L. Ron Hubbard is a clown

Yeah, so I've been reading Dianetics. It's a very important book, or so I have heard from Very Important People. I've always had a thing for Scientology; you know, it's full of celebrities and helpiness and smilishy people. I've taken one of their personality tests and met with a woman who told me that Scientology made you really smart. I had to think that she had been, literally, pre-verbal before Scientology because she was dumb.

At any rate, there are things that fascinate me about Scientology. Sure, they've got Xenu and volcanoes and thetans and all that magic, but every religion is crazy. What really fascinates me is their view on psychology and psychiatry; if you'll recall, Tom Cruise had a hissy fit about psychiatry while being interviewed by Matt Lauer several years ago. It's not that I am some huge fan of psychiatry. In fact, as a psychology undergrad, I was pretty anti-psychiatry, to the extent that I considered it a science of dispensing pills and sucking pharma cock. That said, I think that pills can sometimes help some disorders, and for other people, psychologists can be really beneficial. And beyond that, I don't equate psychology with counseling; it is the study of how and why people behave the way they do.

So when Tom Cruise got all up in Matt Lauer's face about how psychiatry is basically Nazism, it piqued my interest. I started to pay a little more attention to what Scientologists didn't like about psychiatry. First, they don't like the overmedication of children. I completely agree. Second, they don't think mental illness is real, or it's an "aberration" of a perfectly formed mind. And with that, I bid you (Scientological logic) adieu and take my leave. Also, they think psychology is BS.

And with that, let us return to Dianetics. It is basically a cheap ripoff of psychological theories, amalgamated and with made-up words, written by someone on copious quantities of methamphetamine. I've been reading it before I go to sleep, and often I will read it aloud to myself, just to savor the crazy:

Any one of man's perceptions can be aberrated by psychic derangements which refuse to permit the received sensations to be realized by the analytical portion of the individual's mind ... Colorblindness can be discovered to be relative or in degrees in such a way that colors appear to be less brilliant, dull or, at the maximum, entirely absent. Anyone is acquainted with persons to whom 'loud' colors are detestable with persons who find them insufficiently 'loud' to notice. This varying degree of colorblindness has not been recognized as a psychic factor but has been nebulously assumed to be some sort of a condition of mind when it was noticed at all - Dianetics, p. 15.

Now, first of all: no, colorblindness is not usually attributed to a "condition of mind." I presume he means preference, since he's talking about something called the "loud"-ness of color. But it's totally unclear. And he doesn't clarify. The writing is always that bad. It's written for people who are easily impressed by words with more than one syllable. Sorry, that is unkind. But it's true. It is page after page of postmodern farce. I am going to assume that he did it all as a joke, and that he's laughing at us all, floating just above our heads. Because L. Ron is magic like that.

I will continue to read Dianetics, if only so that one day, when I finally meet an intelligent, conversant Scientologist, I can ask them honestly what they believe and why. I really want to know.

Finally, as a postscript, I really want to know why Scientologists don't like psychology, since L. Ron flagrantly lifts so many psychological concepts and just relabels them. I don't have time for detail (trying to defend soon!) but suffice it to say that if you took developmental psych, combined it with cognitive psych, and sprinkled a bit of Freudianism on top, you'd have Dianetics. Also, the book constantly refers to L. Ron's years of research. Yet the research is completely undocumented and unverifiable. How did he conduct his research? Does he have journals? It's written as received wisdom, yet I think L. Ron wanted naive people to think that he had "researched" this shit so they could call themselves scient(olog)ists.