What’s the poop on this Dianetics stuff? Is it a religion, a life-view, or another P.T. Barnum scam? L. Ron Hubbard’s ads make it sound like the best thing for humanity since cable TV. However, all these years of reading your column have made us skeptical. Is it worth wasting our time and money on this stuff, or is it just more garbage from money-grubbing con artists?
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Let’s put it this way: Cecil wouldn’t waste his time and money. But what the hell, some people happily pay to get beaten with canes. Maybe you’d get a kick out of Dianetics, more commonly known in its religious incarnation, Scientology. The teachings of the late L. Ron Hubbard (he died in 1986) have been described as “the poor man’s psychoanalysis,” which I take to mean that if you’re not poor when you start, you will be by the time you’re done. It takes thousands of dollars’ worth of training sessions to achieve “clear,” the Scientological equivalent of enlightenment, and there have been repeated claims that the whole thing is a just a hugely profitable scam. At its peak the cult was reportedly taking in $100 million a year, and in 1986 it was said to have assets of $280 million. L. Ron himself told a meeting of authors in 1949, “Writing for a penny a word is ridiculous. If a man really wanted to make a million dollars, the best way would be to start his own religion.”
Dianetics inspired a brief vogue for kitchen-table auditing. But the medical establishment condemned it and many early enthusiasts became disillusioned when they didn’t get results. Undiscouraged, Hubbard repackaged Dianetics a few years later as a religion called Scientology, throwing in some new elements of Eastern mysticism. He now argued that we are all “thetans,” or immortal spirits. Through auditing we can explore previous lives (74 trillion years’ worth), free our inner being, and gain control over the material world. A key element in this is the “E-meter,” a biofeedback device consisting of a galvanometer, some wires, and two soup cans.
