Inside Scientology - Janet Reitman [30]
With this structure in place, Scientology would grow into "the McDonald's hamburger chain of religion," as Jon Atack described it, with independent franchised churches springing up all over the world. Hubbard's doctrine, known as "standard tech," was marketed and ultimately trademarked. Church officials would later compare Scientology's trademarks (each one "a symbol which assures the public of a certain quality," in the words of one Scientology attorney) to Coca-Cola's.
While this might have been an off-the-cuff statement, Scientology did, in fact, mimic certain features of the Coca-Cola Company. Its orgs functioned as processing plants, churning out an identical product at every site worldwide. As the years went by, some of its core doctrine would be referred to not as sacred teachings but as "trade secrets." The Church of Scientology would go to court to protect its proprietary rights over this material: litigation, in fact, would become its hallmark.
When Scientology made its debut, few in the mainstream took it seriously. In one of the first articles about Hubbard's new spiritual science, published in Time on December 22, 1952, the magazine laid out the predominant view of the newly self-designated "Dr." Hubbard. "Now, the founder of still another cult, he claims to have discovered the ultimate secrets of life and the universe, and to be able to cure everything, including cancer," the article stated. "His latest ology is compounded of equal parts of science fiction, Dianetics (with 'auditing,' 'preclears' and engrams), and plain jabberwocky."
It did not help Hubbard's reputation that his latest books struck many as even more implausible than Dianetics. Hubbard's 1951 book, Science of Survival, laid out a theory of human behavior based on eighty emotional "tones," or levels, ranging from +40.0 (serenity of being) to –40 (total failure). The higher up the tone scale a person was positioned, the more emotionally and spiritually alive he or she would be. A tone, Hubbard said, affected a person's overall attitude or vibe, as well as the ability to communicate and to relate to others; it even determined a person's smell. People with body odor, Hubbard noted, were invariably lower on the tone scale than those with none; the same held true for those with bad breath. "The body is normally sweet-smelling down to 2.0"—the tone of "antagonism"—"but begins to exude chronically certain unpleasant effluvia from 2.0 down." But as people were audited "up" the tone scale, they would most likely lose these embarrassing traits.*
In his 1952 book The History of Man, Hubbard ventured away from the psychological into what could easily be read as pure fantasy. But Hubbard began the book by telling readers it was "a cold-blooded and factual account" of the past sixty trillion years of their own existence. Homo sapiens had a genetic line that confirmed much of what Darwin laid out in his evolutionary theory, Hubbard said, but Scientology helped fill in the blanks by explaining the various phases of development through the prism of engrams. Some engrams on the evolutionary chain could be traced back to a mollusk-centered era, dominated by a deadly incident known as the Clam. Auditing a person on this incident could be dangerous; simply asking this question—"Can you imagine a clam sitting on the beach, opening and closing its shell very rapidly?" —could cause the person severe jaw pain. "One such victim, after hearing about a clam death, could not use his jaws for three days. Another 'had to have' two molars extracted because of the resulting ache."
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