Questions, questions...

[Udarnik]

Don't you have K-12? Then 4 years at college? We have K-12 then 3 years at university. There is a vast difference in the units needed to complete a degree in Australia vs the US. In fact one psychology lecturer was bemoaning the fact that a degree in psychology here is considered a joke in other countries requiring more study for the award.

I thought you were on the British system where 3 - 4 A Levels either from your HS or a prep school before matriculating at the University level?

We have K-12. Good high schools offer an advanced track where in 12th grade we take the A-Level-like AP classes. Since schools are funded from local taxes primarily, that means kids in good / affluent school districts get the additonal advantage in college of testing out of the lower level classes, which is what I did. I wish our rural HS calculus program had been better so I could have tested out of 2 semesters of Calc, but c'est la vie - I busted my ass and made a US degree look like an Australian one time-wise. But I still wish I could have been a wee bit faster and let my dad see me graduate. I wasn't capable of taking more than 8 classes in a trimester though - I'm smart, but not a genius.

I will say that I have much less respect for UK / Australian MD and Ph.D. programs than US ones. The time to get the right to practice independently with a medical degree is about the same in both systems, but the US has 2 more years of classroom instruction, whereas the UK system is more of an apprenticeship, and leaves the practitioner a bit weaker in the fundamentals of things such as biochem. The UK style MD is very good though, pretty much equivalent to the US MD / Ph.D., but it requires more classroom and practical instruction than a normal medical degree.

The U.K. Ph.D. in the sciences is a joke compared to the US degree. In the US, you area expected to be able to work very, very independantly after the Ph.D., even to get your own grants. In the UK, you get enveloped by a system that takes care of you in a very hierarchical way. In exchange for that, you get a lot less freedom to pursue your own projects as a newly minted Ph.D.

We had a guy from Strathclyde come to our lab as a post-doctoral fellow. He got his Ph.D. in 3.5 years, and we all though he'd be a fucking genius. Not so fast. Fewer papers were expected of that program (I had to have at least 4 - 5 peer-reviewed papers to get out of my lab), and technicians ran his samples for him. In the US, if a prof wants a tech, that salary has to be paid by grants, and in the first few grant cycles, no one has money for techs. So in grad school I did everything from learning how the lasers work, to aligning the optics myself, to fixing their power supplies, to doing my own plumbing (sweating the copper pipe) for their cooling systems, and I damn well ran my own samples. I knew every instrument inside and out, because if it broke, we were expected to do our damndest to fix it before our advisor would pay for a tech to look at it. As a result, I knew my instruments better than the Strathclyde guy did, and scientifically, that gave me an edge in trying to figure out what went wrong in a failed experinment and what other people might be doing wrong when I reviewed a paper. My advisor also had us write our own sections for grant renewals and he would give the 4th and 5th year students manuscripts sent to him for peer review to get our comments, so we had experience doing that fresh out of the gate, too, which is very rare in the UK. I spent 30 - 40% of my time doing things that, while useful, were not getting me anywhere closer to defending my thesis. Hence the 4 - 6 year time frame on the US Ph.D. But I think I was much more prepared to be an independent researcher when I defended than was that guy from Strathclyde.

 

[Udarnik]

<snip>Now I’ll better (possibly) explain that. It’s a technical thing. Literally to confront means to “front with” [See appendix 1]. Now Ron in all his life only fronted with things. In fact your training drill [is] called confronting. He called it confronting. And I think Ron only ever knew how to confront people. He always fronted with a subject, he never experienced it.


I can confront people. I can front with things and I can experience. When you’re experiencing you’re not fronting with anything. You’re knowing them, you’re experiencing them and its quite different from confronting. Ron evidently didn’t do that. Ron, in all his personal dealings with people, he always confronted them.<snip>

I'm not sure exactly what he means by "experiencing", and he uses too much scieno-speak (and he appears to still believe in auditing...), but I think I get the drift. Ron was never interested in what someone else had to say, unless they said something he could use or manipulate. He was never interested in understanding their point of view, only in bringing them around to his.

Did I get that right?

Someone said in business school that the reason so many arguments and negotiations are circular is that when someone stops to allow the other party to speak, the first party isn't listening, they are reloading.

I think Ron was always reloading.

 

[Udarnik]

Agreed. Hubbard didn't strike me as schizophrenic -- paranoid at times, yes, and with good psychological reason, but not schizophrenic (it's normal for someone with NPD to be paranoid, because without people to believe in the chronic lying the NPD person is toast, so the lying engenders a certain amount of paranoia). There's no doubt in me that he had NPD, and was possibly bipolar, but his level of functioning was altogether too high and his delusions (assuming that he actually had any -- I'm less inclined than some to believe that he was, at heart, deluded about much of anything) were too self-directed and self-serving to come in on the schizophrenic spectrum, where the delusions are inevitably self-harming. If outcomes are evidentiary, he was fully in control of his actions, even so far as making those around him accept and at times embrace his seeming delusions, his lies, and his mood swerves.

NPD and BPD are often a stew of all of the PDs, in my nonprofessional but intrigued experience, and in this instance the concept of valences applies: those with NPD or BPD are generally antisocial and histrionic and paranoid and whatever else it takes when it suits them -- whatever the situation requires or inspires. Hubbard's emotional lability fits in nicely with a diagnosis of NPD or BPD, and of the two NPD suits him best (says the armchair psychologist, ha). I did meet Hubbard several times back in the 1970s, when he was at times in Potomac, Maryland and at the FCDC and the GO, and he could be extremely engaging when it served him -- when he had an appreciative audience or when he was into the subject at hand. While my impression is that he wasn't deluded in any way concerning Marcab, Teegeeack, Target 2, and Xenu, he was very sincere in his convictions about auditing and its effects and potential, both beneficial and harmful.

Hmm, very interesting, and thanks for the first hand observations. I think face nailed it when he said Schizoaffective disorder later in life, and I agree with you that as a younger man he was not schizoprenic - I was actually being very imprecise with my terms and meant something like schizoaffective disorder. But I now have doubts about even that, as I thought he truly believed the space opera stuff.

But his last years, with the fear of perfumes and such, certainly do take ona a schizoaffective aspect. That could have been brought on by years of drug abuse, though, and not part of the original mental illness.

I can't say for certain that Ron could not have been a mutant in aquiring the NPD / BPD genes, and then been able to pass it on to his kids and grandkids. Those kids of disorders do tend to show up in clusters in famlies, though, and the way Ron imagined family relationships in Dianetics and other works still makes me wonder if his childhood was as idyllic as painted in Bare Faced Messiah and other works.

 

[Udarnik]

My pet theory is that Ron was coddled by his aunts and grandparents and, perhaps, his parents as an only child. There's one book, forgotten the book, that talks about how cheerful and fun his mother's father was and how his mother's sisters would interfere in Ron's defense for discipline. Ron was an only child and an only grandchild from a large close family for his toddler years per that book.

As far as fair gaming critics are there any other known schemes singling out to destroy a critic like the Paulette Cooper caper? Ron hated women and I'm saying that based on his behavior and treatment of them and his Affirmations, etc. Maybe being the coward he was he felt tough enough to covertly attack a woman, I'm not suggesting that a woman is inferior to a man but I do believe Ron considered women inferior.

That was Bare Faced Messiah. I re-read it just prior to starting this thread. The thing about women makes me think he had issues with his mother, and I wonder what they might have been. He certainly didn't show much remorse when she died, but he was a giant flaming [strike]turd[/strike] narcissist, so perhaps I'm reading too much into that...

 

[Udarnik]

Udanik,

If and when you're so disposed, I would enjoy hearing what life in the USSR / Komosomol / construction brigades was like just a few years before the USSR dissolved, from the perspective of an American youth.

That's rather a rare perspective, I would bet.

TG1

Heh. You just want me to talk about the two times I was detained by the KGB, and that other time I was shanghaied into interpreting for the Moscow PD. I'll start another thread sometime, or alternatively, you can join Face and we can meet at Pooks's SP party sometime. I think I'll be dropping by there again in the future, it was fascinating as hell and good company: I got to meet Pooks, Denise, Purple Rain and a bunch of other folks.

 

[guanoloco]

I'm not sure exactly what he means by "experiencing", and he uses too much scieno-speak (and he appears to still believe in auditing...), but I think I get the drift. Ron was never interested in what someone else had to say, unless they said something he could use or manipulate. He was never interested in understanding their point of view, only in bringing them around to his.

Did I get that right?

Someone said in business school that the reason so many arguments and negotiations are circular is that when someone stops to allow the other party to speak, the first party isn't listening, they are reloading.

I think Ron was always reloading.

All three of those people used mock-up to describe Ron, although Mystic actually used tulpa instead of mock-up. At any rate a mock-up would be a false persona so Ron was always acting and observing people observe...that is watching how others accepted his act so that he could quickly modify his portrayal for their acceptance.

The point of experiencing and the confronting is similar to a time when you were in a peer group that you desired membership. Prior to the acceptance the prospect is highly aware of how they are perceived by the group. Once acceptance is granted the prospect, now a member, drops their guard and can then become themselves. Their attention goes off of how they are being evaluated to participating in the conversations at hand...the focus goes off of themselves and they become at ease. That's what I think the guy was trying to say.

Ron, always the predator, was scamming all of the time.

 

[Udarnik]

All three of those people used mock-up to describe Ron, although Mystic actually used tulpa instead of mock-up. At any rate a mock-up would be a false persona so Ron was always acting and observing people observe...that is watching how others accepted his act so that he could quickly modify his portrayal for their acceptance.

The point of experiencing and the confronting is similar to a time when you were in a peer group that you desired membership. Prior to the acceptance the prospect is highly aware of how they are perceived by the group. Once acceptance is granted the prospect, now a member, drops their guard and can then become themselves. Their attention goes off of how they are being evaluated to participating in the conversations at hand...the focus goes off of themselves and they become at ease. That's what I think the guy was trying to say.

Ron, always the predator, was scamming all of the time.

Ah, I see. Yes, I did get the impression that Ron had a much thicker facade than most people, and had a larger number of them than most people, and never, ever let anyone completely inside them.

Have you ever seen the article describing persona he showed the Explorer's Club or the Forum thread on it from the beginning of this year?

 

[Purple Rain]

I thought you were on the British system where 3 - 4 A Levels either from your HS or a prep school before matriculating at the University level?

We have K-12. Good high schools offer an advanced track where in 12th grade we take the A-Level-like AP classes. Since schools are funded from local taxes primarily, that means kids in good / affluent school districts get the additonal advantage in college of testing out of the lower level classes, which is what I did. I wish our rural HS calculus program had been better so I could have tested out of 2 semesters of Calc, but c'est la vie - I busted my ass and made a US degree look like an Australian one time-wise. But I still wish I could have been a wee bit faster and let my dad see me graduate. I wasn't capable of taking more than 8 classes in a trimester though - I'm smart, but not a genius.

I will say that I have much less respect for UK / Australian MD and Ph.D. programs than US ones. The time to get the right to practice independently with a medical degree is about the same in both systems, but the US has 2 more years of classroom instruction, whereas the UK system is more of an apprenticeship, and leaves the practitioner a bit weaker in the fundamentals of things such as biochem. The UK style MD is very good though, pretty much equivalent to the US MD / Ph.D., but it requires more classroom and practical instruction than a normal medical degree.

The U.K. Ph.D. in the sciences is a joke compared to the US degree. In the US, you area expected to be able to work very, very independantly after the Ph.D., even to get your own grants. In the UK, you get enveloped by a system that takes care of you in a very hierarchical way. In exchange for that, you get a lot less freedom to pursue your own projects as a newly minted Ph.D.

We had a guy from Strathclyde come to our lab as a post-doctoral fellow. He got his Ph.D. in 3.5 years, and we all though he'd be a fucking genius. Not so fast. Fewer papers were expected of that program (I had to have at least 4 - 5 peer-reviewed papers to get out of my lab), and technicians ran his samples for him. In the US, if a prof wants a tech, that salary has to be paid by grants, and in the first few grant cycles, no one has money for techs. So in grad school I did everything from learning how the lasers work, to aligning the optics myself, to fixing their power supplies, to doing my own plumbing (sweating the copper pipe) for their cooling systems, and I damn well ran my own samples. I knew every instrument inside and out, because if it broke, we were expected to do our damndest to fix it before our advisor would pay for a tech to look at it. As a result, I knew my instruments better than the Strathclyde guy did, and scientifically, that gave me an edge in trying to figure out what went wrong in a failed experinment and what other people might be doing wrong when I reviewed a paper. My advisor also had us write our own sections for grant renewals and he would give the 4th and 5th year students manuscripts sent to him for peer review to get our comments, so we had experience doing that fresh out of the gate, too, which is very rare in the UK. I spent 30 - 40% of my time doing things that, while useful, were not getting me anywhere closer to defending my thesis. Hence the 4 - 6 year time frame on the US Ph.D. But I think I was much more prepared to be an independent researcher when I defended than was that guy from Strathclyde.

I have no idea about the British system - we don't have anything actually called an "A level". I just know that I have to take pretty much half as many classes to get a bachelor degree in Australia as I would have to in America. Personally, of course, I did like it like that, although I did much better academically during my semester at an American college.

This blog post is kind of interesting:

http://www.bobinoz.com/blog/4077/australian-education-standards-compared-to-the-uk-and-usa/

 

[Udarnik]

His auditing history with Mayo shows otherwise...

What do you mean? Are you convinced that he wasn't just pulling Mayo's chain? I'm not familiar with much of that body of evidence.

 

[AnonKat]

In other words he had autism, well I confront too, I have a whole box of constructed of appropiate social responses, but sometimes I goof the floof onley thing that shuts me down is somebody being angry with me. I can't handle angry people.

Here's a couple of things to consider regarding Hubbard and auditing:

L. RON HUBBARD THE MAN THAT I KNEW

By DENNIS STEVENS

"As I got to know Ron better and its only because we were meeting socially in restaurants and so forth –night clubs– As I got to know him better I realized things about him. I noticed in the beginning Ron –I don’t know whether other people noticed it because I don’t think I ever mentioned it to anyone, oh, except to Ann (she agreed with me) – was that Ron didn’t experience people. When somebody’s taking to Ron he didn’t experience them, he confronted them. Now there is a difference. If somebody’s talking to me I experience them, I don’t confront them.


Now I’ll better (possibly) explain that. It’s a technical thing. Literally to confront means to “front with” [See appendix 1]. Now Ron in all his life only fronted with things. In fact your training drill [is] called confronting. He called it confronting. And I think Ron only ever knew how to confront people. He always fronted with a subject, he never experienced it.


I can confront people. I can front with things and I can experience. When you’re experiencing you’re not fronting with anything. You’re knowing them, you’re experiencing them and its quite different from confronting. Ron evidently didn’t do that. Ron, in all his personal dealings with people, he always confronted them.


He used to confront them when he was talking to them and he was listening to them. Whatever was happening Ron always was confronting. And that was the fren---s [?], it was a mock-up. A glowing mock-up you might say he used to put there to confront people with. That’s what you used to sense when he walked into a room. It was the confront, the thing he fronting with.
When I first spoke to Ann about this she almost had a line charge, she had a tremendous cognition. She’d spotted it but she didn’t quite understand it. She said: “Yes, right, its exactly right isn’t it. That’s exactly what he does.”


He’s a confronter. He puts [a/the] subject there for you to look at and that’s what you see. He doesn’t experience you, he confronts you. If you knew that about Ron –If you knew the inner most part of the man’s personality that he never experience, that he always confronted. Maybe it was a weakness in his personality. I don’t think Ron ever really experienced anything. He sure as hell confronted, he confronted a hell of a lot (chuckle). I don’t think he ever really experienced anything. I don’t think he was capable of it. But he was one hell of a confronter.
Another thing about Ron that –I think many people who’ve been with him socially realize he was a conversation hogger. You know if you’re at a dinner party sitting around a table then the whole evening revolves ‘round everyone sitting listening to Ron."

TRANSCRIPT OF TAPE #1 OF JUNE 28, 1984 - RON DEWOLF

Side 1

"And to make another accurate statement - that L. Ron Hubbard probably was the greatest suppressive in Scientology. Because there's another prime truth you ought to know, and that is that Dad never practised what he preached. Anyone who has had any personal contact, communication, living-with or personal involvement with L. Ron Hubbard can attest to that. Whether it be at home, the family, friends, staff, on the Apollo, those people can understand when I say that ninety-nine percent of whatever my father ever said or ever wrote about himself to the press, media, public and membership is totally false and untrue. It is just total fabrication. And you can also see that any self- respecting auditor who had audited Dad was in many instances very perplexed and could not figure out what the heck was going on. Because L. Ron Hubbard didn't get any case gains, at least in the normal sense of the word, because he had so many withholds. One of the major secret withholds (besides all the others of course) is his deep and very real involvement with the Magick tech. The one major thing he could not openly communicate, so he drove auditors nuts because in truth what the auditors were dealing with is the mock-up, not the person, not the real bank, not the individual. He was dealing with this great huge - as they say in Magick, the "construct". And one of the problems that friends, family and staff kept running into is that the L. Ron Hubbard they saw and talked to and worked with was not the Scientology L. Ron Hubbard, and slowly but surely, regardless of the justifications and rationalizations, saw the truth, bit-by-bit, inch-by-inch. This created the old early fifties horror formula: Must but Can't. That is, they saw the truth and must communicate it but can't. The other half is that they had to withhold but can't. You found this around a great many of the staff members, friends and family: Must withhold but can't. The other half is Must communicate but can't. This of course caused the opposing lockup in one's bank and caused tremendous overpowering negative feedback. It would be like being stuck between two plates in a battery with both sides trying to discharge against each other and you're in the middle - and you're trying to keep them from discharging."

Also, if one looks back far enough Gordon Bell posted here on ESMB as Mystic and his pet name for Ron the Magnificent was "tulpa".

Tulpa (Tibetan: སྤྲུལ་པ, Wylie: sprul-pa; Sanskrit: निर्मित nirmita[1] and निर्माण nirmāṇa;[2] "to build" or "to construct") is a concept in mysticism of a being or object which is created through sheer discipline alone. It is a materialized thought that has taken physical form and is usually regarded as synonymous to a thoughtform.


Although a tulpa is some supposedly conjured construct the fact that Ron was a withholdy NCG is pretty apt.

 

[Queenmab321]

In other words he had autism, well I confront too, I have a whole box of constructed of appropiate social responses, but sometimes I goof the floof onley thing that shuts me down is somebody being angry with me. I can't handle angry people.

If I'm not mistaken, an autistic person is less able to empathize with other people, less able, that is, to anticipate and identify with the emotions of others. This handicap does not, however, typically betray actual callousness, indifference or disdain on the part the autistic (although it often appears this way). By contrast, Hubbard possessed a keen ability to read people, he just didn't care for them, except insofar as they fed his ego and/or served his interests. Hubbard could feign great interest and be extremely charming or exihbit violent anger in order to manipulate people. He understood people, but he didn't love them.

 

[OhMG]

Oh, he was certainly unwilling to apply the "rules" of auditing to himself, on both sides of the cans.

You missed the point. It shows that he WAS delusional. He actually believed in the whole OT III/BT's insanity.

 

[Udarnik]

If I'm not mistaken, an autistic person is less able to empathize with other people, less able, that is, to anticipate and identify with the emotions of others. This handicap does not, however, typically betray actual callousness, indifference or disdain on the part the autistic (although it often appears this way). By contrast, Hubbard possessed a keen ability to read people, he just didn't care for them, except insofar as they fed his ego and/or served his interests. Hubbard could feign great interest and be extremely charming or exihbit violent anger in order to manipulate people. He understood people, but he didn't love them.

I don't know WTF AnonKat is talking about. People on the autistic spectrum tend to miss social cues and say tactless things, but this is a different "confront" from what guanoloco is talking about. Not to mention most also can't focus with distractions, and Hubbard was famous in his younger years for writing in the midst of chaos. Asperger's people tend not to have the social skills to contruct a normal social covering, let alone the elaborate facades Hubbard created. They are not that adept at manipulating people because they don't know what strings to pull, since they don't have those strings themselves.

Here's a relevant passage that pretty much conclusively excludes Hubbard from the Autisic spectrum:

On Saturday 2 December, Jack Williamson, then a Sergeant in the US Army, hosted a dinner in Philadelphia for fellow science-fiction writers and their wives. He was to be sent overseas in a couple of days and this was his farewell party. Among those present were the Heinleins, the de Camps, the Asimovs and L. Ron Hubbard. 'The star of the evening', Isaac Asimov recalled, 'was Ron Hubbard. Heinlein, de Camp and I were each prima donna-ish and each liked to hog the conversation - ordinarily. On this occasion, however, we all sat as quietly as pussycats and listened to Hubbard. He told tales with perfect aplomb and in complete paragraphs.'[17]

The host was less impressed. 'Hubbard was just back from the Aleutians then,' said Williamson, 'hinting of desperate action aboard a Navy destroyer, adventures he couldn't say much about because of military security.

'I recall his eyes, the wary, light-blue eyes that I somehow associate with the gunmen of the old West, watching me sharply as he talked as if to see how much I believed. Not much.'

 

[Udarnik]

You missed the point. It shows that he WAS delusional. He actually believed in the whole OT III/BT's insanity.

THIS is the debate I want to get at. It sheds a lot of light on his mental state to know if he actually believed this crap or not. Arguments pro and con would be appreciated.

 

[TG1]

You missed the point. It shows that he WAS delusional. He actually believed in the whole OT III/BT's insanity.

THIS is the debate I want to get at. It sheds a lot of light on his mental state to know if he actually believed this crap or not. Arguments pro and con would be appreciated.

I don't know that there is much of a debate necessary about whether Hubbard believed that BTs were a valid construct. We've got the testimony of Hubbard's late-in-life caretaker Steve (Sarge) Pfauth, who told both Larry Wright and Marty Rathbun that Hubbard begged Pfauth to jerry-rig an e-meter that would knock the BTs off of him and kill him, since he was desperate to rid himself of BTs that he couldn't seem to get shed of with auditing.

Whether Hubbard's belief in BTs proves that he was "delusional" is, of course, still debatable, depending on what assumptions the debaters bring to the fight.

TG1

 

[Udarnik]

I don't know that there is much of a debate necessary about whether Hubbard believed that BTs were a valid construct. We've got the testimony of Hubbard's late-in-life caretaker Steve (Sarge) Pfauth, who told both Larry Wright and Marty Rathbun that Hubbard begged Pfauth to jerry-rig an e-meter that would knock the BTs off of him and kill him, since he was desperate to rid himself of BTs that he couldn't seem to get shed of with auditing.

Whether Hubbard's belief in BTs proves that he was "delusional" is, of course, still debatable, depending on what assumptions the debaters bring to the fight.

TG1

It's also time-dependent, isn't it? As with Face speculating that Hubbard went Schizo-affective late in life, and my speculation that might have been drug induced, I seem to get different answers from people depending on what point in time they encountered the man.

I think his might have been a progressive disease that started out with him consciously making up BTs like all the other half-baked crap that went into his fiction, and ended with him having been exposed to his own stupid shit so long that when he finally lost his grip on reality he became trapped by his own creations, which he hadn't believed in at first.

 

[Queenmab321]

I don't know that there is much of a debate necessary about whether Hubbard believed that BTs were a valid construct. We've got the testimony of Hubbard's late-in-life caretaker Steve (Sarge) Pfauth, who told both Larry Wright and Marty Rathbun that Hubbard begged Pfauth to jerry-rig an e-meter that would knock the BTs off of him and kill him, since he was desperate to rid himself of BTs that he couldn't seem to get shed of with auditing.

Whether Hubbard's belief in BTs proves that he was "delusional" is, of course, still debatable, depending on what assumptions the debaters bring to the fight.

TG1

If we take this account at face value, I'm still not sure it proves conclusively that Hubbard believed in BTs. He may have been genuinely suicidal, but anxious, nevertheless, to avoid the stigma that attaches to suicide. It strikes me as just the sort of ruse he would concoct. It's easy to imagine Hubbard vain and duplicitous to the very end.

 

[Student of Trinity]

Here's a relevant passage ...

Asimov was clearly impressed with the tale-telling, not with the feats reported in the tales being told.

 

[TG1]

If we take this account at face value, I'm still not sure it proves conclusively that Hubbard believed in BTs. He may have been genuinely suicidal, but anxious, nevertheless, to avoid the stigma that attaches to suicide. It strikes me as just the sort of ruse he would concoct. It's easy to imagine Hubbard vain and duplicitous to the very end.

I agree we can't know. But we can judge. My judgment (having spoken directly to Pfauth) is that Hubbard did think (at least at that point) that BTs were real enough to him that he was very upset about them and his inability to control them.

 

[TG1]

Udarnik,

I think everyone here would agree that Hubbard was not normal.

He may have been born “not normal.”

Then you throw in all the drugs he did, which nobody who knew him well seems to dispute was the case.

Then you throw in all his wild experiences, and he certainly had a lot of those.

And finally there's what happens to people as they age, whether they were normal to begin with or not. They acquire dementias of various kinds, which we now understand only vaguely. Even “normal” people become “unusual” under those circumstances.

Except for people like Face, who actually observed Hubbard up close and personal and are entitled to their opinions about Hubbard’s mental conditions, I think the rest of us are just circle-jerking when we try to diagnose Hubbard’s mental disorders. Sure, we could list all his personal maladies, but what difference does it make what we collectively name them? The lists of psychological disorders that appear in APA listings continue to be in flux, and IMHO some of those are no more descriptive or distinguishing from one another than horoscopes.

Isn’t it a better use of our efforts to consider the results of his greatest creation, Scientology. After all, someone is best judged by how they influenced others and what they left behind.