Why Hubbard's Personal Life Matters

by Chris Owen

From	Chris Owen <chriso@lutefisk.OISPAMNOdemon.co.uk>
Subject	For CONFRONT23: Why Hubbard's personal life matters
Date	2000/03/26
Msg-ID	<$ao1GPADve34EwnK​@lutefisk.demon.co.uk>
Newsgroups	alt.religion.scientology

I do believe that LRH's personal life matters, as it affects (a) the workability of Scientology and (b) the integrity of Scientology.

Let's take the latter first. It's a matter of incontrovertible public record that Hubbard had a turbulent personal life. His first two marriages were failures. His son from his first marriage disowned him and was disinherited as a result. His second marriage was bigamous. He denounced his second wife as a Communist secret agent and his daughter from his second marriage as not being fathered by him. His third wife was imprisoned for crimes committed on his behalf. His youngest son committed suicide. All of this is a matter of undisputed factual record.

So what do Scientology and Hubbard have to say about this? Hubbard says, on camera, that he had a first and third wife but no second wife (!). Scientology biographies either barely touch upon his marriages or don't mention them at all, perhaps unsurprisingly given the embarrassing facts. Given what Hubbard says about the importance of the family, the second dynamic, why is so little said about his own? Surely it is of relevance to his biographers? And why did he lie blatantly about his marital history?

This wouldn't make any difference if Scientology was amoral. Einstein's equations had no bearing or influence whatsoever on his personal life. e would still equal mc2 no matter what Einstein did. Hubbard, however, set himself up as a moralist, stressing the importance of truth and accuracy. Yet he and his Church have consistently been untruthful and inaccurate in statements about his personal life. This shows at the very least that both Scientology and Hubbard have not practiced what they preach, and therefore have a significant lack of integrity.

How does this affect the workability of Scientology? What do you mean by workability? I assume that this means — does Scientology do what it claims to do? Well, does it?

There's no doubt that Scientology produces subjectively similar phenomena. Enough people have reported experiencing mental flashbacks and exteriorisation during auditing to make it clear that something is going on. But recognising that a phenomenon exists is a long way from accepting that a particular explanation of it is correct. An example: the phenomenon of the movement of the stars and planets has been recognised for millennia. The Egyptians believed that the planets were moved around by the gods and the sun pushed across the sky by a giant dung beetle. The Greeks believed that the stars and planets were fixed to the inside of giant rotating spheres centred on the Earth — the sound made by this giant celestial engine was the famed "music of the spheres". The Victorians believed that the stars passed through a viscous fluid called aether, which allowed light to propagate. We believe that the stars and planets' movement is governed by gravitational influences produced by concentrations of matter distorting the space around them.

What distinguishes these competing theories? Why can we be so confident that our modern explanation is the right one and all the others wrong? The answer is experimental proof. The present-day theory of cosmic motions being due to gravitation interactions is provable by multiple routes. For instance: Earthbound observation and experimentation; mathematical proofs; sending people and probes into space to test the theory directly. Each of these experimental routes has, independently of any of the others, provided strong evidence supporting the theory.

Compare this to Scientology. The central principles of Scientology are the engram theory — of cellular memory traces — and the theory that a bodyless being called a thetan is resident inside every human body. The engram hypothesis pre-dates Scientology by many years but has never been accepted as a credible theory, not least because physical evidence — such as PET scans and electron microscopy, techniques unavailable in Hubbard's day — shows it to be increasingly unlikely. It is significant that Hubbard himself never provided a convincing explanation of the mechanism by which engrams are recorded and retrieved. The closest he came to it appears to have been in his essay "The Rediscovery of the Human Soul" (see http://www.ronthephilosopher.org/page32.htm):

"[A biology major at George Washington University] remark[ed] to me that the brain contained an exorbitant number of molecules of protein and that each molecule 'had been discovered' to have holes in it. Fascinated, I bled him of data and a few days later made the time to calculate memory.

It seemed to me that if molecules had holes in them to a certain number, then memory, perchance, might be stored in these holes in the molecules. At least it was more reasonable than the texts I had read. But the calculation, done with considerably higher math than psychologists or biologists use, yet yielded a blank result. I calculated that memory was 'made' at a certain rate and was stored in the holes in these punched protein molecules in the form of the most minute energy of which we had any record in physics. But despite the enormous number of molecular holes and the adequate amount of memory, the entire project yielded only this result: I was forced to conclude, no matter how liberal I became, that even with this system, certainly below cellular level, the brain did not have enough storage for more than three months of memory."

Hubbard evidently managed to resolve this problem in his own mind, as he was able to assert in Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health:

"The engram is not a memory; it is a cellular trace of recordings impinged deeply into the very structure of the body itself."

(D:MSMH, 1988 ed, p. 172)

"The word engram, in dianetics is used in its severely accurate sense as a 'definite and permanent trace left by a stimulus on the protoplasm of a tissue.' It is considered as a unit group of stimuli impinged solely on the cellular being."

(D:MSMH, 1988 ed, footnote p. 82)

Note that Hubbard never states what his "calculations" were or how he verified the existence of these "molecular holes" scattered through the body's cells. He also provides no explanation for how engrams are recorded on cellular tissue or how engrammatically stored memories are retrieved. He claims that enormous amounts of data have been collected and not a single exception to his theory have been found. But where is this data? It's never been published. Instead Hubbard just asserts his claims or presents anecdotes and hypothetical examples as "evidence".

The hypothesis of the thetan is an even starker example of this tendency. Belief in the existence of an intangible spiritual entity residing within the human body is, of course, not unique to Scientology. But as far as I know, no other religious philosophy has claimed that it could detect the existence of the spirit though scientific means.

Not even Hubbard claimed (as far as I know) that the thetan could be detected directly — intangible things generally cannot be. The entire thetan hypothesis, and with it the whole of Scientology, rests on being able to detect phenomena caused by the actions of the thetan. Enter the E-meter — the electropsychogalvanometer, to give it its full name. There would be no Scientology without this instrument. Hubbard explains in "Electropsychometric Auditing — Operating Manual" (in Technical Volumes of Dianetics & Scientology vol. 1) that

"The E-Meter works on a very easily understood principle. It measures the relative density of the body. The relative density is changed as the facsimiles [memories] change. The E-Meter then registers shifts in thought. And it registers in particular shifts in thought relating closely to the questions asked by the E-Meter operator. The operator asks, the facsimiles shift under his asking. The E-Meter measures the shift. Thus the mind is read."

Hubbard's fundamental assumption here is that memories have mass —

"Mental mass has a higher electrical resistance and so measures more 'ohms' of resistance, an electrical term for the trouble electricity has in passing through something. The more resistance the more units of resistance are recorded on the meter."

(HCOB 4 Jan 1971R, "Exteriorization and high TA")

So the E-meter does not actually detect the thetan; instead, it detects the physical side-effects of a thetan accessing and discarding memories. But nowhere does he explain how exactly a thought — which is an merely a momentary electrical impulse — gains mass. Again he simply states this without providing any proofs or corroborative evidence. He also does not suggest any alternative explanations for the undeniable phenomena recorded on the E-meter — what of the role of biofeedback, for example?

This is why Hubbard's personal life is of fundamental importance to the workability of Scientology. His research and data have never been published, only his conclusions. Every important aspect of Scientology, asserts Hubbard, is due to his efforts alone. Hubbard and his Church display a ruthless attitude to anyone who tries to develop his work further (can you imagine any science taking this line? — physicists suing Einstein for challenging Newtonian gravitation?). There is no objective evidence that Scientology actually does what it claims to do. Do Scientologists really have higher IQs, reduced vulnerability to bacteria and the ability to influence events and physical objects through thought alone? This would be easily tested; why hasn't it been? Scientology can't even explain coherently, if at all, why it "works".

At the end of the day, Scientology is inseparable from L. Ron Hubbard. It tries to plug the gaping evidential gaps in its assertions by pointing to Hubbard's reputation as the great humanitarian, "Man's greatest friend". Surely such a paragon of virtue cannot be mistaken or untruthful? Scientology is dependent upon the integrity of its founder for its credibility. If that integrity is perceived as lacking the consequences for Scientology are potentially devastating. The CoS understands that very well, which is why they've spent so much time and money attacking authors of critical biographies of Hubbard (myself included).

In short: Hubbard's personal life matters because Scientology has made it matter.