TechGnosis

by Erik Davis

  Today the belief that the mind behaves like a computer barely raises an eyebrow, and for decades has almost constituted a guild oath for reductionist cognitive scientists. But in 1950, the world’s first electronic computer, ENIAC, was only four years old, and Hubbard’s transistorized Freud packed a healthy punch among people feeling the first stirrings of the digital revolution. His “modern scientific methodology” particularly appealed to ASF readers and their intellectual ilk, who evidenced much of the pragmatic rationalism and Promethean dreams that would later breed technological enthusiasts like the Extropians. These were the kind of people who were tickled pink about mainframe computers and the promises of cybernetics, Norbert Wiener’s new science of communication and control.

  Hubbard became one of the first people to hawk the new paradigm to an American market notoriously attracted to self-help scams and quick-fix gadgets. By employing a cybernetic language of “circuits,” “process,” and “memory banks,” Hubbard seemed to offer his readers technical control over their own minds, giving them an effective therapeutic system they could use to improve themselves in the comfort of their own homes, and without the expensive intervention of meddling psychoanalytical witch doctors. Hubbard was also reacting to the dominant psychological theory of behaviorism, which conceived of human beings as “black boxes”—organic stimulus-response machines whose behavior could be understood and treated on an essentially mechanical basis that paid no attention at all to subjective experience. Hubbard did not so much reject this paradigm as give it a comic-book, Gurdjieffean twist: our bodies and ordinary minds may be programmable contraptions, but our essential selves are capable of programming and debugging these machines.

  In the early 1950s, Dianetics groups started spontaneously popping up across the land, and Hubbard may have felt that he was losing control of his do-it-yourself, self-help program. In any case, his initially secular techniques were soon absorbed into the “spiritual” philosophy (and hierarchy) of Scientology, which incorporated its first church in 1954. To the Freudian circuit diagrams of Dianetics, Hubbard added ungainly chunks of Buddhist psychology, New Thought, and probably elements of Aleister Crowley’s Nietzschean brand of modern occult “magick.” Early in their spiritual career, budding Scientologists learned to break down ingrained patterns of social behavior and to generate altered states of consciousness (one training routine consisted of staring blankly into another person’s eyes for hours without reacting). These palpable shifts in perception and awareness were then reframed according to Scientology doctrine, a process that led students deeper into Hubbard’s off-the-wall cosmology and the authoritarian structure of his church. Bureaucratic and technological efficiency reigned supreme as metaphors of spiritual progress. Scientologists still refer to Hubbard’s elaborate and byzantine system of training routines, audiotapes, and texts as the “tech.” And the tech, they say, always works.

  Hubbard also pushed a new cyborg technology, a strange and intriguing box originally demonstrated to him in 1952 by a New Jersey Dianeticist named Volney Mathison. The “electropsychometer,” or E-meter, is equipped with dials and two attachments that resemble tin cans. Somewhat like lie detectors, the E-meter registers changes in galvanic skin response—roughly speaking, the flow of electricity through the body. Budding Scientologists hold the cans while an auditor asks them questions (or attempts to “push their buttons”); eventually, the dials register a charge that indicates the presence of an engram. Hubbard’s idea was that thought has mass, and that the neurotic “heaviness” of engrams creates resistance to electrical flow. Once the imprints are cleared through Dianetic techniques, the E-meter needle “floats,” and the subject is one step closer to enlightenment. The E-meter is like God in a box—as one operator’s manual put it, “It sees all, knows all. It is never wrong.”6

  Such claims did not cut it with the FDA, who teamed up with some U.S. marshals and stormed Scientology’s Washington, DC, head-quarters in 1963, seizing truckloads of E-meters and manuals. In a protracted court battle, the Church of Scientology contended that auditing was akin to Catholic confession, that the E-meter was a “religious artifact,” and that Scientologists didn’t have to prove its efficacy any more than the Vatican had to run tests on wafers and holy water. The argument was ingenious: rather than attempting to prove the scientific validity of the E-meter—a challenging task to say the least—they simply hid behind the cloak of religious mystery. But they also unwittingly underscored the fact that technologies sometimes derive their power from symbolic and ritual performance rather than mechanical effects. Attempting to clarify the distinction between these two overlapping dimensions of technological efficacy, a federal judge banned the E-meter for “secular” diagnosis and treatment but allowed its continued use for “religious” counseling.

  In his history of Scientology, the British journalist Stewart Lamont noted that for Scientologists, “spiritual progress could actually be measured and practiced without recourse to providential grace from God. It could be assured by performing the correct techniques and by following a manual.… It was the age-old heresy of gnosticism repackaged in a way to appeal to twentieth-century scientific man.”7 Though Lamont’s conception of gnosticism reflects orthodox propaganda more than the phenomenon itself, he is right to note the gnostic current that gives Hubbard’s tech its peculiar zap. Sounding like an Extropian battle plan, Scientology claims “to increase spiritual freedom, intelligence, ability, and to produce immortality.” Once the E-meter has erased all the instincts, memories, and pains that define our personalities, we are left with what Hubbard calls the “thetan,” an immortal essence that he defines as the incorporeal part of us that is “aware of being aware.” Taking Cartesian dualism into the stratosphere, Hubbard imagined an alien spiritual entity that distinctly resembles the “spark” described by the Gnostics of yore.

  In fact, Hubbard’s cosmology reads like “The Hymn of the Pearl” as filtered through Darwin and paranoid science fiction. In his brain-bending book Scientology: A History of Man, which purports to be nothing less than a “a cold-blooded and factual account of your last sixty trillion years,” we learn that long ago a bunch of bored thetans decided to amuse themselves by creating and destroying universes. To make the game more interesting, they relinquished some of their superpowers, voluntarily entering the universe of MEST—matter, energy, space, and time. Our universe. Falling into MEST in a “dwindling spiral,” they became so hopelessly ensnared in physical space that they wound up forgetting their true origins. Reduced to “pre-clears,” these thetans were condemned to pass from one lifetime to the next, accumulating karmic banks of engrams that only Dianetics could clear. Once freed of the vegetable body and its psychic crud, the thetan would be fully operational again, able to simulate “facsimiles” of a body, and manipulate the virtual reality of MEST at will.

  Thetans are not the only forces in the cosmos, however. After arriving on earth and transforming mindless apes into Homo sapiens, the body-snatching thetans encountered the Martian “Fourth Invader Force.” These sinister legions trapped and enslaved the thetans using a variety of psychological and electronic torture devices, including the dread “Jack-in-the-Box” and the horrifying “Coffee-Grinder.” When we die, our inner thetan goes to a report station where Martians erase its memories using a “forgetting implant” that resembles a satanic wheel of television sets.

  Beneath their “hoods and goggles,” the Fourth Invaders clearly recall the Gnostic archons of old. But with their battery of bizarre electronic machines, these archons also represent Hubbard’s feverish pulp spin on psychiatry. Hubbard hated the mental health establishment, and particularly loathed the widespread use of electroconvulsive therapy. (Hubbard’s A History of Man includes extended rants about how “electronics alone can make a truly slave society.”) In the 1950s and 1960s, he fanatically and publicly opposed ECT, lobotomies, the deplorable conditions of mental institutions, and the authority granted to psychiatrists by the law. He also became on
e of the first to accuse the CIA of performing mind-control experiments, accusations that later revelations about MK-ULTRA proved perfectly true. In his own paranoid and self-serving way, Hubbard suggested the position that Michel Foucault would later articulate in Madness and Civilization: that institutional psychiatry is as much a form of social control as a form of healing.

  Like many heretical and authoritarian organizations, however, the Church of Scientology was also capable of reproducing and far exceeding the most manipulative, totalitarian, and fanatical elements of the social institutions it opposed. As exposés like Jon Atack’s A Piece of Blue Sky document in chilling detail, the church hierarchy became quite paranoid in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and used a variety of dirty tricks to undermine “suppressive persons” deemed hostile to the organization. Inside the church, Hubbard increasingly put communications in the service of control. Fleeing from the authorities to the high seas, Hubbard maintained tight control over his “Orgs” through an elaborate telex network. He also churned out tens of thousands of pages of Scientology material, an endless stream of books, pamphlets, directives, memos, and policy letters that unconsciously parodied the most absurd excesses of print-based bureaucracy. Audiotapes of Hubbard’s mesmerizing, rambling, and vaguely amusing lectures were also used extensively during Scientology training, perhaps fostering the “deep tribal involvement” that Marshall McLuhan claimed allowed demagogues like Hitler to sway the masses through the radio.

  Needless to say, the most advanced levels of Scientology did not always deliver the promised superpowers, and Hubbard was forced to constantly upgrade his increasingly expensive tech. Atack describes the scenario in terms all too familiar in these digital days: “Each new rundown [or upgrade] would be launched amid a fanfare of publicity, and claims of miraculous results. One critic … complained of ‘auditing junkies,’ forever waiting for the next ‘level’ to resolve their chronic problems.”8 Drawn ever deeper into a worldview rigidly enforced by insiders and well-nigh incomprehensible to the rest of us, many Scientologists found themselves locked in a paradigm without exit doors. As Margery Wakefield explains in her survivor text The Road to Xenu, Scientology’s attempt to overcome cultural and psychological programming paradoxically drew its acolytes into vicious cybernetic loops. Wakefield’s tale culminates when, after twelve years in the organization, she reaches the level of OT3 and gains access to its extremely esoteric texts. She learns that many moons ago, Xenu, the head of the Galactic Federation, solved a cosmic overpopulation problem by sending thetans to earth and then blowing them up with nuclear weapons hidden in volcanoes. Reading this seriously baked tale, Wakefield experiences a kind of cognitive dissonance:

  I felt very strange. I had been programmed under hypnosis for twelve years to accept as gospel everything Hubbard said or wrote.… but the materials were too absurd to be believed. The result was that my mind, like a computer that has come upon data impossible to analyze, simply refused to compute.… Hubbard had jammed my mind. From that point, I became a total pawn. Unable to think, I was a completely programmable stimulus-response machine, a robot. To use the phrase now popular among ex-Scientologists, I was a “Rondroid.”9

  Wakefield’s knotted mix of technological metaphors is fascinating, not least of all because it shows how a therapeutic “technology” based on liberating the mental computer could produce in some of its followers a sense of robotic stimulus-and-response reminiscent of the evil Borgs (Orgs?) on Star Trek: The Next Generation. But while one can hardly fault Wakefield for considering herself a Rondroid, her technological language also obscures as much as it reveals. As the psychologist Lowell Streiker points out, the tactics of persuasion used by Scientology and other cults “are not so much a ‘technology of mind control’ or hallmarks of brainwashing as they are … common techniques by which groups break down personal resistance and establish their influence.”10 But to acknowledge this is to acknowledge the possibility that every day we swim in a sea of brainwash, albeit a diluted one. Every time we rally around a flag or a logo, or pop a Prozac, or accept a marketing campaign or app into our lives, we are dancing with the forces of control, or at least with the “consensus trance” that unconsciously seeks to keep us, for all intents and purposes, dazed and confused.

  Gurdjieff’s Work suggests that the “man-machine” can wake up and free itself from its own automatic and socially imposed behavior, and that the spiritual cyborg can move toward higher consciousness by first getting in touch with his or her inner machine. Scientology exemplifies the creepy cultic hazards that lurk along this road and reminds us that liberating the self from some programs may simply free up blank tape for new and far more debilitating demands. In any case, and despite Hubbard’s resoundingly bad example, computers, cybernetics, and information technology now provide curiously useful mirrors and metaphors along the trail of self-development. For people drawn to psychospiritual transformation but repelled by the old fairy tales, the notion of “technologies of the self” does not dehumanize so much as empower. Besides satisfying the gadget-happy temperament of modern people, it carves out room for a pragmatic experimentation that is freed, at least in principle, from any dogma.

  At the same time, the increasingly popular image of the programmable self also reflects the steady bureaucratization and technologizing of society that took place throughout the twentieth century, a process that brought with it an order of social control impossible to jibe with the genuine exploration of human potential. For this reason, many of the countercultural spiritual movements of the postwar Western world violently rejected the mechanistic imaginary, attacking electronic Babylon and the dehumanizing effects of technocracy, with its abstract, institutional calculus of the organized man-machine. But as we will see, beneath their buckskin vests and Japanese robes, the spiritual rebels of the postwar counterculture were far more intimate with the logic of technique than they initially let on.

  Freak Technique

  In his 1964 book The Technological Society, the French theologian Jacques Ellul proclaimed that the forces of “technique” had begun to run amok, invading and transforming all spheres of human activity. For Ellul, technique referred not just to machines but to the logic of manipulation and gain that lay behind machines. Sociologically, technique described the procedures, languages, and social conditions generated by the “rationality” of modern institutions, bureaucracies, and technocratic organizations. Following World War II, these organizations made an ever deeper pact with technique when they began to computerize themselves and to incorporate the cybernetic logic of control, with its feedback loops and information flows, into their management structures. The System, as it was known to its later foes, began to hit its stride.

  At the same time that computer scientists began to consider the possibility of artificially intelligent machines, Ellul argued that technique had already taken on a life of its own. The System was, in essence, out of control. In its ceaseless drive for efficiency and productive power, this hell-bent technoeconomic Frankenstein was squeezing the life out of individuals, cultures, and the natural world, reducing everything to what Heidegger described as a standing reserve of raw material. Like Heidegger, Ellul rejected the humanist notion that technology was simply a tool we use to implement human goals. Instead, technology installs a new and invisible framework around the world we live in, a potentially catastrophic structure of knowing and being that swallows us up whether we like it or not.

  The rather Manichaean portrait that Ellul painted proved enormously influential among the postwar generation destined to stage the blazing freak show known as “the sixties.” An uneasy alliance of political radicals and bohemians, violent revolutionaries and anarchic acidheads, the young men and women of the 1960s counterculture were united in their hatred of the System. They dreamed of a millennial world that would replace the dehumanizing megamachine of technocratic society and its military-industrial complex; whether expressed in Marxist, mystical, or hedonistic terms, this new age would us
her in a redeemed society of justice, human potential, and organic freedom. In the counterculture’s eyes, technology symbolized the System, with its heartless yen for domination and its fetish for rational control.

  At the same time, revolutionaries like the Students for a Democratic Society or the Weathermen were more than willing to use the master’s tools against him, whether they be bullhorns or guns, bombs or radios. For the more apolitical hippies, however, who believed that changing consciousness would itself change the world, modern technology radiated seriously bad vibes. Many opted for a more “organic” lifestyle based on bean sprouts, moon charts, scruffy hair, and rural Rousseauism. Nonetheless, the freak scene would never have spread without technology: FM radio, underground newspapers, powerful stereos, television news, the pill, the electric guitar. Especially the electric guitar. By the mid-sixties, the rock concert had become the hedonic agora of the counterculture; musicians dove headfirst into the electromagnetic imaginary, transforming previously “extraneous” electrical effects like feedback and distortion into ferocious transcendental chaos. Combined with the flashing goo of light shows and the LSD that had migrated out of elite psychological circles and military experiments, these kundalini-tweaking soundstorms staged electrified Eleusinian mysteries whose power, as Roszak notes, was “borrowed from the apparatus”—that is, from the very System the freaks sought to supplant.

  Alongside their embrace of certain select technologies, the hippies must also be seen as revising, rather than rejecting, the dreams of technique. Freaks created an entire mythos around self-empowering tools and instrumental skills, an organic and imaginative transformation of technical manipulation that is nowhere more evident than in the generation’s powerfully innovative spirituality. Rejecting the arid and authoritarian religious institutions of the West, the freaks decided to get their mystical hands dirty, to pry open the human sensorium and uncover whatever was inside. Which is why, from yoga to psychedelics, from the Kama Sutra to the I Ching, countercultural spirituality is characterized by nothing so much as techniques, especially what Mircea Eliade called “techniques of ecstasy.” This grab bag of mystic methods and psychological tools, plucked out of their original cultural context or invented anew, allowed individual seekers to probe and expand their own bodyminds while avoiding the dogmatic traps of orthodoxy.