im back
clickbait! i talk about my experience with scientology
thank you for tuning back in after my long absence. i’ve been researching and writing and editing for some extremely legitimate extremely stressful publications and I am anxious to get this chapter of my life wrapped up. i have been thinking of this paris review essay about the end of summer and how even small accomplishments seem impossible; i have seen it as a challenge to be bested. i am unfortunately really unclear about the timelines to publication for any of my pieces and as such see no end to the torture.
okay, what else? I started two new gigs while going part-time at the lab. i spend much of my time riding and waiting for the buses of chicago. I am feeling more and more disenchanted with this city each day; the tattered state of the public transit, the erratic drivers, the blasting music and unmuffled cars that make me want to throw eggs. there is something mordant in the rows of the sepulchral greystones, shaped like mausoleums to entomb the living. as the skeletal winter approaches i worry: will these feelings grow? will i love my fellow man less and less? will i become a husk of my former self, like an eviscerated cricket hanging motionless in a spider’s web? if the city banned cars most of my problems would be solved.
i have been reading a lot about scientology (unrelated to any recent events, just out of longstanding interest), and specifically the leaked operating thetan level 8 texts, or OT VIII in official parlance. it’s very compelling from an academic standpoint and perhaps a literary one. Among other things it alleges that jesus was a homosexual pedophile. every world religion except for buddhism is part of a galactic conspiracy to enslave humanity! don’t the mormons also believe in an interplanetary afterlife, their chosen heavenly reward being their own planet to lord over? if you’ve been following my stack for a while, you know i have been reading about apocalyptic thought for a while, particularly as it intersects with science and technology. i’d like to write something longer about these religious texts, the fascination with space exploration turned divine: the holy space opera.
i visited the scientology church in st louis when i was a college student, housed in an old masonic temple, a resonance of different kinds of myth and control. there were children running around the building in unicorn onesies. i took a personality test for no other reason than i was foolish and nineteen; it was administered by a woman who put the letters LRH on her iphone wallpaper. the scientologist told me i was a cold and unfeeling person. when i said that my mother was a psychiatrist her face changed and she said “so you’ve been raised in that culture.”
i have been sitting with this experience for a long time. what has remained is a tremendous sympathy for the personality test woman; she was incredibly forthright about her experiences that brought her to scientology and they involved a litany of those uniquely American tragedies that destroy so many lives. lack of healthcare access and affordable housing, an absence of community resources, so many intractable problems that drive people to desperate places.
i think it’s probably time for a sociological analysis of scientology, how it found its center in california, how it finds people and vice versa. i don’t think a critique of scientology is possible without a critique of capitalism; i have a suspicion that it is only under a system like ours that a group like theirs could flourish.
i see scientology and Qanon as strange cousins of a uniquely american religious phenomenon, one that is wrapped in the language of freedom and truth but is really just a grand manipulation for people attempting to make meaning from the wreckage of contemporary life. these and some other groups (especially certain strains of reactionary libertarianism) seem to be propelled by backlash to the late-stage hypertrophied corporate democratic capitalist status quo, in the same propulsive force that has seen a slight resurgence in marxism in the past 10-15 years. the difference perhaps is that Qanon is undeniably internet-centric, whereas scientology predates the internet by four decades, yet has been altered by it (see the lawsuits and general misbehavior caused by leaks of scientology documents).
there is more to parse here, i think, and lots to add about the recent congressional UFO hearings, the falun gong and the epoch times, all the political ramifications. i will close for now, sweet readers, as you’ve granted me so much patience already.