In an article http://tonyortega.org/2013/09/28/10468/ about Hubbard and Scientology’s occult incidents and connections Jon Atack writes:
When I first met Gerry, he told me about a scale he’d found in Hubbard’s papers, which belonged to the period between Parsons and Dianetics — around 1947. I asked Gerry about this, recently, but he couldn’t remember it, so I foraged through my ancient notes, and there it is:
God
The Fool
Fanatics and Zealots
The Wealthy, Financiers
The Intelligentsia
Labourers and Farmers
AnimalsHubbard believed he’d reached the level of the Fool.
My memory of my memory is different from Jon’s.
It is true that Jon asked me recently by email about Hubbard’s scale, specifically on May 14 this year. He wrote that he remembered talking to me in 1984 about a scale of Hubbard’s that had ‘fanatics and zealots’ on it. Jon asked if I had it, and if so, could he have it. I answered him:
From: Gerry Armstrong
Sent: Wednesday, May 15, 2013 7:29 AM
To: ‘jon atack’
Subject: RE: fanatics and zealotsI don’t have Hubbard’s scale, and have only a faint memory of it. I’ve called it his beast-to-fooldom scale. The Scientologists have it. It was quite clearly from his post WW II occult period.
At the bottom of the scale, or ladder, or page, were farmers and sub-farmers. At the top was “the fool.” I think Hubbard had an alligator or crocodile snapping at the fool’s heels. There were what Hubbard called “three fool steps.” There was a magus up there, and Hubbard might even have mentioned God even a bit higher. His scale borrows, of course, from the tarot, and other occult/philosophic sources, probably including his own judgments.
I think he had financiers a couple of steps above scientists. And I’m not sure where fanatics and zealots fit in exactly, but they were pretty high in the hierarchy, far up from farmers.
The post-Hubbard scuttlebutt was that he was coming back next time as a politician.
Jon says that sometime after this, he foraged through his notes from 1984 and found what he wrote down while I recounted my memory at that time of Hubbard’s scale.
Anyone could not but feel validated that my 2013 memory matches so precisely my 1984 memory, or at least the note Jon made. But his statement that I couldn’t remember Hubbard’s scale, which, because of Hubbard’s narcissistic scaling of all things, scalable or not, I called his “beast-to-fooldom scale,” is not true.
I have thought about the scale a number of times over the years since I left Hubbard and his Scientologists’ control. I wasn’t trying to get the special order of the relative valuableness or idealness of beings Hubbard placed on his scale, but was using the scale for a reference in getting the foolishness of all such hierarchies. Scientology is maximally, even militaristically, hierarchical. Scientologists sell hierarchism, they hierarchize each other and themselves, and they seek a global hierocracy. On top is the biggest hierarch, Hubbard and now Miscavige. DM even calls himself the “ecclesiastical head,” that is, the humongous hierarch.
What Hubbard actually believed, I hesitate to say, although doubtlessly I have said what I believed he believed. I’ll write separately about what I believe about Hubbard, the-Man-Who-Would-Be-Fool.
