The doctor’s dilemma

In 1949, when John W. Campbell and L. Ron Hubbard prepared to reveal dianetics to the world, one of their first orders of business was to recruit their fellow writers to the cause. Numerous authors—most famously Alfred Bester—have provided accounts of their efforts, and occasionally, they worked, most notably in the cases of Theodore Sturgeon and A.E. van Vogt. Another obvious prize was Isaac Asimov, with whom Campbell had perhaps the closest working relationship of any author of the time, although Asimov was arguably the writer least inclined to be sympathetic to Hubbard’s theories. He had written disparagingly in his diary of “Hubbard’s dabblings in amateur psychiatry,” and when he and L. Sprague de Camp finally read the first article on dianetics in Astounding, he was no more convinced than before: “Neither Sprague nor I were in the least impressed. I considered it gibberish.” Yet he remained unwilling to confront his old friend and mentor about it directly. After Campbell made one last attempt at a hard sell, Asimov resisted, leading the editor to complain about his “built-in doubter.” But Asimov never seems to have revealed the full extent of his contempt for dianetics, perhaps because he was afraid of risking a valued friendship, or at least an important market for his fiction. (His fears on that front may not have been justified. After Lester del Rey criticized dianetics openly in print, he was told that he would never be able to sell to the magazine again. He responded by writing up a submission and delivering it to Campbell in person. On his arrival, the editor greeted him warmly: “I guess we’re not going to talk about dianetics, are we?” And he bought the story.)

Recently, I came across a fascinating piece of evidence about Asimov’s state of mind at the time, in the form of an actual review that he wrote of the book Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health. (The exact provenance of this article remains a mystery to me, and I’m happy to throw it out to any readers here for help. I found the original manuscript in the Asimov collection at the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center at Boston University, dated June 19, 1950, and a clipping of the piece is available online. Unfortunately, neither source indicates where the item first appeared, apart from the fact that it was evidently a newspaper in New York. As far as I can tell, Asimov doesn’t mention it in his memoirs, and I haven’t seen it in bibliographies of his work. My very rudimentary attempts to track it down haven’t gone anywhere, and I’ll try again when I have time, but anyone out there who cares is welcome to give it a shot.) It was published after Asimov claimed to have already dismissed Hubbard’s work as “gibberish,” but anyone looking for a similar takedown here will be disappointed. Here’s how it opens:

L. Ron Hubbard is an optimist. He believes the human being to be essentially sane and good, and the human mind to be, potentially, a perfect thinking machine. Furthermore, he proposes a new technique of mental therapy which, he claims, is so simple that it can be supervised by almost anyone who reads the book and so effective that, properly handled, it can eradicate all neuroses and most diseases.

Asimov continues with a concise but accurate description of Hubbard’s ideas, including the assertion that the patient’s memory can be brought back to “a pre-natal state,” and his treatment of it leaves little doubt that he read the book carefully.

Yet in stark contrast to his private statements and his later characterization of his response in his memoirs, Asimov bends over backward to avoid criticizing the book in any meaningful way. After a brief summary, he writes:

That the book is startling is evident, I believe, even from the short description of its contents here. It might even be dismissed out of hand as incredible were it not for the fact that Freud’s theories (to say nothing of Einstein’s and Galileo’s) must have seemed equally startling and even incredible to their contemporaries…What can one say…except that these days it is a brave man indeed who would dismiss any theory as unbelievable. The author invites investigation of his claims by psychiatrists and medical men, and it would be interesting to see what they say.

Asimov is careful to hedge his language—the article is full of phrases like “he believes,” “he proposes,” “he claims”—but the overall tone is one of studied neutrality. Every now and then, there’s a hint of his underlying skepticism, although you have to look hard to see it:

Of course, if what Hubbard claims for dianetics is true, there will be no stopping it. One man will “clear” another, until within the lifetime of those living today, all the world will be free or almost free of disease, insanity, and evil. On the other hand, if Hubbard is mistaken, we are led to the melancholy conclusion that the world will continue as is.

At first, it doesn’t seem hard to understand why Asimov was reluctant to come out against dianetics in print. He knew that Campbell was all but certain to see the review, and he appears to have written it with precisely one reader in mind. Yet there’s also a deeper tension here. The year before, Asimov had accepted a position as an instructor at the medical school at Boston University, and he would spend much of the next decade worried about his job security, as well as how his work in science fiction would be perceived. (When the dust jacket of his first novel, Pebble in the Sky, mentioned the school by name, he was nervous enough about it to speak to the dean, James Faulkner. Faulkner asked if it was a good book, and when Asimov said that his publishers thought so, the dean responded: “In that case, the medical school will be glad to be identified with it.”) Yet even at this delicate moment, he allowed his byline to appear on a review in which an instructor in biochemistry failed to express any reservations over such elements as “memories at the cellular level.” The only possible conclusion is that Asimov, remarkably, was still more concerned about what Campbell would think than about his colleagues in Boston, and it led him to remain neutral at a time in which such writers as Lester del Rey were publicly attacking dianetics. Frankly, I’m surprised that he even agreed to write the review, which could hardly have benefited him in any meaningful way. To the best of my knowledge, Asimov never explained his reasoning, or even mentioned writing it at all. For obvious reasons, it was never reprinted, and Asimov clearly preferred to forget about it. But its last lines were undeniably prescient: “It will be interesting to wait and see. It shouldn’t take more than a few years to check up on dianetics.”

The unique continent

Early in 1939, the science fiction editor John W. Campbell wrote to Lester del Rey to propose a story idea. As Del Rey recalled years later: “The idea was that maybe [Neanderthals weren’t] killed off fighting Cro-Magnon, but rather died of frustration from meeting a race with a superior culture. I didn’t exactly accept it as good anthropology, but the story took shape easily.” The result, “The Day is Done,” appeared in the May 1939 issue of Astounding Science Fiction, and it moved Isaac Asimov so much that he wept as he read it on the subway. To a modern reader, the most striking thing about it is probably the unsigned editorial note—clearly written by Campbell—that followed the story on its original publication. The magazine didn’t usually provide this kind of extended commentary on specific works of fiction, so many readers must have read it closely, including the following passage:

Anthropologists believe today that, as Lester del Rey has here portrayed, the Neanderthal man died out due to heartbreak…Incredible? Senseless to attribute such feelings to them? We have on earth today an exact and frightening duplication of that cosmic tragedy. The Bushmen of Tasmania are gone; the aboriginal race of Australia are going, become useless beggars without self-respect hanging on the fringes of the white man’s civilization, unable to reach understanding of man’s higher intelligence, and paralyzed to hopelessness thereby. Those who have not contacted white men continue in their own ways, but any missionary, any government protector sent to them—brings death by hopelessness! There is no help for them, for help is death.

I was reminded of these lines after Susan Goldberg, the editor of National Geographic, published a remarkable essay headlined “For Decades, Our Coverage Was Racist.” The magazine has taken a commendable first step—although not the last—to coming to grips with its legacy, and Goldberg outlines its history of reinforcing or creating racial stereotypes in devastating detail. As an example of the ideas that were quietly passed along to its readers, Goldberg cites an article about Australia from 1916, in which pictures of two Aboriginal people carry the stark caption: “South Australian Blackfellows: These savages rank lowest in intelligence of all human beings.” And when you examine the article itself, which is available elsewhere online, you find language that is so reminiscent of Campbell that I wonder if he might not have read it:

The blackfellow is not a “degraded savage,” but rather a primitive man placed in an unfavorable environment. When food and water are abundant the aboriginal is kind to the infirm, and even shows traits of generosity and gratitude. When the struggle for existence is severe he becomes an animal searching for its pretty. Mentally he is a weak child, with uncontrolled feelings, without initiative or sense of responsibility. In many respects he is intelligent and profits by education, but abstract ideas are apparently beyond his reach. His ignorance, superstition, and fear, rather than viciousness and evil intentions, make him dangerous to strangers.

And as an excellent article by Gavin Evans of The Guardian recently pointed out, this kind of “race science” has never disappeared—it just evolved with the times.

Goldberg doesn’t identify the author of “Lonely Australia: The Unique Continent,” but his background might be the most notable point of all. His name was Herbert E. Gregory, and he was nothing less than the director of the geology department at Yale University. He was an expert on the geography of “the Navajo country” of Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah; he extensively documented his studies of “the Indians and geology of Peru”; and shortly after the article was published, he became the director of the Bishop Museum in Honolulu, the home of the largest collection of Polynesian artifacts in the world. Gregory, in other words, was “interested in Indians,” to use Paul Chaat Smith’s devastating phrase, but he was also a distinguished scholar whose career amounted to a guided tour of the areas where contact between native and colonizing peoples took place. In a government publication titled The Navajo Country, which appeared the same year as his piece for National Geographic, Gregory wrote:

To my mind the period of direct contact with nature is the true “heroic age” of human history, an age in which heroic accomplishment and heroic endurance are parts of the daily routine. The activities of people on this stage of progress deserve a place among the cherished traditions of the human race. I believe also that the sanest missionary effort includes an endeavor to assist the uncivilized man in his adjustment to natural laws…This country is also the home of the vigorous and promising Navajos—a tribe in remarkably close adjustment to their physical surroundings. To improve the condition of this long-neglected but capable race, to render their life more intelligently wholesome by applying scientific knowledge, gives pleasures in no degree less than that obtained by the study of the interesting geologic problems which this country affords.

There’s a lot to unpack here, and I know only as much about Gregory as I’ve been able to find in a morning of research. But I know something about Campbell, and I feel justified in pointing out a common pattern. Both Campbell and Gregory were intelligent, educated men in positions of authority who were trusted by their readers to provide information about how the world worked. Astounding was the news of the future, while National Geographic, in the minds of many subscribers, represented the past, and you could probably perform a similar analysis of the magazines on which people relied for their understanding of the present. For all their accomplishments, both men had unexamined ideas about race that quietly undermined the stated goals of the publications in which their work appeared. Campbell undeniably did a great deal for science fiction, but by failing to see that his views were excluding voices that could have elevated the entire genre, he arguably did just as much to hold it back. Try to imagine an editor in the thirties who believed that he had the ability and the obligation to develop a diverse range of writers, and you end up with a revolution in science fiction that would have dwarfed everything that Campbell actually accomplished. And this isn’t a matter of projecting our own values onto an earlier time—Campbell actively conceived of himself as an innovator, and he deserves to be judged by his own high standards. The same holds true for the National Geographic Society, which was founded “to increase and diffuse geographic knowledge,” but often settled for received notions, even if it expanded the horizons of its audience in other ways. Goldberg quotes John Edwin Mason, a professor at the University of Virginia: “It’s possible to say that a magazine can open people’s eyes at the same time it closes them.” This was equally true of Astounding, which defined itself and its readers in ways that we have yet to overcome. And these definitions still matter. As the tagline once read on all of the ads in National Geographic: “Mention the Geographic—it identifies you.”

From Sputnik to WikiLeaks

In Toy Story 2, there’s a moment in which Woody discovers that his old television series, Woody’s Roundup, was abruptly yanked off the air toward the end of the fifties. He asks: “That was a great show. Why cancel it?” The Prospector replies bitterly: “Two words: Sput-nik. Once the astronauts went up, children only wanted to play with space toys.” And while I wouldn’t dream of questioning the credibility of a man known as Stinky Pete, I feel obliged to point out that his version of events isn’t entirely accurate. The space craze among kids really began more than half a decade earlier, with the premiere of Tom Corbett, Space Cadet, and the impact of Sputnik on science fiction was far from a positive one. Here’s what John W. Campbell wrote about it in the first issue of Astounding to be printed after the satellite’s launch:

Well, we lost that race; Russian technology achieved an important milestone in human history—one that the United States tried for, talked about a lot, and didn’t make…One of the things Americans have long been proud of—and with sound reason—is our ability to convert theoretical science into practical, working engineering…This time we’re faced with the uncomfortable realization that the Russians have beaten us in our own special field; they solved a problem of engineering technology faster and better than we did.

And while much of the resulting “Sputnik crisis” was founded on legitimate concerns—Sputnik was as much a triumph of ballistic rocketry as it was of satellite technology—it also arose from the notion that the United States had been beaten at its own game. As Arthur C. Clarke is alleged to have said, America had become “a second-rate power.”

Campbell knew right away that he had reason to worry. Lester del Rey writes in The World of Science Fiction:

Sputnik simply convinced John Campbell that he’d better watch his covers and begin cutting back on space scenes. (He never did, but the art director of the magazine and others were involved in that decision.) We agreed in our first conversation after the satellite went up that people were going to react by deciding science had caught up with science fiction, and with a measure of initial fear. They did. Rather than helping science fiction, Sputnik made it seem outmoded.

And that’s more or less exactly what happened. There was a brief spike in sales, followed by a precipitous fall as mainstream readers abandoned the genre. I haven’t been able to find specific numbers for this period, but one source, the Australian fan Wynne Whitford, states that the circulation of Astounding fell by half after Sputnik—which seems high, but probably reflects a real decline. In a letter written decades later, Campbell said of Sputnik: “Far from encouraging the sales of science fiction magazines—half the magazines being published lost circulation so drastically they went out of business!” An unscientific glance at a list of titles appears to support this. In 1958, the magazines Imagination, Imaginative Tales, Infinity Science Fiction, Phantom, Saturn, Science Fiction Adventures, Science Fiction Quarterly, Star Science Fiction, and Vanguard Science Fiction all ceased publication, followed by three more over the next twelve months. The year before, just four magazines had folded. There was a bubble, and after Sputnik, it burst.

At first, this might seem like a sort of psychological self-care, of the same kind that motivated me to scale back my news consumption after the election. Americans were simply depressed, and they didn’t need any reminders of the situation they were in. But it also seems to have affected the public’s appetite for science fiction in particular, rather than science as a whole. In fact, the demand for nonfiction science writing actually increased. As Isaac Asimov writes in his memoir In Joy Still Felt:

The United States went into a dreadful crisis of confidence over the fact that the Soviet Union had gotten there first and berated itself for not being interested enough in science. And I berated myself for spending too much time on science fiction when I had the talent to be a great science writer…Sputnik also served to increase the importance of any known public speaker who could talk on science and, particularly, on space, and that meant me.

What made science fiction painful to read, I think, was its implicit assumption of American superiority, which had been disproven so spectacularly. Campbell later compared it to the reaction after the bomb fell, claiming that it was the moment when people realized that science fiction wasn’t a form of escapism, but a warning:

The reactions to Sputnik have been more rapid, and, therefore, more readily perceptible and correlatable. There was, again, a sudden rise in interest in science fiction…and there is, now, an even more marked dropping of the science-fiction interest. A number of the magazines have been very heavily hit…I think the people of the United States thought we were kidding.

And while Campbell seemed to believe that readers had simply misinterpreted science fiction’s intentions, the conventions of the genre itself clearly bore part of the blame.

In his first editorials after Sputnik, Campbell drew a contrast between the American approach to engineering, which proceeded logically and with vast technological resources, and the quick and dirty Soviet program, which was based on rules of thumb, trial and error, and the ability to bull its way through on one particular point of attack. It reminds me a little of the election. Like the space race, last year’s presidential campaign could be seen as a kind of proxy war between the American and Russian administrations, and regardless of what you believe about the Trump camp’s involvement, which I suspect was probably a tacit one, there’s no question as to which side Putin favored. On one hand, you had a large, well-funded political machine, and on the other, one that often seemed comically inept. Yet it was the quick and dirty approach that triumphed. “The essence of ingenuity is the ability to get precision results without precision equipment,” Campbell wrote, and that’s pretty much what occurred. A few applications of brute force in the right place made all the difference, and they were aided, to some extent, by a similar complacency. The Americans saw the Soviets as bunglers, and they never seriously considered the possibility that they might be beaten by a bunch of amateurs. As Campbell put it: “We earned what we got—fully, and of our own efforts. The ridicule we’ve collected is our just reward for our consistent efforts.” Sometimes I feel the same way. Right now, we’re entering a period in which the prospect of becoming a second-rate power is far more real than it was when Clarke made his comment. It took a few months for the implications of Sputnik to really sink in. And if history is any indication, we haven’t even gotten to the crisis yet.

The Imaginary Dr. Kutzman

In my recent piece on Longreads about L. Ron Hubbard and the origins of Scientology, I note that Hubbard initially didn’t want the first important article on dianetics to appear in Astounding Science Fiction at all. In April of 1949, he made efforts to reach out to such organizations as the American Psychiatric Association, the American Psychological Association, and the Gerontological Society in Baltimore, and he only turned to the science fiction editor John W. Campbell after all of these earlier attempts had failed. Most of the standard biographies of Hubbard mention this fact, but what isn’t always emphasized is that even Campbell, who became one of Hubbard’s most passionate supporters, didn’t seem all that eager to publish the piece in Astounding. Campbell knew perfectly well that printing this material in a pulp magazine would make it hard for it to be taken seriously, and he was also concerned that it would be mistaken for a hoax article, like Isaac Asimov’s story about the fictional compound thiotimoline. As a result, even as Campbell served as a key member of the team that was developing dianetics in Bay Head, New Jersey, he continued to push for it to make its first appearance in a professional journal. Later that year, Dr. Joseph Winter, their third crucial collaborator, reached out “informally” about a paper to the Journal of the American Medical Association, only to be told that it lacked sufficient evidence, and he got much the same response from the American Journal of Psychiatry. It was only after they had exhausted these avenues that they decided to publish “Dianetics: The Evolution of a Science” in the magazine that Campbell himself edited—which tells us a lot about how they had originally wanted their work to be received.

At that point, Campbell was hardly in a position to be objective, but he wanted to present the article to his readers in a way that at least gave the appearance of balance. Accordingly, he proposed that they find a psychiatrist to write a critical treatment of dianetics, presumably to run alongside Hubbard’s piece—but he was doomed to be disappointed in this, too. On December 9, 1949, Hubbard wrote: “In view of the fact that no psychiatrist to date has been able to look at Dianetics and listen long enough to find out the fundamentals, Dianetic explanations being dinned out by his educational efforts about Freud, we took it upon ourselves to compose the rebuttal.” Incredibly, Hubbard and Winter wrote up an entire article, “A Criticism of Dianetics,” that spent over five thousand words laying out the case against the new therapy, credited to the nonexistent “Irving R. Kutzman, M.D.” (In his letter, Hubbard argued that the “M.D.” was justified, since it reflected the contributions of Winter, a general practitioner and endocrinologist from Michigan.) Hubbard claimed that the essay consisted of the verbatim comments of four psychiatrists he had consulted on the subject, including one he had met while living in Savannah, Georgia, and that he had “played them back very carefully,” using the perfect memory that a dianetic “clear” possessed. He also described setting up “a psychiatric demon” to write the piece, which refers to the notion that a clear can deliberately create and break down temporary delusions for his private amusement. To the best of my knowledge, this paper, which I discovered among Campbell’s correspondence, hasn’t been published or discussed anywhere else, and it provides some fascinating insights into Hubbard’s thinking at the time.

The most interesting thing about “A Criticism of Dianetics” is how straightforward it is. Hubbard told Campbell that “it is in no sense an effort to be funny and it is not funny,” and for most of the piece, there’s little trace of burlesque. Notably, it anticipates many of the objections that would be raised against dianetics, including the idea that it merely repackaged existing psychological concepts. As “Kutzman” writes: “Further examination…disclosed that scraps of Dianetics have been known for thousands of years. Except for one or two relatively minor matters, all of them are known to the modern psychologist.” He also observes that Hubbard has only thirteen months of data—which is actually generous, given how little he disclosed about any of his alleged cases—and that there’s no evidence that any perceived improvements will last. It’s only toward the end that the mask begins to slip. “Kutzman” speaks glowingly of “the new technique of trans-orbital leukotomy and the older and more reliable technique of pre-frontal lobotomy,” with which “patients can be treated more swiftly and will be less of a menace to society than heretofore.” He concludes: “By such operations…[the neurosurgeon] can get rid of that part of your personality which is causing all your trouble.” (Even the name “Kutzman,” I suspect, is a bad pun.) The piece dismisses General Semantics and cybernetics, the latter of which it attributes to a “Dr. Werner [sic],” and closes with an odd account of the fictional Kutzman being audited by Hubbard, in which he explains away the prenatal and childhood memories that he recovered as delusions: “I had eaten excessively at supper and…my ulcer had been troubling me for some time.” It ends: “Discoveries not solidly founded in classical psychoanalysis are not likely to be easily accepted by a social world which already comprehends all the basic problems of the human mind.”

In any event, it was never published, and it isn’t clear whether Hubbard or Winter ever thought that it would be. Hubbard wrote to Campbell: “Any article you receive will, I know, run something on this order if written by a psychiatrist…May I invite you to peruse same, not in any misguided spirit of levity, but as a review of the composite and variously confirmed attitudes Dianetics meets in the field of those great men who guide our minds.” No actual rebuttal ever materialized, and dianetics was presented in the pages of Astounding without any critical analysis whatsoever. (Interestingly, Hubbard did contribute to a point/counterpoint discussion on at least two other occasions. One was in the November 1950 issue of Why Magazine, which ran Hubbard’s “The Case For It” with “The Case Against It” by Dr. Oscar Sachs of Mount Sinai, and the other was in the May 1951 installment of Marvel Science Stories, which contained positive articles on dianetics from Hubbard and Theodore Sturgeon and a critical one from Lester del Rey. Campbell could have arranged for something similar in Astounding, if he had really wanted it.) But it provides a valuable glimpse into a transitional moment in Hubbard’s career. Compared to the author’s later attacks on psychiatry, its tone is restrained, even subtle—which isn’t a description that usually comes to mind for Hubbard’s work. Yet it’s equally clear that he had already given up on reaching mainstream psychologists and psychiatrists, even to the extent of convincing one to compose an objective response. Campbell, for his part, still clung to the hope of obtaining academic or scientific recognition. Much of the tragicomedy of what happened over the next eighteen months emerged from that basic misunderstanding. And the seeds of it are visible here.

From Xenu to Xanadu

I do know that I could form a political platform, for instance, which would encompass the support of the unemployed, the industrialist and the clerk and day laborer all at one and the same time. And enthusiastic support it would be.

—L. Ron Hubbard, in a letter to his wife Polly, October 1938

Yesterday, my article “Xenu’s Paradox: The Fiction of L. Ron Hubbard and the Making of Scientology” was published on Longreads. I’d been working on this piece, off and on, for the better part of a year, almost from the moment I knew that I was going to be writing the book Astounding. As part of my research, I had to read just about everything Hubbard ever wrote in the genres of science fiction and fantasy, and I ended up working my way through well over a million words of his prose. The essay that emerged from this process was inspired by a simple question. Hubbard clearly didn’t much care for science fiction, and he wrote it primarily for the money. Yet when the time came to invent a founding myth for Scientology, he turned to the conventions of space opera, which had previously played a minimal role in his work. Both his critics and his followers have looked hard at his published stories to find hints of the ideas to come, and there are a few that seem to point toward later developments. (One that frequently gets mentioned is “One Was Stubborn,” in which a fake religious messiah convinces people to believe in the nonexistence of matter so that he can rule the universe. There’s circumstantial evidence, however, that the premise came mostly from John W. Campbell, and that Hubbard wrote it up on the train ride home from New York to Puget Sound.) Still, it’s a tiny fraction of the whole. And such stories by other writers as “The Double Minds” by Campbell, “Lost Legacy” by Robert A. Heinlein, and The World of Null-A by A.E. van Vogt make for more compelling precursors to dianetics than anything Hubbard ever wrote.

The solution to the mystery, as I discuss at length in the article, is that Hubbard tailored his teachings to the small circle of followers he had available after his blowup with Campbell, many of whom were science fiction fans who owed their first exposure to his ideas to magazines like Astounding. And this was only the most dramatic and decisive instance of a pattern that is visible throughout his life. Hubbard is often called a fabulist who compulsively embellished own accomplishments and turned himself into something more than he really was. But it would be even more accurate to say that Hubbard transformed himself into whatever he thought the people around him wanted him to be. When he was hanging out with members of the Explorers Club, he became a barnstormer, world traveler, and intrepid explorer of the Caribbean and Alaska. Around his fellow authors, he presented himself as the most productive pulp writer of all time, inflating his already impressive word count to a ridiculous extent. During the war, he spun stories about his exploits in battle, claiming to have been repeatedly sunk and wounded, and even a former naval officer as intelligent and experienced as Heinlein evidently took him at his word. Hubbard simply became whatever seemed necessary at the time—as long as he was the most impressive man in the room. It wasn’t until he found himself surrounded by science fiction fans, whom he had mostly avoided until then, that he assumed the form that he would take for the rest of his career. He had never been interested in past lives, but many of his followers were, and the memories that they were “recovering” in their auditing sessions were often colored by the imagery of the stories they had read. And Hubbard responded by coming up with the grandest, most unbelievable space opera saga of them all.

This leaves us with a few important takeaways. The first is that Hubbard, in the early days, was basically harmless. He had invented a colorful background for himself, but he wasn’t alone: Lester del Rey, among others, seems to have engaged in the same kind of self-mythologizing. His first marriage wasn’t a happy one, and he was always something of a blowhard, determined to outshine everyone he met. Yet he also genuinely impressed John and Doña Campbell, Heinlein, Asimov, and many other perceptive men and women. It wasn’t until after the unexpected success of dianetics that he grew convinced of his own infallibility, casting off such inconvenient collaborators as Campbell and Joseph Winter as obstacles to his power. Even after he went off to Wichita with his remaining disciples, he might have become little more than a harmless crank. As he began to feel persecuted by the government and professional organizations, however, his mood curdled into something poisonous, and it happened at a time in which he had undisputed authority over the people around him. It wasn’t a huge kingdom, but because of its isolation—particularly when he was at sea—he was able to exercise a terrifying amount of control over his closest followers. Hubbard didn’t even enjoy it. He had wealth, fame, and the adulation of a handful of true believers, but he grew increasingly paranoid and miserable. At the time of his death, his wrath was restricted to his critics and to anyone within arm’s reach, but he created a culture of oppression that his successor cheerfully extended against current and former members in faraway places, until no one inside or outside the Church of Scientology was safe.

I wrote the first draft of this essay in May of last year, but it’s hard to read it now without thinking of Donald Trump. Like Hubbard, Trump spent much of his life as an annoying but harmless windbag: a relentless self-promoter who constantly inflated his own achievements. As with Hubbard, everything that he did had to be the biggest and best, and until recently, he was too conscious of the value of his own brand to risk alienating too many people at once. After a lifetime of random grabs for attention, however, he latched onto a cause—the birther movement—that was more powerful than anything he had encountered before, and, like Hubbard, he began to focus on the small number of passionate followers he had attracted. His presidential campaign seems to have been conceived as yet another form of brand extension, culminating in the establishment of a Trump Television network. He shaped his message in response to the crowds who came to his rallies, and before long, he was caught in the same kind of cycle: a man who had once believed in nothing but himself gradually came to believe his own words. (Hubbard and Trump have both been described as con men, but the former spent countless hours auditing himself, and Trump no longer seems conscious of his own lies.) Both fell upward into positions of power that exceeded their wildest expectations, and it’s frightening to consider what might come next, when we consider how Hubbard was transformed. During his lifetime, Hubbard had a small handful of active followers; the Church of Scientology has perhaps 30,000, although, like Trump, they’re prone to exaggerate such numbers; Trump has millions. It’s especially telling that both Hubbard and Trump loved Citizen Kane. I love it, too. But both men ended up in their own personal Xanadu. And as I’ve noted before, the only problem with that movie is that our affection for Orson Welles distracts us from the fact that Kane ultimately went crazy.

Quote of the Day

Pulp fiction is basically a fiction which deals with a set of timeless values. Mainstream can deal specifically with the problems of this particular narrow period and the mannerisms of this particular narrow little period…We have to get the effects, and that’s what a writer’s job is—not to report but to get the effects.

—Lester del Rey