scientology & celebrities

I dunno, it's pretty juicy!

i'll jus' have to check it out!

Any new scoops/info in that book?

that tommy davis had allegedly blown twice was new to me

Going Clear goes deeeeeeeep. I thought it was pretty full of revelations, to degrees, especially re: LRH, made more effective given how well reported it all is, and how straight-forward and not at all salacious the prose is. Also: many people involved are even crazier than you think.

cool, definitely check out ASAP then. my mild skepticism was only because there has been a veritable flood of scientology books and exposes in the last few years.

120 pages in, it's fantastic, and omg is hubbard/scientology batshit [oops spoiler]

made more effective given how well reported it all is, and how straight-forward and not at all salacious the prose is.

very vigorously seconded

Read this last year, outstanding book. Agree with y'all about the authorial tone.

lates, its mindblowing. read it.

Same author's al Qaeda book is also excellent.

Just put a hold on the eBook for this at my local library. Stoked about reading it.

And then declaring all of you as SPs.

I always love Lawrence Wright pieces in the New Yorker, and yes, they always have that crisp, unhyperbolic prose style that makes the facts shimmer a lot more. I love the way he'll present the obviously delusional account of a Hubbard experience without qualifying it too much, maybe just putting in a quick word or phrase, or else the brief testimony of someone else, to show that it's clearly not true -- like, here are all the things Hubbard said about how his vision improved through scientology, and then here is what another person said, which demonstrates that this is almost certainly false. But he doesn't weigh in or tilt the scales with adjectives, he just lets the facts speak.

Also, given the subject matter, he apparently subjected the book to a massive degree of scrutiny/proofreading/source-checking. The bind the CoS finds itself in is that to sue over this stuff, they'd have to produce suppressed or locked-away documents that would counter its claims. And clearly they don't want to or can't do that; there's a lot in this book that references Hubbard's supposedly unofficial autobiography, which the CoS has submitted as evidence in the past but has kept conspicuously locked up and out of the spotlight for most of the past couple of decades. If the CoS asserted that confessions in that book do not exist, they'd have to produce the book to prove it. Which is perhaps why the CoS has stayed weirdly silent and not-litigious when it comes to this giant tome and the earlier NYer article (with its damning revelation of massively doctored/faked documents and photographs from the St. Louis Hubbard archives).

the 70 or so pages of Hubbard biography was riveting

just the sheer amount of moving around the world he did in the middle of the twentieth century is crazy on its own, let alone everything else he was up to

Read "Bare Faced Messiah" years ago and that was :-O enough. Unfortunately, "Going Clear" isn't available in the UK, give you one guess why.

That's one thing the book brought up that I thought was most bonkers: Hubbard may hold the Guinness Record for most number of books published. Which this books brings up as an odd irony: if he were simply a con artist, why did Hubbard go above and beyond and write dozens of books, thousands upon thousands of words, developing this mythology? (Possible short answer: mental illness and amphetamines.)

No-one can fault the Commodore's work ethic, you've got to give him that

I heard the same but I'm in the UK and just ordered from Amazon - delivery tomorrow, been meaning to read this for ages! xxp

just the sheer amount of moving around the world he did in the middle of the twentieth century is crazy on its own, let alone everything else he was up to

― |$̲̅(̲̅ιοο̲̅)̲̅$̲̅| (gr8080), Friday, January 24, 2014 11:40 AM (22 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

ya for some reason this was one of the most mind-blowing aspects o fit

Same author's al Qaeda book is also excellent.

― grape is the flavor of my true love's hair (Jon Lewis), Friday, January 24, 2014 9:40 AM (1 hour ago)

thank you for this tip i will now read this book

His adventuring is actually impressive in its own light, even though the officially "impressive" parts of it are fabricated. I mean just the fact that he got a bunch of people to go on this sea voyage with him looking for some portal to a space station or something?

That's one thing the book brought up that I thought was most bonkers: Hubbard may hold the Guinness Record for most number of books published. Which this books brings up as an odd irony: if he were simply a con artist, why did Hubbard go above and beyond and write dozens of books, thousands upon thousands of words, developing this mythology? (Possible short answer: mental illness and amphetamines.)

― Josh in Chicago, Friday, January 24, 2014 11:47 AM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Yes, this is a really fascinating part of the book, and I think it demonstrates that it takes more than a rational, cold-minded plan to pull off something like scientology -- you almost need the delusions and the hyper-energy of mental illness in order to make it work.

I assume the bit about LRH et al turning up in Portugal at the time of the revolution in 1974/75 in the hopes of doing - something or other, who knows what - is covered?

yeah maybe he actually was a superhuman he just was really weird and misguided in how he went about dealing with it

xp

He tried to draft a new constitution for Rhodesia! There are so many mind-blowing details in this.

For some reason, the most fucked up thing about this whole tale is the anecdote about ... Tommy? Miscavige? One of them, anyway, telling a whole bunch of pitiful people to pack up their bags and belongings, get locked in a trailer, and then play a game of musical chairs to the music of Queen. Last one standing gets banished out to the middle of nowhere. The game progresses, it gets crazier and crazier, more competitive, and then in the end ... he doesn't follow through. They just go back to their assignment of moving names around on a chart or some such insanity/inanity.

yeah that was crazy but iirc it was everyone except the last one standing was going to get banished

they had plane tickets printed up and everything

Either way: totally OTT insane.

it's almost like he was a religious devotee of his own narcissism - his efforts and philosophy were maniacal and incoherent, but they were all to the aim of maintaining a grandiose image of himself

i feel like a lot of insane tyrants and religious leaders were like him, it's not that unusual to be totally insane and super charismatic, manipulative and influential

i mean, it is unusual to be that way, but not unprecedented.

right, I think it almost certainly IS unusual, but it does follow a pattern to an extent

yeah the book's closing was pretty good in the way it place scientology in with the whole history of new religious movements

Debbie Nathan's book about satanic ritual abuse fits in nicely with Going Clear due to the extreme wtf factor

reserved a copy of this at the local library

In comparison to the people running it now, LRH seems almost like some cuddly old tomato-torturing eccentric

totally, he seemed like a sad self-destructive too rich bozo by the end, but seriously compared to M_______age and his torture trailer and his disappearing people and all that? lol @ LRH, cower in fear of tom cruise.

Well, there's the matter of LRH's torment of his wife, kidnapping of his kid, etc. Hanging with Aleister Crowley. All that stuff about just chucking people off boats in the ocean or making them push peanuts or whatever across the deck until their nose bleeds. The crazy bar is set pretty high with these folks.

Yeah no kidding. If my lasting memory is lol sad clown for a guy who made people push peanuts with their noses, the bar is among the highest in recent broad cultural history, no?

the great thing about that book is that everything that happens in the first half is so unbelievable, so crazy, and then all the sudden it takes a twist and becomes if anything more insane, but a totally different flavour of insane

yes, it is the twist cone of books about crazy people and the things they do!

He tried to draft a new constitution for Rhodesia! There are so many mind-blowing details in this.

― Burt Stuntin (Hurting 2), Friday, January 24, 2014 12:30 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

a good Bill Brasky sketch could probably written with nothing but facts about Hubbard

the great thing about that book is that everything that happens in the first half is so unbelievable, so crazy, and then all the sudden it takes a twist and becomes if anything more insane, but a totally different flavour of insane

― socki (s1ocki), Saturday, January 25, 2014 11:23 AM (10 minutes ago)

world history: 1911 - present imo #trenchant

L. Ron Hubbard - we got the crazy 20th century cult leader we deserved.*

*Say the poor CoS souls locked in a trailer in a desert who have not seen a TV or newspaper or computer in 25 years.

omg seriously it's the best story of our time and it's still happening!

One of the things that really resonates me is the moments where people see cracks in the facade and continue to follow anyway.

It's nothing near this scale of madness, but in college I sort of fell in with a cult-leaderish english professor who was a great teacher but very grandiose and tended to have "true believer" students who kept taking more classes with him and would adopt his worldview. His students would sort of hang around him and hang out with each other as well, almost like a real life Secret History. After a couple of years I felt like I started to see his limitations and flaws and see through his schtick, but I still kept going to his office hours and events because there was just something compelling and captivating about him.

dead poets society?

did you read that new yorker story last year about the cult-like schoolmaster at a NYC prep school?

Had miss this thread got revived -- yeah, the book is great, and it's nice to see folks enjoying here (and hopefully elsewhere). Josh in Chicago's point about the proofreading/factchecking hadn't occurred to me but strikes me as incredibly important.