This was the most potent medicine ever discovered, Campbell continued, but also the most dangerous weapon imaginable if not properly handled. “With the knowledge I now have, I could turn most ordinary people into homicidal maniacs within one hour.” And yet, as an editor, Campbell recognized the commercial possibilities: “This is the greatest story in the world—far bigger than the atomic bomb.” He added in a postscript that he had also lost twenty pounds in twenty-five days—another commercial bonanza. Campbell was beside himself because Hubbard had yet to actually start writing the book. “The key to world sanity is in Ron Hubbard’s head, and there isn’t even an adequate written record!”
In December, Ron and Sara moved into what Hubbard termed “a little old shack” in Bayhead, New Jersey, with eight bedrooms, near the beach. In March 1950, he sent the Heinleins a handmade miniature book catalogue from “Hubbard House” publishers, proclaiming the spring collection:
Announcing
A New Hubbard Edition
Completely New Material
Not a revision
Co-Authors—Ron & Sara Hubbard
Release Date March 8, ’50—11:50 A.M.
Weight—9 lbs. 2 oz. — Height—21 in.
Alexis Valerie
Has received rave notices from all reviewers!
Alexis was the image of her father, who delighted in her precociousness. “Ron is going at a little less than the speed of light all day and every day,” Sara wrote to the Heinleins, “then, in the middle of the night he goes in and tells Alexis all about it.”
Ron promised to send Heinlein a galley of Dianetics as soon as it was available. He reported that it was 180,000 words, “begun Jan. 12, ’50, finished Feb. 10, off the press by April 25.” When one of his followers asked Hubbard how he had been able to dash it off so quickly, Hubbard said that his guardian spirit, the Empress, had dictated it to him.
Like several other prominent sci-fi writers of the Golden Age, including Heinlein and A. E. van Vogt, Hubbard had been strongly influenced by the writings of Alfred Korzybski, a Polish American philosopher who created the theory of general semantics. In New Jersey, Sara read Korzybski and quoted several passages aloud to Ron, who immediately grasped the ideas as the basis for a system of psychology, if not for a whole religion.
Korzybski pointed out that words are not the things they describe, in the same way that a map is not the territory it represents. Language shapes thinking, creating mental habits, which can stand in the way of sanity by preserving delusions. Korzybski argued that emotional disturbances, learning disorders, and many psychosomatic illnesses—including heart problems, skin diseases, sexual disorders, migraines, alcoholism, arthritis, even dental cavities—could be remedied by semantic training, much as Hubbard would claim for his own work. He cited Korzybski frequently, although he admitted that he could never get through the texts themselves. “Bob Heinlein sat down one time and talked for ten whole minutes on the subject of Korzybski to me and it was very clever,” he later related. “I know quite a bit about Korzybski’s works.”
From this secondhand knowledge, Hubbard saw the need for creating a special vocabulary, which would allow him to define old thoughts in new ways (the soul becomes a thetan, for instance); or invent new words, such as “enturbulate” (confuse) and “hatting” (training); or use words and phrases in a novel manner, such as turning adjectives or verbs into nouns, or vice versa (“an overt,” “a static,” “alter-isness”); plus a Pentagon-level glut of acronyms—all of which would entrap his followers in a self-referential semantic labyrinth.
Hubbard granted his friend and acolyte John Campbell a scoop by letting him buy a lengthy excerpt of his forthcoming book. Thus the world got its first look at Dianetics in the pages of Astounding Science-Fiction. “This article is not a hoax, joke, or anything but a direct, clear statement of a totally new scientific thesis,” Campbell warns his readers, who might be confused by finding a work of scholarship in a pulp magazine. “I know dianetics is one of, if not the greatest, discovery of all Man’s written and unwritten history,” he wrote to a puzzled contributor. “It produces the sort of stability and sanity men have dreamed about for centuries.” He assured a young writer that Hubbard would win the Nobel Peace Prize for his work.
The book itself, Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health, appeared in May. It was completely unexpected, given Hubbard’s history as a writer. He intended it to stand as a capstone to the “fifty thousand years of thinking men without whose speculations and observations the creation and construction of Dianetics would not have been possible.” In Scientology, Dianetics is known as Book One. “With 18 million copies sold, it is indisputably the most widely read and influential book on the human mind ever published,” the church maintains. Scientology dates its own calendar from 1950, the year Dianetics was published.