Lafayette Ronald Hubbard was born on 13 March 1911 in Tilden, Nebraska. His father was in the navy for a while, and his mother worked as a clerk for the state government, but the family moved around a lot during Ronald’s childhood. During the last years of his schooling, he lived mostly with his grandparents in Helena, Montana, apart from some time in Guam, South Pacific, where his father was stationed. He studied civil engineering at George Washington University for a couple of years but then dropped out.
During the 1930s, Hubbard developed a skill at writing in various genres for pulp fiction magazines, particularly science fiction, and is said to have associated with writers such as Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein. His first full-length novel, Buckskin Brigades, was published in 1937, many more followed. During the late 1940s, Hubbard started publishing works about a system of mental health, called Dianetics. After his book Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health became a best-seller, he gave up fiction and focused on promoting Dianetics, writing more books, delivering many lectures and launching various research organisations. The Church of Scientology, founded by Hubbard in 1954, became the most popular and famous of these groups.
Hubbard’s ideas continued to be popular throughout the 1960s and 1970s, establishing many hundreds of churches, missions, and groups around the world with membership rising to six million. However, increasingly Scientology ran into all kinds of legal problems, and eventually Hubbard became a recluse living in various different locations around the world. He had married three times and had had seven children when he died of a stroke in 1986. Wikipedia has a very extensive and well-referenced biography, noting many of the contradictions between official Scientology versions of Hubbard’s life and the facts. For a Scientology view of the man see the official Ron Hubbard website, and for an alternative view see Russell Miller’s Bared-Faced Messiah (available on Chris Owen’s website) or A Piece of Blue Sky by Jon Atack.
While still a teenager, Hubbard made two trips to China. Later the trips were to be mythologised as the source of some of the wisdom that went into the spiritualism in Dianetics and Scientology. But at the time, Hubbard was keeping a diary, and much is made of this by critics of Hubbard and Scientology’s stories about him. Here are three paragraphs from Wikipedia’s text summarising the two trips and the records of those trips in his diary. (The original source of the diary material is given by Atack in his book as ‘exhibits 62, 63, 65, Church of Scientology of California vs. Gerald Armstrong, Superior Court for the County of Los Angeles, case no. C 420153’; and the photo of Hubbard’s diary is also taken from Atack’s book.)
‘Between 1927 and 1929 Hubbard traveled to Japan, China, the Philippines and Guam. Scientology texts present this period in his life as a time when he was intensely curious for answers to human suffering and explored ancient Eastern philosophies for answers, but found them lacking. He is described as traveling to China ‘at a time when few Westerners could enter’ and is said to have spent his time questioning Buddhist lamas and meeting old Chinese magicians. . . Hubbard’s unofficial biographers present a very different account of his travels in Asia. Hubbard’s diaries recorded two trips to the east coast of China. The first was made in the company of his mother while traveling from the United States to Guam in 1927. It consisted of a brief stop-over in a couple of Chinese ports before traveling on to Guam, where he stayed for six weeks before returning home. He recorded his impressions of the places he visited and disdained the poverty of the inhabitants of Japan and China, whom he described as ‘gooks’ and ‘lazy [and] ignorant’. . .
Between October and December 1928 a number of naval families, including Hubbard’s, traveled from Guam to China aboard the USS Gold Star. The ship stopped at Manila in the Philippines before traveling on to Qingdao (Tsingtao) in China. Hubbard and his parents made a side trip to Beijing before sailing on to Shanghai and Hong Kong, from where they returned to Guam. Scientology accounts present a different version of events, saying that Hubbard ‘made his way deep into Manchuria’s Western Hills and beyond - to break bread with Mongolian bandits, share campfires with Siberian shamans and befriend the last in the line of magicians from the court of Kublai Khan.’
However, Hubbard did not record these events in his diary. He remained unimpressed with China and the Chinese, writing: ‘A Chinaman can not live up to a thing, he always drags it down.’ He characterized the sights of Beijing as ‘rubberneck stations’ for tourists and described the palaces of the Forbidden City as ‘very trashy-looking’ and ‘not worth mentioning’. He was impressed by the Great Wall of China near Beijing but concluded of the Chinese: ‘They smell of all the baths they didn’t take. The trouble with China is, there are too many chinks here.’ ’
2 comments:
Your article ignores more than 70% of L. Ron Hubbard's life and is clearly intended to denigrate Mr. Hubbard for his 100th birthday. How low can you go?
Hubbard's journals were the internal musings of a teenage American boy from the 1920s who was seeing Asian culture for the first time. His observations about overcrowded conditions in Beijing in 1928 and the sights, sounds and smells to which he was unaccustomed were expressed in the vernacular of his day and from the viewpoint of his upbringing, not to mention his youthful exuberance. Those isolated comments do not change the fact that he travelled extensively throughout Asia for more than 14 months on several journeys between 1927 and 1929 and that the things he learned contributed to his development of Dianetics and Scientology.
As an adult and after his thoughts about Asia coalesced, Hubbard had this to say about his initial impressions of Asia:
“Here in the East we find a tradition of wisdom and it was that thing more than anything else which came through to me when I was quite young—a tradition of wisdom, the freedom to think—the freedom to be an individual to be as eccentric as one pleases and to lie down and die if it struck one as that was the thing to do. In Coal Hill, just outside Peking, I have seen a coolie sitting on the edge of an open hole, just sitting there and waiting for the groundskeeper to push him in when he was dead. He goes up, he gives to the groundskeeper three coppers, he sits down on the edge of a hole and he wills himself to die. And the groundskeeper will, of course, push him into the hole and push the hole in after him, after this has occurred. What a strange world—a world incomprehensible to a young American—that somebody would simply get tired of life and decide to die. I have seen men lying on the street, starving to death. I’ve seen them receive a broken leg in an accident and simply sit there—just sit there—and no passerby felt even vaguely called upon to do a thing about it. A weird and peculiar country to my frame of reference—you should help people and you should do this and you should do that—but freedom to think, freedom to be and freedom to become anything was predominant. It wasn’t complete carelessness as I first supposed. It was a tradition of intellectual freedom.”
If you have the remotest sense of decency you could actually find out something about L. Ron Hubbard by going to his website, http://www.lronhubbard.org .
Paul,
I am sure you will agree that your article is anything but complete about L. Ron Hubbard, but as you seem to be interested in short biographies you should know the following about your "source" on Mr. Hubbard, Jon Atack.
Jon Atack was expelled from the Church in the early 1980's. Atack wrote and published an unauthorized biography, A Piece of Blue Sky in 1990 (L. Ron Hubbard died in 1986). Atack also became a "deprogrammer" (someone paid to forcibly remove family members from a religion). The book relied exclusively on "stories" dredged up from a handful of apostates, particularly Gerald Armstrong, another apostate who served a "source" of countless bogus claims. Both Atack and Armstrong also served as sources for Russell Miller's unauthorized biography of L. Ron Hubbard. Not surprisingly, there is a great deal of overlap between the books.
John Atack's book spawned litigation in the United Kingdom. In one case, Mr. Atack was held to have defamed a Scientologist who was a school head mistress and in another, Narconon, a Scientology-affiliated drug-abuse treatment program. Mr. Atack's dishonesty and conduct during the litigation resulted in judicial orders impugning his credibility; in one order, the court described him as a "devious" and "unsavory" litigant.
Atack had been denied a staff position in the Church because of his background using and selling illegal drugs and his drug-related criminal convictions. In 1993, Atack sued the Church alleging that if the Church were to be allowed to state the truth about his criminal convictions, nobody would employ him and his livelihood would be affected. During these proceedings Atack swore six false affidavits. The Court dismissed his case and rescinded a previously granted leave to appeal because of the seriousness of Atack's discovery abuse. Atack's repeated lies under oath and the stinging judicial comments about him have completely discredited Jon Atack as a source of any information on Scientology.
Best,
Jeff
Post a Comment