Bare-Faced Messiah (PDF) - Apologetics Index

worth a damn compared to what he had come up with and what it would do.
'I guess it would be true to say that the early 'fifties was the right moment to launch Dianetics. The
atomic bomb had been dropped, there was a sense of hopelessness around and there was a
great deal of fear about a nuclear war - people were building cabins out in the wilderness.
McCarthyism was rife and our troops were fighting a war in Korea which seemed completely unreal
to most of us. Then along comes Hubbard with the idea that if we could increase the overall sanity
of man just a little bit, it would be a partial solution to the threat of nuclear war. It was no wonder that
people wanted to listen to him.'
While Hubbard was lecturing in Elizabeth, Dianetics became, virtually overnight, a national 'craze'
somewhat akin to the canasta marathons and pyramid clubs that had briefly flourished in the
hysteria of post-war America. Dianetic groups sprang up everywhere, in every small town and every
college; on the West Coast 'Dianetic parties' became the rage; in Hollywood, where neuroses and
dollars lay thick on the ground, the movie colony joyfully embraced the idea of a therapy that did not
involve all the tedious hours demanded by psychoanalysts. Everyone wanted to audit everyone else
and right across the nation Americans were excitedly reliving their births, courtesy of the new guru,
L. Ron Hubbard.
The media had so far largely chosen to ignore L. Ron Hubbard and his new science, but it was
clear from the rising level of public interest that he could not be ignored forever. On 2 July,
Dianetics, The Modern Science of Mental Health - now known to converts simply as 'The Book' -
reached the top of the bestseller list in the Los Angeles Times, where it would remain for many
months. On the same day the book received its first major review, in The New York Times. It was a
predictable savaging by Rollo May, a noted psychologist and writer.
May could find no merit in Dianetics. It was, he said, an oversimplified form of regular
psychotherapy mixed with hypnosis. He wondered if the author was not writing with his tongue in
his cheek and searched in vain for scientific evidence to support the book's bizarre theories. 'Books
like this do harm', May concluded, 'by their grandiose promises to troubled persons and by their
oversimplification of human psychological problems.'
In Scientific American, a professor of physics at Columbia University declared the book contained
less evidence per page than any publication since the invention of printing. 'The huge sale of the
book to date is distressing evidence', wrote the professor, 'of the frustrated ambitions, hopes,
ideals, anxieties and worries of the many persons who through it have sought succor.'[11] New