Illustration by Julien Pacaud, colagene.com; photograph by Chris Ware/Keystone Features — Getty Images
By LAWRENCE WRIGHT
Reviewed by MICHAEL KINSLEY
Wright’s book ... makes clear that Scientology is like no church on Earth (or, in all probability, Venus or Mars either). The closest institutional parallel would be the Communist Party in its heyday: the ruthless struggles for power, the show trials and forced confessions (often false); the paranoia (often justified); the determination to control its members’ lives completely (the key difference, you will recall, between authoritarian and totalitarian regimes, according to the onetime American ambassador to the United Nations Jeane Kirkpatrick); the maintenance of something close to prison camps where dissenters, would-be defectors and power-struggle rivals were incarcerated in deplorable conditions for years and punished if they tried to escape; what the book describes as mysterious deaths and disappearances; and so on. Except that while the American Communist Party, including a few naïve Hollywood types, merely turned a blind eye to events happening in faraway Russia, Scientology — if Wright is to be believed, and I think he is — ran, and maybe still runs, a shadow totalitarian empire here in the United States, financed in part by huge contributions by Tom Cruise and others of the Hollywood aristocracy. “Naïve” doesn’t begin to describe the credulousness and sense of entitlement that has allowed actors, writers and directors to think they were helping themselves and the world by hanging around the Scientologists’ “Celebrity Centre,” taking “upper level” courses and gossiping about who was about to be labeled a “Suppressive Person” (bad guy).
Jennifer Burns, "In the Ayn Rand Archive":
I've heard Rand compared to L. Ron Hubbard countless times, and it is never an analogy I accept--primarily because Rand is far more intellectually substantive and culturally important than Hubbard. But there is another more important distinction between the two. Hubbard tried unabashedly to create his own religion, but he did not for one second buy into the scheme he sold to others. The tragedy of Rand is that not only did she create her own religion, as the legions of true believers who persist to this day so effectively demonstrate--but she believed in her own religion, truly and deeply. She taught a creed of selfishness and radical individualism that boomeranged upon itself to culminate in a creed of Stalinesque conformity. She died alone, having driven off all those who once mattered to her most. It turned out, as Rand always claimed, that Objectivism is its own avenger.
Comments
Post a Comment