(include this in OSA DR re RVY)

Scientology as the autobiography of L. Ron Hubbard or (reposted as) Hubbard on how to kill him

Occasionally I see people trying desperately to understand Hubbard and Scientology-think, e.g., wondering on what basis he/they could be saying or doing what is obviously stupid or insane. Some try to lay LRH/Scn on some preestablished or already-known grid or system to try to grasp the mentality. I've even done this by using Orwell's "1984" as one of the best models for understanding or showing a certain world that occurs in there, at the upper echelons, equivalent to the "Party."

However, the best way to understand Scientology and the mind of L. Ron Hubbard is to equate the two and to apply his writings back to him. Treat Scientology as the autobiography of L. Ron Hubbard, the blueprint/outline of his mind. (Another way to view it is as his PC folders.) It is his thinking process. Sometimes it is stable and doesn't change and other times he is very mercurial. At times he pontificates proudly and at other times he is a trembling paranoid and the policies that are emitted during these times reflect his state of mind, rather than any fact or truth in the real world. Thus sometimes he is right and sometimes he is wrong. Sometimes he might make a brilliant observation and sometimes he might be a raving psychotic. It's really not more complex than that.

What he was good at doing was applying his definition of reality, that reality was nothing more than agreement. Thus he demanded agreement in a frantic hope that if enough people agreed with him, he would be real.

There are any number of places where one can begin but let's begin with the notion of overts and withholds. These are basically crimes and secrets. Hubbard said that if a person had enough of them, they would flee ("blow") the area. Thus when a person leaves the organization, they are automatically criminal. Yet look at Hubbard's life, how he blew one area after another until he was finally hiding in Creston, California, under disguise, terrified that a local would recognize him. What explains it? Overts and withholds.

Now I am not not not saying that his theory of overts and withholds is valid or correct. I am saying his own writings explain his behavior. They do not necessarily explain the behavior of others. But they usually explain his and when you apply the theory of overts and withholds to Hubbard, he can be better understood. He had massive crimes and massive withholds and he fled to avoid being discovered. That was how he ended up hiding in Creston. Meanwhile, he's living a life of pretense (the lie) by saying he's doing "research." That was a major withhold, a major lie. He was hiding from the IRS and the feds and the courts and the media and a host of lawyers who wanted to serve him.

In that vein, one of my favorite Hubbard policies to apply back to him is the HCOPL "Your Post and Life." In it Hubbard says if you have the tech, you cannot be hurt. If you have the tech, he said, suppressives/enemies will shatter. (The cover of the PTS/SP course pack is a snarling face shattering.)

If you read it, he is like the shaman who gives the poor tribesman a blessed trinket to wear or perhaps body paint that will protect the warrior from the guns of the white man. Medicine men did this and the Indians were cut down in droves.

Well, there is Hubbard, selling his blessed trinkets and meanwhile he is hiding in Creston, completely deluding himself that he is protected, when he is nothing more than an ostrich with the head in the ground, feeling invisible. He was not able to fend off his ghosts but he would write that others could, and that gives insight into his mind. He was clearly trying to overcome his own spiritual impotence, trying to convince himself, perhaps more than he was trying to convince anyone else.

There is also the "Criminal Mind" HCOB where he says a person is guilty of the crimes he accuses of others. That is straight L. Ron Hubbard talking. All you have to do is read the crimes he rants about and you can find him committing them, starting with sex crimes. (Hubbard was completely psychotic on the subject of sex and finally said it was invented by the psychs, meaning sex was evil.)

But in my own opinion, the most telling autobiographical essay on and by Hubbard is what we called the "Bolivar PL," a long essay about Simon Bolivar. It is basically a book review, of a biography of Bolivar and Hubbard uses it to talk about "leadership" and the role of "power." What he doesn't say in the essay was that he believed he was Bolivar and had remarked upon this to many staff.

Hubbard had the most amazing ability to write about himself as if it were someone else. I'm sure there is a professional name for it, besides "disassociated." But that was how he was able to write many directives and never see that they were actually autobiographical. They were sometimes confessional and sometimes delusory.

The Bolivar PL was how he saw himself and his "mistakes." It contains a section that is especially amazing because - unbeknownst to him - it is L. Ron Hubbard describing himself, nearly perfectly.

Honors meant a great deal to Bolivar. To be liked was his life. And it probably meant more to him than to see things really right. He never compromised his principles but he lived on admiration, a rather sickening diet since it demands in turn continuous 'theater.' One is what one is, not what one is admired or hated for. To judge oneself by one's successes is simply to observe that one's postulates worked and breeds confidence in one's ability. To have to be _told_ it worked only criticizes one's own eyesight and hands a spear to the enemy to make his wound of vanity at his will. Applause is nice. It's great to be thanked and admired. But to work only for that? And his craving for that, his addiction to the most unstable drug in history - fame - killed Bolivar. That self-offered spear. He told the world continually how to kill him - reduce its esteem. So as money and land can buy any quantity of cabals, he could be killed by curdling the esteem, the easiest thing you can get a mob to do.

But that is just a theory, isn't it?

Robert Vaughn Young
writer@eskimo.com