I recently did a post about “What Is Greatness” (L. Ron Hubbard — Dr. Jekyll or Mr. Hyde?). This is a follow up with another of Hubbard’s “PR” pieces intended to make him sound magnanimous and benign. These are the two pillars of the Hubbard myth.
If you read My Philosophy without blindly accepting what he has to say, it is apparent that his philosophy is to tell a whole lot of lies.
I’m not going to document each of the lies with the factual citations — just make note of the most egregious ones in he recounting of “hi philosophy.” If you want to know the truth read Barefaced Messiah by Russell Miller and Ron the War Hero by Chris Owen.
These are the biggest bs statements:
The first principle of my own philosophy is that wisdom is meant for anyone who wishes to reach for it. [You must pay for it]
The second principle of my own philosophy is that it must be capable of being applied.
Learning locked in mildewed books is of little use to anyone and therefore of no value unless it can be used. [Again, you have to BUY it]
The third principle is that any philosophic knowledge is only valuable if it is true or if it works. [From the very start with Dianetics, the claims he made were not true and it did not make Clears — a pattern that proceeded from one “breakthrough” to the next, always promising to deliver what had been promised and not delivered previously]
Therefore, for 15 years I have had Mankind knocking on my door. It has not mattered where I have lived or how remote, since I first published a book on the subject, my life has no longer been my own. [He tried to be in the headlines, always selling his latest “discoveries,” he pretends he tried to avoid a life in the limelight, the only time this is true is when he was trying to avoid governments seeking to prosecute him]
Blinded with injured optic nerves, and lame with physical injuries to hip and back, at the end of World War II, I faced an almost nonexistent future. [Just not true — he had an ulcer]
My Service record stated: “This officer has no neurotic or psychotic tendencies of any kind whatsoever,” but it also stated “permanently disabled physically.” [Again, not true]
I was abandoned by family and friends as a supposedly hopeless cripple and a probable burden upon them for the rest of my days. [Another lie — he abandoned his wife at the time and their two children]
I yet worked my way back to fitness and strength in less than two years, using only what I knew and could determine about Man and his relationship to the universe. I had no one to help me; what I had to know I had to find out. And it’s quite a trick studying when you cannot see. [He recovered from his ulcer and was never unable to see]
Yet I came to see again and walk again, and I built an entirely new life.
So my own philosophy is that one should share what wisdom he has, one should help others to help themselves, and one should keep going despite heavy weather for there is always a calm ahead.
I think this piece by Hubbard should be renamed: “My Hypocrisy”
The problem is summarized best in this song:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xyigdRxPOR4
I happen to have a bit of a different take. Hubbard didn’t sell his knowledge, he applied it.
The distinction is found in his affirmations and several other places such as his statement that if you want to control people you have to lie to them. The gamesmaker tape from The Philadelphia Doctorate course lectures, entitled structure/function, details how Hubbard would create Scientology and noted that you have to do various things to have a game as he described but that you must use a 180 degree vector of the truth, meaning lie, specifically with Orwellian reversal, calling things by their opposite term.
To be clear, Hubbard saw his psychology as so good it hypnotizes others to help with his goals of making slaves of men as described in his affirmations.
A significant thing that is often missed about Scientology is that Hubbard occasionally let the cat out of the bag and admitted or hinted that he didn’t believe in Scientology.
As an example I remember a clearing congress video in which Hubbard said that he gets asked about his ideas about the mind and that he has quite a few, but let’s stick to Scientology! Meaning he had ideas about the mind, which is something that Scientology describes in depth, but his ideas that he actually believes are outside of Scientology!
He occasionally would admit it in old lectures as well. Remember, Hubbard was a pathological liar who couldn’t stop talking and writing and he was a drug addict and alcoholic, so it stands to reason that occasionally he would slip and accidentally admit the truth.
Drug addicts are notorious for not being able to keep secrets and often seen as a bad risk in criminal organizations such as gangs and the mafia.
It stands to reason that a drug addict who also had a nearly non-stop compulsion to communicate for decades would occasionally slip up and tell the truth. We all make mistakes, after all.
I also recall the story of Hubbard being asked if believed in reincarnation and hesitating to answer but being quick to say yes when asked if Scientologists believe in reincarnation. I believe this was when he was filmed by a documentary film crew.
As described in his affirmations in fine deta, Hubbard wanted his mind to be protected against any influence from the words or beliefs of others, but he wanted to as he described influence and control others with his words. In terms of rhetoric which he studied in college, he wanted the aesthetic wavelength of his sublime writing to inspire ecstasy (a euphoric trance state) in his victims aka followers. I think he plagiarized all the ideas for his Art Book and series from the subject of rhetoric. It’s barely changed at all.
To sum up he knew he was lying and manipulating people and had the ideas he presented to people to control them and his own separate and hidden beliefs and techniques he used to control them.
His overarching philosophy (named after an ancient Irish wise man Phil O’Sophy) was, slightly paraphrased, “Make money to make more money.”
I have to disagree, partially. When I first entered Scientology in about 1988 or 1989 I realized that Hubbard had convinced his followers to give him their money and devote their lives to him by sometime in the sixties.
He at some point in the sixties was a millionaire several times over. If his only interest was money he could have gone to a beautiful beach in a country that would sell him citizenship and never extradite him for a few million dollars.
But Hubbard as he described in his affirmations wanted to enslave mankind and further as he said in The Skipper Letter he wanted to smash his name into history so violently that even if all the books were destroyed he would remain known.
Hubbard in my opinion hated God and hated that he was not God and further blamed God for his flaws and suffering.
The affirmations and his writing in the original OT VIII The Antichrist Edition support this.
Hubbard liked getting money, reportedly because he liked fooling the smart ones. He was obsessed with overcoming his feelings of worthlessness and being useless and incompetent by fooling smart people and taking their money.
I think he as they say had a whole in him that all the money in the world couldn’t fill, because he had inner hidden feelings of shame, worthlessness and being useless and hating himself, feelings that he could only partially and temporarily escape by pretending to be a godlike and superior being.
This is a problem of the human predators that are called malignant narcissists.
This explains why he didn’t get a sum of one or two or ten million dollars and simply retire to enjoy his wealth. He didn’t really enjoy the wealth itself.
From a very young age, having been born into Scientology, I firmly believed Hubbard was a man who knew the “secrets” of life itself.
As I studied along (I studied a LOT), my belief was that he was misunderstood and abused by his fellow Man… almost like a martyr of sorts.
I now know that Hubbard had, what I consider, extreme insecurities and may have been quite mentally ill. I have had several conversations with those who were close to him. His sense of reality and fantasy were so intertwined, he was attractive to those who wanted to see their own accomplishments blown into the stars alongside Hubbard’s fallacies.
It was only through recognizing the hypocrisy and outright lies that I woke up.
Take care Mike and thank you!!
He wasn’t mistakenly labeled a pathological liar.
He lied to everyone all the time.
No one was exempt. People he met, students, journalists, friends (I don’t know if he had any real ones, same for miscavige by the way) and even his family and various wives.
So true!
I believe this is crucial to understand the mind and character of Hubbard. He hid his inner self and his self image as a weak and worthless creature, undeserving of love and life and compassion all of the time, or very nearly so. He both hated himself and wanted to deny and escape from this profound self loathing all of the time.
He did this by constantly lying and projecting an image of himself as the opposite of how he truly saw himself.
He had to lie or die. He would be mortified and face a fate worse than death if lies crumbled.
He likely would have faced decompensation into florid decompensation if his lies were entirely rejected. Daniel Shaw describes cult leaders who go through in his book, Traumatic Narcissism. The descent into florid schizophrenia is shocking.
It is a sort of destruction of the facade by shame.
Mockingbird Thanks. A comment (as always from you) that gets to the point and offers interesting aspects. He was a prisoner of his own thoughts and ideas that became lies to escape him. He ran away from them (apparently) creating new ideas that then become thoughts again to get rid of because that image he had of himself came back to the surface everywhere and sooner or later. In other words scn is an expression of all this, and that has no real functionality unless you believe in it completely and unconditionally.
It’s amazing that the lie of “Clear” has persisted so long within even the true believers who have been around long enough to know better. Is it the ‘sunk cost fallacy’ keeping them in line, of just their yearning to finally get a taste of that carrot dangling just out of reach? I suspect it is something about group dynamics, wherein people do not easily abandon friends and associates, almost like quitting a job which, while not remunerative, is at least a well known quantity.
I think it is something very strong in each of us yearning to be free of, or rather superior to, the shackles of our five senses. A yearning, a longing for the spiritual beings which we are to dominate the demands of our earthly needs We are animials, very much so, but at the same time, we are spiritual beings too, and there’s no doubt about that. So one could say we are hybrids.
In my wallet I carry this saying which I found somewhere:
“Be humble for you are made of earth
Be noble for you are made of stars.
—–Serbian Proverb.
Folded up tight I also carry this:
The good you do today may be forgotten tomorrow.
Do good anyway.
Honesty and transparency make you vulnerable.
Be honest and transparent anyway.
What you spend years building may be destroyed overnight.
Build anyway.
Give the world the best you have and you may get hurt.
Give the world your best anyway.
——Mother Theresa
Nice, eh?
These are not the advices of animals to other animals 🙂
I would not give a fig for anything “Mother” Teresa says; I look instead at what she did. Sad to say, she was needlessly cruel to patients who were hungry, cold, in pain, and dying, refusing to let her subordinates dispense so much as an aspirin or a blanket or comfortable cot to them. At the same time, her coffers were overflowing with the generous donations of people who, like so many, assumed someone with the name “Mother” Teresa must have her patients interests at heart. No so – she thought their pain and suffering was better for their souls than any relief from pain a simple warm blanket or over-the-counter medication could provide. Her story is one of deceit and personal distrust of even her own faith. She harmed more than she helped, and got sainted for it. The hypocrisy she brought to her life is more than one should ever see.
Wow! Just wow.
I had not heard any such information about her. I was not raised a Catholic nor am I one now. Apart from being a kind of fan of the current Pope Francis and what appears to be his operating state of tolerance and inclusiveness, I know almost nothing about modern Catholicism.
One day I in some way I read this advice attributed Mother Theresa, and it moved me, Of course, I had heard of her in a general way, that she was a good and kind and caring nun, etc.. I had never studied her, never read a book about her. Anyway I read this thing attributed to her and it affected me strangely. It struck a chord in me, in a good way. I have reality on the good that people do being forgotten – people I’v known, who did a lot of good, who are no longer here, and the good they did is now forgotten. And perhaps any good that I do will likely be forgotten also, so one could argue, why bother? But she said, do it anyway. I liked that. Do it anyway. It comforted me. Hard to explain. I cut out the page out and put it in my wallet, and along with the Serbian Proverb I’ve been carrying both ever since.
You have provided shocking information about Mother Theresa which is widely at variance with her public image in general.
I can well understand how someone’s public image varying widely from their known actual deeds and true character can be extremely upsetting.
Quick question, and this is not intended to be argumentative or make wrong of you in any way: Would you like this advice if you didn’t know that it came from her?
In any event I am sincerely sorry that my post made you upset.
Evil genius? Egomaniac ? Master hypnotist? A combination of all ?
Depending on the individual victims he might have done some good or irreparable damage . On an overall scale the good is overwhelmed by the bad . But the perceived good is keeping people in.
What a despicable man !
I don’t understand why Hubbard believed it necessary to invent illnesses and disabilities he didn’t have. He enlisted and served in World War 2. He spent time in Oak Noll – for what, I don’t know. He came out of the war with an ulcer. Why invent all this blind and disabled nonsense that could be easily disproven? Back when I was in I had to read a lot of his Congresses and in almost every one of them he had a WW2 anecdote. I used to wish that he would just keep to the point of the lecture. Looking back now at all of this mandated reading which I dutifully did its annoying to ponder the high probability that all these WW2 anecdotes were simply made up.
Perhaps he just enjoyed entertaining people.
Perhaps his presenting himself as being self-cured of blindness and lameness, etc.,after the war was just his way of entertaining people, painting himself with words as a far more vibrant, interesting, dramatic and tragic figure than his actual, rather pedestrian self. He was a story teller, after all. Maybe his real self, he considered boring…? Just a theory.
I too got nauseated listening to Hubbard’s ‘war stories’. They sounded too far fetched and somewhat grandiose. Honestly I would listen to the lectures and then I would be like “I have no idea what he was talking about “ then I would go to an event where they would do those ‘success stories’ with musical accompaniment and all the people in the videos were talking about how listening to LRH made them go exterior or enabled them to walk through walls or whatever. When they would talk about how they really understood the tech I would wonder why I couldn’t understand. Now the Scibots will tell me that I must have had an MU and that I need to Method One Word Clear the entire lecture.
I think that there are other reasons.
Tedious, wasn’t it? Not only did we have to BUY these Congresses which weren’t cheap, we had to READ them too. So I did. Ditto on both. But inwardly I’d groan when reading and another war anecdote, loosely (very loosely and unecessarily, I thought) presented itself. Not exactly in these words but…”Not again!”…was the concept as I began having to read and “duplicate” another act of heroism or incident in which Hubbard was of course right about everything and others were wrong about everything.
True they are expensive but were you able to go exterior or walk straight through solid substances?
Laughter!
I think he made up all this “in a war hospital blind and this and that affliction” was so he could then say, “I cured it with Dianetics!” So that people would buy the book and come in for auditing.
@Cindy – yes your explanation makes the most sense. Sure he liked to entertain and puff himself up at the same time, but makiing himself out to be a truly tragic figure – blind, lame, deserted by his family, etc., would sell a lot more books than an author who emerged from the war with some hip arthritis and an ulcer 🙂
God knows many men had it far worse.
My own father was a WWII vet, one of the lucky ones not killed or mamed. He considered himself extremely lucky.
What he did have off and on for many years after the war were nightmares of being in combat with a Japanese. Besides thrashing around violently in the bed they shared, several times he and she would wake up with his hands around her throat, coming out of his nighmare thinking she was some Japanese, part of some incident, etc.
His nightmares, when they would come, would be vivid. And he was this football player type, 6ft and very strong, while my mother was tiny – not even 5″ (“4’11” & 3/4 she always said, lol), very light and petite, just like a Japanese! They would sleep apart for a while 🙂 There wasn’t any medication for his condition back then and he probably would have refused it even if there had been. PTSD they call it today. Sometimes years would go by with no nightmare and then, wham, he’s have one, and my mother would make up the guest room for herself for a while 🙂
Wow. WWII was horrible. I hope we don’t get into WWIII any time soon. We live in perilous times.
Right back at you with that, Cindy.
I like this actual man as a counterpoint from around the time: https://taskandpurpose.com/news/marine-corps-oldest-recruit-paul-douglas-world-war-ii/
If only he could have figured out how to permanently get rid of those pesky body thetans maybe he could’ve stopped smoking or having strokes
Hubbard rejected Reality.
In other words, he was a Scientologist.