Cuba was run by mobsters, who had turned it into a hedonistic paradise, but Hubbard took little advantage of the nightlife; he locked himself in a hotel room, rented an old typewriter with Spanish-language keys, and began to write. According to de Mille, Hubbard wrote all night with a bottle of rum at hand, which was empty in the morning.
The book Hubbard was pounding out in Havana was Science of Survival. He introduced his readers to the Tone Scale, which had evolved since he sketched it out in his letter to Robert Heinlein two years before. The scale classifies emotional states, starting at zero, Body Death. The lower tones are characterized by psychosis, where hatred and anger give way to perversion, artful lying, cowardice, withdrawal, and apathy. “People below the 2.0 level, no matter their avowed intention, will bring death or injury to persons, things and organizations around them if in the anger bracket, or death to themselves if in the apathy bracket,” Hubbard writes. “Anyone below 2.0 level is a potential suicide.” Their bodies stink, as does their breath. At 2.5, there is a break point between the normal and the neurotic. This stage is characterized by boredom, vagueness, indifference, and pointless conversation. At level 3.0 one enters a stage that Hubbard characterizes as “very high normal,” where one is resistant to infections, tolerant, and reasonable; however, he is also insincere, careless, and untrustworthy.
Clear registers 4.0 on the scale. A person who has attained this level is nearly accident-proof and immune to bacteria. He is exhilarated, eager, strong, able, curious, ethical, creative, courageous, responsible, and impossible to hypnotize. And yet this state is only one-tenth of what Hubbard forecasts in the realm of human potential. His scale goes all the way to 40.0, Serenity of Beingness, but the capabilities of the upper regions are largely unknown.
Given the circumstances that surrounded the creation of this book, it’s interesting to read what Hubbard writes about sexual behavior and attitudes toward children. Not only was he on the run in Cuba with his abducted daughter when he wrote this, he was also being sued for non-support of the two children from his first marriage, whom he hadn’t seen for years. “Sex,” he wrote, “is an excellent index of the position of the preclear on the Tone Scale.” The highest levels are characterized by monogamy, constancy, a pleasurable attitude toward sex, and an intense interest in children, although the urge to procreate is mitigated by the sublimation of sexual desire into pure creative thought. At 3.0 on the scale, sexual interest is diminished but the urge to procreate remains high. That begins to fall off at 2.5, “not for any reason beyond a general failure to be interested in anything.” Children are tolerated, but there is little interest in their affairs. At 2.0, sex becomes revolting and children provoke anxiety. Rape and child abuse characterize 1.5.
Then Hubbard arrives at a level that preoccupies him, 1.1 on the Tone Scale. “Here is the harlot, the pervert, the unfaithful wife, Free Love, easy marriage and quick divorce and general sexual disaster,” he writes. “A society which reaches this level is on its way out of history.” A mother who is at 1.1 on the Tone Scale will attempt to abort her child. However, once the child is born, “we get general neglect and thoughtlessness about the child and no feeling whatsoever about the child’s future or any effort to build one for it. We get careless familial actions, such as promiscuity, which will tear to pieces the family security upon which this child’s future depends. Along this band, the child is considered a thing, a possession.”
Hubbard finished the book and wrote this dedication:
To
Alexis Valerie Hubbard
For Whose Tomorrow May
Be Hoped a World That
Is Fit To Be Free