It’s Easter, let’s talk Scientology.

So, one thing you should first understand is that historically, Southern California is the second-richest wellspring of new religious enthusiasm in America, after the “Burned-Over District” of Western New York. Other prominent religious movements to come out of LA include Pentecostalism and the Foursquare Church, and there’s a ton less famous.

If you loosen up your definition of religion, throw out the requirement of a cosmological mythology (and Scientology’s cosmological mythology was kind of an afterthought), and accept things that present as philosophies or best practices for life, you can add in stuff like Objectivism.

The second thing it’s worth understanding is that when it started out Scientology was more of a theory and praxis of mind than a religion. The… okay, wait, that’s maybe the third thing.

The second thing it’s worth understanding is that the founder of Scientology, pulp author L. Ron Hubbard, was part of the Los Angeles literary scene. Yes, LA had a literary scene, and yes, it was pulp authors and screenwriters, because obviously. This being before the internet, they had salons and cocktail parties, ideas passed around and people trying to top each other. Raymond Chandler used to be part of this scene.

Yes, this is kind of ridiculous, yes, now is your time to bring out the (accurate) line about how no one reads in LA (though they do have a very good book fair). But those hack writers managed to create Scientology and Objectivism and and a bunch of good movies, which is at least on a level with the rival and ~better accredited~ New York novelists and critics of the time who gave us neoconservatism (by way of Trotskyism + Zionism + resentment of uppity Negroes), a bunch of boring books about academic politics and adultery, and a bunch of little magazines with an increasingly tedious Holocaust obsession. Meanwhile you, reader, have given us jack shit so show some respect.

Anyway, back in the ‘50s some of the bigger hobbyhorses on this scene were Freudian psychology and Huxleyite psychedelic mysticism. The ‘50s LA intelligentsia was basically the first place LSD came into regular use, which actually explains a *lot* of things.

(Ayn Rand, who had been a screenwriter, was more oriented towards the more practical drug vogue of the time, amphetamines, which accounts both for her disinterest in mystical nature-of-reality-and-consciousness stuff and for the thousand-page books with hundred-page speeches about how everyone else in the world should just shut the fuck up and defer completely to your obvious innate superiority.)

Okay so that brings us to the third thing it’s worth understanding, that when it started out it was more a theory and praxis of mind than a religion. That it was conceived towards the same end as Freudian analysis - a method to enable people to overcome internal limitations and achieve full potential - but in opposition to its premises and methods. The funny thing is that if Hubbard thought “I’ve got a better way of doing psychology”, most modern psychologists would agree with him. You hear stories about Scientology practices that involve a mentor identifying trauma in their mentee and directing them “Focus on a thing. Touch a thing. Repeat. For hours.” as a way to overcome it?

Haha what bunk right? Except that’s basically cognitive behavioral therapy, which since then has almost completely eclipsed analysis as the standard practice of mainstream psychology, because it has a track record of producing results. It works by basically exploiting bugs in human mental processing

(Actually maybe I shouldn’t wander too far into the programming metaphor, under the frame of cybernetics that was actually an active and competing (Northern) Californian theory/praxis of mind - Lily’s “human biocomputer” model, Leary’s 8-circuit model. Basically, later on Silicon Valley techies also decided to drop acid and investigate the nature of human consciousness, with programming rather than psychiatry as their lexifier. A lot of stuff that today seems aligned with “hard science” materialist atheism - stuff like artificial intelligence, SETI, transhumanism - used to be linked with this ‘70s technomysticism, with the ’80s-‘90s Mondo 2000/WIRED/Web 1.0 cyberpunk technoshamanism as the intermediate link.)

And the “thetan” thing, well, I’ll get into mentioning the mythology, but the concept - that “you” are not actually an integrated whole, the coherency of your sense of self is actually a narrative wrapper around a set of scattered drives and aversions that are only in coincidental proximity if not active tension - well, in addition to bearing some similarities to the Freudian id/ego/superego model, I mean, if you’ve never done psychedelic drugs, well. I’ve tripped out for maybe 50 hours in my life, spent maybe 10 minutes dealing with visual hallucinations, and the rest of it was just grappling with this realization and trying to figure out what to do with it.

Deconstruction and continental literary postmodernism also incorporates a lot of psychedelic insight. It’s very true what they say, that most avant-garde stuff from the ‘60s and ‘70s makes a lot more sense if you’ve ever used psychedelics, and that gets treated as a knock on said avant-garde stuff when it’s really a strong argument for the psychedelic experience.

This - psychology as the core of Scientology - is why the biggest bete noire of Scientologists is psychiatry, because Freudian analysis having fallen, it’s mental pharmacology, not, say, Christianity, that’s their real major rival.

Okay that’s a treatment of Scientology as an ideology. As an institution - well, people say it’s a cult and obviously they’re right. “Cult” is the infant stage of religion, a bunch of people gathering around and giving control of their lives over to a charismatic figure with radical new teachings. The Twelve Apostles were a cult. As Hubbard’s following grew, I mean, he liked it. Who wouldn’t. And as it grew past Dunbar’s number he realized he had to create some sort of structure, and so he kind of slapped one together ad-hoc. Dude was in fact a science fiction author and the whole worldbuilding aspect of “what are some plausible alternate social structures humans could arrange themselves in” was something he’d spent time thinking about, and reading other people’s ideas, but in a pinch he drew heavily on the one top-down functional hierarchy he’d had extensive personal experience with - the U.S. Navy. Which is why the ecclesiarchy is called “Sea Org” and wears uniforms rather than robes.

And then, as it goes with cults, the founder dies and maybe a charismatic successor can step in, and that chain can go for a while if the successors are competent enough, but if the cult survives it eventually switches its power source from personal charisma for institutional charisma and settles as a stable(ish) church. From what I hear, people are realizing the current head figure Miscavige is kind of an incompetent jackass and trying to figure out how to edge him out or route around him or practice Scientology outside of the structures he dominates, so I’d say we’re in that process now.

Now finally the mythology - Xenu and the volcano and all that - is dumb. I’m not going to pretend it’s not dumb. It’s batshit stupid. It was kind of an afterthought - like I said, Scientology is first of all a theory and practice of mind, and the cosmology is exactly what it looks like - a halfassed effort by a SF hack made to make the whole thing more closely fit the expectation of what a religion looks like, mostly so it could claim the tax exemption and general shielding from government oversight traditionally granted to American religions. And it worked well enough I guess, backed up with an admirable dedication to lawfare on behalf of the Scientologists that basically made it not worth the effort for the government to deny them.

(The legal system likes to put on airs of majesty and absolutism and meaning, but anyone who’s been in contact with it long enough realizes its just an organization of finite resources and internal politics same as anything else, and like feudal succession crises you need a plausible enough claim to legitimate a campaign, but past that success really comes down to how much resources each side is willing to spend.)

Scientologists as individuals - not lying they can be a little weird, though I think a lot of that is that converts to any religion are a little off-puttingly intense, and as a young religion that puts a lot of energy into recruitment (also like the law, evangelism likes to pretend that it’s a matter of having a more correct understanding but in practice mostly comes down to how much time and money and effort you’re willing to put into it), they’ve got a pretty high share of first-generation converts in their ranks. In LA I knew a few Scientologists who were born into the church, and they were actually some of the chillest bros I’ve ever met.