‘Dianetics’ is 74: Isn’t it time L. Ron Hubbard’s hoax got pulled from libraries?

We’re not fans of censorship, and we think it’s not a good thing that books get pulled from libraries because they have controversial themes, or adult situations, or other things that often make uptight parents uncomfortable.

But today, 74 years since L. Ron Hubbard’s bestseller Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health was first released on May 9, 1950 and eventually produced the Scientology movement, shouldn’t there be some discussion about whether this thing belongs on library shelves after all the damage it has done?

Even before it came out, Hubbard confided in his friend Forrest Ackerman that the book was going to be useful for men who wanted to run roughshod over unsuspecting women. In a January 13, 1949 letter, Hubbard said he would be sending over a copy to Forrie…

Good as my word, however, I shall ship it along just as soon as decent. Then you can rape women without their knowing it, communicate suicide messages to your enemies as they sleep, sell the Arroyo Seco parkway to the mayor for cash, evolve the best way of protecting or destroying communism, and other handy house hold hints. If you go crazy, remember you were warned.

Good publishing trick, by the way, is to have the bookseller make the buyer sign a release releasing the author of all responsibilities if the reader goes nuts.

Scanning it to insert a few case histories I’d come across here and there, I got interested again and have not decided whether to destroy the Catholic church or merely start a new one. And I grow restless when I think of all the charming ladies and young boys who walk around without the slightest taste for LIFE.

That Ron, he was a joker, right? He didn’t mean any of it, right? That bit about raping women, that canard about replacing the Catholic Church? This was 1949 and he was still writing Dianetics, he didn’t really have that in mind, did he?

Let’s take a look at what actually did make it into the book itself, a passage that is in every edition of Dianetics from its first edition to the copy you can buy from the Church of Scientology today.

The passage appears in Book Three, Chapter IX, Part Two, under the subheading “Differences,” and in our first edition copy is on page 336…

The seven-year-old girl who shudders because a man kisses her is not computing; she is reacting to an engram since at seven she should see nothing wrong in a kiss, not even a passionate one. There must have been an earlier experience, possibly prenatal, which made men or kissing very bad.

We’ve checked, and that same passage is present in every edition of Dianetics to the present day. Here it is, for example, in the “Basics” edition of the book published in 2007, supposedly after current Scientology leader David Miscavige made sure that every word in these early works was gone over meticulously for a set of reprints…

Current and former Scientologists (all men) will tell you that your eyes deceive you, that this passage doesn’t mean what it says quite plainly, that there’s something wrong with a seven-year-old girl who “shudders” at a passionate kiss from a grown man.

The Church of Scientology’s own Twitter account tried to explain it away by claiming that the word “passionate” had a non-sexual meaning in 1950 when Hubbard used it.

But that’s preposterous. Hubbard himself, elsewhere in the book, uses “passionate” to refer to sexual excitement, specifically to illustrate his favorite example of how an engram is formed, and that’s when you’re a fetus tossed around in the womb like in a washing machine because of rough sex between mom and dad…

Oh, you were unaware of Hubbard’s repeated references to a fetus getting poked by dad’s dong during rough sex? You were unaware what a vile turd of a book this was?

And after 74 years of this book being used as a basis for enslaving young people in billion-year contracts, protecting predators and covering up heinous crimes against children and adults: Is 74 years long enough for libraries to maybe take another look at it and decide whether it actually deserves to sit on shelves and potentially infect another generation of gullible seekers?

We can only wonder why it’s taken this long for a serious review of this book to occur.

May 9. Dianetics Day.

Hip, hip, hooray.

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Source Code: Actual things founder L. Ron Hubbard said on this date in history

Avast, Ye Mateys: Snapshots from Scientology’s years at sea

Overheard in the Freezone: Indie Hubbardism, one thought at a time

Past is Prologue: From this week in history at alt.religion.scientology

Random Howdy: Your daily dose of the Captain

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