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L. Ron Hubbard, My 2019 View

I have been associated with Scientology (the subject) since Easter 1954.


This article, written in September/October 2019, summarises some of my views and experiences with regard to Ron and his goings-on with Scientology. If you are interested in the bloke, L. Ron Hubbard and have done a bit of investigation, what I have discovered and described here may be a bit of help to you to get an even broader picture.


There has been a lot said and written by and about L. Ron Hubbard. Generally speaking what has been written and said is slanted. Scientology and sources favourable to Scientology emphasises and exaggerates the positive. Others, including those have been ARC broken with Scientology, emphasise, sometimes exaggerate and sometimes invents, negative aspects. With these two different viewpoints and an enormous amount of written and spoken words forming a general opinion on Ron Hubbard and his work is a trifle difficult. So to add to the confusion here is my viewpoint after many years of experience, study, and some thought. Summarised as concisely as I can.


1950


This was the year of issue of Dianetics: Modern Science of Mental Health. It became rather quickly a bestseller. I think that a possibility is that this was a complete surprise to Ron Hubbard, something he was unprepared for. He had been a successful science fiction and other Pulp Fiction author in the time of the great depression in USA with a relatively small group of admirers. He had to deal, suddenly, with two things. Firstly, vested interests (apparently the American Psychiatric Association (APA) and the American Medical Association (AMA) ) felt themselves and their interests threatened and employed covert (and possibly illegal) methods to fight Scientology. At the time I came into Scientology there was still talk of people being sent in for auditing who were highly unstable and who "freaked out" the moment an auditor tried to handle them. Secondly, Ron, with very little of an organisation, was inundated with requests for training. I found that Jack Horner, one of the very first Scientologists, reported a waiting list of 500 people. That is quite something to handle with no organisation.


So in the first years, I suspect, L.Ron Hubbard was faced with enormous problems and confusions and it was possibly unlikely that he had access to competent therapy. In fact asking for help in that direction could have appeared to be an admission of failure of his own therapy. It might have been somewhat against his nature to ask for help!


Service FAC


The service FAC (also known as Service Facsimile) includes amongst its components the desire or compulsion to dominate and the desire or compulsion to avoid being dominated. The subject was discovered (or rediscovered) in Scientology and level IV of the Scientology gradation chart is supposed to handle it. My observation is that a person can have a number of service FAC's and that many Scientologists including those who have taken level IV still display a strong tendency to dominate. I have noted this in myself (and incidentally noticed in others a tendency, sometimes marked, to react strongly if they feel that someone is attempting to dominate them by attacking person they see as dominating).


With regard to L. Ron Hubbard history it fairly clearly shows that he has got rid of people close to him who appeared to be somewhat on a level with him and thus perceived to be liable to dominate him. David Mayo, Otto Roos, are examples from the early days. Jack Horner suffered from this.

 

 

Creating big effects (out of gradient)

It has been remarked that Ron was not all that good at following his own advice.

In an 18th ACC lecture entitled "The Effect Scale" Ron carefully delineated a scale the principle which I found rather important. A principal as I understood it was that in handling other people one is wise to work towards creating a small effect on them, this being often more acceptable than trying to create a big effect. This idea was notably violated in the fifth London ACC (see: http://scientolipedia.org/info/5th_London_ACC ). Here one tried to locate the most abberative incident on the person's time track, and run that. It was a notable failure.

Why? It was trying to create a big effect (the most abberative of incident in their lives) and thus violating the principle of approaching things on an appropriate gradient.

A partial clue to what was going on in the Sea Org seems to me to be that, in the early days probably DMSMH, Ron discovered what he called "necessity level". The principal was in the area of unusually challenging conditions a person was able to achieve more than they would normally achieve. It works occasionally.  Ron seemed to come to try and use it all the time

 Blurry time in Ron's life

In the time after the Great Split (about 1985) there was a lot of uninhibited communication going on about Ron Hubbard and Scientology. Communication and research in that direction by individual "church" individuals had become very inhibited in those areas. Now curiosity and communication were rife. One of the things that was noticed was that in checking through the life of L Ron Hubbard as available publicly there was some confusion about what he did in the beginning of the Second World War.

Later some data has come up which gives a hint of what was going on. The concept behind it is the fact (theory) that if some secret operation is being undertaken that must not be known about, whether or not it could be classified as "intelligence" or not, there is an element of secrecy and misinformation concerning the activities of the persons involved at that time. A participants officially available service record could be altered to conceal some secret.

The theory (and I will not go into substantiating evidence here, see the end of this article) is that:

(a) L. Ron Hubbard and another person who later to become a Scientologist, Woodward (Woody) McPheeters, worked amongst others on a secret mission which had the intention of understanding German mentality.

(b) amongst other things they studied was a book in German entitled (Scientologie: Wissenschaft von der Beschaffenhelt und der Tauglichkeit des Wissens) by an Argentinian German, Dr. A.Nordenholz.

Woody McPheeters was American but his mother was German and bought him up speaking the German language.

Apart from the name which could be translated as Scientology it contains three axioms which have been likened to the first three Scientology axioms.

The theory was that Ron took both the name and the first three Scientology axioms from that book.

I can remember the name Woody McPheeters from the fifties, his name appeared in the American magazine Ability which I received. He had produced and got printed a translation of the book and in the sixties he was thoroughly trounced by L Ron Hubbard.

I am suggesting that having this secret to hide had some probably significant influence on Ron's behaviour and life. Therefore perhaps on the development of Scientology.

……

References:

http://ivymag.org/cyberivy/IVy_106.pdf cyber IVy number 106, scroll down to page 8 etc.


In the print IVys there is an attempt by C.B.Willis to summarise parts of the book's and some other comments. All print IVy's are at the following:http://articles.ivymag.org/pdfs.html. They take time to load (all 89 front pages) and near the end of the preliminary blurb is a link to contents lists under title and author. The C.B. Willis articles are in IVy's 29, 30, 32, 35 (there is a contents list at the beginning of each IVy)


 

Micromanaging


Ron once said or wrote something which warmed my heart. It was to the effect that some managers with the staff under them had a tendency to do the interesting parts of the junior's work and leave them with the drudgery. I had never seen it happen in life (I had only worked in very small firms). I was in the position for some years to be able to read as they came out the Policy Letters which Ron wrote (Bulletins also). I read them avidly and they seemed to be very interesting and valuable things in them. There was one point where I had a live sort of audience with Ron. It was not really a conversation as he did most of the talking. However I did mention to him some problems I was having with my work. A day or so afterwards he wrote a Policy Letter which impressed me at the time. Now it kind of horrifies me seeing how he micromanaged (or tried to) what he intended to be a small post in a large organisation (? LINK). The same applies to the Green Volumes (the major policy letters of Scientology)


Saint Hill.


I do not have a good picture of where he previously lived with his family (wife and four children) so this one is a trifle hypothetical. I do know that he was frequently crossing the Atlantic, spending part of his time in the USA and part in London or elsewhere. Somewhat nomadic.


But when he came to St Hill he had rather sumptuous premises in which to run his business and bring up a family and a very amenable butler to seek for his every need. Could it be that at that point, for the sake of others, the family, he decided to compromise his ethical standards slightly in order to retain his sumptuous living conditions?


Building a cult on stable data.


You hopefully understand the Scientology principle of confusion and stable data. A stable datum does not have to be true. So far as most of us know now the world is round, but it was a stable datum to many of the world was flat, and those who thought otherwise were ostracised (et cetera).


You can build a cult on (often untrue) stable data creating a little universe of true believers.


The cult of Scientology is held together by belief in stable data some of which I believe to be untrue.


You may hold some of the stable data of Scientology to be true and I am going now to go into an area which may be uncomfortable. I was interviewed, and the interview is now on YouTube, about my for experiences in four decades with regard to clear. LINK


In the interview I am a bit vague, I think. This is because I want to avoid too heavy a disruption of some people's stable data. Stable advances are made on a gradient, and I did not want to make too steep a gradient, for some (query many).


Clear


I think one of Hubbard's errors was to repeat a successful action without taking into account the fact that the environment in which the successful action was a successful no longer existed.


This applies particularly to DMSMH which was a roaring success when first issued. Hubbard had it re-issued many times without editing it concerning the things which have since been found not to be true. It also applies to the concept of Clear. Clear, as stated ("A being who is unrepressed and self-determined"), was an absolute and absolutes are unattainable.


It is a very sad story. Scientology was capable of handling many peoples ruins (not all, for example it could not raise the dead routinely). Instead of handling things that bothered people in daily life routinely and successfully they concentrated on plugging the idea of clear. If only Scientology Org's had concentrated on finding peoples wooden ring me one ruins and handling them! It could have promulgated data on problems and help people to handle their problems. That is going at it at their reality level rather than concentrating on the utopian idea of clear.


A datum which I believe is true is that Scientology can do an enormous amount for handling individuals individual problems and worries. I have no objection to your making that a stable datum.


Gradients of Clear


David Mayo did a valiant job of trying to resolve the difficulty of clear being a utopian concept, and people who were declared clear not always behaving as they were expected to behave (as superhumans)behave .


We will not go into it here but I recommend you in a moment of leisure to read David Mayo's article on clear, which was written when David was thrown out of the church and was facing very unpleasant legal action by the church. Here is the link to it: LINK


Two Technical Things


A) In a Bulletin Ron gives the end phenomenon for the state of Clear (which is not to be told to anybody who is not officially Clear, secrecy being a possible indicator of some dirty tricks going on) and the definition of Clear. I personally do not see that getting that end phenomenon would necessarily produce that state. With my knowledge of tech it does not add up for me.


B) Many people have blown staff posts on Scientology organisations. There was when I was in the church a prevalent datum that blowing (leaving a job or place contrary to expectations or promises) was caused by overts and withholds regarding the thing one was blowing from. This is not true in my opinion. A person will leave a place because his affinity for it is low. I came across a rather chilling reference to this. Here is the link to it:https://www.forum.exscn.net/threads/bill-franks-story-about-brainwashing-thread-merge.22265/


Epilogue


This is not intended to be a definitive, authoritarian article on Ron, but it gives some data and viewpoints to help forward your own personal research and appraisal into L Ron Hubbard. I personally have found that he produced some good and valuable stuff and hope that you also, with or without his assistance, get similar help in leading a life which is successfull and satisfying to you and your associates.
  Now a question to you reader: have I missed something out which you found valuable in understanding L Ron Hubbard? If so please write and tell me: ant.phillips@post8.tele.dk . I am very grateful to you if you do that and warn you that if I find it suitable I will add it to this article possibly with your name or a pseudonym you choose to tell me.

Antony A Phillips