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---
title: "Understanding Scientology — us-01"
source: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/Library/Shelf/wakefield/us-01.html
retrieved: 2026-06-28
---
Understanding Scientology, by Margery
Wakefield
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Chapter 1
## From Dianetics to Scientology -- The Evolution of a Cult
Writing for a penny a word is ridiculous. If a man really
wants to make a million dollars, the best way would be to start his own
religion.
-- L. Ron Hubbard
Scientology is here to rescue you.
-- L. Ron Hubbard
L. Ron Hubbard, founder of the curious and controversial cult of
Scientology, and author of swashbuckling tales of mystery and adventure,
could very well have stepped larger than life from the pages of one of
his own stories. Flamboyant, charismatic, Messiah to thousands of
adulating followers, Hubbard lived by no rules but his own. In an age of
anxiety, he offered to those in his thrall the comforting certainty of
simple solutions to the problems of life. Yet, as weaver of the complex
web of Scientology, he managed to ensnare not only others, but also
himself.
Lafayette Ronald Hubbard began his life as the center of attention
in a large and lively extended family in Helena, Montana, which included
his doting grandparents and several adoring maternal aunts. His father,
Harry Ross Hubbard, after a brief and unsuccessful business career, was
caught up in the surge of patriotism which affected many young men
following the declaration of war in 1917 between the United States and
Germany. He enlisted in the Navy. When the war ended, he reenlisted as a
career Navy officer. Ron's mother, May Waterbury Hubbard, was a dutiful
Navy wife who was to inherit the impossible task of bridging the gap
between a military father who lived life by the rules, and his brilliant
and unpredictable son to whom rules were anathema.
As a child, according to his aunts, Ron Hubbard was already
possessed of a fecund imagination, making up games and stories for the
amusement of the invariably attentive adults in his world. From the
beginning, he possessed a capacity for fantasy which he was to carry
with him throughout his life. As a schoolboy, to escape the reality of
dreary algebraic equations and dry facts of history, he would fill the
pages of his school notebooks with pages and pages of swashbuckling
tales of heroic adventurers in exotic and distant lands.
In later years, he created a resume for himself, transforming his
most pathetic liabilities into assets of heroic proportions -- as if the
boundary between fantasy and reality had become blurred even to himself.
Yet, ironically, no fantasy life he created for himself could ever match
the colorful and improbable reality that he actually lived.
"I am possessed," he once told a friend, "of an insatiable lust for
power and money." In his greed, he would siphon the energy and assets
from the lives of thousands of followers whom he came to regard with a
sneering contempt. Although he created the vast and complex world of
Scientology, in which his followers could lose themselves for years, he
did not want to be identified with his marks.
By the early thirties, Hubbard acquired a wife and two small
children. To the horror of his
conservative parents, he flunked out of college and had no acceptable
skills with which to support his young family. Money was a constant and
wearying problem. He soon discovered that the colorful adventures he had
been creating for years in his notebooks were actually salable to the
popular pulp fiction magazines of that era. He started slowly, but it
was soon obvious that he possessed a prolific talent in writing for
these magazines, named for the inferior wood pulp paper stock on which
they were printed.
His work habits were somewhat eccentric. He was a phenomenally fast
writer, and would work all night to produce story after story, retiring
at dawn to sleep until early afternoon. However, no matter how prolific
his output, he could never seem to make enough money to support his
profligate spending habits.
By the mid-forties, his literary output was beginning to decline. He
was well known and respected as a writer of adventure stories, science
fiction and westerns. But he soon realized the limits of his vocation,
that he was not going to achieve power and money by writing penny-a-word
pulp adventures. The way to make money, he began to remark to his
friends, is to start a religion. He once addressed a group of science
fiction writers in New Jersey with the words, "Writing for a penny a
word is ridiculous. If a man really wanted to make a million dollars,
the best way to do it would be to start his own religion."
In 1949, Hubbard dropped out of sight. Rumors said he was working on
something new, a book on psychology. In January of 1950, a mysterious ad
appeared in Astounding Science Fiction, a pulp magazine edited by
his friend, John Campbell, promising:
... an article on the science of the mind, of human thought. It is a
totally new science, called Dianetics, and it does precisely what a