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Lawrence Wright

Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief Hardcover – Deckle Edge, January 17, 2013

by Lawrence Wright (Author)

4.4 4,510 ratings

Goodreads Choice Award nominee

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National Book Award Finalist

A clear-sighted revelation, a deep penetration into the world of Scientology by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Looming Tower, the now-classic study of al-Qaeda’s 9/11 attack. Based on more than two hundred personal interviews with current and former Scientologists—both famous and less well known—and years of archival research, Lawrence Wright uses his extraordinary investigative ability to uncover for us the inner workings of the Church of Scientology.

At the book’s center, two men whom Wright brings vividly to life, showing how they have made Scientology what it is today: The darkly brilliant science-fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard, whose restless, expansive mind invented a new religion. And his successor, David Miscavige—tough and driven, with the unenviable task of preserving the church after the death of Hubbard.

We learn about Scientology’s complicated cosmology and special language. We see the ways in which the church pursues celebrities, such as Tom Cruise and John Travolta, and how such stars are used to advance the church’s goals. And we meet the young idealists who have joined the Sea Org, the church’s clergy, signing up with a billion-year contract.

In Going Clear, Wright examines what fundamentally makes a religion a religion, and whether Scientology is, in fact, deserving of this constitutional protection. Employing all his exceptional journalistic skills of observation, understanding, and shaping a story into a compelling narrative, Lawrence Wright has given us an evenhanded yet keenly incisive book that reveals the very essence of what makes Scientology the institution it is.

From Booklist

*Starred Review* Immersed in this book, the reader is drawn along by tantalizing revelations while simultaneously exhausted, longing for escape from its cloistered world—mirroring the accounts of many former Scientologists on the record, here. In efficient, unemotional prose, Wright begins with the biography of founder L. Ron Hubbard: his days as a prodigiously prolific writer of pulp fiction, his odd military career, the publication of his breakthrough self-help book Dianetics (1950), and the influence, riches, and controversy that have followed since he founded the Church of Scientology in 1954. For those aware of Scientology through its celebrity adherents (Tom Cruise and John Travolta are the best known) rather than its works, the sheer scope of the church’s influence and activities will prove jaw-dropping. Wright paints a picture of organizational chaos and a leader, David Miscavige, who rules by violence and intimidation; of file-gathering paranoia and vengefulness toward apostates and critics; of victories over perceived enemies, including the U.S. government, won through persuasion, ruthless litigation, and dirty tricks. Even more shocking may be the portrayal of the Sea Org, a cadre of true believers whose members sign contracts for a billion years of service, and toil in conditions of indentured servitude, punished mercilessly for inadvertent psychic offenses. Their treatment is a far cry from the coddling afforded to the much-courted celebrities. (Wright does point out that, for whatever reason, most Sea Org members remain in service voluntarily.) Page after page of damaging testimony, often from formerly high-ranking officers, is footnoted with blanket denials from the church and other parties (e.g., “The church categorically denies all charges of Miscavige’s abuse” and “Cruise, through his attorney, denies that he ever retreated from his commitment to Scientology”). Readers will have to decide whether to believe the Pulitzer-winning author’s carefully sourced reporting, or the church’s rebuttals. But, quoting Paul Haggis, the Academy Award–winning film director and former Scientologist whom Wright first profiled in the New Yorker: “if only a fraction of these accusations are true, we are talking about serious, indefensible human and civil rights violations.” Going Clear offers a fascinating look behind the curtain of an organization whose ambition and influence are often at odds with its secretive ways. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: The publisher’s announced first printing of 150,000 seems right on the money. Wright will be promoting the book on a seven-city tour, but its reputation precedes him. --Keir Graff

Review

Praise for Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief, by Lawrence Wright


“Powerful . . . essential reading.” —Michael Kinsley, the front page of The New York Times Book Review

“Who’d have thought a history of a religion would offer so many guilty pleasures?   Lawrence Wright’s enthralling account of Scientology’s rise brims with celebrity scandal. To anyone who gets a sugar rush from Hollywood gossip, the chapters on Tom Cruise and John Travolta will feel like eating a case of Ding Dongs.”
      —Evan Wright, The Los Angeles Times

“An utterly necessary story . . . A feat of reporting. The story of Scientology is the great white whale of investigative journalism about religion.”—Paul Elie, The Wall Street Journal

“Wright’s account of the church’s history and struggles is helpful, admirably fair-minded and, at times, absorbing . . . The book’s most intriguing aspect, though is not its treatment of Scientology, in particular, but its raising general questions about the nature of faith and reason and the role of religion in American life.”
       —Troy Jollimore, Chicago Tribune

“A wild ride of a page-turner, as enthralling as a paperback thriller . . .I could go on and on, listing Hubbard’s tall tales, paranoid delusions and eccentricities, as well as Miscavige’s brutalities and tidbits from the famously wacky and decidedly unscientific Scientologist cosmology.”—Laura Miller, Salon.com

“Insightful, gripping, and ultimately tragic . . . The initial biographical section [about L. Ron Hubbard] could stand as an engrossing book in itself. . . .The second section,
“Hollywood,” provides the answer to one of the great mysteries of the modern world: What’s the deal with Tom Cruise and Scientology?”—Buzzy Jackson, The Boston Globe

“A hotly compelling read. It’s a minutiae-packed book full of wild stories.”
      —Janet Maslin, The New York Times


“Lawrence Wright brings a clear-eyed investigative fearlessness to Scientology—its history, theology, its hierarchy—and the result is . . . evidence that truth can be stranger even than science fiction.”—Lisa Miller, The Washington Post

“A gripping, exhaustive, remarkably evenhanded investigation of the religion everyone loves to hate.”—Lawrence Levi, Newsday

“It’s incredible.   It is an incredible, fascinating read.    It is like a pirate novel, but there are celebrities in it. I admired [Wright’s] chutzpah, he’s like Don Quixote.”—The Hairpin

“Revealing and disturbing . . . A series of devastating revelations that will come as news even to hardened Scientology buffs who follow the Church’s every twist and turn.”—The Daily Beast

“Devastating . . . A patient, wholly compelling investigation into a paranoid "religion" and the faithful held in its sweaty grip.”—Kirkus Reviews

“Not only a titillating expose on the reported “you’re kidding me” aspects of the religion, but a powerful examination of belief itself.”—Entertainment Weekly

“A fascinating look behind the curtain of an organization whose ambition and influence are often at odds with its secretive ways. . . . For those aware of Scientology through its celebrity adherents (Tom Cruise and John Travolta are the best known) rather than its works, the sheer scope of the church’s influence and activities will be jaw-dropping.”
                  —Keir Graff, Booklist

“An eye-opening short biography of Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard and a long-form journalism presentation of the creature Hubbard birthed: a self-help system complete with bizarre cosmology, celebrity sex appeal, lawyers, consistent allegation of physical abuse, and expensive answers for spiritual consumers.”—Publishers Weekly

About the Author

Lawrence Wright is a graduate of Tulane University and the American University in Cairo, where he spent two years teaching. He is a staff writer for The New Yorker, and the author of one novel, God’s Favorite, and six previous books of nonfiction, including In the New World; Saints and Sinners; Remembering Satan; and The Looming Tower, which was the recipient of many honors--among them, The Pulitzer Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the New York Public Library’s Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism. He is also a screenwriter and a playwright. He and his wife are longtime residents of Austin, Texas.

Lawrence Wright official website: http://www.lawrencewright.com/

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter 1
The Convert

London, Ontario, is a middling manufacturing town halfway between Toronto and Detroit, once known for its cigars and breweries. In a tribute to its famous namesake, London has its own Covent Garden, Piccadilly Street, and even a Thames River that forks around the modest, economically stressed downtown. The city, which sits in a humid basin, is remarked upon for its unpleasant weather. Summers are unusually hot, winters brutally cold, the springs and falls fine but fleeting. The most notable native son was the bandleader Guy Lombardo, who was honored in a local museum, until it closed for lack of visitors. London was a difficult place for an artist looking to find himself.

Paul Haggis was twenty-one years old in 1975. He was walking toward a record store in downtown London when he encountered a fast-talking, long-haired young man with piercing eyes standing on the corner of Dundas and Waterloo Streets. There was something keen and strangely adamant in his manner. His name was Jim Logan. He pressed a book into Haggis’s hands. “You have a mind,” Logan said. “This is the owner’s manual.” Then he demanded, “Give me two dollars.”

The book was Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health, by L. Ron Hubbard, which was published in 1950. By the time Logan pushed it on Haggis, the book had sold more than two million copies throughout the world. Haggis opened the book and saw a page stamped with the words “Church of Scientology.”

“Take me there,” he said to Logan.

At the time, there were only a handful of Scientologists in the entire province of Ontario. By coincidence, Haggis had heard about the organization a couple of months earlier, from a friend who had called it a cult. That interested Haggis; he considered the possibility of doing a documentary ﬁlm about it. When he arrived at the church’s quarters in London, it certainly didn’t look like a cult—two young men occupying a hole- in- the- wall office above Woolworth’s ﬁve-and-dime.

As an atheist, Haggis was wary of being dragged into a formal belief system. In response to his skepticism, Logan showed him a passage by Hubbard that read: “What is true is what is true for you. No one has any right to force data on you and command you to believe it or else. If it is not true for you, it isn’t true. Think your own way through things, accept what is true for you, discard the rest. There is nothing unhappier than one who tries to live in a chaos of lies.” These words resonated with Haggis.

Although he didn’t realize it, Haggis was being drawn into the church through a classic, four-step “dissemination drill” that recruiters are carefully trained to follow. The first step is to make contact, as Jim Logan did with Haggis in 1975. The second step is to disarm any antagonism the individual may display toward Scientology. Once that’s done, the task is to “find the ruin”—that is, the problem most on the mind of the potential recruit. For Paul, it was a turbulent romance. The fourth step is to convince the subject that Scientology has the answer. “Once the person is aware of the ruin, you bring about an understanding that Scientology can handle the condition,” Hubbard writes. “It’s at the right moment on this step that one . . . directs him to the service that will best handle what he needs handled.” At that point, the potential recruit has officially been transformed into a Scientologist.

Paul responded to every step in an almost ideal manner. He and his girlfriend took a course together and, shortly thereafter, became Hubbard Qualified Scientologists, one of the first levels in what the church calls the Bridge to Total Freedom.

Haggis was born in 1953, the oldest of three children. His father, Ted, ran a construction company specializing in roadwork—mostly laying asphalt and pouring sidewalks, curbs, and gutters. He called his company Global, because he was serving both London and Paris— another Ontario community fifty miles to the east. As Ted was getting his business started, the family lived in a small house in the predominantly white town. The Haggises were one of the few Catholic families in a Protestant neighborhood, which led to occasional confrontations, including a schoolyard fistfight that left Paul with a broken nose.

Although he didn’t really think of himself as religious, he identified with being a minority; however, his mother, Mary, insisted on sending Paul and his two younger sisters, Kathy and Jo, to Mass every Sunday. One day, she spotted their priest driving an expensive car. “God wants me to have a Cadillac,” the priest explained. Mary responded, “Then God doesn’t want us in your church anymore.” Paul admired his mother’s stand; he knew how much her religion meant to her. After that, the family stopped going to Mass, but the children continued in Catholic schools.

Ted’s construction business prospered to the point that he was able to buy a much larger house on eighteen acres of rolling land outside of town. There were a couple of horses in the stable, a Chrysler station wagon in the garage, and giant construction vehicles parked in the yard, like grazing dinosaurs. Paul spent a lot of time alone. He could walk the mile to catch the school bus and not see anyone along the way. His chores were to clean the horse stalls and the dog runs (Ted raised spaniels for ﬁeld trials). At home, Paul made himself the center of attention—”the apple of his mother’s eye,” his father recalled—but he was mischievous and full of pranks. “He got the strap when he was five years old,” Ted said.

When Paul was about thirteen, he was taken to say farewell to his grandfather on his deathbed. The old man had been a janitor in a bowling alley, having fled England because of some mysterious scandal. He seemed to recognize a similar dangerous quality in Paul. His parting words to him were, “I’ve wasted my life. Don’t waste yours.”

In high school, Paul began steering toward trouble. His worried parents sent him to Ridley College, a boarding school in St. Catharines, Ontario, near Niagara Falls, where he was required to be a part of the cadet corps of the Royal Canadian Army. He despised marching or any regulated behavior, and soon began skipping the compulsory drills. He would sit in his room reading Ramparts, the radical magazine that chronicled the social revolutions then unfolding in America, where he longed to be. He was constantly getting punished for his infractions, until he taught himself to pick locks; then he could sneak into the prefect’s office and mark off his demerits. The experience sharpened an incipient talent for subversion.

After a year of this, his parents transferred him to a progressive boys’ school, called Muskoka Lakes College, in northern Ontario, where there was very little system to subvert. Although it was called a college, it was basically a preparatory school. Students were encouraged to study whatever they wanted. Paul discovered a mentor in his art teacher, Max Allen, who was gay and politically radical. Allen produced a show for the Canadian Broadcasting Company called As It Happens. In 1973, while the Watergate hearings were going on in Washington, DC, Allen let Paul sit beside him in his cubicle at CBC while he edited John Dean’s testimony for broadcast. Later, Allen opened a small theater in Toronto to show movies that had been banned under Ontario’s draconian censorship laws, and Paul volunteered at the box office. They showed Ken Russell’s The Devils and Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris. In Ted’s mind, his son was working in a porno theater. “I just shut my eyes,” Ted said.

Paul left school after he was caught forging a check. He attended art school brieﬂy, and took some ﬁlm classes at a community college, but he dropped out of that as well. He grew his curly blond hair to his shoulders. He began working in construction full-time for Ted, but he was drifting toward a precipice. In the 1970s, London acquired the nickname “Speed City,” because of the methamphetamine labs that sprang up to serve its blossoming underworld. Hard drugs were easy to obtain. Two of Haggis’s friends died from overdoses, and he had a gun pointed in his face a couple of times. “I was a bad kid,” he admitted. “I didn’t kill anybody. Not that I didn’t try.”

He also acted as a stage manager in the ninety- nine-seat theater his father created in an abandoned church for one of his stagestruck daughters. On Saturday nights, Paul would strike the set of whatever show was under way and put up a movie screen. In that way he introduced himself and the small community of ﬁlm buffs in London to the works of Bergman, Hitchcock, and the French New Wave. He was so affected by Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow- Up that in 1974 he decided to become a fashion photographer in England, like the hero of that movie. That lasted less than a year, but when he returned he still carried a Leica over his shoulder.

Back in London, Ontario, he fell in love with a nursing student named Diane Gettas. They began sharing a one-bedroom apartment filled with Paul’s books on ﬁlm. He thought of himself then as “a loner and an artist and an iconoclast.” His grades were too poor to get into college. He could see that he was going nowhere. He was ready to change, but he wasn’t sure how.

Such was Paul Haggis’s state of mind when he joined the Church of Scientology.

Like every scientologist, when Haggis entered the church, he took his first steps into the mind of L. Ron Hubbard. He read about Hubbard’s adventurous life: how he wandered the world, led dangerous expeditions, and healed himself of crippling war injuries through the techniques that he developed into Dianetics. He was not a prophet, like Mohammed, or divine, like Jesus. He had not been visited by an angel bearing tablets of revelation, like Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism. Scientologists believe that Hubbard discovered the existential truths that form their doctrine through extensive research—in that way, it is “science.”

The apparent rationalism appealed to Haggis. He had long since walked away from the religion of his upbringing, but he was still looking for a way to express his idealism. It was important to him that Scientology didn’t demand belief in a god. But the figure of L. Ron Hubbard did hover over the religion in suggestive ways. He wasn’t worshipped, exactly, but his visage and name were everywhere, like the absolute ruler of a small kingdom.

There seemed to be two Hubbards within the church: the godlike authority whose every word was regarded as scripture, and the avuncular figure that Haggis saw on the training videos, who came across as wry and self-deprecating. Those were qualities that Haggis shared to a marked degree, and they inspired trust in the man he had come to accept as his spiritual guide. Still, Haggis felt a little stranded by the lack of irony among his fellow Scientologists. Their inability to laugh at themselves seemed at odds with the character of Hubbard himself. He didn’t seem self-important or pious; he was like the dashing, wisecracking hero of a B movie who had seen everything and somehow had it all figured out. When Haggis experienced doubts about the religion, he reflected on the 16 mm films of Hubbard’s lectures from the 1950s and 1960s, which were part of the church’s indoctrination process. Hubbard was always chuckling to himself, marveling over some random observation that had just occurred to him, with a little wink to the audience suggesting that they not take him too seriously. He would just open his mouth and a mob of new thoughts would burst forth, elbowing each other in the race to make themselves known to the world. They were often trivial and disjointed but also full of obscure, learned references and charged with a sense of originality and purpose. “You walked in one day and you said, ‘I’m a seneschal,’ “ Hubbard observed in a characteristic aside:

“And this knight with eight-inch spurs, standing there—humph— and say, ‘I’m supposed to open the doors to this castle, I’ve been doing this for a long time, and I’m a very trusted retainer’. . . He’s insisting he’s the seneschal but nobody will pay him his wages, and so forth. . . . He was somebody before he became the seneschal. Now, as a seneschal, he became nobody—until he finally went out and got a begging pan on the highway and began to hold it out for fish and chips as people came along, you know. . . . Now he says, ‘I am something, I am a beggar,’ but that’s still something. Then the New York state police come along, or somebody, and they say to him—I’m a little mixed up in my periods here, but they say to him—‘Do you realize you cannot beg upon the public road without license Number 603-F?’ . . . So he starves to death and kicks the bucket and there he lies. . . . Now he’s somebody, he’s a corpse, but he’s not dead, he’s merely a corpse. . . . Got the idea? But he goes through sequences of becoming nobody, somebody, nobody, somebody, nobody, somebody, nobody, not necessarily on a dwindling spiral. Some people get up to the point of being a happy man. You know the old story of a happy man—I won’t tell it—he didn’t have a shirt. . . ."

Just as this fuzzy parable begins to ramble into incoherence, Hubbard comes to the point, which is that a being is not his occupation or even the body he presently inhabits. The central insight of Scientology is that the being is eternal, what Hubbard terms a “thetan.” “This chap, in other words, was somebody until he began to identify his beingness with a thing. . . . None of these beingnesses are the person. The person is the thetan.”

“He had this amazing buoyancy,” Haggis recalled. “He had a deadpan sense of humor and this sense of himself that seemed to say, ‘Yes, I am fully aware that I might be mad, but I also might be on to something.’ “

The zealotry that empowered so many members of the church came from the belief that they were the vanguard of the struggle to save humanity. “A civilization without insanity, without criminals and without war, where the able can prosper and honest beings can have rights, and where Man is free to rise to greater heights, are the aims of Scientology,” Hubbard writes. Those breathless aims drew young idealists, like Haggis, to the church’s banner.

To advance such lofty goals, Hubbard developed a “technology” to attain spiritual freedom and discover oneself as an immortal being. “Scientology works 100 percent of the time when it is properly applied to a person who sincerely desires to improve his life,” a church publication declares. This guarantee rests on the assumption that through rigorous research, Hubbard had uncovered a perfect understanding of human nature. One must not stray from the path he has laid down or question his methods. Scientology is exact. Scientology is certain. Step by step one can ascend toward clarity and power, becoming more oneself—but, paradoxically, also more like Hubbard. Scientology is the geography of his mind. Perhaps no individual in history has taken such copious internal soundings and described with so much logic and minute detail the inner workings of his own mentality. The method Hubbard put forward created a road map toward his own ideal self. Hubbard’s habits, his imagination, his goals and wishes—his character, in other words—became both the basis and the destination of Scientology.

Secretly, Haggis didn’t really respect Hubbard as a writer. He hadn’t been able to get through Dianetics, for instance. He read about thirty pages, then put it down. Much of the Scientology coursework, however, gave him a feeling of accomplishment. In 1976, he traveled to Los Angeles, the center of the Scientology universe, checking in at the old Château Élysée, on Franklin Avenue. Clark Gable and Katharine Hepburn had once stayed there, along with many other stars, but when Haggis arrived it was a run-down church retreat called the Manor Hotel. (It has since been spectacularly renovated and turned into Scientology’s premier Celebrity Centre.) He had a little apartment with a kitchen where he could write.

There were about 30,000 Scientologists in America at the time. Most of them were white, urban, and middle class; they were predominantly in their twenties, and many of them, especially in Los Angeles, were involved in graphic or performing arts. In other words, they were a lot like Paul Haggis. He immediately became a part of a community in a city that can otherwise be quite isolating. For the first time in his life, he experienced a feeling of kinship and camaraderie with people who had a lot in common—”all these atheists looking for something to believe in, and all these wanderers looking for a club to join.”

In 1977, Haggis returned to Canada to continue working for his father, who could see that his son was struggling. Ted Haggis asked him what he wanted to do with his life. Haggis said he wanted to be a writer. His father said, “Well, there are only two places to do that, New York and Los Angeles. Pick one, and I’ll keep you on the payroll for a year.” Paul chose LA because it was the heart of the ﬁ lm world. Soon after this conversation with his father, Haggis and Diane Gettas got married. Two months later, they loaded up his brown Ranchero and drove to Los Angeles, moving into an apartment with Diane’s brother, Gregg, and three other people. Paul got a job moving furniture. On the weekends he took photographs for yearbooks. At night he wrote scripts on spec at a secondhand drafting table. The following year, Diane gave birth to their first child, Alissa.

Print length

448 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Knopf
Publication date

January 17, 2013
Dimensions

6.57 x 1.39 x 9.49 inches
ISBN-10

0307700666
ISBN-13

978-0307700667
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An insightful and provocative read

Reviewed in the United States on January 21, 2013

Verified Purchase

This was by far the most insightful and well researched book on L Ron Hubbard, David Miscavige and Scientology that I have ever read.

In researching the material for the book the author and his assistants spoke with an unprecedented number of people (some 250 or so) who studied, witnessed and/or were part of the history of Scientology and its leaders.

The bibliography of the Scientology sources, media, books, articles and manuscript collections that the author consulted in studying the subjects shows the great pain that was clearly taken not only to be thorough with the facts in the book but also to try to analyze the true story behind those facts and what it was that made both Hubbard and Miscavige (Scientology's two main leaders over the years) what they were.

I believe Lawrence Wright has accomplished that well beyond anything ever published. And he did it in an objective, professional way while constantly striving to be fair.

There are also some 42 pages of detailed notes near the end of the book where the author gives his sources for what he wrote in the book, page by page. Simply amazing!

In my opinion this book could not even have been written had not Project Chanology Anonymous (acknowledged in the book) suddenly made it possible for thousands to come forward and speak out without being destroyed by Scientology's intelligence and litigation machine designed to stop others from freely speaking out.

Where one or a few of us have managed to speak out before or even protest, suddenly thousands donned the mask and marched in unison and in protest starting on February 10, 2008. The beauty of that was how it opened the door to many others coming out, speaking and taking a stance. This had turned the tide. Organized Scientology could not stop them and they were joined by so many others who finally saw they could stand up and speak out.

Simply put, without the actions started by Anonymous in 2008 many of the sources for this book would not have felt safe to come out and tell the truth.Thus this book could not have been written.

A great deal (but not hardly all) of the facts covered in this book have been covered before. But the book lays out those facts in a clear, concise manner that helps the reader to understand not only the story of scientology but what it was that made its leaders what they became.

The author compassionately explores the life of L Ron Hubbard from his childhood, through his marriages, his time in the military, his friendships, his loves and his early writings. In countless writings and recordings about Hubbard in the past (if only on internet forum postings) writers often debated and tried to understand Hubbard as clearly one or the other: kind or cruel, a liar or a man of truth, sane or insane, a conman or an honest man, an abuser or a healer.

I think what the author tried to show was that Hubbard at different points was all of the above.

Combining Hubbard's own Affirmations with how he actually led his life, in my opinion the author gives a highly insightful perspective of Hubbard. It can be found on page 54 of this book:

"If one looks behind the Affirmations to the condition they are meant to correct one sees a man who is ashamed of his tendency to fabricate personal stories, who is conflicted about his sexual needs, and who worries about his mortality. He has a predatory view of women but at the same time fears their power to humiliate him".

While we are each of us at times conflicted, even walking contradictions throughout our lives, the real problem with Hubbard's own conflicts as well covered in this book is what they did to destroy the lives of so very many people over decades and indeed to this day some 27 years after Hubbard's death.

Some of the very worst parts of Hubbard became the very fabric of Scientology and organized Scientology. Woven throughout the policies and practices of organized Scientology one can see Hubbard's own paranoia and cruelty. Such things as the heartless internment camps known as "the Rehabilitation Project Force", heavy ethics for counter and other intentions (to his own), the cruelty of disconnection and so much more was all to protect a technology Hubbard called priceless but was rather valueless to most who tried it.

As covered in the book, Hubbard's conflicts are also reflected in his writings where he saw enemies everywhere and demanded the destruction of all who opposed his will.

His incessant demands for money combined with his disdain of those who thought differently than he destroyed perhaps thousands of families, even lives. And, like Hubbard before him, David Miscavige to this day continues to profit on the anguish of others while cowardly hiding behind organized Scientology's myriad corporate veils so as not to be held liable for that of which he is completely liable.

As shown in this book, the stories of widespread abuse of children, beatings, forced incarcerations, financial scandals, greed, medical abuse and the like rampant within organized Scientology both through the times of Hubbard and continuing to this very day are as painful to see as they are numerous. The cruelty meted out on others in the name of "salvaging the planet" while profiting Hubbard and Miscavige is breathtaking in its scope.

One horrid example that has me in tears just to read it can be found page 157 of the book. It is about an abused, pregnant mother sneaking out of the scientology's "Rehabilitation Project Force" without approval to see how her daughter was doing in the Scientology "Child Care Org":

"Taylor managed to slip away to visit her ten-month-old daughter in the Child Care Org across the street. To her horror, she discovered that Venessa had contracted whopping cough, which is highly contagious and occasionally fatal. The baby's eyes were welded shut with mucus, and her diaper was wet - in fact her whole crib was soaking. She was covered with fruit flies. Taylor recoiled. The prospect of losing both her unborn baby and her daughter seemed very likely".

My God!!!!

So many misled people of good heart were and are a part of Scientology who themselves put it all on the line to dedicate themselves and their lives to the following of a man who would ultimately betray them. This book makes me feel a sadness for all the good souls who cared and who tried to follow a dream and were betrayed.

I love how insightful the author is when he analyzes the facts before him and tries to make it make sense. For example, as the book points out, Hubbard wrote a great deal of science fiction before he ever wrote anything about Scientology. And there are strong elements of science fiction in the hidden levels of Scientology. Reflecting on both, the author makes a simple yet in my opinion insightful statement on page 32 of the book:

"Certainly, the same mind that roamed so freely through imaginary universes might be inclined to look at the everyday world and suspect that there was something more behind the surface reality. The broad canvas of science fiction allowed Hubbard to think in large-scale terms about the human condition. He was bold. He was fanciful. 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".

I agree with the author that while one can argue that Scientology is a religion it must not be allowed to carry out such horrid abuses on countless others while hiding from prosecution behind the cloak of religion.

More than whether or not Scientology is indeed a religion I think the really important question is whether or not it is charitable or even spiritual. I see nothing spiritual at all about Hubbard's and Miscavige's abuse of others, the incessant demands for money and just hundreds and hundreds of things that make up the very fabric of organized Scientology and the policies it follows.

Perhaps even more importantly, as is clear in reading the book, there is nothing inherently charitable about Scientology. People have to either pay vast sums or give up their personal freedoms to "progress" in Scientology. Their benign-sounding front groups in the field of business, education, drug abuse and the like are not there to freely help the downtrodden or otherwise needy. They are there solely to themselves be a conduit of money and people into Scientology. They are "PR" to try to make organized Scientology look good to the public while in many cases are themselves a danger to the public.

In the book examples are given where others speak of Hubbard's "research" and his "technology" that has helped them. And I am glad they were helped.

But Hubbard's research has no scientific validity and in my opinion is often the product of a deranged mind thinking that somehow he has made these brilliant scientific discoveries when he has not.

An example from the book is Hubbard's "research" resulting in "The Introspection Rundown" which, Hubbard says eliminates the last need for psychiatry. "Evidence" of its value is a story of a man who was crazed on a ship and a danger to others. Hubbard had him confined and treated gently and given healthy supplements. The man came out of it. I am so glad this happened to this man but my God that is hardly scientific study showing Hubbard's procedure eliminates the last need of psychiatry.

Related to this, the book debunks Hubbard's claims about psychology and medication in effect showing how Scientology not only may not help a person but it will often keep a person away from the very sources that can indeed help him.

Examples of this are given in the book including the death of a beautiful boy Kyle Brennan who died from an apparent suicide at Scientology's "mecca" in Florida after his medically prescribed medication was taken away from him due to Scientology's unfounded beliefs from Hubbard's writings.

And, carrying on from what Hubbard preached, the book tells of a speech given by Scientology's current abusive leader David Miscavige saying that he intends to obliterate psychiatry, wiping it from the face of the earth.

My God how dangerous a view is that?

People have had "wins" in Scientology therapy which the author feels is akin more to psychotherapy which perhaps is Scientology's "more respectable cousin". But I submit that some of the beautiful and well-meaning people who are trying to help others using this "therapy" are more helping those people because they are good and kind people who give the others someone to whom they can pour out their hearts and discuss their troubles.

And that is all well and good until someone really needs professional help and there is no one within Scientology who is trained to give that help.

Later in the book, on page 359, the author speaks of how Scientology wants to be understood as a scientific approach to spiritual enlightenment but concludes that it really has no basis in science at all. Perhaps, he says, it would be better understood as a philosophy of the human nature.

As usual organized Scientology denies everything in this book that is negative. I would like to believe them but I can't. Although I was a small contributor of information to Lawrence Wright in his research, I know of so much of this book as being true from first hand observation.

I feel love and compassion for the many, many good souls who are Scientologists and who are trying to help others. I was once one of them. But I also feel a great sadness of just how these people were and are being betrayed by Hubbard, by Miscavige and indeed by a dream of a "heaven" which to many of them has turned out to be a "hell".

I wish all of them the greatest of healing and of peace. And I want them to know there are many of us out here with open arms ready to welcome them to join us as imperfect but free sisters and brothers who will help them heal.

And I wish to express my great thanks to Lawrence Wright and all who assisted him for this magnificent work that I believe will end up helping many people.

Perhaps the real sadness of all this is best reflected in some of the final words from the book telling of a time that was a few weeks before Hubbard's death when Hubbard summoned one he trusted at a ranch where he was hiding:

"Six weeks before the leader died, Pfauth hesitantly related, Hubbard called him into the bus. He was sitting in his little breakfast nook. `He told me he was dropping his body.......He told me he failed, he's leaving.' ..............................

I mentioned the legend in Scientology that Hubbard would return.

`That's bull crap,' Pfauth said. `He wanted to drop the body and leave. And he told me basically that he failed. All the work and everything, he'd failed'".

brb sad

82 people found this helpful

Money, power, control, intimidation

Reviewed in the United States on September 27, 2015

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Powerful...Riveting...Frightening. They say a thin line exist between insanity and genius; clearly L Ron Hubbard qualifies for this classification of human existence. A prolific writer and forward thinker, with one hand he reaches out and discovers the breadth and depths of the human mind along with its short comings and its potential; then with the other hand he creates a house of mirrors, its foundation a form of delusional paranoia where it's him against the world, constantly checking himself and those around him for problems, imperfections preventing advancement toward a concept he called clear. A world without turmoil, friction or struggle. His personnel life is full of contradictions. What you see is not always what you see. His church is no less immune to this word play. It's like pulling back the curtain of the great oz in emerald city.
This organization he called a church became a prison via osmosis. Language was developed to build a wall between the learned and unlearned. Orwell described a concept called thought crime. Here we have it being applied without restraint against members of this community. Every creature exposed to it became fanatically infected with this mans ideology and expectations, whether they acknowledge it or not. Courses and reviews, they call it auditing (true definition: confession), all point the adherent toward a future of expected perfection. Religion is a term defined as a devotion to a person, idea or a thing. Jesus, communism and the environment all come to mind. Pursuit of complete freedom without human conditions (example: pain, sickness, death, doubt, controversy) became the dogma of L Ron Hubbards church. Who in his right mind could argue against such a laudable effort? The simple matter is those things do exist because humans are just that, humans. Life is not easy, but it is a journey. No matter how hard one tries you can not factor out those conditions of human life. The spirit inside man is not the super being of science fiction. It is subordinate to the created process and it has a place clearly defined and a parameter that confines and sets its boundaries. A creation is never greater than its creator. Period. This movement teaches something else.
People in Hubbards religion believed they could then and obviously they believe it now. Believe what? They could reach perfection. They could evolve into their true self. They could escape this mortality and move on to a higher existence. They could become powerful enough to help others by thought alone. They had been helped or cured by this program, actually or so they believed, surely they could now show others this great truth? Fear of failure, intimidation of being isolated or expelled from the group drives this congregation. Under it all is money. Money buys the course work that facilitates the path to freedom. In this regard, this place is not a church but an institution of higher learning. But what you buy is not commercially applicable. It's narrowly focused on one thing, advancement in the church; the different levels are the stages of improvement of self, elimination of imperfections, and it cost a lot of money.
Reading this book is a look inside this institution. Their greatest fear is controversy and exposure. This work does both things very well, exposes a terrible mind control culture, the insane amounts of money, the power of people over people, the violence and imprisonment, the price of non conformity applied to those weighed and found wanting, the celebrity worship. We also see the power of institutional intimidation on a scale I've never read of outside the confines of a government. This church and its various departments are like medusa, reaching out in every direction at once, squeezing the voices of dissent into silence. It's international and its in your face personal. Through exposure will come the much feared controversy. People hopefully will think for themselves and those on the inside will not submit to being told by others that what they read, has been and is being written by suppressive persons, enemies of freedom of religion.
Will this book change the church? Probably not. Will it change governmental views of the institution? Probably not. This organization has weathered worst storms than this and came out stronger. But hopefully it will give people a reason to pause and take a breath before walking through the door.

10 people found this helpful

Top reviews from other countries

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Sean

Fantastic read

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on December 7, 2023

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I picked this up after watching the film that was made from this book….film/documentary excellent but this book gives a lot more info as you’d expect! One of the most interesting/intriguing reads in a fair while!

h93

l'horreur de cette secte et la destruction des adeptes volontaires ou mis de force dedans

Reviewed in France on September 20, 2019

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je lis doucement car le livre n'existe que dans la version originale et je ne suis pas vraiment bilingue, mais ce livre pour lequel la maison d'édition avait engagé 163 avocats pour contrer les attaques scientologues qui empêchaient la parution, est la dure réalité, de charognards qui profitent de la vulnérabilité de personnes fragiles pour les exploiter, leur piquer tout leur argent et même l'argent de leurs familles, l'horreur des tortures psychiques infligés, les mariages arrangés, la perte des repères, les faux témoignages pour perdre ceux qui refusent d'y entrer, les dénonciations calomnieuses mises sur le bureau de certains magistrats pour qu'ils instruisent à charge contre les récalcitrants, cela est en France aussi, pas qu'aux Etats-Unis.

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Opinionist ™

Un libro molto interessante ed informativo!!

Reviewed in Italy on December 1, 2018

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Avendo avuto uno zio che era membro di questo cult e sapendo che lui è la sua moglie hanno speso centinaia di migliaie di dollari con Scientology, volevo leggere la verità sul questo "religione". Il libro non mi è deluso!! Era stra pieno di informazione e mi è piaciuto molto!!

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Snapdragon

Reveals the weirdness

Reviewed in Australia on May 12, 2018

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It’s hard to believe that a man so odd could create a religion as odd as Scientology that people still follow. Then again, perhaps not, for as White points out, all religions contain fantastic claims that when considered objectively, don’t make a blind bit of sense. L Ron Hubbard was a very mixed bag: a liar, a braggart, a forger, a space-dreaming romantic with a wry, folksy geniality and a way of bringing people with him on his curious intellectual and spiritual journey.

It’s one thing to write a lot of B grade science fiction and to create a cosmology out of such imaginings, but it’s quite another to set in place an organisation that tyrannises its adherents. While many ordinary Scientologists find the (very expensive) trainings helpful, the cruelty with which many members are treated is astonishing. Then there’s the well-documented harassment of those who leave. Phones are tapped, computers hacked, files stolen.

This is a very readable, accessible book. White organises the material well, and it all makes for compelling reading. So much so that I stayed up all night, fascinated in a shocked kind of way. Naturally, John Travolta and Tom Cruise are mentioned. Travolta comes off better.

D A Pettit

He did a very good job in giving a clear picture of the very ...

Reviewed in Canada on May 25, 2015

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Very direct and to the point. He did a very good job in giving a clear picture of the very confused mind of L Ron Hubbard and his followers.
The parallel of this scientology cult or church with North Korea, ISIS and other dictatorial societies is shocking. It seems that the top people seem to personally benefit by millions or billions of dollars at the expense of the brainwashed little people. The various US authorities seem to yield many times to the challenges of the legal people hired by the scientology cult or church for their own self interest.

Like Hubbard, Stalin and Hitler - they all die. They too shall pass.

2 people found this helpful

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