Inside Scientology - Janet Reitman [25]
Hubbard by now had many other problems to worry about. Because the existing foundations were in shambles, he had accepted the offer of a wealthy supporter named Don Purcell to leave Havana and start a new Dianetic Research Foundation in Wichita, Kansas, which he did. But Purcell was not prepared to assume the debts of the other foundations, particularly not the Elizabeth Foundation, which closed its doors for good at the end of 1951, hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt. In 1952, a court ruled that the Wichita Foundation was liable for the Elizabeth Foundation's debts. Purcell implored Hubbard to file for voluntary bankruptcy, which he refused to do. Left with no choice, Purcell held an emergency meeting of the Wichita Foundation's board of directors in February 1952, which voted to go ahead with the bankruptcy proceedings.
Furious, Hubbard resigned from the board and sued Purcell for mismanagement, breach of faith, and breach of contract. To no avail: the court auctioned off the foundation's assets, which Purcell bought for just over $6,000. Hubbard launched a bitter campaign to discredit Purcell, accusing him of accepting a $500,000 bribe from the American Medical Association to destroy Dianetics.
It was no use. Purcell owned Dianetics; Hubbard was left without rights to any part of his creation, including its name. His great scientific adventure, it appeared, was at an end. Hubbard needed to reinvent himself, once again.
Chapter 3
The Franchised Faith
IN MARCH OF 1952, L. Ron Hubbard sent personal telegrams to about eighty loyal Dianeticists, his remaining followers. He had "important new material" to present, he said.
Hubbard didn't disappoint. Standing at the lectern in a hotel banquet room in Wichita, he unveiled, with theatrical flourish, a device he called an "electropsychometer," or E-meter. It had been developed by an inventor and Dianeticist named Volney Mathison; having heard Hubbard talk about the problems he was having with identifying incidents of heavy emotional charge by simply questioning a patient, Mathison came up with an apparatus that would give an auditor "deep and marvelous insight into the mind of his preclear," as Hubbard put it. This simple black box with adjustable knobs and a lit dial measured galvanic skin response—the tiny electrical fluctuations under the surface of the skin that occur at moments of excitement, stress, or physical pain.
It was, essentially, a lie detector, operating on many of the same principles. And it would be used, said Hubbard, in the practice of what he called a brand-new science: Scientology. According to Hubbard, the term derived from the Latin scio, meaning "study," and the Greek logos, meaning "knowing." Scientology is thereby defined as "the study of knowledge." Hubbard's followers would come to refer to it in slightly different terms: "Knowing How to Know."
If Dianetics had revealed "the exact anatomy of the human mind," Scientology went further, allowing its practitioners to discover the anatomy of the human soul. Hubbard called that entity the thetan (theta, Hubbard said, meant "life") and said it represented a person's "true," or innate, self, which was wholly separate from the body, the mind, and the physical world.
Thetans, Hubbard explained, existed long before the beginning of time and had drifted through the eons, picking up and then discarding physical bodies as if they were temporary shells. Bored, they created the universe. But after a while, they got trapped in that creation. During the lengthy course of their history, which Hubbard called the "whole track," they had been implanted, through electric shock, pain, or hypnotic suggestion, with a host of ideas, some positive, like love, and others contradictory or negative—such as the ideas of God, Satan, Jesus Christ, and political or bureaucratic government. Eventually they came to believe themselves to be no more than the bodies they inhabited—Hubbard called them "theta