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Inside Scientology: a review of John Duignan’s The Complex
The Complex: An Insider Exposes the Covert World of The Church of Scientology by John Duignan with Nicola Tallant, Merlin Publishing, Dublin.
The Scientologists have been doing their damnedest to stop the international publication of John Duignan’s memoir The Complex. Following legal representations, it is no longer possible to buy the book, published in Ireland by Merlin, from Amazon.co.uk. That made me curious, so I had a copy sent direct from Dublin. Here’s my review.
In places, Duignan – a former member of the Church’s elite “Sea Org” – makes the headquarters of Scientology in Hollywood sound truly creepy, like Auschwitz run by Center Parcs. At other times, the fancy dress and antiquated jargon inherited from L Ron Hubbard make one wonder how anyone employed by this “religion” keeps a straight face. I’m still not quite sure which sections of this book the Scientology army of lawyers consider libellous. Perhaps I’m about to find out.
We can pass over the earlier chapters, which consist of a conventional Irish “misery memoir”. John Duignan’s parents died when he was young and he had a wretched childhood. In 1985 he was a young drifter, working for a cleaning company in Germany and smoking lots of pot, when he ran into some Scientologists who ran a personality test that revealed severe problems that could be solved by… well, I think you can guess the answer.
Unable to pay for the expensive “auditing” recommended by the Church, Duignan went to work for it full-time so that he could afford the courses that would lead him to becoming ”Clear”. Eventually he joined the Sea Org, the quasi-naval corps at the heart of the organisation, signing the standard contract for one billion years (to cover future lives). He moved to the Complex, a former hospital in Hollywood that had become the Sea Org’s imposing but shabby HQ. Here he submitted incredibly detailed and personal information about himself for the “ethics files” that (he says) are held on every Scientologist by the Office of Special Affairs, the Church’s “secret police”.
Duignan makes the Complex sound like a Gulag, where the tiniest details of work and play were regulated by the rambling dictates of L Ron Hubbard: even vacuuming a room had to be done as dictated by L Ron, with the machine kept outside the room while the nozzle was inside. Hovering over everyone was “the most feared of all penalties”, being sent to join the Rehabilitation Project Force (RPF). RPFers lived in a rat-infested basement, dressed in black and were forced to do “the dirtiest work imaginable”, such as unblocking lavatories, for years at a stretch. Someone serving an RPF sentence could not see his wife or children, says Duignan, and had to address everyone (including children) as “sir”.
Half-way through the book comes a comic set piece. The Scientologists are bussed out to the Hollywood Palladium to be told by Hubbard’s mini-me, David Miscavige, that L Ron had taken the decision that he needed to continue his work unimpeded by his physical body. Some people might call this “dying”, but Scientologists do not take such a negative view. Nor, of course, do Christians, one should add: a Scientologist would be perfectly entitled to point out that its evasive, half-embarrassed announcement of Hubbard’s death is not half as ridiculous as the proclamation that an executed carpenter has come back to life in his tomb.
Still, Duignan has touched a raw nerve here: the Church will not be pleased by his claim that the autopsy on Hubbard showed the presence of the psychiatric drug Vistaril in his system. Psychiatry is pretty much the root of all evil, according to Scientology: at one stage, Duignan describes Miscavige raving about a US psychiatrists’ secret plan to turn a million acres of Alaska into a huge mental health colony. (We are not told whether the state’s Governor would be an administrator or an inmate of this icebound loony bin.)
Anyway, for much of this book, Duignan divides his time between Saint Hill Manor in East Grinstead and the HQ in Los Angeles. It’s hard to tell from the writing how bright he is: he was sensible enough to feel like a prat when he was forced to wear his Ruritarian Sea Org uniform in public, but he did stay in for 22 years and I suspect that much of the pace of the narrative comes from his co-author, Nicola Tallant. The Complex is a proper page-turner; even if it’s not clear which passages might form the basis of a lawsuit, you can understand why the Church of Scientology hates the book so much, because its dignity does not survive intact.
What comes across most strongly is a sense of the increasingly accident-prone incompetence of this allegedly sinister organisation. Duignan talks about the mental torture inflicted on some members, but in his own case it sounds as if it was growing awareness of the ridicule surrounding Scientology that drove him out. The year 2005, for example, was one long public relations disaster for the Church, what with the famous South Park episode poking fun at Miscavige, Cruise, Hubbard and the Emperor Xenu, to say nothing of Cruise’s couch-jumping incident on Oprah. Until very recently, Tom Cruise was Scientology’s most prized asset; now he is fast becoming its mad uncle in the attic, gushing crazily on recruitment videos that the Church had to have removed from YouTube this year because they were so embarrassing. If he really is now number two in the organisation, that doesn’t bode well.
Anyone interested in Scientology should read The Complex. I can’t recommend it uncritically, because I came across one fatuous claim that made me wonder about the author’s reliability: at the end of the book he says that the cult-watching group INFORM, based at the LSE, has been infiltrated by the Moonies and the Scientologists, and that the Office of Special Affairs is “involved on their board”. Well, I’m a member of that board, and can assure you that the accusation is total bollocks. I’m also unconvinced by the presentation of Scientology’s LA premises as a Soviet-style prison camp. It may be difficult for an RPFer to walk out of the building, but in no country in the world is the Church allowed to keep its people in custody – which may be why it has rarely (if ever) been convicted of doing so, and why so many of its members rapidly become crusading ex-members once they stumble across all the nonsense about an inter-galactic emperor millions of years ago.
That said, Duignan certainly succeeds in persuading the reader that involvement with the Church of Scientology can be a ghastly and humiliating experience for anyone with an IQ over 75 or an annual income of under $500,000. If you are stupid and rich, however, then sign on the dotted line. You’ll be made to feel very welcome.
Inside Scientology: a review of John Duignan’s The Complex
The Complex: An Insider Exposes the Covert World of The Church of Scientology by John Duignan with Nicola Tallant, Merlin Publishing, Dublin.
The Scientologists have been doing their damnedest to stop the international publication of John Duignan’s memoir The Complex. Following legal representations, it is no longer possible to buy the book, published in Ireland by Merlin, from Amazon.co.uk. That made me curious, so I had a copy sent direct from Dublin. Here’s my review.
In places, Duignan – a former member of the Church’s elite “Sea Org” – makes the headquarters of Scientology in Hollywood sound truly creepy, like Auschwitz run by Center Parcs. At other times, the fancy dress and antiquated jargon inherited from L Ron Hubbard make one wonder how anyone employed by this “religion” keeps a straight face. I’m still not quite sure which sections of this book the Scientology army of lawyers consider libellous. Perhaps I’m about to find out.
We can pass over the earlier chapters, which consist of a conventional Irish “misery memoir”. John Duignan’s parents died when he was young and he had a wretched childhood. In 1985 he was a young drifter, working for a cleaning company in Germany and smoking lots of pot, when he ran into some Scientologists who ran a personality test that revealed severe problems that could be solved by… well, I think you can guess the answer.
Unable to pay for the expensive “auditing” recommended by the Church, Duignan went to work for it full-time so that he could afford the courses that would lead him to becoming ”Clear”. Eventually he joined the Sea Org, the quasi-naval corps at the heart of the organisation, signing the standard contract for one billion years (to cover future lives). He moved to the Complex, a former hospital in Hollywood that had become the Sea Org’s imposing but shabby HQ. Here he submitted incredibly detailed and personal information about himself for the “ethics files” that (he says) are held on every Scientologist by the Office of Special Affairs, the Church’s “secret police”.
Duignan makes the Complex sound like a Gulag, where the tiniest details of work and play were regulated by the rambling dictates of L Ron Hubbard: even vacuuming a room had to be done as dictated by L Ron, with the machine kept outside the room while the nozzle was inside. Hovering over everyone was “the most feared of all penalties”, being sent to join the Rehabilitation Project Force (RPF). RPFers lived in a rat-infested basement, dressed in black and were forced to do “the dirtiest work imaginable”, such as unblocking lavatories, for years at a stretch. Someone serving an RPF sentence could not see his wife or children, says Duignan, and had to address everyone (including children) as “sir”.
Half-way through the book comes a comic set piece. The Scientologists are bussed out to the Hollywood Palladium to be told by Hubbard’s mini-me, David Miscavige, that L Ron had taken the decision that he needed to continue his work unimpeded by his physical body. Some people might call this “dying”, but Scientologists do not take such a negative view. Nor, of course, do Christians, one should add: a Scientologist would be perfectly entitled to point out that its evasive, half-embarrassed announcement of Hubbard’s death is not half as ridiculous as the proclamation that an executed carpenter has come back to life in his tomb.
Still, Duignan has touched a raw nerve here: the Church will not be pleased by his claim that the autopsy on Hubbard showed the presence of the psychiatric drug Vistaril in his system. Psychiatry is pretty much the root of all evil, according to Scientology: at one stage, Duignan describes Miscavige raving about a US psychiatrists’ secret plan to turn a million acres of Alaska into a huge mental health colony. (We are not told whether the state’s Governor would be an administrator or an inmate of this icebound loony bin.)
Anyway, for much of this book, Duignan divides his time between Saint Hill Manor in East Grinstead and the HQ in Los Angeles. It’s hard to tell from the writing how bright he is: he was sensible enough to feel like a prat when he was forced to wear his Ruritarian Sea Org uniform in public, but he did stay in for 22 years and I suspect that much of the pace of the narrative comes from his co-author, Nicola Tallant. The Complex is a proper page-turner; even if it’s not clear which passages might form the basis of a lawsuit, you can understand why the Church of Scientology hates the book so much, because its dignity does not survive intact.
What comes across most strongly is a sense of the increasingly accident-prone incompetence of this allegedly sinister organisation. Duignan talks about the mental torture inflicted on some members, but in his own case it sounds as if it was growing awareness of the ridicule surrounding Scientology that drove him out. The year 2005, for example, was one long public relations disaster for the Church, what with the famous South Park episode poking fun at Miscavige, Cruise, Hubbard and the Emperor Xenu, to say nothing of Cruise’s couch-jumping incident on Oprah. Until very recently, Tom Cruise was Scientology’s most prized asset; now he is fast becoming its mad uncle in the attic, gushing crazily on recruitment videos that the Church had to have removed from YouTube this year because they were so embarrassing. If he really is now number two in the organisation, that doesn’t bode well.
Anyone interested in Scientology should read The Complex. I can’t recommend it uncritically, because I came across one fatuous claim that made me wonder about the author’s reliability: at the end of the book he says that the cult-watching group INFORM, based at the LSE, has been infiltrated by the Moonies and the Scientologists, and that the Office of Special Affairs is “involved on their board”. Well, I’m a member of that board, and can assure you that the accusation is total bollocks. I’m also unconvinced by the presentation of Scientology’s LA premises as a Soviet-style prison camp. It may be difficult for an RPFer to walk out of the building, but in no country in the world is the Church allowed to keep its people in custody – which may be why it has rarely (if ever) been convicted of doing so, and why so many of its members rapidly become crusading ex-members once they stumble across all the nonsense about an inter-galactic emperor millions of years ago.
That said, Duignan certainly succeeds in persuading the reader that involvement with the Church of Scientology can be a ghastly and humiliating experience for anyone with an IQ over 75 or an annual income of under $500,000. If you are stupid and rich, however, then sign on the dotted line. You’ll be made to feel very welcome.
