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Constructing a Plan for Survival: Scientology as Cold War Psychology

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 June 2018

Robert Genter
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Abstract

Developed in the early 1950s by science fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard, Scientology was part of the larger postwar therapeutic culture that blended religion and psychology in a search for mental well-being. Unlike contemporaneous self-help gurus such as Norman Vincent Peale and Harry Overstreet, however, Hubbard painted a much bleaker portrait of modern life, one rife with forces of psychological and social control. Railing against communists, homosexuals, and feminists as well as against the decay of the family and the rise of the welfare state, Hubbard argued that Americans suffered from a waning sense of ontological security, living in a world that provided no support for self-identity. Hubbard refused, however, to shrink from such changes and lapse into nostalgia for a pre-modern, pre-technological world like Peale and others did; instead, he offered a way for individuals to appropriate the dynamism of modernity for themselves. As advanced industrialization erased distances between societies, revolutionized transportation, and computerized information systems, Hubbard reimagined the self as spiritual being possessing precisely those powers to manipulate time and space and to remake the world at large. Borrowing freely from Eastern religious ideas, cybernetic theory, and German idealism, Hubbard produced a philosophy that was staunchly libertarian, spiritual, and future-oriented, one that tapped into Cold War fears about psychological manipulation and waning personal autonomy and into dreams about the immanent power of human beings.

Keywords

ScientologyCold Warcyberneticspsychology
Type
Research Article
Information
Religion and American Culture , Volume 27 , Issue 2 , Summer 2017 , pp. 159 - 190
Copyright
Copyright © Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture 2017

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References

Notes

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2. Val Peterson, “Panic: The Ultimate Weapon?” Collier's (August 21, 1953): 99–110.

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12. In this sense, I am following the lead of Hugh Urban, Lawrence Wright, and others who have located the origins of Scientology in the social and cultural history of the 1950s. In contrast to Urban, however, who sees Hubbard as a “bricoleur” who, following the zeitgeist of the decade, combined “religion and secular culture” in an effort to update religion in a scientific age, I argue that Scientology operated in the 1950s more as a form of survivalism in a world that Hubbard believed was on the brink of catastrophe. In other words, Lawrence Wright is a bit closer to the mark in stressing the “immense trauma” of World War II that opened the door for a litany of self-help philosophies. But Scientology’s staunchly individualistic and libertarian bent distinguished it from other movements and accounts for its appeal both during and after the rise of the counterculture the next decade. See Urban, Hugh, The Church of Scientology: A History of a New Religion (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), 59–60;Google Scholar and Wright, Lawrence, Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2013)Google Scholar,

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77. Hubbard, The Phoenix Lectures, 94.

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85. Ron Hubbard, L., The Creation of Human Ability (Los Angeles: Church of Scientology of California Publications Organization, 1954), 248.Google Scholar

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87. Ibid., 254.

88. Ibid., 260.

89. Ibid., 256.

90. Ibid., 282.

91. Ibid., 259.

92. Hubbard, Scientology 0-8008, 28.

93. Hubbard, “The Limitations of Homo Novis,” 403.

94. Hubbard, Creation, 251.

95. Phelan, James, “Have You Ever Been a Boo-Hoo?” Saturday Evening Post 237 (March 21, 1964), 84.Google Scholar

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97. Quoted in Miller, Bare-Faced Messiah, 6.

98. In this sense, I disagree with Leigh Schmidt who argues that spirituality in America, originating as a radical form of Protestantism in the early nineteenth century, has always been tied to “liberal progressivism and a religious left.” Political categories, however, are not so clear cut, and Scientology is one example of how certain spiritual movements, while anti-government and anti-institutional, have little connection to left-wing social reform. In part, this explains why Scientology weathered the currents of the Age of Aquarius and reemerged just as popular in the 1970s during the Age of Watergate. See Schmidt, Restless Souls, xii.

99. Hubbard, “Brainwashing Manual,” 313.

100. See Gregory R. Hansell, and Grassie, William, eds., H+/-: Transhumanism and Its Critics (Philadelphia: Metanexus Institute, 2011).Google Scholar

101. Hubbard, All about Radiation, 29.