hen considering all Dianetics and Scientology represent as both a philosophic statement and a means to the realization of that statement, it is only reasonable to assume L. Ron Hubbard would have met with opposition. In the simplest terms, he speaks of a “power elite” made uneasy with a genuinely popular philosophic movement, and particularly one which stands so unequivocally for individual freedom. He also speaks of what Dianetics and Scientology represent to an international psychiatric establishment and financially linked pharmaceutical industry (both of which have traditionally stood at loggerheads to the spiritual, with a behavioral creed from Darwin and epitomized by Pavlov’s “Philosophy of the Mechanistic”). Finally, and herein lies the rub, LRH speaks of a thirty-year psychiatric effort, not to bury his work, but to grab it.
The record bears him out. Among the several million pages of documentation eventually released from United States’ government files are thousands of pages detailing attempts, both covert and overt, to appropriate Dianetics and Scientology for psychiatric offices within the American intelligence community. To what ends LRH discoveries were to be employed is not entirely clear, but the psychiatric obsession—the only word for it—is absolutely undisputable. Leafing through since declassified Central Intelligence Agency memoranda, for example, one repeatedly encounters suggestions of dark plans to first discredit and then appropriate the materials of Scientology. Likewise one encounters much in the way of attempted infiltration initiated by and on behalf of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, while illegally obtained copies of LRH lectures on The state of OT are still said to reside within National Security Agency vaults.
In reply, and remembering we are still speaking of a philosophic dispute, comes L. Ron Hubbard’s “My Only Defense for Having Lived.” It dates from 1966, or when several British and United States intelligence services conspired to curtail both Ron’s personal movements and the growth of Scientology as a whole. Deeply personal and immensely powerful, let us simply describe it as a statement from a man whose life cannot be divorced from the convictions of his philosophy.
