Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief
✒️ Author: Lawrence Wright |. 📖 Published: 2013 | 🗓 Read: March 6, 2020 | 📄 Pages: 450
Summary
Based on more than two hundred personal interviews with current and former Scientologists—both famous and less well known—and years of archival research, Lawrence Wright uses his extraordinary investigative ability to uncover for us the inner workings of the Church of Scientology.
At the book’s center, two men whom Wright brings vividly to life, showing how they have made Scientology what it is today: The darkly brilliant science-fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard, whose restless, expansive mind invented a new religion. And his successor, David Miscavige—tough and driven, with the unenviable task of preserving the church after the death of Hubbard.
We learn about Scientology’s complicated cosmology and special language. We see the ways in which the church pursues celebrities, such as Tom Cruise and John Travolta, and how such stars are used to advance the church’s goals. And we meet the young idealists who have joined the Sea Org, the church’s clergy, signing up with a billion-year contract.
Why You Should Read
You learn all about Scientology. In Going Clear, Wright examines what fundamentally makes a religion a religion, and whether Scientology is, in fact, deserving of this constitutional protection. Lawrence Wright has given us an evenhanded yet keenly incisive book that reveals the very essence of what makes Scientology the institution it is.
Notable Highlights
“What is true is what is true for you. No one has any right to force data on you and command you to believe it or else. If it is not true for you, it isn’t true. Think your own way through things, accept what is true for you, discard the rest. There is nothing unhappier than one who tries to live in a chaos of lies.”
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Scientologists believe that Hubbard discovered the existential truths that form their doctrine through extensive research—in that way, it is “science.”
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The method Hubbard put forward created a road map toward his own ideal self. Hubbard’s habits, his imagination, his goals and wishes—his character, in other words—became both the basis and the destination of Scientology.
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Only Scientology can awaken individuals to the joyful truth of their immortal state. Only Scientology can rescue humanity from its inevitable doom. The recruits were infused with a sense of mystery, purpose, and intrigue. Life inside Scientology was just so much more compelling than life outside.
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The ultimate goal of auditing is not just to liberate a person from destructive mental phenomena; it is to emancipate him from the laws of matter, energy, space, and time—or MEST, as Hubbard termed them. These are just artifacts of the thetan’s imagination, in any case.
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He could easily invent an elaborate, plausible universe. But it is one thing to make that universe believable, and another to believe it. That is the difference between art and religion.
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Dianetics, Hayakawa noted, was neither science nor fiction, but something else: “fictional science.”
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“To keep a person on the Scientology path,” Hubbard once told one of his associates, “feed him a mystery sandwich.”
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Religion is always an irrational enterprise, no matter how ennobling it may be to the human spirit.
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Anthropologists have called schizophrenia the “shaman sickness,” because part of a shaman’s traditional journey requires suffering an illness that cannot be cured except by spiritual means. The shaman uses the powers and insights he gains from his experience to heal his community. This is exactly the history that Hubbard paints as his own: a blind cripple in the Navy hospital, given up for lost, who then heals himself through techniques he refines into Dianetics.
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The failure of Hubbard’s followers to challenge him made them complicit in the creation of the mythical figure that he became. They conspired to protect the image of L. Ron Hubbard, the prophet, the revelator, and the friend of mankind.
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Even as Hubbard was inventing the doctrine, each of his decisions and actions would become enshrined in Scientology lore as something to be emulated—his cigarette smoking, for instance, which is still a feature of the church’s culture at the upper levels, as are his 1950s habits of speech, his casual misogyny, his aversion to perfume and scented deodorants, and his love of cars and motorcycles and Rolex watches. More significant is the legacy of his belittling behavior toward subordinates and his paranoia about the government. Such traits stamped the religion as an extremely secretive and sometimes hostile organization that saw enemies on every corner.
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In an evident attempt at blackmail, they stole the Los Angeles IRS intelligence files of celebrities and political figures, including California governor Jerry Brown, Los Angeles mayor Tom Bradley, and Frank Sinatra.
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The totalist paradigm begins with shutting off the individual’s access to the outside world, so that his perceptions of reality can be manipulated without interference.
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Lifton points out that in totalist hands, confession is used to exploit vulnerabilities, rather than to provide the solace or forgiveness that therapy and religion seek to provide.
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Scientologists have attested to the value of their training and the insight they derived from their study of the religion. They have the right to believe whatever they choose. But it is a different matter to use the protections afforded a religion by the First Amendment to falsify history, to propagate forgeries, and to cover up human-rights abuses.
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Belief in the irrational is one definition of faith, but it is also true that clinging to absurd or disputed doctrines binds a community of faith together and defines a barrier to the outside world.
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