Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief by Lawrence Wright Page B

bigger than the atomic bomb.” He added in a postscript that he had also lost twenty poundsin twenty-five days—another commercial bonanza. Campbell was beside himself because Hubbard had yet to actually start writing the book. “The key to world sanityis in Ron Hubbard’s head, and there isn’t even an adequate written record!”
    In December, Ron and Sara moved into what Hubbard termed “a little old shack” in Bayhead, New Jersey, with eight bedrooms, near the beach. In March 1950, he sent the Heinleins a handmade miniature book catalogue from “Hubbard House” publishers, proclaiming the spring collection:
    Announcing
A New Hubbard Edition
Completely New Material
Not
a revision
Co-Authors—Ron & Sara Hubbard
Release Date March 8, ’50—11:50 A.M.
Weight—9 lbs. 2 oz. — Height—21 in.
Alexis Valerie

Has received rave notices from all reviewers!
    Alexis was the image of her father, who delighted in her precociousness. “Ron is going ata little less than the speed of light all day and every day,” Sara wrote to the Heinleins, “then, in the middle of the night he goes in and tells Alexis all about it.”
    Ron promised to send Heinlein a galley of
Dianetics
as soon as it was available. He reported that it was 180,000 words, “begun Jan. 12, ’50, finished Feb. 10, off the press by April 25.” When one of his followers asked Hubbard how he had been able to dash it off so quickly, Hubbard said that hisguardian spirit, the Empress, had dictatedit to him.
    Like several other prominent sci-fi writers of the Golden Age, including Heinlein andA. E. van Vogt, Hubbard had been strongly influenced by the writings ofAlfred Korzybski, a Polish American philosopher who created thetheory of general semantics. In New Jersey, Sara read Korzybskiand quoted several passages aloud to Ron, who immediately grasped the ideas as the basis for a system of psychology, if not for a whole religion.
    Korzybski pointed out that words are not the things they describe, in the same way that a map is not the territory it represents. Language shapes thinking, creating mental habits, which can stand in the way of sanity by preserving delusions. Korzybski argued that emotional disturbances, learning disorders, and many psychosomatic illnesses—including heart problems, skin diseases, sexual disorders, migraines, alcoholism, arthritis, even dental cavities—could be remedied by semantic training, much as Hubbard would claim for his own work. He cited Korzybski frequently, although he admitted that he could never get through the texts themselves. “Bob Heinlein sat downone time and talked for ten whole minutes on the subject of Korzybski to me and it was very clever,” he later related. “I know quite a bit about Korzybski’s works.”
    From this secondhand knowledge, Hubbard saw the need for creating aspecial vocabulary, which would allow him to define old thoughts in new ways (the soul becomes athetan, for instance); or invent new words, such as “enturbulate” (confuse) and “hatting” (training); or use words and phrases in a novel manner, such as turning adjectives or verbs into nouns, or vice versa (“an overt,” “a static,” “alter-isness”); plus a Pentagon-level glut of acronyms—all of which would entrap his followers in a self-referential semantic labyrinth.
    Hubbard granted his friend and acolyte John Campbell a scoop by letting him buy a lengthy excerpt of his forthcoming book. Thusthe world got its first look at
Dianetics
in the pages of
Astounding Science-Fiction
. “This article is
not
a hoax, joke, or anything but a direct, clear statement of a totally new scientific thesis,” Campbell warns his readers, who might be confused by finding a work of scholarship in a pulp magazine. “I know dianetics isone of, if not the greatest, discovery of all Man’s written and unwritten history,” he wrote to a puzzled contributor. “It produces the sort of stability and sanity men have dreamed about for