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Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief Paperback – Illustrated, November 5, 2013
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Scientology presents itself as a scientific approach to spiritual enlightenment, but its practices have long been shrouded in mystery. Now Lawrence Wright—armed with his investigative talents, years of archival research, and more than two hundred personal interviews with current and former Scientologists—uncovers the inner workings of the church. We meet founder L. Ron Hubbard, the highly imaginative but mentally troubled science-fiction writer, and his tough, driven successor, David Miscavige. We go inside their specialized cosmology and language. We learn about the church’s legal attacks on the IRS, its vindictive treatment of critics, and its phenomenal wealth. We see the church court celebrities such as Tom Cruise while consigning its clergy to hard labor under billion-year contracts. Through it all, Wright asks what fundamentally comprises a religion, and if Scientology in fact merits this Constitutionally-protected label.
- Print length560 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherVintage
- Publication dateNovember 5, 2013
- Dimensions5.1 x 1.16 x 8 inches
- ISBN-100307745309
- ISBN-13978-0307745309
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A Best Book of the Year: The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, New York magazine, Slate, Chicago Tribune, Huffington Post, Newsday, Entertainment Weekly, People, The Week, Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Reviews
A GoodReads Reader's Choice
“An utterly necessary story. . . . A feat of reporting.” —The Wall Street Journal
“Brings a clear-eyed, investigative fearlessness to Scientology . . . a rollicking, if deeply creepy, narrative ride, evidence that truth can be stranger even than science fiction." —The Washington Post
“A hotly compelling read. It’s a minutiae-packed book full of wild stories.” —The New York Times
“Courageous. . . . Devastating . . . will come as news even to hardened Scientology buffs who follow the Church’s every twist and turn.” —The Daily Beast
“Essential reading. . . . Lawrence Wright bend[s] over backward to be fair to Scientology. . . . This makes the book’s indictment that much more powerful.” —The New York Times Book Review
“Not to be read home alone on a stormy night: Going Clear, Lawrence Wright's scary book about Scientology and its influence. . . . It’s a true horror story, the most comprehensive among a number of books published on the subject in the past few years, many of them personal accounts by people who have managed to escape or were evicted from the clutches of a group they came to feel was destroying them. . . . Wright’s book is a tribute to fact-checkers as well as to his personal courage.” —The New York Review of Books
“Insightful, gripping, and ultimately tragic.” —The Boston Globe
“A fearless, compelling, exhaustive work of muckraking journalism and a masterpiece of storytelling. . . . A ripping yarn about ego, money, abuse, faith, and the corrupting nature of power when wielded by the wrong people. It’s as lurid, pulpy, and preposterous-seeming as anything Hubbard or Haggis ever wrote, but it’s much better, because it has the benefit of being true.” —The A.V. Club
“Invaluable. . . . Completely and conclusively damning.” —Salon
“Who’d have thought a history of religion would offer so many guilty pleasures? Lawrence Wright’s enthralling account of Scientology’s rise brims with celebrity scandal. To anyone who gets a sugar rush from Hollywood gossip, the chapters on Tom Cruise and John Travolta will feel like eating a case of Ding Dongs.” —Los Angeles Times
“Admirably judicious and thoroughly researched. . . . Being Clear is an inducement to darkness and disarray. You may laugh at it at first, but get ready to weep.” —The Guardian (London)
“Not only a titillating exposé on the reported ‘you’re kidding me’ aspects of the religion, but a powerful examination of belief itself.” —Entertainment Weekly
“A fascinating read, and a chilling one. . . . The power in Wright’s book lies as much in his meticulous investigative reporting as in his evenhanded approach.” —Minneapolis Star-Tribune
“Absorbing and important. . . . Scrupulous parsing is vintage Wright; his footnotes are as vital as those of any nonfiction writer alive.” —The Plain Dealer
“Mr. Wright’s reportorial techniques seem impeccable. . . . Lawrence Wright shines a light on a world that prefers to keep its players off stage, and the public in the dark.” —Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
“A powerful piece of reportage. . . . Detailed, intense and at times shocking.” —The Miami Herald
“Wholly engrossing stuff.” —The Austin Chronicle
“Wright’s brave reporting offers an essential reality test. . . . Poses larger questions about the nature of belief.” —Publishers Weekly
“Devastating. . . . Wholly compelling. . . . Each page delivers startling facts that need no elaboration.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred)
“Jaw-dropping. . . . A fascinating look behind the curtain of an organization whose ambition and influence are often at odds with its secretive ways.”—Booklist
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
The Convert
London, Ontario, is a middling manufacturing town halfway between Toronto and Detroit, once known for its cigars and breweries. In a tribute to its famous namesake, London has its own Covent Garden, Piccadilly Street, and even a Thames River that forks around the modest, economically stressed downtown. The city, which sits in a humid basin, is remarked upon for its unpleasant weather. Summers are unusually hot, winters brutally cold, the springs and falls fine but fleeting. The most notable native son was the bandleader Guy Lombardo, who was honored in a local museum, until it closed for lack of visitors. London was a difficult place for an artist looking to find himself.
Paul Haggis was twenty-one years old in 1975. He was walking toward a record store in downtown London when he encountered a fast-talking, long-haired young man with piercing eyes standing on the corner of Dundas and Waterloo Streets. There was something keen and strangely adamant in his manner. His name was Jim Logan. He pressed a book into Haggis’s hands. “You have a mind,” Logan said. “This is the owner’s manual.” Then he demanded, “Give me two dollars.”
The book was Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health, by L. Ron Hubbard, which was published in 1950. By the time Logan pushed it on Haggis, the book had sold more than two million copies throughout the world. Haggis opened the book and saw a page stamped with the words “Church of Scientology.”
“Take me there,” he said to Logan.
At the time, there were only a handful of Scientologists in the entire province of Ontario. By coincidence, Haggis had heard about the organization a couple of months earlier, from a friend who had called it a cult. That interested Haggis; he considered the possibility of doing a documentary film about it. When he arrived at the church’s quarters in London, it certainly didn’t look like a cult—two young men occupying a hole- in- the- wall office above Woolworth’s five-and-dime.
As an atheist, Haggis was wary of being dragged into a formal belief system. In response to his skepticism, Logan showed him a passage by Hubbard that read: “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.” These words resonated with Haggis.
Although he didn’t realize it, Haggis was being drawn into the church through a classic, four-step “dissemination drill” that recruiters are carefully trained to follow. The first step is to make contact, as Jim Logan did with Haggis in 1975. The second step is to disarm any antagonism the individual may display toward Scientology. Once that’s done, the task is to “find the ruin”—that is, the problem most on the mind of the potential recruit. For Paul, it was a turbulent romance. The fourth step is to convince the subject that Scientology has the answer. “Once the person is aware of the ruin, you bring about an understanding that Scientology can handle the condition,” Hubbard writes. “It’s at the right moment on this step that one . . . directs him to the service that will best handle what he needs handled.” At that point, the potential recruit has officially been transformed into a Scientologist.
Paul responded to every step in an almost ideal manner. He and his girlfriend took a course together and, shortly thereafter, became Hubbard Qualified Scientologists, one of the first levels in what the church calls the Bridge to Total Freedom.
Haggis was born in 1953, the oldest of three children. His father, Ted, ran a construction company specializing in roadwork—mostly laying asphalt and pouring sidewalks, curbs, and gutters. He called his company Global, because he was serving both London and Paris— another Ontario community fifty miles to the east. As Ted was getting his business started, the family lived in a small house in the predominantly white town. The Haggises were one of the few Catholic families in a Protestant neighborhood, which led to occasional confrontations, including a schoolyard fistfight that left Paul with a broken nose.
Although he didn’t really think of himself as religious, he identified with being a minority; however, his mother, Mary, insisted on sending Paul and his two younger sisters, Kathy and Jo, to Mass every Sunday. One day, she spotted their priest driving an expensive car. “God wants me to have a Cadillac,” the priest explained. Mary responded, “Then God doesn’t want us in your church anymore.” Paul admired his mother’s stand; he knew how much her religion meant to her. After that, the family stopped going to Mass, but the children continued in Catholic schools.
Ted’s construction business prospered to the point that he was able to buy a much larger house on eighteen acres of rolling land outside of town. There were a couple of horses in the stable, a Chrysler station wagon in the garage, and giant construction vehicles parked in the yard, like grazing dinosaurs. Paul spent a lot of time alone. He could walk the mile to catch the school bus and not see anyone along the way. His chores were to clean the horse stalls and the dog runs (Ted raised spaniels for field trials). At home, Paul made himself the center of attention—”the apple of his mother’s eye,” his father recalled—but he was mischievous and full of pranks. “He got the strap when he was five years old,” Ted said.
When Paul was about thirteen, he was taken to say farewell to his grandfather on his deathbed. The old man had been a janitor in a bowling alley, having fled England because of some mysterious scandal. He seemed to recognize a similar dangerous quality in Paul. His parting words to him were, “I’ve wasted my life. Don’t waste yours.”
In high school, Paul began steering toward trouble. His worried parents sent him to Ridley College, a boarding school in St. Catharines, Ontario, near Niagara Falls, where he was required to be a part of the cadet corps of the Royal Canadian Army. He despised marching or any regulated behavior, and soon began skipping the compulsory drills. He would sit in his room reading Ramparts, the radical magazine that chronicled the social revolutions then unfolding in America, where he longed to be. He was constantly getting punished for his infractions, until he taught himself to pick locks; then he could sneak into the prefect’s office and mark off his demerits. The experience sharpened an incipient talent for subversion.
After a year of this, his parents transferred him to a progressive boys’ school, called Muskoka Lakes College, in northern Ontario, where there was very little system to subvert. Although it was called a college, it was basically a preparatory school. Students were encouraged to study whatever they wanted. Paul discovered a mentor in his art teacher, Max Allen, who was gay and politically radical. Allen produced a show for the Canadian Broadcasting Company called As It Happens. In 1973, while the Watergate hearings were going on in Washington, DC, Allen let Paul sit beside him in his cubicle at CBC while he edited John Dean’s testimony for broadcast. Later, Allen opened a small theater in Toronto to show movies that had been banned under Ontario’s draconian censorship laws, and Paul volunteered at the box office. They showed Ken Russell’s The Devils and Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris. In Ted’s mind, his son was working in a porno theater. “I just shut my eyes,” Ted said.
Paul left school after he was caught forging a check. He attended art school briefly, and took some film classes at a community college, but he dropped out of that as well. He grew his curly blond hair to his shoulders. He began working in construction full-time for Ted, but he was drifting toward a precipice. In the 1970s, London acquired the nickname “Speed City,” because of the methamphetamine labs that sprang up to serve its blossoming underworld. Hard drugs were easy to obtain. Two of Haggis’s friends died from overdoses, and he had a gun pointed in his face a couple of times. “I was a bad kid,” he admitted. “I didn’t kill anybody. Not that I didn’t try.”
He also acted as a stage manager in the ninety- nine-seat theater his father created in an abandoned church for one of his stagestruck daughters. On Saturday nights, Paul would strike the set of whatever show was under way and put up a movie screen. In that way he introduced himself and the small community of film buffs in London to the works of Bergman, Hitchcock, and the French New Wave. He was so affected by Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow- Up that in 1974 he decided to become a fashion photographer in England, like the hero of that movie. That lasted less than a year, but when he returned he still carried a Leica over his shoulder.
Back in London, Ontario, he fell in love with a nursing student named Diane Gettas. They began sharing a one-bedroom apartment filled with Paul’s books on film. He thought of himself then as “a loner and an artist and an iconoclast.” His grades were too poor to get into college. He could see that he was going nowhere. He was ready to change, but he wasn’t sure how.
Such was Paul Haggis’s state of mind when he joined the Church of Scientology.
Like every scientologist, when Haggis entered the church, he took his first steps into the mind of L. Ron Hubbard. He read about Hubbard’s adventurous life: how he wandered the world, led dangerous expeditions, and healed himself of crippling war injuries through the techniques that he developed into Dianetics. He was not a prophet, like Mohammed, or divine, like Jesus. He had not been visited by an angel bearing tablets of revelation, like Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism. Scientologists believe that Hubbard discovered the existential truths that form their doctrine through extensive research—in that way, it is “science.”
The apparent rationalism appealed to Haggis. He had long since walked away from the religion of his upbringing, but he was still looking for a way to express his idealism. It was important to him that Scientology didn’t demand belief in a god. But the figure of L. Ron Hubbard did hover over the religion in suggestive ways. He wasn’t worshipped, exactly, but his visage and name were everywhere, like the absolute ruler of a small kingdom.
There seemed to be two Hubbards within the church: the godlike authority whose every word was regarded as scripture, and the avuncular figure that Haggis saw on the training videos, who came across as wry and self-deprecating. Those were qualities that Haggis shared to a marked degree, and they inspired trust in the man he had come to accept as his spiritual guide. Still, Haggis felt a little stranded by the lack of irony among his fellow Scientologists. Their inability to laugh at themselves seemed at odds with the character of Hubbard himself. He didn’t seem self-important or pious; he was like the dashing, wisecracking hero of a B movie who had seen everything and somehow had it all figured out. When Haggis experienced doubts about the religion, he reflected on the 16 mm films of Hubbard’s lectures from the 1950s and 1960s, which were part of the church’s indoctrination process. Hubbard was always chuckling to himself, marveling over some random observation that had just occurred to him, with a little wink to the audience suggesting that they not take him too seriously. He would just open his mouth and a mob of new thoughts would burst forth, elbowing each other in the race to make themselves known to the world. They were often trivial and disjointed but also full of obscure, learned references and charged with a sense of originality and purpose. “You walked in one day and you said, ‘I’m a seneschal,’ “ Hubbard observed in a characteristic aside:
“And this knight with eight-inch spurs, standing there—humph— and say, ‘I’m supposed to open the doors to this castle, I’ve been doing this for a long time, and I’m a very trusted retainer’. . . He’s insisting he’s the seneschal but nobody will pay him his wages, and so forth. . . . He was somebody before he became the seneschal. Now, as a seneschal, he became nobody—until he finally went out and got a begging pan on the highway and began to hold it out for fish and chips as people came along, you know. . . . Now he says, ‘I am something, I am a beggar,’ but that’s still something. Then the New York state police come along, or somebody, and they say to him—I’m a little mixed up in my periods here, but they say to him—‘Do you realize you cannot beg upon the public road without license Number 603-F?’ . . . So he starves to death and kicks the bucket and there he lies. . . . Now he’s somebody, he’s a corpse, but he’s not dead, he’s merely a corpse. . . . Got the idea? But he goes through sequences of becoming nobody, somebody, nobody, somebody, nobody, somebody, nobody, not necessarily on a dwindling spiral. Some people get up to the point of being a happy man. You know the old story of a happy man—I won’t tell it—he didn’t have a shirt. . . ."
Just as this fuzzy parable begins to ramble into incoherence, Hubbard comes to the point, which is that a being is not his occupation or even the body he presently inhabits. The central insight of Scientology is that the being is eternal, what Hubbard terms a “thetan.” “This chap, in other words, was somebody until he began to identify his beingness with a thing. . . . None of these beingnesses are the person. The person is the thetan.”
“He had this amazing buoyancy,” Haggis recalled. “He had a deadpan sense of humor and this sense of himself that seemed to say, ‘Yes, I am fully aware that I might be mad, but I also might be on to something.’ “
The zealotry that empowered so many members of the church came from the belief that they were the vanguard of the struggle to save humanity. “A civilization without insanity, without criminals and without war, where the able can prosper and honest beings can have rights, and where Man is free to rise to greater heights, are the aims of Scientology,” Hubbard writes. Those breathless aims drew young idealists, like Haggis, to the church’s banner.
To advance such lofty goals, Hubbard developed a “technology” to attain spiritual freedom and discover oneself as an immortal being. “Scientology works 100 percent of the time when it is properly applied to a person who sincerely desires to improve his life,” a church publication declares. This guarantee rests on the assumption that through rigorous research, Hubbard had uncovered a perfect understanding of human nature. One must not stray from the path he has laid down or question his methods. Scientology is exact. Scientology is certain. Step by step one can ascend toward clarity and power, becoming more oneself—but, paradoxically, also more like Hubbard. Scientology is the geography of his mind. Perhaps no individual in history has taken such copious internal soundings and described with so much logic and minute detail the inner workings of his own mentality. 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.
Secretly, Haggis didn’t really respect Hubbard as a writer. He hadn’t been able to get through Dianetics, for instance. He read about thirty pages, then put it down. Much of the Scientology coursework, however, gave him a feeling of accomplishment. In 1976, he traveled to Los Angeles, the center of the Scientology universe, checking in at the old Château Élysée, on Franklin Avenue. Clark Gable and Katharine Hepburn had once stayed there, along with many other stars, but when Haggis arrived it was a run-down church retreat called the Manor Hotel. (It has since been spectacularly renovated and turned into Scientology’s premier Celebrity Centre.) He had a little apartment with a kitchen where he could write.
There were about 30,000 Scientologists in America at the time. Most of them were white, urban, and middle class; they were predominantly in their twenties, and many of them, especially in Los Angeles, were involved in graphic or performing arts. In other words, they were a lot like Paul Haggis. He immediately became a part of a community in a city that can otherwise be quite isolating. For the first time in his life, he experienced a feeling of kinship and camaraderie with people who had a lot in common—”all these atheists looking for something to believe in, and all these wanderers looking for a club to join.”
In 1977, Haggis returned to Canada to continue working for his father, who could see that his son was struggling. Ted Haggis asked him what he wanted to do with his life. Haggis said he wanted to be a writer. His father said, “Well, there are only two places to do that, New York and Los Angeles. Pick one, and I’ll keep you on the payroll for a year.” Paul chose LA because it was the heart of the fi lm world. Soon after this conversation with his father, Haggis and Diane Gettas got married. Two months later, they loaded up his brown Ranchero and drove to Los Angeles, moving into an apartment with Diane’s brother, Gregg, and three other people. Paul got a job moving furniture. On the weekends he took photographs for yearbooks. At night he wrote scripts on spec at a secondhand drafting table. The following year, Diane gave birth to their first child, Alissa.
Product details
- Publisher : Vintage; Illustrated edition (November 5, 2013)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 560 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0307745309
- ISBN-13 : 978-0307745309
- Item Weight : 15.4 ounces
- Dimensions : 5.1 x 1.16 x 8 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #118,008 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #7 in Scientology
- #78 in Sociology & Religion
- #428 in History of Christianity (Books)
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About the author
Lawrence Wright (born August 2, 1947) is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American author, screenwriter, staff writer for The New Yorker magazine, and fellow at the Center for Law and Security at the New York University School of Law. Wright is best known as the author of the 2006 nonfiction book The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11. Wright is also known for his work with documentarian Alex Gibney who directed film versions of Wright's one man show My Trip to Al-Qaeda and his book Going Clear.
Bio from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Photo by U.S. Department of State [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.
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In researching the material for the book the author and his assistants spoke with an unprecedented number of people (some 250 or so) who studied, witnessed and/or were part of the history of Scientology and its leaders.
The bibliography of the Scientology sources, media, books, articles and manuscript collections that the author consulted in studying the subjects shows the great pain that was clearly taken not only to be thorough with the facts in the book but also to try to analyze the true story behind those facts and what it was that made both Hubbard and Miscavige (Scientology's two main leaders over the years) what they were.
I believe Lawrence Wright has accomplished that well beyond anything ever published. And he did it in an objective, professional way while constantly striving to be fair.
There are also some 42 pages of detailed notes near the end of the book where the author gives his sources for what he wrote in the book, page by page. Simply amazing!
In my opinion this book could not even have been written had not Project Chanology Anonymous (acknowledged in the book) suddenly made it possible for thousands to come forward and speak out without being destroyed by Scientology's intelligence and litigation machine designed to stop others from freely speaking out.
Where one or a few of us have managed to speak out before or even protest, suddenly thousands donned the mask and marched in unison and in protest starting on February 10, 2008. The beauty of that was how it opened the door to many others coming out, speaking and taking a stance. This had turned the tide. Organized Scientology could not stop them and they were joined by so many others who finally saw they could stand up and speak out.
Simply put, without the actions started by Anonymous in 2008 many of the sources for this book would not have felt safe to come out and tell the truth.Thus this book could not have been written.
A great deal (but not hardly all) of the facts covered in this book have been covered before. But the book lays out those facts in a clear, concise manner that helps the reader to understand not only the story of scientology but what it was that made its leaders what they became.
The author compassionately explores the life of L Ron Hubbard from his childhood, through his marriages, his time in the military, his friendships, his loves and his early writings. In countless writings and recordings about Hubbard in the past (if only on internet forum postings) writers often debated and tried to understand Hubbard as clearly one or the other: kind or cruel, a liar or a man of truth, sane or insane, a conman or an honest man, an abuser or a healer.
I think what the author tried to show was that Hubbard at different points was all of the above.
Combining Hubbard's own Affirmations with how he actually led his life, in my opinion the author gives a highly insightful perspective of Hubbard. It can be found on page 54 of this book:
"If one looks behind the Affirmations to the condition they are meant to correct one sees a man who is ashamed of his tendency to fabricate personal stories, who is conflicted about his sexual needs, and who worries about his mortality. He has a predatory view of women but at the same time fears their power to humiliate him".
While we are each of us at times conflicted, even walking contradictions throughout our lives, the real problem with Hubbard's own conflicts as well covered in this book is what they did to destroy the lives of so very many people over decades and indeed to this day some 27 years after Hubbard's death.
Some of the very worst parts of Hubbard became the very fabric of Scientology and organized Scientology. Woven throughout the policies and practices of organized Scientology one can see Hubbard's own paranoia and cruelty. Such things as the heartless internment camps known as "the Rehabilitation Project Force", heavy ethics for counter and other intentions (to his own), the cruelty of disconnection and so much more was all to protect a technology Hubbard called priceless but was rather valueless to most who tried it.
As covered in the book, Hubbard's conflicts are also reflected in his writings where he saw enemies everywhere and demanded the destruction of all who opposed his will.
His incessant demands for money combined with his disdain of those who thought differently than he destroyed perhaps thousands of families, even lives. And, like Hubbard before him, David Miscavige to this day continues to profit on the anguish of others while cowardly hiding behind organized Scientology's myriad corporate veils so as not to be held liable for that of which he is completely liable.
As shown in this book, the stories of widespread abuse of children, beatings, forced incarcerations, financial scandals, greed, medical abuse and the like rampant within organized Scientology both through the times of Hubbard and continuing to this very day are as painful to see as they are numerous. The cruelty meted out on others in the name of "salvaging the planet" while profiting Hubbard and Miscavige is breathtaking in its scope.
One horrid example that has me in tears just to read it can be found page 157 of the book. It is about an abused, pregnant mother sneaking out of the scientology's "Rehabilitation Project Force" without approval to see how her daughter was doing in the Scientology "Child Care Org":
"Taylor managed to slip away to visit her ten-month-old daughter in the Child Care Org across the street. To her horror, she discovered that Venessa had contracted whopping cough, which is highly contagious and occasionally fatal. The baby's eyes were welded shut with mucus, and her diaper was wet - in fact her whole crib was soaking. She was covered with fruit flies. Taylor recoiled. The prospect of losing both her unborn baby and her daughter seemed very likely".
My God!!!!
So many misled people of good heart were and are a part of Scientology who themselves put it all on the line to dedicate themselves and their lives to the following of a man who would ultimately betray them. This book makes me feel a sadness for all the good souls who cared and who tried to follow a dream and were betrayed.
I love how insightful the author is when he analyzes the facts before him and tries to make it make sense. For example, as the book points out, Hubbard wrote a great deal of science fiction before he ever wrote anything about Scientology. And there are strong elements of science fiction in the hidden levels of Scientology. Reflecting on both, the author makes a simple yet in my opinion insightful statement on page 32 of the book:
"Certainly, the same mind that roamed so freely through imaginary universes might be inclined to look at the everyday world and suspect that there was something more behind the surface reality. The broad canvas of science fiction allowed Hubbard to think in large-scale terms about the human condition. He was bold. He was fanciful. 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".
I agree with the author that while one can argue that Scientology is a religion it must not be allowed to carry out such horrid abuses on countless others while hiding from prosecution behind the cloak of religion.
More than whether or not Scientology is indeed a religion I think the really important question is whether or not it is charitable or even spiritual. I see nothing spiritual at all about Hubbard's and Miscavige's abuse of others, the incessant demands for money and just hundreds and hundreds of things that make up the very fabric of organized Scientology and the policies it follows.
Perhaps even more importantly, as is clear in reading the book, there is nothing inherently charitable about Scientology. People have to either pay vast sums or give up their personal freedoms to "progress" in Scientology. Their benign-sounding front groups in the field of business, education, drug abuse and the like are not there to freely help the downtrodden or otherwise needy. They are there solely to themselves be a conduit of money and people into Scientology. They are "PR" to try to make organized Scientology look good to the public while in many cases are themselves a danger to the public.
In the book examples are given where others speak of Hubbard's "research" and his "technology" that has helped them. And I am glad they were helped.
But Hubbard's research has no scientific validity and in my opinion is often the product of a deranged mind thinking that somehow he has made these brilliant scientific discoveries when he has not.
An example from the book is Hubbard's "research" resulting in "The Introspection Rundown" which, Hubbard says eliminates the last need for psychiatry. "Evidence" of its value is a story of a man who was crazed on a ship and a danger to others. Hubbard had him confined and treated gently and given healthy supplements. The man came out of it. I am so glad this happened to this man but my God that is hardly scientific study showing Hubbard's procedure eliminates the last need of psychiatry.
Related to this, the book debunks Hubbard's claims about psychology and medication in effect showing how Scientology not only may not help a person but it will often keep a person away from the very sources that can indeed help him.
Examples of this are given in the book including the death of a beautiful boy Kyle Brennan who died from an apparent suicide at Scientology's "mecca" in Florida after his medically prescribed medication was taken away from him due to Scientology's unfounded beliefs from Hubbard's writings.
And, carrying on from what Hubbard preached, the book tells of a speech given by Scientology's current abusive leader David Miscavige saying that he intends to obliterate psychiatry, wiping it from the face of the earth.
My God how dangerous a view is that?
People have had "wins" in Scientology therapy which the author feels is akin more to psychotherapy which perhaps is Scientology's "more respectable cousin". But I submit that some of the beautiful and well-meaning people who are trying to help others using this "therapy" are more helping those people because they are good and kind people who give the others someone to whom they can pour out their hearts and discuss their troubles.
And that is all well and good until someone really needs professional help and there is no one within Scientology who is trained to give that help.
Later in the book, on page 359, the author speaks of how Scientology wants to be understood as a scientific approach to spiritual enlightenment but concludes that it really has no basis in science at all. Perhaps, he says, it would be better understood as a philosophy of the human nature.
As usual organized Scientology denies everything in this book that is negative. I would like to believe them but I can't. Although I was a small contributor of information to Lawrence Wright in his research, I know of so much of this book as being true from first hand observation.
I feel love and compassion for the many, many good souls who are Scientologists and who are trying to help others. I was once one of them. But I also feel a great sadness of just how these people were and are being betrayed by Hubbard, by Miscavige and indeed by a dream of a "heaven" which to many of them has turned out to be a "hell".
I wish all of them the greatest of healing and of peace. And I want them to know there are many of us out here with open arms ready to welcome them to join us as imperfect but free sisters and brothers who will help them heal.
And I wish to express my great thanks to Lawrence Wright and all who assisted him for this magnificent work that I believe will end up helping many people.
Perhaps the real sadness of all this is best reflected in some of the final words from the book telling of a time that was a few weeks before Hubbard's death when Hubbard summoned one he trusted at a ranch where he was hiding:
"Six weeks before the leader died, Pfauth hesitantly related, Hubbard called him into the bus. He was sitting in his little breakfast nook. `He told me he was dropping his body.......He told me he failed, he's leaving.' ..............................
I mentioned the legend in Scientology that Hubbard would return.
`That's bull crap,' Pfauth said. `He wanted to drop the body and leave. And he told me basically that he failed. All the work and everything, he'd failed'".
brb sad
First, the book. If you're using a Kindle, do not be alarmed at the very slow rate your "% completed" rises...the actual book ends before 70% (the rest is acknowledgements and sources).
Going Clear reminded me a lot of Under the Banner of Heaven by Jon Krakauer, just swapping out Scientology for Mormonism. Part 1 is mostly about the Scientology beliefs and LRH's life and is a bit tedious at times. Wright is known as a meticulous researcher (as evidenced in his book on Al Qaeda, The Looming Tower), but he sometimes goes overboard. A lot of the tedium for me was in the detail of the actual Scientology beliefs and in LRH's writing, which can be completely unintelligible because the beliefs sound insane and they basically use their own language. The parts about LRH's life were more interesting - he seems to me to be a narcissistic con man. Even his son is quoted in the book as saying LRH's goal was to be "the most powerful being in the universe". Wright illuminates the glaring differences between the Church's narrative of LRH's life and the actual evidence supporting their claims - and this is where his meticulous research is a huge advantage.
Part 2 was my favorite. Why? Because it dealt with Scientology's connections with Hollywood - i.e. celebrity gossip! Wright hits Tom Cruise at about 37% of the way through and he is a large presence through the remainder of the book. You also get some decent dirt on John Travolta, Kelly Preston, and Kirstie Alley.
Part 3 is mostly about the current state of the religion (including statements from defectors and media critics). One of the most interesting aspects of the book (aside from the celebrity gossip, of course!) is the question of whether Scientology is a "religion" or a "commercial enterprise". The Church fought the IRS on this point for years and is now classified as a religion, which means they get an astounding number of protections and benefits under the law.
However, Scientology seems to me to be more of a self-help philosophy than a religion (which makes sense because it grew out of LRH's 1950 self-help book, Dianetics). It does have some rational theories and methods for improving your self-esteem, communication skills, etc. And, this is the sales pitch that is used to attract recruits, along with the brilliant "rumor" that the highest levels of the entertainment industry are full of Scientologists who try to help out "like-minded" up and comers. What wide-eyed wannabe actress wouldn't sign up for that upon landing in L.A.?
But, the upper level beliefs are at times insane and sickening. For example, Scientologists believe that LRH did not actually die, but merely "dropped his body" and will come back to earth in the relatively near future. To be prepared for his return, the Church keeps a fully staffed $10M mansion stocked with his clothes and personal items.
The most sickening parts are the Church's views on family and children. Children "belong to the Church" and are basically separated from their parents at the upper levels and pressed into Church service. Sea Org (the Church's "clergy") members are not even allowed to have children. And, if your spouse begins to question the faith, a Scientology member will be "counseled" (i.e. forced) to divorce him or her.
And, it's a stretch of the imagination to take the actual beliefs seriously because they sound like a kids' video game - using terms like "operating thetan", "Xenu", "Galactic Confederacy", and "wall of fire". You wonder about the sanity of people that truly believe this stuff.
Going Clear contains a plethora of interesting discussion topics, so would make a great Book Club selection.
For more reviews, check out my blog, Sarah's Book Shelves.
Top reviews from other countries
It’s one thing to write a lot of B grade science fiction and to create a cosmology out of such imaginings, but it’s quite another to set in place an organisation that tyrannises its adherents. While many ordinary Scientologists find the (very expensive) trainings helpful, the cruelty with which many members are treated is astonishing. Then there’s the well-documented harassment of those who leave. Phones are tapped, computers hacked, files stolen.
This is a very readable, accessible book. White organises the material well, and it all makes for compelling reading. So much so that I stayed up all night, fascinated in a shocked kind of way. Naturally, John Travolta and Tom Cruise are mentioned. Travolta comes off better.