Those Wacky Scientologists
The following article was originally published in the New York Times Book Review, January 17, 2013.
Paul Haggis was arrested in Italy last month and charged with various sexual improprieties. He flatly denies them all.
That crunching sound you hear is Lawrence Wright bending over backward to be fair to Scientology in his book Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief. Every deceptive comparison with Mormonism and other religions is given a respectful hearing. Every ludicrous bit of church dogma is served up deadpan. This makes the book’s indictment that much more powerful. Open almost any page at random. That tape of L. Ron Hubbard, Scientology’s founder, that Wright quotes from? “It was a part of a lecture Hubbard gave in 1963, in which he talked about the between-lives period, when thetans are transported to Venus to have their memories erased.”
Oh, that period. Of course. How could I forget?
We are all thetans, spirits, trapped temporarily in our current particular lives. Elsewhere, though, Hubbard says that when a thetan discovers that he is dead, he should report to a “‘between-lives’ area” on Mars for a “forgetter implant.”
Oh dear, oh dear. So what are poor thetans to do, where are they to go, when they find themselves between lives? Left to Venus or right to Mars? For sure, they can’t stay here. “The planet Earth, formerly called Teegeeack, was part of a confederation of planets under the leadership of a despot ruler named Xenu,” said Hubbard, who was a best-selling science fiction writer before he became the prophet of a new religion. To suppress a rebellion, Xenu tricked the confederations into coming in for fake income tax investigations. Billions of thetans were taken to Teegeeack (you remember: Earth), “where they were dropped into volcanoes and then blown up with hydrogen bombs.” Suffice it to say I’m not hanging around Earth next time I’m between lives.
Hubbard apparently could go on for hours — or pages — with this stuff. Wright informs us, as if it were just an oversight, that “Hubbard never really explained how he came by these revelations,” but elsewhere he says they came to him at the dentist’s office. Of the Borgia-like goings-on after Hubbard’s death in 1986, Wright says cheerfully, “Every new religion faces an existential crisis following the death of its charismatic founder.” He always refers to Scientology respectfully as “the church.”
But Wright’s book, Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief, makes clear that Scientology is like no church on Earth (or, in all probability, Venus or Mars either). The closest institutional parallel would be the Communist Party in its heyday: the ruthless struggles for power, the show trials and forced confessions (often false); the paranoia (often justified); the determination to control its members’ lives completely (the key difference, you will recall, between authoritarian and totalitarian regimes, according to the onetime American ambassador to the United Nations Jeane Kirkpatrick); the maintenance of something close to prison camps where dissenters, would-be defectors and power-struggle rivals were incarcerated in deplorable conditions for years and punished if they tried to escape; what the book describes as mysterious deaths and disappearances; and so on. Except that while the American Communist Party, including a few naïve Hollywood types, merely turned a blind eye to events happening in faraway Russia, Scientology — if Wright is to be believed, and I think he is — ran, and maybe still runs, a shadow totalitarian empire here in the United States, financed in part by huge contributions by Tom Cruise and others of the Hollywood aristocracy. “Naïve” doesn’t begin to describe the credulousness and sense of entitlement that has allowed actors, writers and directors to think they were helping themselves and the world by hanging around the Scientologists’ Celebrity Centre, taking “upper level” courses and gossiping about who was about to be labeled a “Suppressive Person” (bad guy).
Wright’s last book, The Looming Tower, a history of Al Qaeda, won the Pulitzer Prize. He is also the author of, among other books, a charmingly presumptuous premature autobiography, In the New World, published in 1987. He belongs to a small cult of his own — an Austin-centered group of writers dedicated to preserving long-form narrative journalism. With this book, he’s certainly paid his dues for a few years.
Wright is well advised to be calm and seem neutral in his presentation of the Scientology story, since the group has been known to make life miserable for its critics, its favorite weapon being the lawsuit, often brought in order to bury the defendant in legal costs and hassles. “The purpose of a lawsuit is to harass and discourage rather than to win,” Hubbard said. Perhaps, though, this knowledge that any mistake will be abnormally costly does lend added credibility to Wright’s vast research and reporting.
Among the horrors Wright either uncovers or borrows (with credit) from previous Scientology exposés in Time magazine and The St. Petersburg (now Tampa Bay) Times is “the Hole,” a hellish double-wide trailer parked at a California resort owned by the church. Forty or 50 people were housed there with no furniture or beds, eating leftovers, enduring cold-hose group showers. There are stories of people being beaten; and lots of stories of forced divorces, mandatory “disconnections” — orders not to talk with a spouse or friend who has offended in some way. But only once in 430 pages filled with lurid anecdotes did my skeptical antennas start to twitch. Wright asserts that someone was punished by being “made to run around a pole in the desert for 12 hours a day, until his teeth fell out.” Really? That’s the first thing that happens when you run in circles in the desert all day? I need to know more. How many days are we talking about? Did they let him floss?
But I shouldn’t jest. Wright’s favorite Scientologist, at least in this life, is the television and film writer Paul Haggis. (He wrote and directed Crash, which won the Academy Award for best picture in 2006.) Haggis talked at length with Wright and therefore gets off way too easily in the retelling. I was about to write that Haggis is no fool, but let me amend that: he is no fool in the particular matter of cooperating with the author of a book about events you were involved in. In Washington it’s called the Bob Woodward rule — always talk, or you’ll regret it.
Haggis is quoted advising Tom Cruise to have a sense of humor about himself, “something that is often lacking in Scientology,” Wright says dryly, in one of the few passages where he shows his cards. That is certainly true, and possibly a problem, but if so it is among the least of them. When people are running something akin to a private gulag across the United States and, to a lesser extent, the entire world, who cares whether they get the joke? And what is the joke, exactly?
The real-life history of Scientology raises the same question that comes up whenever you see a lazily plotted movie or television show: Why didn’t someone call the police? Most of the Scientologists who were incarcerated and humiliated by the group’s leaders were not literally in chains all day. They could have walked out or refused to return when caught. Why didn’t they?
The answer is partly familiar psychological explanations, variations on the Stockholm syndrome. But there were other, practical barriers. Some had joined as children and signed “billion-year contracts” that they didn’t realize were preposterous. (Some adults also contracted away the next billion years of their lives.) Some had no friends outside Scientology, no relatives they hadn’t been forced to disown, no mailing address or credit card. As a practical matter, they had no place else to go. And if they asked to leave, they were told they needed to pay back some ridiculous sum like $100,000 for classes they supposedly had signed up for (not easy on a weekly salary — often not paid — of $50).
All this was going on under the nose of Tom Cruise, who, according to Wright, allowed Scientology’s leaders to pimp for him (no, no: all women), among other favors. Young women were told that they had been chosen for a “special program” that would require they drop their boyfriends. But the fish that got away, Scientologists believed, was Steven Spielberg. He told Haggis that Scientologists “seem like the nicest people,” and Haggis responded that “we keep all the evil ones in the closet,” which was close enough to being true that Haggis was in hot water with the Scientology powers-that-be. But he didn’t quit.
Haggis joined Scientology in 1975, when he was 21. Wright assures us that Haggis “never lost his skepticism,” but he must have misplaced it for a few decades. He remained a member and rose to be a top thetan among Scientologists through the death of L. Ron Hubbard and the rise of his successor, David Miscavige, who has often been described as sadistic. Then he read on the Internet about children “10, 12 years old, signing billion-year contracts, . . . and they work morning, noon and night. . . . Scrubbing pots, manual labor — that so deeply touched me. My God, it horrified me.” Still, he didn’t quit. Once again like American Communists on the eve of World War II, a few “useful idiots” like Haggis held on through every moment of doubt and twist in the story. What finally pushed him over the edge, away from Scientology and out into the real world, was the church’s refusal to endorse gay marriage. Now, I’m for gay marriage. And Haggis has two gay daughters, so it’s understandable that he should feel particularly strongly about this issue. But some perspective, please: it’s like hanging on through the Moscow trials and then quitting the Communist Party because it won’t endorse . . . oh, I dunno — well, gay marriage.
Lawrence Wright is so deeply into his material, and there is so much of it, that he sometimes doesn’t realize when he’s left the reader behind. What is OT V status again? (It’s the fifth level of ascent for a thetan, achieved by taking expensive courses.) Which wife of L. Ron Hubbard are we talking about here? What does PTS/SP stand for? (Potential Trouble Source/Suppressive Person, or really bad guy.) Even the book’s title is unalluring to the uninitiated. (“Going clear” means — very roughly — reaching a level that makes you a real Scientologist.)
But don’t be deterred. “Going Clear” is essential reading for thetans of all lifetimes.
Learned a lot, winced and laughed all in one article. Thanks for sharing your work.
Great piece, Mike!