No CrossRef data available.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 June 2018
Developed in the early 1950s by science fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard, Scientology was part of the larger postwar therapeutic culture that blended religion and psychology in a search for mental well-being. Unlike contemporaneous self-help gurus such as Norman Vincent Peale and Harry Overstreet, however, Hubbard painted a much bleaker portrait of modern life, one rife with forces of psychological and social control. Railing against communists, homosexuals, and feminists as well as against the decay of the family and the rise of the welfare state, Hubbard argued that Americans suffered from a waning sense of ontological security, living in a world that provided no support for self-identity. Hubbard refused, however, to shrink from such changes and lapse into nostalgia for a pre-modern, pre-technological world like Peale and others did; instead, he offered a way for individuals to appropriate the dynamism of modernity for themselves. As advanced industrialization erased distances between societies, revolutionized transportation, and computerized information systems, Hubbard reimagined the self as spiritual being possessing precisely those powers to manipulate time and space and to remake the world at large. Borrowing freely from Eastern religious ideas, cybernetic theory, and German idealism, Hubbard produced a philosophy that was staunchly libertarian, spiritual, and future-oriented, one that tapped into Cold War fears about psychological manipulation and waning personal autonomy and into dreams about the immanent power of human beings.
1. U.S. Federal Civil Defense Administration, Survival under Atomic Attack (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1950).
2. Val Peterson, “Panic: The Ultimate Weapon?” Collier's (August 21, 1953): 99–110.
3. On civil defense in the early Cold War, see Guy Oakes and Andrew Grossman, “Managing Nuclear Terror: The Genesis of American Civil Defense Strategy,” International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society 5, (Spring 1992): 361–403.
4. Lasch, Christopher, The Minimal Self: Psychic Survival in Troubled Times (New York: W.W. Norton, 1984), 4.Google Scholar
5. “The Age of Psychology in the U.S.,” Life 42, (1957): 68.
6. Schlesinger, Arthur Jr., The Vital Center: The Politics of Freedom (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1949), 244.Google Scholar
7. Herman, Ellen, The Romance of American Psychology: Political Culture in the Age of Experts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995).Google Scholar
8. Ron Hubbard, L., All about Radiation (Los Angeles: Scientology Publications Organization, 1957), 46.Google Scholar
9. Ibid., 50.
10. Melley, Timothy, Empire of Conspiracy: The Culture of Paranoia in Postwar America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000), 7.Google Scholar
11. Heidegger, Martin, “Letter on ‘Humanism,’” in Pathmarks, ed. William McNeill (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 245.Google Scholar
12. In this sense, I am following the lead of Hugh Urban, Lawrence Wright, and others who have located the origins of Scientology in the social and cultural history of the 1950s. In contrast to Urban, however, who sees Hubbard as a “bricoleur” who, following the zeitgeist of the decade, combined “religion and secular culture” in an effort to update religion in a scientific age, I argue that Scientology operated in the 1950s more as a form of survivalism in a world that Hubbard believed was on the brink of catastrophe. In other words, Lawrence Wright is a bit closer to the mark in stressing the “immense trauma” of World War II that opened the door for a litany of self-help philosophies. But Scientology’s staunchly individualistic and libertarian bent distinguished it from other movements and accounts for its appeal both during and after the rise of the counterculture the next decade. See Urban, Hugh, The Church of Scientology: A History of a New Religion (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), 59–60;Google Scholar and Wright, Lawrence, Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2013)Google Scholar,
63. 13. “The Life of Stress,” Time 56, (October 9, 1950): 93–94.
14. Selye, Hans, The Stress of Life (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1956), 3.Google Scholar
15. On the history of the concept of stress, see Mark Jackson, The Age of Stress: Science and the Search for Stability (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).
16. Wolff, Harold, Stress and Disease (Springfield, Ill.: Charles C. Thomas, 1953), 19.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
17. Havemann, Ernest, “The Age of Psychology in the U.S.,” Life 42, (January 7, 1957): 77.Google Scholar
18. “For the Psyche,” Time 48, (September 2, 1946): 73.
19. On Hubbard's life, see Miller, Russell, Bare-Faced Messiah: The True Story of L. Ron Hubbard (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1987),Google Scholar Reitman, Janet, Inside Scientology: The Story of America's Most Secretive Religion (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011)Google Scholar, and Wright, Going Clear.
20. Quoted in Atack, John, A Piece of Blue Sky: Scientology, Dianetics, and L. Ron Hubbard Exposed (New York: Carol Publishing Group, 1990), 83.Google Scholar
21. Wright, Going Clear, 22.
22. Hubbard, All about Radiation, 56.
23. Ron Hubbard, L., Dianetics: The Original Thesis (Los Angeles: Church of Scientology of California, Publications Organization, 1976), 141.Google Scholar
24. Helen O’Brien, Dianetics in Limbo (Philadelphia: Whitmore Publishing Co., 1966), 30.
25. Wright, Going Clear, 57.
26. Ron Hubbard, L., Dianetics: The Evolution of a Science (Commerce, Calif.: Bridge Publications, 2007), 35.Google Scholar
27. Ron Hubbard, L., Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health (Los Angeles: Bridge Publications, 2007), 38.Google Scholar
28. Ibid, 74.
29. Ibid.
30. Edwards, Paul N., The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996), 163–64.Google Scholar
31. “Of Two Minds,” Time 56, (July 24, 1950): 64.
32. Hubbard, Dianetics: The Evolution of a Science, 3–5.
33. Ibid., 70.
34. Ibid., 56.
35. Mills, John A., Control: A History of Behavioral Psychology (New York: New York University Press, 1998).Google Scholar
36. Hubbard, Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health, 37.
37. On the Korean War brainwashing scare, see Robert Genter, “‘Hypnotizzy’ in the Cold War: The American Fascination with Hypnotism in the 1950s,” Journal of American Culture 29, (June 2006): 154–69.
38. Tucker, Robert, “Stalin and the Uses of Psychology,” World Politics 8, (July 1956): 455–83.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
39. “The War for the POW's Mind,” New York Times (September 13, 1953): 13.
40. Ron Hubbard, L., Scientology: The Fundamentals of Thought (Los Angeles: American St. Hill Organization, 1971), 60.Google Scholar
41. Ibid., 13.
42. FBI airgram, April 17, 1951, Havana, Cuba. Federal Bureau of Investigation Freedom of Information / Privacy Acts Section. Subject: Church of Scientology/L. Ron Hubbard, 1951–1991, File Number 62-94080.
43. Wiener, Norbert, Cybernetics: or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1948), 128.Google Scholar
44. Ron Hubbard, L., Science of Survival (Los Angeles: Bridge Publications, Inc., 1979), 49.Google Scholar
45. Ibid., 90.
46. Ibid., 124.
47. Hubbard, All about Radiation, 76.
48. L. Ron Hubbard, Letter to Attorney General, May 14, 1951. Federal Bureau of Investigation Freedom of Information / Privacy Acts Section. Subject: Church of Scientology/L. Ron Hubbard, 1951–1991, File Number 62-94080.
49. Ron Hubbard, L., “Brainwashing Manual: History,” in The Technical Bulletins of Dianetics and Scientology, vol. 2 (Los Angeles: Scientology Publications, 1976), 313.Google Scholar
50. “Washing Brains of POWs: Can They Be Rewashed?” Newsweek 41, (May 11, 1953): 37.
51. See Wright and Reitman.
52. See Miller, p. 199–201.
53. Ron Hubbard, L., “The Limitations of Homo Novis,” Technical Bulletins, 1:403.Google Scholar
54. Hubbard, Science of Survival, 119.
55. Hubbard, Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health, 125.
56. Ron Hubbard, L., The Problems of Work: Scientology Applied to the Work-a-Day World (Los Angeles: Church of Scientology, Publications Organization, 1972), 31;Google Scholar Ron Hubbard, L., Self Analysis (Los Angeles: Bridge Publications, 1995), 151.Google Scholar
57. Hubbard, Science of Survival, 98.
58. Hubbard, The Problems of Work: Scientology Applied to the Work-a-Day World, 91.
59. Wiener, Norbert, The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1954), 46.Google Scholar
60. Ron Hubbard, L., Dianetics 55! (Los Angeles: Bridge Publications, 1982), 15.Google Scholar
61. See Wuthnow, Robert, After Heaven: Spirituality in America since the 1950s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
62. Hubbard, Scientology: The Fundamentals, 57.
63. Ibid., 56.
64. See Ellwood, Robert S., The Fifties Spiritual Marketplace: American Religion in a Decade of Conflict (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1997).Google Scholar
65. Quoted in Urban, The Church of Scientology, 58.
66. Ron Hubbard, L., Scientology 0-8: The Book of Basics (Los Angeles: American St. Hill Organization, 1970), 8.Google Scholar
67. Ron Hubbard, L., The Phoenix Lectures (Los Angeles: Church of Scientology of California, Publications Organization, 1969), 10.Google Scholar
68. See Genter, “‘Hypnotizzy’ in the Cold War.”
69. Ron Hubbard, L., Have You Lived before This Life? (Los Angeles: Church of Scientology of California, Publications Organization, 1975), 169.Google Scholar
70. Ron Hubbard, L., Scientology 8-8008 (Los Angeles: American St. Hill Organization, 1968), 3.Google Scholar
71. Hubbard, Dianetics 55! 19.
72. Hubbard, Scientology 8-8008, 25.
73. Quoted in Kenny, Anthony, Philosophy in the Modern World, Vol. 4 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 169.Google Scholar
74. Hubbard, Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health, 613.
75. Hubbard, Dianetics 55! 15.
76. Hubbard, Scientology 8-8008, 14.
77. Hubbard, The Phoenix Lectures, 94.
78. See Coward, Harold, The Perfectibility of Human Nature in Eastern and Western Thought (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008)Google Scholar, chaps. 7 and 8. On Hubbard's debt to Eastern sources, see Flinn, Frank K., “Scientology as Technological Buddhism,” in Scientology, ed. Lewis, James R. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 209–23.Google Scholar
79. Ron Hubbard, L., “Why Doctor of Divinity,” in Technical Bulletins, 2:73.Google Scholar
80. Quoted in Low, Albert, Zen and the Sutras (Boston: Tuttle Publishing, 2000), 137.Google Scholar
81. See Malhotra, Ashok Kumar, An Introduction to Yoga Philosophy (Burlington: Ashgate, 2001), chap. 8.Google Scholar
82. See Schmidt, Leigh Eric, Restless Souls: The Making of American Spirituality (San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 2005), 156.Google Scholar
83. Hubbard, Scientology: The Fundamentals, 68.
84. Hubbard, Scientology 8-8008, 73.
85. Ron Hubbard, L., The Creation of Human Ability (Los Angeles: Church of Scientology of California Publications Organization, 1954), 248.Google Scholar
86. Ibid., 264.
87. Ibid., 254.
88. Ibid., 260.
89. Ibid., 256.
90. Ibid., 282.
91. Ibid., 259.
92. Hubbard, Scientology 0-8008, 28.
93. Hubbard, “The Limitations of Homo Novis,” 403.
94. Hubbard, Creation, 251.
95. Phelan, James, “Have You Ever Been a Boo-Hoo?” Saturday Evening Post 237 (March 21, 1964), 84.Google Scholar
96. Urban, The Church of Scientology 73.
97. Quoted in Miller, Bare-Faced Messiah, 6.
98. In this sense, I disagree with Leigh Schmidt who argues that spirituality in America, originating as a radical form of Protestantism in the early nineteenth century, has always been tied to “liberal progressivism and a religious left.” Political categories, however, are not so clear cut, and Scientology is one example of how certain spiritual movements, while anti-government and anti-institutional, have little connection to left-wing social reform. In part, this explains why Scientology weathered the currents of the Age of Aquarius and reemerged just as popular in the 1970s during the Age of Watergate. See Schmidt, Restless Souls, xii.
99. Hubbard, “Brainwashing Manual,” 313.
100. See Gregory R. Hansell, and Grassie, William, eds., H+/-: Transhumanism and Its Critics (Philadelphia: Metanexus Institute, 2011).Google Scholar
101. Hubbard, All about Radiation, 29.