Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief

Alex Gibney's 2015 documentary (based on Lawrence Wright's book), Going Clear:  Scientology and the Prison of Belief is best approached as a black comedy, something like Erasmus' In Praise of Folly -- if you are going to see this film, you should be a jaded aficionado of folly.  Here is why I limit my recommendation of this movie to only those willing to view the whole thing as a joke:  the film's content, it's raw material, is so outrageous and displays a form of bullying stupidity that is so astoundingly overt, arrogant, and successful that watching this show will merely make you angry -- it will raise your blood pressure.  And unresolved anger is blood brother to depression.  In the end, unless taken cum grano salis, this documentary will, probably, just make you enraged, exhaust you, and leave you with a deposit of the deep melancholy.

That said, the film shows a train wreck of such proportions that you can't look away.  The story is probably well-known to most people but so remarkable as to deserve a brief reprise.  A successful science fiction writer, and accomplished liar, L. Ron Hubbard, wrote a self-help book called Dianetics.  The book triggered a fad and Hubbard toured the country lecturing on his doctrine.  As the fad faded, Hubbard decided to repackage his theories as a religion, something he called Scientology.  A devoted core of acolytes surrounded the increasingly paranoid Hubbard who ended up in permanent exile on the high seas for tax fraud.  Scientology has a simple premise:  simony.  You pay for enlightenment.  The more you pay, the more enlightened the Church declares you to be.  To increase the religion's revenues, the Church developed an enormous hierarchy of degrees of revelation, each higher level more expensive than the preceding (and lower/inferior) levels.  When a Scientologist reaches the highest level of understanding, he or she is revealed the ultimate truth of human existence -- this is handed to the adept in the form of a photocopy of a handwritten memo prepared by L. Ron Hubbard himself.  Paul Haggis, in an interview in the film, describes his reaction upon first reading this memo:  "I wondered -- Was it a sanity test?  Were they trying to figure out if I was so completely crazy as to believe the stuff written in the revelation?"  Hubbard's apocalypse tells his disciples that billions of years ago evil aliens, probably something like psychiatrists, the so-called Thetans, were banished to Earth; they were thrown in volcanos that were sealed with nuclear explosions.  But the spirits of the dead Thetans have escaped and occupy living human beings.  To be truly liberated -- that is, to "go clear" -- the Thetan ghosts must be clawed out of our personalities.  This is accomplished by the use of an electromagnetic device something like a lie-detector, the so-called E-Meter.  E-Metrics is the closest thing that Scientology has to a liturgy or religious practice:  members of the Church "audit" one another using the e-meter device and try to extract oppressive (or "suppressive" to use Scientology terminology) influences from the psyche.  (The regimen of "auditing" is obviously derived from Freudian psychoanalysis -- something L. Ron Hubbard, however, vehemently denied.) As this is accomplished, and, as the Scientologist becomes increasingly "clear" of Thetan control, that person reaps dividends that are apparently brazenly materialistic and, even , pecuniary -- you become handsome, self-confident, attractive to beautiful women, and, ultimately, wealthy beyond all dreams of avarice.  The two most famous Scientologists are Tom Cruise and John Travolta.

The belief system animating Scientology is not intrinsically more absurd than Mormonism.  Every religion, including Christianity, requires its adherents to believe something that is "folly to the Greeks" -- that is, something absurd.  What makes Scientology abhorrent is the element of coercive fraud that animates every aspect of its history and operations.  The entire institution is a vast, secretive instrument for committing theft on a massive scale.  Truly disturbing is the fact that the IRS capitulation to Scientology in 1993, it's recognition of this con-game as a religion, has placed the criminals at the helm of this operation effectively beyond the reach of the law.  Furthermore, Scientology, a cult that seems to be shrinking now that the "cat is out of the bag" as to its doctrine, merely grows more powerful and wealthy each day as it loses adherents but increases its investments and real estate portfolio. 

Gibney's film is just a series of talking heads intercut with some drone-type footage of the sinister-looking Church Headquarters in California.  The program is unbalanced -- no one from Scientology would offer an interview to the filmmakers.  The movie documents in nauseating detail Scientology's history of blackmail, extortion, and physically coercive violence -- people cleaning toilets with their tongues, beatings, strange forms of brainwashing, the use of child and slave labor at its compounds and so on.  Some of this material is undoubtedly exaggerated, but if a tenth of what the film alleges is true than most of Scientology's leading apostles should be serving long prison sentences.  Particularly hapless are Travolta and Cruise, both, apparently, closeted homosexuals, who seem to have made a Faustian deal with the Church -- money and fame in exchange for protection with respect to a personal secret that was a big deal five years ago, but that today, in an era of legally sanctioned same sex marriages, no one seems to care much about.  Archival footage of L. Ron Hubbard is fascinating, particularly with regard to Paul Thomas Anderson's great The Master -- the documentary lets us see how Hubbard looked and hear the cadences of his speech.  On screen, he's a roly-poly man dressed incongruously as the Admiral of the Ocean Sea with bad teeth and a sinister jack-o-lantern grin.  Although, in person, Hubbard was apparently a man of some charisma, none of this is perceptible in the film.  The great question that the film poses, and that remains a riddle is a simple one that has always vexed mankind:  Why do people chose to believe things that are so palpably wrong that any reasonably intelligent seven-year old would dismiss as ridiculous?  I can venture only one answer on the basis of this film and it is dispiriting -- I suppose if I have paid good money be told something that is ridiculous, the price-tag on that doctrine requires that I believe what I have been told.  Put a price-tag on a belief and that belief can become, at least for its adherents, unshakeable dogma. 

A heavy package came to my office the week the film was premiered on HBO.  The package contains a DVD about the abuses of psychiatry and extraordinarily glossy brochure and study package printed on high-grade paper.  The graphics in the brochure are brilliant and eye-catching.  The DVD and booklet are publications of the Citizens Commission for Human Rights (in Mental Health).  Needless to say, a quick search on Wikipedia shows that this organization is a front for Scientology and, I presume, the mass mailing, likely costing millions of dollars, was designed to counter the HBO documentary. 

Best to view the whole thing as fiction -- a blithe, Borgesian parable on the perils of faith.