This collegiate thesis by Hugh A.D. Spencer has been cited on very few occasions over the past several decades …
BoingBoing and Scientology Books and Media were those sites that gave it more than mere mention. It seems appropriate to bring it out of the archives with some fresh perspective. Spencer says he “received a grant from the Social Sciences & Humanities Research Council of Canada to investigate the origins of religious movements in science fiction fandom. The project was part of my graduate studies in cultural anthropology and has something of a legacy.” Let’s dust it off and reexamine “The Fictional Origins of a Modern Religion.”
Well, he does get right to the point!
This thesis deals with science fiction and its manifestations as a force in popular culture. To be specific, I discuss science fiction and its symbolic connections with the recently formed ‘cult’ known as the Church of Scientology. Scientology was created by a former science fiction writer, L. Ron Hubbard, who uses a great deal of science fiction imagery in church doctrine.
Following are selected quotes throughout the thesis where Mr. Spencer “examines how ideas and themes in a fictional setting can be transformed into religious doctrine.”
“Fascinating, Captain. The knowledge. The depth.”
Most of us have had some encounter with science fiction at some point in our lives.
…Within the ranks of the more devoted enjoyers of science fiction exist more deeply committed enthusiasts.
…The behavior of a few Star Trek fans is indicative of an effect which is of central importance to this thesis: the immersion of consciousness into a fantasy world.
CAUTION: Here comes the “C” word…for those of you who missed it in the introduction.
One aspect of the wider influence of science fiction is the cult movement known as the Church of Scientology. I shall examine how bodies of ideas, in this case taken from an entertainment, can influence social configurations and behavior. Further, I shall elaborate on how science fiction symbols and enthusiasts aided in the formation of a religious institution: Scientology.
This is an exercise in “processual symbology”; how various ideas and symbols can be manipulated by persons (in this case church founder L. Ron Hubbard, himself a science fiction writer) to gain control over symbols, by changing their meaning and context.
During his discussion of the importance, history, and impact of science fiction on American culture, Spencer makes an intriguing observation, prompted by others who have studied the genre…
Science fiction acts as a means of psychologically compensating for feelings of inadequacy.
HOLD THAT THOUGHT …
or to put it more elegantly in French,
“Maintenir Cette Pensée”
As Spencer shifts gears, his thesis creates its own Question-and-answer session…
When we acknowledge that science fiction has a broader interest base, it becomes possible to’ address this problem: Just how deviant are those who succumb to the appeal of science fiction?
…as a genre, science fiction has a force over the minds and imagination of its readers. For those who are predisposed, science fiction can create alternate realities.
…Science fiction has the potential to attract large numbers of devoted followers, and in the case of fans who are extremely committed to the vision of science fiction, it separates them from those who have chosen to live in the real world.
…the fact that some science fiction should eventually give rise to a sect or religious movement can be partially understood.
We find a similar theme in the realm of Fantasy publications, “Faith and Religion in Fantasy Societies.” The topic presented tends to corroborate Spencer’s suggestion about the natural relationship between science fiction and religion.
Fantasy appeals frequently to characters with transcendent abilities that allow them to enter into communication with supernatural beings.
The word “sacred” traditionally refers to anything that is outside of the ordinary or goes beyond basic utilitarian principles. Any sacrosanct object or concept whose legitimacy and superiority may not be challenged is considered sacred. Defining the sacred is therefore one of the founding elements of any society. What a populace considers sacred reveals its beliefs, customs and history. Thus, a people’s relationship to the sacred is actually a way of defining its identity.
So it makes sense that fantasy, which aims to create lush and often complex worlds, would also grant great importance to the sacred. More than just window dressing to define a society, the characters’ spirituality, and the religions established in their world, often play a crucial role in the plot. To bring a fully realized fantasy world compellingly to life, authors and creators can’t settle for an exotic landscape, endearing characters, and an unusual plot; they also need to account for spiritual issues in the worlds they create.
Although it offers exciting stories in fascinating settings, fantasy is still founded on the major philosophical questions that occupy humanity, including the relationship between body and mind, the existence of a divine power, how we are affected by the passage of time, and of course, life and death. Fantasy often includes apocalyptic themes, with threats looming over the world and their possible consequences to society. Whether the point is to save the world from destruction, get life back to normal, or, on the contrary, to learn to live with the repercussions of chaos, the protagonists often turn towards spirituality to help them with their task – or, conversely, are required to labor in a godless, lawless world.
Because of the diversity of themes addressed in fantasy, the sacred isn’t limited to traditional monotheistic or even polytheistic deities. Fantasy creates new, superior beings, gods, demons and fairies, who, following the model of the ancient epics, often meddle in the hero’s path.
Are you beginning to see some major clues emerging here?
This concept is reiterated in a 2014 article by Susan Raine, “Astounding history: L. Ron Hubbard’s Scientology space opera.” The following citation is illustrative of the theory that Hubbard employed strategies that he was well familiar with as an author and as a contributor to the science fiction genre.
L. Ron Hubbard created in Scientology an immense landscape of alternative worlds, realities, and possibilities. Scientology cosmology, mythology, and eschatology are inescapably linked to galactic events and Hubbard’s retelling of human history is replete with science-fiction tropes – many of which found popularity in the early science-fiction tradition to which he belonged. In his therapeutic and religious teachings, Hubbard proposed a complex narrative that re-defined the essence of self and society in relation to the cosmos. For Scientologists, the fantastic becomes mundane as they position themselves within a vast and heavy quest to reshape themselves, the rest of humanity, and, for some, the entire universe. Understood within the science-fiction context from which Scientology emerged, one can better understand the grand nature of Hubbard’s proposals as belonging to a specific tradition within the genre – namely, space opera. Consequently, this article analyses Hubbard’s propositions using space-opera concepts, and argues that Hubbard re-defined a unique tradition in the course of creating a new reality.
As in the pulp science-fiction writings of his youth, L. Ron Hubbard created in Scientology – and in its forerunner, Dianetics – an immense and fantastic landscape of alternative worlds, realities, and possibilities. This creative process was a lifelong project for Hubbard – one that incorporated an astounding quantity of output. In the course of his unearthing of proposals and building of ideologies and histories, Hubbard incorporated a myriad of influences ranging from psychology, science, pseudo-science, science fiction, the occult, and more, resulting in what Hugh Urban (2011) aptly describes as a bricolage of ideas woven together to form a new movement. Critically, this multi-faceted creation becomes the singular truth for many of Scientology’s devoted followers, especially, one might argue, for those who achieve the most advanced levels of Scientology training – OT and beyond.
The first published version of Hubbard’s ideas made its appearance in the May 1950 issue of Astounding Science Fiction. Campbell previewed the essay in the previous
issue:
… the item that most interests me at the moment is an article on the most important subject conceivable. This is not a hoax article. It is an article on the science of the mind, of human thought, it is not an article on psychology–that isn’t a science. It’s not General Semantics. It’s a totally new science called dianetics, and it does precisely what a science of thought should do. Its power is almost unbelievable; it proves the mind not only can but does rule the body completely; following the sharply defined basic laws dianetics sets forth, physical ills such as ulcers, asthma and arthritis can be cured, as can other psychosomatic ills…. It is quite simply, impossible to exaggerate the importance of a true science of human thought (Campbell 1950:80).
Also in the April issue of that year, Campbell wrote on the subject of human memory and in the June issue he editorialized on the issues of education. In both editorials Campbell endorsed Hubbard’s theories on the human mind, suggesting how this new “science” could be applied to improve learning.
While writing for Campbell, Hubbard had become skilled in the art of hypnotism. Using this ability in conjunction with his own Dianetic jargon, Hubbard succeeded in temporarily curing Campbell of chronic sinitus, and so he made his first important convert.
The following article explains how real life and what is perceived as a “fictional” encounter can intersect and create the illusion of an alternate supernatural reality…
During the Second World War, fierce fighting took place between the Western Allies and Japan. The Melanesian Islands were used first by the Japanese, then by the allied forces as staging posts to stockpile war supplies.
Until this happened, the people of the Melanesian Islands had been completely isolated from the wider world. They encountered both state-of-the-art technology (e.g. aircraft and radio) and the products of industrial society for the first time
Aircraft landed and took off. Supplies were air-dropped by parachute. Soldiers in identical clothes drilled and worked while they watched. Sometimes these curious strangers engaged with their people, and gave them strange gifts. Then the soldiers disappeared, as quickly mysteriously as they had arrived.
The reaction of the Islanders to these strange visitations provides an insight into the claims for the scientific status of Scientology, and why Scientologists accept the organisation’s extraordinary claims.
This encounter was a serious psychological challenge to the indigenous culture. They could not reproduce the artefacts and technology that they they glimpsed, and had no experience of the industrial processes that had created these things. They decided that the goods had been originated by supernatural means.
Soon, charismatic individuals began to preach that the Gods &/or Ancestors had created the ‘cargo’ to give to their people but the mysterious visitors had stolen it, or been given it by mistake.
The solution was to perform new rituals designed to persuade those same supernatural forces to send more cargo – but this time deliver into the hands of the right people.
Islanders took on the appearance of the visitors – for example by dressing in cast-off uniforms and ‘drilling’ with sticks. They spoke to the Gods through wooden radios, and ‘heard’ their replies through headphones made from coconut shells.
This robust and creative response saved their self-esteem, and their culture survived what could have been a devastating encounter.
When he learned of this phenomenon, pioneering physicist Richard Feynman coined the expression ‘Cargo Cult Science‘. He initially intended it to apply to ‘bad science’, but it can be extended to describe a host of fringe ideas which claim to be ‘Scientific’ but have no rational or systematic basis.
Modern cargo cults imitate scientific culture. The aim of this application of sympathetic magic is not to attract cargo (we probably have more than enough consumer goods) but status.
Cargo cult scientists cannot produce valid scientific concepts of their own because they do not understand the intellectual process by which they are bought about. Consequently, they are not taken seriously by the scientific or medical establishments. They compensate for this by arguing that their cargo (the prestige that they desire) has been stolen from them. The thieves in this case are vested interests who would (supposedly) be laid low by the guru’s revolutionary ideas – academics, doctors, psychiatrists and others who have earned the status that the cultist merely aspires to.
The USA in the 1950’s was fertile ground for this sort of thinking. People were recovering from a gruelling war, during which the power of science had been decisively demonstrated at Hiroshima and Nagasaki and about to enter into a new form of conflict – ‘the cold war.’
The future was seen to belong to science and technology – an optimism which was expressed through science-fiction pulp magazines – so the publication of “Dianetics” in “Astounding Science Fiction” represents the ideal example of a new form of cargo cult.
Dianetics is replete with claims to scientific authority. Hubbard constantly refers to his ‘research’ and ‘stable data’. He draws analogies between the human brain and complex mechanical computers, and constantly asserts that his conclusions have the reliability of natural law.
At this time, the man in the street had learned that science was powerful – but did not understand how it worked. They judged claims like Hubbard’s by their style, not their substance – and were taken in.
Of course, Hubbard originated no real research for Dianetics. His book was pure ‘cargo cult science’ – the few real scientists who examined it found his claims to be simply false. These include:
When people like Hubbard attract followers, their delusional self-belief can take on a life of its own. When a formal organisation is created, the founders position is reinforced – and the higher the status that is conferred upon him by the group, the more prestigious their position, as his disciples, becomes.
‘Qualifications’ (including elaborate certificates and titles) are awarded and diagnostic sign of cargo cult pseudo-scientific props are deployed. Hubbard came to rely heavily on one such prop – the e-meter.
This strange creation is a simple electronic device called a Wheatstone bridge. The user holds two electrodes (early versions used empty soup cans) one in each hand, so that a small electrical current is passed through their body.
A needle on the device (the blue box that can be seen on the right) moves when the person holding them sweats, or relaxes their grip. These movements are ‘interpreted’ by Scientologists – who are taught that they can indicate anything from the existence of previous lives to the concealment of crimes.
The e-meter demonstrates the same understanding of electronic engineering (and psychology) as the coconut-shell headphones and wicker aeroplanes of the Melanesian Islanders. Cargo cult science comes full circle.
Writing about this phenomenon for the Village Voice (whose Scientology coverage since 1995 is among the best), journalist Tony Ortega had a realization:
For going on 17 years I’ve been writing about Scientology, and over that time there’s one question that has come up again and again.
Why don’t Scientologists, when they’ve been in the organization long enough to reach the legendary material in “Operating Thetan Level Three” — the stuff about Xenu the galactic overlord which made for a great 2005 episode of South Park — bust out laughing and walk away?
Tom Cruise and John Travolta and thousands of other Scientologists have moved on beyond the space opera stuff in OT 3 (Cruise, for example, has moved up to OT 7), and for some reason, they accepted the Xenu story and never looked back.
When I’ve been asked that question, I had a ready answer that I’d put together after talking to many ex-Scientologists who told me their own experiences.
But now, I realize that the answer I was giving was wrong. The reason why Scientologists accept the story about Xenu and disembodied alien beings infesting this Earth is actually much simpler, and much more mindblowing, than I ever realized.
A few weeks ago, I interviewed a man named Dani Lemberger, and he made me understand the “whole track” and auditing better than anyone else had before. (In auditing — Scientology’s spiritual counseling — a subject holds onto the sensors of an e-meter while an auditor asks questions prescribed by Hubbard, encouraging the subject to remember events earlier and earlier. The purpose is to remember and then disarm traumatic memories that happened in your past lives, and helps you move toward becoming “clear.” As you do so, you gain a view down your entire “whole track” of existence as an immortal spirit, called a “thetan.”)
Lemberger made me realize something very basic about Scientology that, for some reason, had never really sunk in before. And it is this…
The reason Scientologists accept Hubbard’s bizarre story about Xenu is that by the time they reach OT 3, they have been “remembering” their own outlandish space opera “whole track” stories during auditing, perhaps for several years.
Why question Hubbard’s tale about mass alien genocide 75 million years ago, when you’ve been “seeing” yourself as some kind of Buck Rogers fighting enemies and bedding beauties from one end of the galaxy to the other?
Tiziano Lugli was the same way. He spoke to me at length about his own auditing and the entire progression of the OT levels. But I had to keep pushing him until he finally coughed up one of his whole track events…
“It was 250,000 years ago, in a space ship, and I’d gathered all these people from these planets, and I’m implanting them with mental pictures and then throwing them down to the earth, a prison planet,” Lugli said. “I was the guy in charge, and I’m responsible for this prison planet. The feeling of that responsibility and what I went through freaked me out for a year.”
And that’s really the purpose of “remembering” such material — Scientologists believe that if they can recall and “handle” things that happened to them eons ago, it will solve whatever problems they have going on in their current lives.
“At the end of a session you feel invincible,” Lugli says. “You’ve been having planets built and destroyed. After that, you come out into this normal world and you feel like the most powerful person around because you’ve been traveling through space and time.”
What Ortega suggests is that the allure of creating elaborate fantasy worlds, a common draw for role-playing gamers, is mirrored in Scientology. However, while RPG players engage in this as a form of escapism, Scientologists are led to believe that these fabricated realities are factual.
Spencer concludes his thesis by discussing “Symbolic Ambivalence,” providing some relief for those in the broader science fiction audience who might be expecting collateral damage from the strafing run he performed on the genre in general…
The purpose of this thesis has been to point out how much of science fiction lore and Scientological beliefs arose out of a single “cultural background”. But it is a mistake to assert that science fiction is simply a source for bizarre and potentially harmful groups in society. Science fiction did provide the forum for Dianetics to gain public attention, but some qualifications must be made regarding their symbolic relatedness.
So relax everyone, Science Fiction is still fun …
Spencer’s conclusion brings everything into focus…
As I compiled my data for this thesis I found the greatest error committed by Hubbard and his followers, and even extreme fans such as Ray Nelson, is that in their proposed solutions to society’s problems, they do not deal with any immediate difficulties, but instead argue for a new kind of society, circumventing existing problems. Utopianists make this central flaw in their ideologies: they propose the “final step” in human action, rather than the best next step. Such an attitude, which Scientologists in particular are guilty of, puts their followers farther out of touch with reality rather than allowing them to address its true nature.
Although fans familiar with science fiction ideology and symbolism may act as a check on some of the proselytization by Scientologists, we cannot leave them to shoulder the burden alone. Scholars and analysts could also study various movements in society which might pose threats to the rights of its members.Such studies would at least provide people with information that would allow them to make better choices in their actions and attitudes.
If the reader wishes to categorize this thesis, then it should be considered as a contribution to such an endeavour.
Thank you, Mr. Spencer, and yes, more than just a few ex-members, journalists, movie stars, scholars, and analysts have provided their insights since 1981.
NOTE: HUGH ALAN DOUGLAS SPENCER is a pretty unique name. I’m thinking THIS is our guy some 40+ years later, but sadly his site has disappeared from the Internet (this link is from the Internet Archive).
And he’s written a bunch of … WAIT FOR IT … science fiction books! Here is a compilation of “Why I Hunt Flying Saucers” thanks to the Internet Archive.
Hugh A. D. Spencer’s weird, wonderful, side-splitting short fiction has been delighting audiences for over 25 years. His stories have been published in a variety of magazines and anthologies and broadcast on National Public Radio satellite networks. Now collected together for the first time, Why I Hunt Flying Saucers And Other Fantasticals contains thirteen of his best-loved stories, along with all-new introductions by the author.
Malfunctioning household robots, an endless apocalyptic loop, potash-fueled interstellar travel, and more—these stories stretch science fiction to its limit and bring it into our backyards at the same time.
His Facebook page confirms he Studied Anthropology at McMaster University, class of 1981 (same date as this thesis). There is no online indication that he ever mentioned anything regarding Scientology beyond his Master’s thesis.
Oh yeah … let’s check in with Readers’ Digest at the same time Robert Spencer was completing his 1981 Master’s thesis … “Scientology: The Sickness Spreads.”
Eighteen months ago, the U.S.-based Church of Scientology launched a global-and unsucccssful — campaign to prevent publication of a Reader’s Digest report called “Scientology: Anatomy of a Frightening Cult.” The church engaged a detective agency to investigate the author, Digest Senior Editor Eugene H. Methvin. Digest offices in a half-dozen nations were picketed or bombarded with nuisance phone calls. In Denmark, South Africa and Australia, the church sued unsuccessfully to prevent publication.
In the months since the article appeared, in May 1980, a flood of reader reaction both here and abroad has convinced us that our article only scratched the surface. Indeed, there is every indication that Scientology’s international operations are at least as chilling as the U.S. operations described in the May ’80 article. And they continue to grow at an alarming pace.
Most of us have had some encounter with science fiction at some point in our lives.
One aspect of the wider influence of science fiction is the cult movement known as the Church of Scientology. I shall examine how bodies of ideas, in this case taken from an entertainment, can influence social configurations and behavior. Further, I shall elaborate on how science fiction symbols and enthusiasts aided in the formation of a religious institution: Scientology.
As in the pulp science-fiction writings of his youth, L. Ron Hubbard created in Scientology – and in its forerunner, Dianetics – an immense and fantastic landscape of alternative worlds, realities, and possibilities. This creative process was a lifelong project for Hubbard – one that incorporated an astounding quantity of output. In the course of his unearthing of proposals and building of ideologies and histories, Hubbard incorporated a myriad of influences ranging from psychology, science, pseudo-science, science fiction, the occult, and more, resulting in what Hugh Urban (2011) aptly describes as a bricolage of ideas woven together to form a new movement. Critically, this multi-faceted creation becomes the singular truth for many of Scientology’s devoted followers, especially, one might argue, for those who achieve the most advanced levels of Scientology training – OT and beyond.
The USA in the 1950’s was fertile ground for this sort of thinking. People were recovering from a gruelling war, during which the power of science had been decisively demonstrated at Hiroshima and Nagasaki and about to enter into a new form of conflict – ‘the cold war.’
