This book changed my life. Its narration, its psychology, its… brain rot. For those unfamiliar with this run-on sentence confused to be a book, “Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health,” is a text written by the founder of Scientology, L. Ron Hubbard. While Hubbard was a science-fiction writer by trade, this book is not fiction, but an account of a new science with clinical tests, case studies and experiments that the reader is supposed to believe are not made up. This book changed my life. It wasted my time and gave me mixed feelings about Tom Cruise.
To understand lunacy, I will break down the main “sciences” that are written about in the book. Keep in mind that these created an entire religion. The book is broken down into three main components: describing the goal of man, the reasons man is so damaged and the therapies needed to combat our mental illnesses. The base component for all people is not only to survive, but to do it well. To do so, man must evolve. According to Hubbard, we live as a mind-body system composed of the analytical mind and the reactive mind that clash. In our reactive mind, some engrams cause psychosomatic illness, traumas and memories that make us sick. According to this, we are all deeply damaged people. However, there are ways to get “fixed” through auditing. Auditing from Hubbard’s brilliant mind is a psychotherapy with hypnosis to treat these engrams and cure our poor, miswired minds of overreaction.
The humor of the book cannot be matched. Constantly there are ridiculous lines: “This is the truth,” “Factually, this is the case” and “According to science…” Yet, I see no footnotes, in-text citations, bibliography or “Dr.” title in front of Hubbard’s name. However, he did get a mail-in degree from the unaccredited Sequoia University (doctor perhaps spelled with a k?). “Dianetics” pulls inspiration from Darwin and Freud, with some lines of the book feeling more like projection from Hubbard’s mommy issues rather than real psychology.
For example, Hubbard writes, “Mama often has had a couple of more men than Papa that Papa never knew about; and Mama would very often rather condemn her child to illness or insanity or merely unhappiness than let a child pursue the course of the pre-clear.”
In “Dianetics,” abortion is incessantly mentioned. Hubbard asserts that nearly all women attempt to abort their children and that pregnant women are obsessed with not being pregnant. They supposedly want their husbands to beat them to cure them of their child-ridden states or attempt to find pleasure outside of marriage to condemn their fetuses. Masturbation is an attempted abortion and a woman’s innate sexual deviancy is a testament to their pregnancy. This is not mentioned once, twice or three times. It is mentioned 60 times. There is so much insanity in this book that the creators of “South Park” never touched on, but the comedy writes itself.
Pseudoscience or not, the book itself is insufferable. It skips between interesting paragraphs detailing hypnotic ideas and then jumps to disorganized chaos that jumbles words into ill-formed mulch. Above all else, it is rambling. All 194 axioms that are labelled are no guidance to the treasure chest of the point.
In some chapters, Hubbard explains the meanings of common words, even applauding himself for his vocabulary. “Therefore, in studying this book be very, very certain you never go past a word you do not fully understand. If the material becomes confusing or you can’t seem to grasp it, there will be a word just earlier that you have not understood. Don’t go any further, but go back to before you get into trouble, find the misunderstood word and get it defined.”
To me, these notes give Hubbard a scapegoat: he is not crazy, the reader just has difficulty with two syllable words. It is unbelievably pandering to itself, lathering ridiculousness cover to cover.
“Dianetics” is to Scientologists what the Bible is to Christians or what the “Art of the Deal” is to the worst person you have ever met. It has been sold worldwide with the souls of the buyers safely in the grasp of Lord Xenu’s jetliner, but that’s a discussion for the sequel.
