L. Ron Hubbard

Lafayette Ron Hubbard is the founder of Scientology, Dianetics (explanation of Dianetics can be found at this Wikipedia page or this Scientology page), and the Sea Org. According to Scientologists, Hubbard is a founder, a humanitarian, and an artist. According to the rest of the world, Hubbard is a science fiction author and founder of a religion.

Born in 1911, he founded the Church in 1954. He was a very influential person, whether it be “tribesmen in Southern Africa” who know him as an educator, “factory workers across Eastern Europe who know him only for his administrative discoveries”, “children in Southeast Asia who know him only as the author of their moral code” or, “readers in dozens of languages who know him only for his novels”. This is all according to Scientologists, however, even non-Scientologists recognize him as influential, as he was one of Smithsonian magazine’s top 100 most significant Americans of all time.

He dropped out of college during his second year and began writing for pulp magazines in the 1930’s. After a brief time spent in the Marine Corps during World War II, he published his book about Dianetics, titled “Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health”, in 1950.

After WWII, Dianetics became increasingly popular along with his book, which became a bestseller, though its scientific legitimacy was always questioned. In 1952, Hubbard introduced the E-Meter, which helped the process of auditing and also helped progress Dianetics into a religion. It is said that Hubbard derived the term Scientology from “the Latin scio (study) and the Greek logos (knowing)” according to this article. This theory of the science of knowledge, or a religion based on the science of knowledge is what initially intrigued me. A later post will explain more on how this is not at all what Scientology is about, if you haven’t gathered that already.

After Hubbard died in 1986 due to health issues, following around six years of hiding because of legal threats and scrutiny, Scientologist “prodigy” David Miscavige took over and has been in power ever since. The church proclaims that his death was a conscious decision to leave his body to obtain higher spiritual levels. Leah Remini explains on her documentary series titled “Leah Remini: Scientology and the Aftermath” that “The core belief of Scientology is that you are a spiritual being… L. Ron Hubbard had reached, obviously, the highest level of Scientology there was to reach, promoting this idea that there’s an afterlife, and he found the answer to it by deciding to discard this body to go explore new OT levels. All of this is bulls–t. L. Ron Hubbard died of a stroke”. My next post will explore more about Miscavige and the effect of this transition of power.

Further Reading:

Scientologists have set up this website that talks about all of Hubbard’s achievements and a history of his life.

If you would like to read on some of the controversies surrounding Hubbard, this website talks about a few. (It is important to keep in mind that these are not proven facts but are simply interesting to read about. This website may not the most credible, as it uses very entertaining titles that can be considered clickbait, but it does list all of their authors and links to all of their sources.)

Hubbard has also reportedly said, “You don’t get rich writing science fiction. If you want to get rich, you start a religion,” at a meeting of the Eastern Science Fiction Association in November 1948 as a response to an audience question about making money from writing.