Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief

In early November 2004, Naz was informed that she had been selected for a special program that was critical to the future of the church, but it was so secret she wouldn’t be allowed to tell anyone, even her mother. Naz was moved immediately into the Celebrity Centre, where she spent a month going through security checks and special auditing programs. She hoped the project had something to do with human rights, which was her special interest, but all she was told was that her participation would end bigotry against Scientology.

At one point during the intensive auditing and security checks, Wilhere informed her that she would have to break up with her longtime boyfriend in order for the project to proceed. She refused. She couldn’t understand why her boyfriend posed any kind of problem; indeed, she had personally introduced him to Scientology. Wilhere persisted, asking what it would take for her to break off the romance. Flustered, she responded that she would break up if she knew he had been cheating on her. According to Naz’s friends, the very next day, Wilhere brought in her boyfriend’s confidential auditing files and showed her several instances of his infidelities, which had been circled in red. Naz felt betrayed, but also guilty, because Wilhere blamed her for failing to know and report her boyfriend’s ethical lapses herself; after all, she had audited him on several occasions. Obviously, she had missed his “withhold.” She confronted her boyfriend and he confessed. That was the end of their relationship.7

Another time, Naz was asked what her “ideal scene for 2-D”—in other words, her dream date—would be. It was eating sushi and going ice-skating. But she wondered why that was important.

One of her assignments was to study a bulletin of Hubbard’s titled “The Responsibilities of Leaders.” It is Hubbard’s deconstruction of the lives of the nineteenth-century South American military leader Simón Bolívar and his ferociously protective mistress, a socialite named Manuela Sáenz. Bolívar, Hubbard writes, “was a military commander without peer in history. Why he would fail and die an exile to be later deified is thus of great interest. What mistakes did he make?” Sáenz, his consort, “was a brilliant, beautiful and able woman. She was loyal, devoted, quite comparable to Bolivar, far above the cut of average humanoids. Why then did she live a vilified outcast, receive such violent social rejection and die of poverty and remain unknown to history? What mistakes did she make?”

Hubbard’s analysis was that Bolívar knew how to do only one thing brilliantly—to lead men in battle—and therefore he tended to resort to military solutions when diplomacy or politics would better serve. “He was too good at this one thing,” Hubbard observes. “So he never looked to any other skill and he never even dreamed there was any other way.” Bolívar failed to use his immense authority to reward his friends and punish his enemies; thus his friends deserted him and his enemies grew stronger. Craving glory and the love of his people, Bolívar disdained the bloody intrigues that might have kept him in power. “He never began to recognize a suppressive and never considered anyone needed killing except on a battlefield,” Hubbard coldly sums up. “His addiction to the most unstable drug in history—fame—killed Bolivar.”

Manuela Sáenz might have saved him. She had qualities that he lacked, but she, too, made mistakes. For all her cleverness, she never contrived to make Bolívar marry her, which would have given her the standing that she badly needed. “She was utterly devoted, completely brilliant and utterly incapable of bringing off an action of any final kind,” Hubbard notes. “She violated the power formula in not realizing that she had power.” She should have taken on the portfolio of Bolívar’s secret police chief (as Mary Sue did for Hubbard). “She was not ruthless enough to make up for his lack of ruthlessness and not provident enough to make up for his lack of providence,” Hubbard writes. “She was an actress for the theater alone.”

In Hubbard’s view, the moral of Bolívar and Sáenz’s tragedy is that those with power must use it. Someone close to power, like Manuela, has to dedicate herself to enlarging the strength of her partner. “Real powers are developed by tight conspiracies of this kind,” Hubbard writes. If Manuela had been willing to support Bolívar completely, Hubbard concludes, she would have been a truly historic figure, rather than being “unknown even in the archives of her country as the heroine she was.”

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