Editor’s note: This article was first published in March 2015, when the HBO documentary came out; the membership figures, Miscavige’s role and the property figures it cites are as of then.
Someone once said that one of the best talents you can have is knowing how to tell a story, and the founder of Scientology, L. Ron Hubbard, probably had that talent very well developed.
HBO has made a documentary about this “church”, sect or religion, focusing on the accusations and scandals of abuse and manipulation by Scientology. The documentary gives an incredible, very well-documented account of its founder’s real life, of the beginnings of Scientology, and of how Hubbard had only one purpose in creating this church: to make money and cleverly build a very profitable business.
Remember that today Scientology has 50,000 followers, among them, in a place of honour, the actor Tom Cruise, among others.
But Hubbard was no god on earth, nor did he have powers or anything of the sort. Quite the opposite.
This is the true story of the life of Scientology’s founder.
After dropping out of university in 1932, Hubbard, a native of Nebraska (USA), began his career as a fiction writer, paid one cent per word.
According to the documentary, Hubbard holds a Guinness world record for having published more than 1,000 books. He is also the most translated author in the world.
Most of his books were science fiction, especially about missions in space, themes he would later use in Scientology when he worked out his own theories about how the world began.
But before starting the Scientology business, Hubbard was a Navy officer. He gave his military service great importance within the church, boasting of his many medals and of taking part in major battles in the Second World War.
However, HBO’s documentary had access to his military records and found that most of his service took place in the United States itself.
Hubbard boasted of having sunk two Japanese submarines, but according to his military record, he only fired on what turned out to be a fallen log and some underwater rocks. He did, however, accidentally shell a Mexican island and was relieved of his command.
When the Second World War ended, Hubbard moved to Los Angeles and became close friends with a rocket engineer, whose girlfriend he took from him: a young woman 13 years his junior named Sara Northrup.
According to her testimony, Hubbard courted her by telling her he was a war hero, the captain of a ship that had been sunk in the Pacific. By the same account, he also told her he had spent several weeks on a raft, blinded by the sun and with his back broken because of the war.
According to the military records, the only illnesses Hubbard had during the war were mild arthritis and conjunctivitis.
The couple’s relationship was not going well and, according to the film, during an argument Hubbard told his girlfriend he would kill himself if she did not marry him. After that proposal, they married in 1946 and had a daughter.
In 1950 the whole family moved to New Jersey, where Hubbard began writing the book Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health, the foundation on which Scientology rests.
The basic principle of Dianetics is that the brain records every experience and event in a person’s life, good or bad. The bad experiences are what the book calls “engrams”, which can supposedly harm a person if they remain with us throughout our lives.
But thanks to Scientology, those engrams can be “audited” and erased, which would give us a perfectly functioning mind.
Put that way, even a psychologist would agree that negative memories and experiences can affect our lives, so Hubbard’s theory was well received by the public. But there was a problem: he wasn’t making money.
A profitable business is born
Although Hubbard said in various interviews that his only intention was to help people with the great knowledge of the mind he had acquired and his effective method, his wife’s writings reveal quite the opposite.
According to those writings, Hubbard told his wife that the way to make a lot of money was to create a religion, because with your own religion you can bring in a large income and the government doesn’t tax it (just look at other religions).
Dianetics became a cultural phenomenon, filling auditoriums with people willing to pay to hear about this cure for humanity’s psychological ills.
According to his wife’s writings, at that time (1950) some people paid up to 500 dollars to train in Dianetics. She admits she felt as if she were robbing people.
When Hubbard went from man to god
His wife described how Hubbard, with an ever-growing legion of followers, really began to believe he was a saviour of humanity, a hero beyond the earthly, a kind of god.
She threatened to leave him if he refused to seek psychiatric help. Hubbard’s response was to flee to Cuba with their daughter without her mother’s consent.
According to some testimonies, Hubbard could not look after his daughter, so for a time he kept her in a kind of cage, and later handed her over to a woman with mental-health problems.
Hubbard called his wife to tell her he had killed their daughter, cut her into small pieces and thrown the remains into the river. Later he called her again to tell her the girl was alive.
In 1951 Hubbard agreed to give his wife a divorce, and she was granted full custody of their daughter.
By 1952 Dianetics’ popularity had faded and Hubbard was desperate for money, having failed to save any of what he had earned.
That was when he began to fold the book’s ideas into a set of beliefs and practices that he would later call Scientology. By paying a fee, a person could climb to higher levels. The higher the level, the higher the fee.
Scientology began with 38 people in a room listening to Hubbard dictate passages from Dianetics. Today there are around 50,000.
In the late 1960s Hubbard came under investigation for tax evasion, so he fled to the high seas. There he created the “Sea Organization”, which would become Scientology’s clergy, and whose members declared their loyalty to the church by signing billion-year contracts.
In other words, once you are in Scientology, they make it hard for you to get out.
In fact, according to the documentary, Hubbard began to devise punishments for those who strayed from Scientology’s path or made some kind of mistake. The punishment was being thrown into the sea from the ship.
By the mid-1970s Hubbard’s ships were no longer welcome in Mediterranean ports, so he went to Florida, where he lived in hiding for the rest of his life.
The church was also pursued by the FBI, and in 1979, after numerous police raids, 11 church members were found guilty of obstruction of justice, breaking into government offices, and stealing government documents and property.
On 24 January 1986 Hubbard died of a heart attack at the age of 74, and he did not come back from the dead.
That was when David Miscavige took control of Scientology, becoming its president, a post he still holds. The business has kept growing within the church, which is now bigger than ever and has expanded to many other countries, including Spain.
Nobody knows exactly how wealthy the church has become, although it is known to have built up real-estate holdings valued at hundreds of millions of dollars.
One of the texts shown in the documentary says, roughly, that Scientology is a journey into L. Ron Hubbard’s mind, and the deeper you go into it, the more like L. Ron Hubbard you become, a line each viewer must interpret in their own way.
This story was originally published by Business Insider and has been adapted and modified.
Further reading
- The fascinating life and career of Bill Ackman
- The fascinating life and career of Bill Gates
- The fascinating life and career of Richard Branson
Featured image: Los Angeles Daily News, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
