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So that was 1950. Bigger and bigger bombs. Cold War psychiatry generating terror. And a population living in the shadow of a mushroom cloud. And make no mistake, that was the world stage in which L. Ron Hubbard presented Dianetics.
As we gather here on the eve of the Year 2000, when I refer to Book One you may instantly think to yourself “a handbook of auditing.” But you can’t forget that world view of 1950, and the real purpose of Book One — the eradication of the source of aberration that had brought the planet to the state it was in, as of May 1950. And in evidence of that LRH purpose, once again listen to the very first paragraphs of Dianetics, “A science of mind is a goal which has engrossed thousands of generations of man. Armies, dynasties and whole civilizations have perished for the lack of it. Rome went to dust for the want of it. China swims in blood for the need of it. And down in the arsenals an atom bomb, its hopeful nose full-armed in ignorance of it.”
The fact is, LRH’s discovery of the Reactive Mind as the source of man’s ill, and auditing as its cure, had given the people of the world a “weapon” — one far more powerful than the atomic bomb. So what did Dianetics represent to a 1950 population, nervously scanning the skies for incoming nuclear warheads? Not just a bolt from the blue — Dianetics was a bolt from the very heavens!
And therein lay the spark behind those words, “Book One Boom” and “Grass Roots Prairie Fire.” And as that fire continued rolling out across the American heartland, newspapers in towns, like Houston, Texas, were soon reporting this: “Booksellers were still dizzy with surprise, but not too dizzy to write for extra copies of the ‘sleeper,’ which had suddenly taken the local reading public by storm.” And why exactly the surprise? Well, here was a book with no fawning review in the New York Times, no establishment “endorsements.” Moreover, the book had been published by a small textbook publisher — hardly the type to reach bestseller lists. And still, Dianetics was outselling every other book on the shelf.
But there was something else unique to that Book One story, and it’s what really “rattled the china,” in establishment quarters. Here was a book that wasn’t simply read and then relegated to the living-room shelf. Rather, here was a book that sparked a national storm of activity. People weren’t just reading. They were doing.
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