls on Earth. Beginning in 1967, new editions of Dianetics featured a volcano on the cover.

Hubbard purchased a ship in Las Palmas and founded the "Sea Org", a private navy of elite Scientologists. Hubbard set out to take command of the ship. Enroute, he wrote OT III, the esoteric story of Xenu. In a letter to his wife Mary Sue, Hubbard said that, in order to assist his research, he was drinking alcohol and taking stimulants and depressants. In OT III, Hubbard wrote of alleged secrets of an immense disaster that had occurred "on this planet, and on the other seventy-five planets which form this Confederacy, seventy-five million years ago". It teaches that Xenu, the leader of the Galactic Confederacy, had shipped billions of people to Earth and blown them up with hydrogen bombs, following which their traumatized spirits were stuck together at "implant stations", brainwashed with false memories and eventually became contained within human beings.

When Hubbard established the Sea Org he publicly declared that he had relinquished his management responsibilities over the Church of Scientology. In fact, he received daily telex messages from Scientology organizations around the world reporting their statistics and income. The Church of Scientology sent him $15,000 a week along with millions of dollars that were transferred to bank accounts. Church of Scientology couriers arrived regularly, conveying luxury food for Hubbard and his family or cash that had been smuggled from England to avoid currency export restrictions. Hubbard's fleet began sailing from port to port in the Mediterranean Sea and eastern North Atlantic, rarely staying anywhere for longer than six weeks, as Hubbard claimed he was being pursued by enemies whose interference could lead to global chaos or nuclear war.

Though Scientologists around the world were presented with a glamorous picture of life in the Sea Org and many applied to join Hubbard aboard the fleet, the reality was rather different. Most of those joining had no nautical experience at all. Mechanical difficulties and blunders by the crews led to a series of embarrassing incidents and near-disasters. Following one incident in which the rudder of the Royal Scotman was damaged during a storm, Hubbard ordered the ship's entire crew to be reduced to a "condition of liability" and wear gray rags tied to their arms. The ship itself was treated the same way, with dirty tarpaulins tied around its funnel to symbolize its lower status. According to those aboard, conditions were appalling; the crew was worked to the point of exhaustion, given meager rations and forbidden to wash or change their clothes for several weeks. Hubbard maintained a harsh disciplinary regime aboard the fleet, punishing mistakes by confining people in the Royal Scotman's bilge tanks without toilet facilities and with food provided in buckets. At other times erring crew members or students were thrown overboard with Hubbard looking on and, occasionally, filming. One member of the Sea Org recalled Hubbard punishing a little boy by confining him to the ship's chain locker.

Aboard ship, Hubbard began dispatching teams of Sea Org members to search for historic evidence of his past lives; in 1973, he published Mission into Time about those searches. Now having his own paramilitary force, orders to use R2-45 (killing someone with a .45 pistol) on specific individuals was published. From about 1970, Hubbard was attended aboard ship by the children of Sea Org members, organized as the Commodore's Messenger Organization (CMO). They were mainly young girls dressed in hot pants and halter tops, who were responsible for running errands for Hubbard such as lighting his cigarettes, dressing him or relaying his verbal commands to other members of the crew. In addition to his wife Mary Sue, he was accompanied by all four of his children by her, who were all members of the Sea Org and shared its rigors.

After his prior failure in Rhodesia, Hubbard again tried to establish a safe haven in a friendly country, this time Greece. The fleet stayed at the Greek island of Corfu for several months in 1968–1969. Hubbard, recently expelled from Britain, renamed the ships after Greek gods—the Royal Scotman was rechristened Apollo—and he praised the recently established military dictatorship. Despite Hubbard's hopes, in March 1969 Hubbard and his ships were ordered to leave.

The practice of prominently displaying the cross in Scientology centers was instituted in 1969 following hostile press coverage where Scientology's status as a legitimate religion was being questioned. In October 1969, The Sunday Times published an exposé by Australian journalist Alex Mitchell detailing Hubbard's occult experiences with Parsons and Aleister Crowley's teachings. The Church responded with a statement, claiming without evidence Hubbard was sent in by the US Government to "break up Black Magic in America" and succeeded.

In mid-1972, Hubbard again tried to find a safe haven, this time in Morocco, establishing contacts with the country's secret police and training senior policemen and intelligence agents in techniques for detecting subversives. The program ended in failure when it became caught up in internal Moroccan politics, and Hubbard left the country hastily in December 1972. After French prosecutors charged Hubbard with fraud and customs violations, Hubbard risked extradition to France.  In response, at the end of 1972, Hubbard left the Sea Org fleet temporarily, living incognito in Queens, New York. Hubbard's health deteriorated significantly during this period, as he was an overweight chain-smoker, suffered from bursitis and had a prominent growth on his forehead. In September 1973 when the threat of extradition had abated, Hubbard left New York, returning to his flagship.

Hubbard suffered serious injuries in a motorcycle accident on the island of Tenerife in December 1973. In 1974, Hubbard established the Rehabilitation Project Force, a punishment program for Sea Org members who displeased him. Hubbard's son Quentin reportedly found it difficult to adjust and attempted suicide in mid-1974. Also in 1974, L. Ron Hubbard confessed to two top executives that "People do not [leave Scientology] because of [their unconfessed sins], they leave because [they stop liking Scientology or stop believing in it]". Hubbard warned "If any of this information ever became public, I would lose all control of the orgs and eventually Scientology as a whole."

On July 8, 1977, after uncovering Operation Snow White, the FBI raided the Founding Church of Scientology in D.C. and seized thousands of documents revealing the scope of the Church's espionage operations.

Throughout this period, Hubbard was heavily involved in directing the activities of the Guardian's Office (GO), the legal bureau/intelligence agency. In 1973, he instigated the "Snow White Program" and directed the GO to remove negative reports about Scientology from government files and track down their sources. The GO carried out covert campaigns on his behalf such as Operation Bulldozer Leak, designed to convince authorities that Hubbard had no legal liability for the actions of the church. Hubbard was kept informed of these operations, including as the theft of medical records from a hospital, harassment of psychiatrists, and infiltrations of organizations such as the Better Business Bureau, American Medical Association, American Psychiatric Association, U.S. Department of Justice, and Internal Revenue Service. Paulette Cooper, a freelance journalist and Scientology critic, was subjected to at least at least 19 lawsuits, framed for sending bomb threats, and was urged to climb onto a dangerous 33rd-floor ledge by a roommate later believed to be a Guardian's Office agent.

In hiding

In his final decade, Hubbard hid throughout the United States, moving from Florida to D.C., then to Southern California.

After suffering a heart attack, Hubbard decided to relocate back to the United States. In October 1975, Hubbard moved into a hotel suite in Daytona Beach while the Fort Harrison Hotel in Clearwater, Florida, was secretly acquired as the location for the Sea Org "land base". According to a former member of the Sea Organization pseudonymously named "Heidi Forrester", in late 1975 she met with a man fitting Hubbard's description who apparently performed a Crowleyite sex magick ritual called Dianism using her.

On June 11, 1976, the FBI apprehended two Guardian's Office agents inside the US Courthouse in D.C., prompting Hubbard to move cross country to a safe house in California, and later a nearby ranch. On October 28, 1976, Las Vegas police discovered Hubbard's son Quentin Hubbard unconscious in his car with a hose connected to the tailpipe. L. Ron Hubbard was furious at the news, shouting, "That stupid fucking kid! Look what he's done to me!" Scientologists were told that Quentin had died from encephalitis.

On July 8, 1977, the FBI carried out simultaneous raids on Guardian's Office locations in Los Angeles and Washington, D.C. They retrieved wiretap equipment, burglary tools and some 90,000 pages of incriminating documents. On July 15, a week after the raid, Hubbard fled with Pat Broeker to Sparks, Nevada. On August 18, 1978, Hubbard suffered from a pulmonary embolism and fell into a coma, but recovered. Hubbard summoned his personal auditor, David Mayo, to heal him.

In August 1979, Hubbard saw his wife for the last time. Hubbard was facing a possible indictment for his role in Operation Freakout, a campaign of attacks against journalist Paulette Cooper. In February 1980, Hubbard disappeared into deep cover in the company of two trusted messengers, Pat and Annie Broeker. For the first few years of the 1980s, Hubbard and the Broekers toured the Pacific Northwest in a recreational vehicle, later residing in Southern California. Hubbard returned to Science-Fiction, writing Battlefield Earth (1982) and Mission Earth, a ten-volume series published between 1985 and 1987.

In OT VIII, Hubbard discusses the Antichrist, a Christian apocalyptic figure, depicted here with the devil whispering into his left ear as visualized by Italian renaissance painter Luca Signorelli.

In OT VIII, dated 1980, Hubbard explains the document is intended for circulation only after his death. In the document, Hubbard denounces the historic Jesus as "a lover of young boys" given to "uncontrollable bursts of temper". Hubbard explains that "My mission could be said to fulfill the Biblical promise represented by this brief anti-Christ period.” This was corroborated by a 1983 interview where Hubbard's son Nibs explained that his father believed he was the Anti-Christ.

In December 1985, Hubbard allegedly attempted suicide by custom e-meter. On January 17, 1986, Hubbard suffered a stroke; he died a week later. His body was cremated and the ashes were scattered at sea.

Sources and doctrines

Hubbard drew upon a diverse set of teachings to create his doctrine, incorporating elements from the psychoanalysis of Sigmund Freud (top) and the occult teachings of Aleister Crowley (bottom) among many other sources.

Hubbard has been described as an "eclectic and ingenious" religious innovator who cobbled together ideas from a diverse array of sources and traditions. Hubbard explicitly cited Freud's psychoanalysis as a source for Dianetics and Scientology, renaming some terms. Hubbard's wife Sara recalled him discussing biologist Richard Semon, who had coined the term "engram" which became a centerpiece of Dianetics. Hubbard incorporated the 1920s psychoanalytic theory of birth trauma and taught his followers to maintain total silence during the birth process. Hubbard explicitly credited Social Darwinism pioneer Herbert Spencer who coined the phrase "survival of the fittest", and taught that the 'one command' given to all life is to "survive" and later authored a book called Science of Survival.

Hubbard cited author Alfred Korzybski as an influence; after two years observing patients at St. Elizabeth's psychiatric hospital in D.C. in collaboration with Superintendent William Alanson White, Korzybski published a tome titled Science and Sanity outlining a doctrine he called "General Semantics". After Korzybski founded an "Institute" to promote his teachings and began offering seminars, his ideas were incorporated into the science-fiction of Hubbard-associates Van Vogt and Heinlein, who envisioned futures where research into General Semantics had transformed some individuals into superhumans; Hubbard cited this fiction in a letter announcing the central principles of Dianetics: a book that promises to "make supermen".

Through his exposure to both psychoanalysts and occultists, Hubbard drew inspiration from Eastern religions. Hubbard cited psychiatrist Joseph Thompson as teaching him the adage "If it's not true for you, it's not true", a purportedly-Buddhist maxim which was later incorporated into Scientology. Reincarnation, originally a Dharmic doctrine, entered Western occultism through the works of Blavatsky and numerous others. Fifteen years after Blavatsky followers’ unveiled "The Bridge to Freedom", Hubbard announced "The Bridge to Total Freedom".

Hubbard's son Nibs said that Aleister Crowley was his father's most important source of inspiration, and scholar Hugh Urban has written extensively about the occult roots of Scientology. Nibs Hubbard said in an interview in 1983:

What a lot of people don't realize is that Scientology is black magic that is just spread out over a long time period. To perform black magic generally takes a few hours or, at most, a few weeks. But in Scientology it's stretched out over a lifetime, and so you don't see it.

Like Crowley, Hubbard identified himself with diabolical figures from the Book of Revelation. Just as Aleister Crowley taught a soul could temporarily leave its body through astral projection, Hubbard taught a thetan could journey outside the body by "going exterior".

Hubbard also taught extensively about hypnosis and recommended a 1949 book on the subject. Hubbard told of hypnotic implants, privately teaching human religions are the product of such implants. The use of hypnosis or trance to remember past lives was an extant practice in occult circles prior to Dianetics. Hubbard incorporated a range of hypnotic techniques into Scientology auditing and courses. They are employed as a means to create dependency and obedience in his followers. Crowley and Hubbard both placed emphasis on a Goddess figure, variously called Babalon, Hathor, or Diana—a name Hubbard gave to a ship and a daughter; the term Dianetics may have been inspired by the Goddess. Crowley taught a sex magic ritual called karezza or Dianism which Hubbard is believed to have practiced.

The e-meter was constructed by inventor Volney Mathison, who introduced it to Hubbard. Similar devices had been in use by psychiatrists and law enforcement for decades. Hubbard likened his own teachings about interstellar empires and invader forces to the early 20th-century fiction genre Space Opera. Hubbard drew upon US Navy traditions in creating the Sea Org, and he once said the Commodore's Messenger Organization had been inspired by the Hitler Youth.