The Development of Dianetics and Scientology

I’ll be doing a series to breakdown the various fundamental beliefs and techniques of Dianetics and Scientology but it occurred to me that before I do that, it might help to first break down some even more basic points about how Dianetics and Scientology work, so this is the first of the videos I’ll make to do that. Here, we’re going to look at the basic and key materials of Dianetics and Scientology, the books and lectures that make up the body of work that is Scientology.

L. Ron Hubbard was a lot of things, many of them not very good, but one thing that cannot be denied is the man was prolific. The entire body of Dianetics and Scientology is huge and it took Hubbard decades to create it all.

I have been doing some study of other destructive cults and with one in particular which you’ll be hearing more about soon, I was overwhelmed by the amount of material that cult had put out over the years. It was very hard to figure out where to start, what was important and what wasn’t. Then I realized no one has ever really broken all this down for Scientology before, that it’s not clear to a lot of people what came first and what Scientologists think is important and why. So what we’re going to do is chronologically walk through the development of this subject and I’ll explain what came out and what Scientologists think of that now. This video will not pretend to cover all of it, just some highlights along the way which I think are particularly important milestones.

This should help any of you out there who may be confused about the enormity of the materials or who can’t figure out the difference between Dianetics vs Scientology or why Scientologists might put a lot of stock in the book Scientology: The Fundamentals of Thought but not in the book Dianetics: The Original Thesis. So let’s take as rapid a tour through all this as we can.