Profile of L. Ron Hubbard

Founder of the Church of Scientology, Author, and Narcissist

Professor Erich Fromm would have diagnosed Scientology's founder, L Ron Hubbard, as suffering from an extreme form of Narcissistic Personality Disorder. Not only did he found a religious organization to honor him and his thought, but also a military unit to protect him and his 'works' and execute his orders. In an all too brief moment of clarity in the early 1950s, he asked for psychiatric help, but left before he could be adequately assessed and treated.

Hubbard was a sporadic attendee of Washington University's School of Engineering from 1930 to 1932. Dr. Christopher Evan's pithy volume on Scientology recalls his other notorious academic achievement having purchased his PhD for $250 at Sequoia University of California:The Cult of Unreason: " well known to quacks on the West Coast as a degree mill where `qualifications' could be bought for suitable sums."

Over three decades later, on March 8 1966 he took an advertisement in the personal column of The Times, `resigning' his degree in the following words: "I, L Ron Hubbard of Saint Hill Manor, East Grinstead, having reviewed the damage being done in our society with nuclear physics and psychiatry by persons calling themselves `Doctor', do hereby resign in protest my university degree as a doctor of philosophy (Ph.D.)..."

In the intervening war years, Hubbard signed up for the Navy in 1940 but never saw action, spending time in training institutions, hospitals and on leave. His brief command of a small submarine chaser ended in disaster when he ordered his crew to fire live rounds at America's ally, Mexico. He was relieved of command and put under close supervision as a navigator on a Liberty ship; he signed himself into hospital complaining of ulcers and conjunctivitis the day before the ship left for combat in the Pacific.

L. Ron Hubbard's Excalibur, Xenu and Dianetics

Though these lesser-known details of his biography may paint a different picture of the man than his propaganda, I can say as a cult member for 20 years in his militant inner circle, that they are evidence of a mindset he cultivated - to view the world around one with mistrust and apprehension. This was just one of many mechanisms employed to keep us obedient and fearful of leaving.

The organization operating under the name 'Scientology' and later on Hubbard's own militant 'praetorian guard' The Sea Organization had its origins in his fiction. He wrote short stories for 8 years during the 1930s for a pulp fiction magazine. He also wrote pornographic texts; an aspect of his literary career his church publicity officers keep under wraps.

Hubbard dug up his unpublished manuscript, the science fiction novel Excalibur about a galactic overlord called Xenu who banished millions of his subjects to the 'prison planet' Earth. The book's hook was Dianetics, a mixture of mind-control techniques and scrambled versions of both Freudian and Jungian psychoanalysis. It eventually became part of a body of 'research' Hubbard called 'The Tech', which he made available to his followers for a price.

His followers were brainwashed into believing they were the vanguard of a new civilization that would eventually overwhelm the institutions of state, learning, and religion with Hubbard's brand of social obedience and thus avert the coming apocalypse.

The manuscript became part of the mysterious Scientology 'holy of holies' secret knowledge that would only be revealed to the follower after years of extensive conditioning and parting with large sums of money.

At this 'level' one would attain superhuman abilities, read minds, operate as a conscious unit outside the confines of the body, become aware of 'past lives' and so on. It is a hook the Church uses today to keep members paying, donating time or, in the case of Hubbard's military, their whole lives, to the cause. Luckily, I escaped with mine, 20 years too late.