At a glance
This review explores Jon Atack’s If Scientology Ruled the World, a sweeping investigation into the occult, political, and ideological currents that shaped both Scientology and twentieth-century authoritarian movements. Drawing on Atack’s deep historical research and personal experience, the review highlights how esoteric fantasies, racial theories, and mind-control ambitions underpin Scientology’s worldview—and why these parallels remain relevant for understanding coercive organisations today.
“Peewee Fascism?”
Fascism has become a political football in current world affairs, with both sides accusing the other of being fascist—like Spy vs. Spy cartoons in MAD Magazine. Jon Atack, in his new book, If Scientology Ruled the World, grabs the fascist football from self-serving spies. After deftly zigzagging through the comparative occultures of Scientology and Nazism, he scores a touchdown. This book is loaded with reliable research about cultural and occult forces and ideas that influenced the developments of Nazism, Scientology, and a host of other movements. Atack summons his decades of dogged investigation and experience in and out of Scientology that he fastidiously wrote about in A Piece of Blue Sky: Scientology, Dianetics, and L Ron Hubbard (1990). His first book remains a seminal book exposing a bizarre self-growth business disguised as a world-saving church.
Notably, Atack is a former member of Scientology, but one who did not serve in the infamous core, the Sea Org. In Chapter 10, “Scientology—How Could Anyone Be So Stupid?” he includes the story of his exposure to the group as a nineteen-year-old, his growth in the ranks, and why he defected nearly a decade later. The group sued him for writing A Piece of Blue Sky, preventing its publication for some time. Scientology has been one of the more notorious groups called cults since the 1960s. Yet, its shrinking following, now in the tens of thousands, belies its influence on offshoots and similar New-Age-styled movements, its wealth, and its ability to intimidate critics with very expensive lawsuits and other forms of harassment, such as spying and rumormongering. In A Piece of Blue Sky, Atack documents dozens of ways the group heartlessly harassed him and many others. Hubbard’s idea, we learn, was to never turn the other cheek in line with his documented disgust and dismissal of normative Christianity.
The book’s comparison of L. Ron Hubbard with Heinrich Himmler can seem a bit grandiose until we consider the behaviors and beliefs of both men, which Atack documents in If Scientology Ruled the World. Chapter 2, “Himmler’s Lust for Superpowers,” shows that both men are relentless, tyrannical occultists. Both claimed to be famous men reincarnated: Himmler as the reincarnation of the medieval King Heinrich the Fowler and Hubbard as the reincarnation of Cecil Rhodes, the mining magnate who founded Rhodesia in South Africa. Both Hitler and Himmler fed off the racist ideas and fanciful neo-Gnosticism of Helena Blavatsky, who flipped the Biblical Fall of Man script, contending that the Genesis serpent was not evil. To Blavatsky, Himmler, and Hubbard, Lucifer offered hidden wisdom to Adam and Eve, not sin. One of those bits of gnosis was that the Old Testament Jewish deity was an evil demiurge. Whether or not that matters to anyone depends on that person’s religious or academic orientation, but it has had serious social ramifications that led some anti-Semitic occultists with political power to kill millions of people.
HPB, as Blavatsky was known to her Theosophical Society members, may have been mentally and characterologically disordered since her youth, but her prodigious facility with languages, scope of research into esoteric lore, real travels through the mid- and far-east as well as in America and Europe, and her hypnotic effect on her immediate followers were astonishingly remarkable for a woman in the 19th century. In Atack’s view, Hubbard remained in occult elementary school compared to Blavatsky despite his gushing outpour of weird ideas, words, and books.
I would agree with the author on that comparison. One of my occult pursuits in the late 1970s was a Theosophical offshoot, the Agni Yoga Society, or System of Living Ethics, founded in 1920. One survey in the last twenty years suggested there were over three million Agni Yoga enthusiasts in Russia alone. Blavatsky’s occult ruminations influenced thousands of movements, including Scientology.
Some of Hubbard’s weird teachings, Atack tells us, have leaked into the mass self-awareness therapies and New Age spiritualities that thrive among thousands of peculiar mind-expanding workshops, life coaching enterprises, and online influence peddlers. But all his major ideas were recycled and renamed from prior sources, such as Freud, Blavatsky, and Aleister Crowley. The latter pseudo-magus greatly influenced Hubbard’s views on sex magic as revealed in Chapter 7, “How Sex Magic Became Scientology.”
I got the impression from Atack’s book that Scientology is like the screech owl among controversial birds, loud but tiny among far larger raptors. Like its founder, Scientology presents an outsized, quasi-delusional opinion of its role in world affairs and human destiny based on fanciful and unprovable claims to wielding occult powers like the separation of consciousness from the body called exteriorization. So did Nazis, like Himmler and Hermann Hesse, but they backed it up with a powerful military. That is Atack’s point: If Scientologists had command of a huge police force and military—you get the idea.
So, why control these occult powers?
Atack says:
The desire to control the minds of others without their consent is of itself reprehensible, but this is the purpose of many Scientology procedures. It can be seen either as deliberate ‘mind control’ or as the black magician’s domineering contempt for others. Scientologists are supposed to achieve ‘Tone 40’[1] intention: ‘giving a command and just knowing that it will be executed despite any contrary appearances.’ (p. 27)
Whenever we hear someone influenced by nineteenth-century New Thought, and Hubbard certainly was, claim to “manifest” something, “speak it into existence,” or decree to “attract” a thing to happen with mental will, whether it be health, wealth, or the destruction of an enemy, we are hearing the occult beliefs of L. Ron Hubbard.
One of the salient chapters in this book is about the history and applications of eugenics. Fascist leaders tend to decide who is worthy of life and who is not, and how to dispense with existence. Atack lists 19th- and 20th-century American eugenicists who inspired the Nazi extermination programs after 1930. Seeing the famous names of corporate leaders and presidents who advocated depopulation selection measures is shocking. One example: “In 1911, the Carnegie Institute recommended the use of gas chambers for extermination of the disabled” (p. 165).
Chapter 11, “Captain Bill and the Markabians,” continues Atack’s self-story and his bizarre meeting with Bill Robertson in 1983 when Atack resigned from Scientology proper. Bill Robertson was a devoted follower of Hubbard in the early 1960s and one of nineteen in the core group that later formed the notoriously demanding Sea Organization, commonly known as the Sea Org. Captain Bill knew Hubbard’s secret occult ideas—at one stage, he was effectively second in command under Hubbard—but, by 1983, Bill had been declared a “suppressive person,” or SP, and thus dismissed. Captain Bill assumed telepathic powers led him to channel new revelations as extensions of what he gleaned from Hubbard.
Chapter 11 astounded me as I had never heard of the Scientology-generated aliens called Markabians and their world takeover plans that were revealed in OT VIII, known to only a small elite group within the Hubbard circle. Apparently, OT VIII reveals that Hubbard will reincarnate. Thus Scientology centers always maintain an office ready for Hubbard. Hubbard claimed he would not return as a religious leader, but as a political one in a body cleared of flaws as defined by him. As for Captain Bill’s “Free Zone:”
Before he died, in 1991, aged only 54, Captain Bill had created an international movement called variously ‘Ron’s Org’ or the ‘Free Zone.’ It may well have more followers than the official Scientology cult. To his followers, Bill is a hero with godly powers. They know that the Markabian take over was averted by him. (p. 77)
Atack reveals that Hubbard held secret beliefs not known to most Scientologists, yet indications of those beliefs are baked into Scientology programs through code words and symbols like an erupting volcano. Hubbard’s secret OT III and OT VIII revelations were so powerful, Hubbard claimed that anyone who heard them without proper initiations and training could die within days. OT III was revealed decades ago. Anyone can look it up and even see it revealed in a South Park 2005 episode: a cartoon send-up of Hubbard and his occult beliefs. There is no evidence, including my experience, that reading the OT revelations causes harm to outsiders. As for insiders, that depends on their mental stability under the indoctrination of the cult.
We learn that Hubbard essentially believed that Christianity needed to be replaced, that Jesus was immoral, and that a version of the Maitreya legend (which Hubbard spelled as Metteyya) in Buddhism would be fulfilled by Hubbard in the future. Of course, as Atack spells out quite clearly, Hubbard’s pronouncements about the future and the nature of man were as much nonsense as were Himmler’s views.
While reading this book, I was reminded of Gerald Bryan, who published Psychic Dictatorship in America (1940) about his former cult, the “I AM” Activity, founded by Guy and Edna Ballard around 1933 (Bryan, 1940). The “I AM” Activity had purportedly gathered around one million supporters in America by 1940 when the federal court indicted it for nineteen counts of fraud (Ballard v. United States). Bryan described the behavior of his former group as Peewee Fascism. A high percentage of the “I AM” Activity’s first members were gleaned from William Dudley Pelley’s overtly fascist cult, The Silver Legion, founded in 1929. Similar to Hubbard, both Pelley and the Ballards were channelers of God-like spirits and fantastic occult experiences.
I recall the words of a Theosophist in the 1930s warning her fellow occultists to beware of the fascist impulse. Not everyone who studied and represented Blavatsky’s Theosophy heeded that warning. Indeed, according to Viktor Frankl, there may be fascist impulses in all of us that wait to be exploited (Pytell, 2017). There was one in me in the late 1970s. If we take Jon Atack seriously, no one is invulnerable to the hypnotic bait-and-switch attractions in the elaborate and confusing schemes of occultist-conmen. Timing and circumstances influence our decisions.
