The Binge
By Jessica Zafra

L. Ron Hubbard was a prolific science-fiction writer of the 1940s and ’50s who wanted more than the dollar per word he was paid for his pulp novels. It occurred to him that the fastest way to gain fame, fortune and power was to start his own religion.This was well within the skill set of a man who’d published over a thousand novels about space aliens with superpowers (Anyone see Battlefield: Earth?).

Hubbard wrote a book called Dianetics, which became the founding text of Scientology.

Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief is the fascinating HBO documentary about the religion founded by L. Ron Hubbard.

Writer-director Alex Gibney (Taxi to the Dark Side; Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God) looks into the personal history of the founding father, who styled himself “Commodore” because he had served in the navy during World War II (and was relieved of his command when he mistakenly shelled Mexico). Gibney traces the rise of the cult, talks to high-profile apostates such as filmmaker Paul Haggis (Crash) and high-ranking ex-members of the cult, and also answers the question, “Why did Tom Cruise suddenly divorce Nicole Kidman?” One of the documentary’s producers is Lawrence Wright, author of Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood and the Prison of Belief.

Wright mentions his fascination with religion, why people choose to believe what they believe, and their crushing certainty that eliminates all doubt.

Rational thinking is never the strong point of religion, but getting even the credulous to believe the origin myth of Scientology is a stretch.

The story goes like this: 75 million years ago, Xenu the galactic overlord dealt with overpopulation by having his subjects frozen and flown to the prison planet, earth, where they were dropped into volcanoes. Then the volcanoes were blown up with atomic bombs, scattering disembodied spirits into the atmosphere. These disembodied spirits, called Thetans, attach themselves to newborn children and become their souls. Thetans are the cause of all the neuroses, doubts and negative emotions that keep people from getting everything they want. Through constant “auditing” — consulting with a Scientology expert who uses an “e-meter” to measure the “mass of their thoughts,” scientologists are purged of their psychological issues. They become “clear.”

Tell this story to the recruits, and they will conclude you are bonkers.

It sounds like an episode of South Park — in fact it was an episode of Parker and Stone’s brilliantly rude cartoon series. But despite his own fears that he was losing his mind, L. Ron Hubbard was a canny guy.

(In the archival footage, where he mentions having “hunted with pygmies in the Philippines,” he also looks a bit like Philip Seymour Hoffman, who played a fictionalized version of him in Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master.) He knew the Xenu tale was hard to swallow, so he simply withheld the origin myth from the members of his church. A member would have to go through seven or eight years of auditing and give hundreds of thousands of dollars to Scientology before he was told this origin myth.

It’s a very, very lucrative bait-and-switch: you think it’s a self-help system, and it turns out to be sci-fi. As a lifelong science-fiction fan (though not of Hubbard’s), I am impressed. How lucrative is Scientology? A couple of years ago, its top three leaders including its current head David Miscavige were worth $1.5 billion. One-point-five billion tax-free dollars.

Interesting that Scientology’s central ritual is called “auditing,” for its greatest victory has been over the taxman. In the 1980s, the US Internal Revenue Service was hounding Scientology for over a billion dollars in back taxes. The church argued that Scientology was a religion and therefore exempted from paying taxes. (Oddly enough, who decides whether something is a religion ergo tax-exempt? Theologians and professors of comparative religion? Nope. The IRS.)

Miscavige came up with a masterful solution to the crisis: he urged church members to file every conceivable lawsuit, including charges not related to taxes, against the IRS and its employees. Scientologists filed 2,400 cases against the IRS. Then the church leaders made it known to the head of the IRS that all the cases would go away if he declared Scientology a religion. Scientology won.

Apart from the tax benefits, being certified as a religion allowed the church to employ its members and pay them pathetically small wages.

The church cannot be charged with human rights violations if these occurred in the practice of their religion.

But the greatest benefit of auditing, which is a combination of confession and psychoanalysis (which Hubbard hated because he said it was for the insane) is the vast amounts of personal information that can be gleaned about the church members. In each session the auditor prods and ferrets out the member’s deep, dark secrets, information that could destroy his career and reputation if he ever disobeys the church leaders. Secrets that the church does not hesitate to make public if the member speaks out against it.

You could view Going Clear as a shocking expose into the workings of a successful cult, with a side dish of “Poor Tom Cruise drank the Kool-Aid.” (You know how, in interviews, Cruise gets that look in his eyes and then starts laughing maniacally? Every time he does that from now on, I’m going to hear the guy in the original The Fly shrieking “Help meeee, help meeee.”) Or you could view Going Clear as a course in how to get hysterically rich by promising people that they can get everything they want. Dammit, I’ve been reading the wrong science-fiction.

Contact the author at TVatemyday@gmail.com.
Read her work every week at BusinessWorld, every day at JessicaRulestheUniverse.com.

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