salon | In America, salvation is big business, and he who dies with the most
souls wins. Plenty of lives are wrecked along the way, but no matter.
When consumer capitalism meets religious yearning, the sky’s the limit
of what can you can get away with. That’s the subtext of Alex Gibney’s
latest film, Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January and screened on HBO on March 29.
L.
Ron Hubbard, or LRH, as he liked to style himself, was an American of
unprepossessing origins in search of meaning and money. Possibly he
found the first, and is just now cavorting with intergalactic spirits in
the sky. Most definitely he found the second, riding a rocket ship of
wacked-out ambition to create what is now essentially a tax-free shell
company with $3 billion in assets and real estate holdings on six
continents.
Gibney doesn’t give us LRH as a madman, or even a
simple huckster. The penny-a-word pulp fiction writer could have just
been another loser who couldn’t manage to finish college and whose
less-than-stellar naval service went awry when he inadvertently used a
Mexican island for target practice and was deemed unfit for command. Going Clear traces
the young man’s early perambulations through California occultism and
various hare-brained moneymaking schemes to the Jersey Shore, where he
washed up exhausted and plagued by anxiety. Another man might have just
given up. But not LRH.
Instead, he marshaled a smattering of
knowledge from various strains of psychological and philosophical
esoterica to gin up a mental health self-help system he named Dianetics,
which he introduced in a hugely successful book in 1950. For a while it
seemed like LRH had finally found his pot of gold, but alas, the
Dianetics fad faded like the hula-hoop craze, its foundations
disintegrating into debt and disorder.
Then came the epiphany,
shared with his second wife Sara Northrup, who appears in the film as
the shell-shocked survivor of LRH’s dreams. “The only way to make any
real money,” he told her, “was to have a religion.”
5 comments:
I'm going to celebrate Easter by going to the strip club.
So why, CNu, at least three decades after pointing out LRH's project, did you decide to join an existing old-line religion rather than starting one of your own?
Because I didn't know enough to properly serve the faithful, that has changed.....,
Brother CNu:
If religion is opium then THE PERPETUAL CHASE FOR "SOCIAL JUSTICE" inside of America, which causes the Americanized Negro to pervert his culture, consciousness and standards that he claims to make him "unique" from the White Male Imperialist is like "Heroin with a chaser of Crack" for good measure, as it is a far more effective scheme to disarm the Negro and take his valuables, while he says "Thank You For Allowing Me To Find My Purpose In Life".
Feed, your coinage "Americanized Negro" is redundant. The Negro is the quintessential American, period. Negro culture is American culture, period. It is quintessentially American to seek to overcome the constraints of social exclusion. From the founding American hoodlums who overcame British exclusion and resource appropriation, to the young protesters who overcame Jim Crow exclusion and resource appropriation.
Now that we are all of us faced with economic contraction and the inevitable in-group/out-group political antics of your killer-ape species here on the deck of the Titanic, it will be interesting to see whether and how Americans either hang-together or divide themselves up into their respective little identity bands and hang together.
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