#even as he is creating hawke the literary figure. almost to protect him in some ways? god da2 is so full of STUFF!!! I adore it)

[vaguely-concerned]

just going about my day idly contemplating how some of the ways hawke can interact with a romanced anders are not at all unlike how they interact with leandra (and a bit of carver too, especially with a purple hawke), and then thought about my hawke in the timeline where he romances anders and was hit straight in the face with 'was he ever actually in love, or was he just desperately trying to renegotiate with his mother's ghost in any way he could' and now i need to lie down. this is the power of dragon age 2

[howwelldoyouknowyourmoon]

How L. Ron Hubbard and Robert Heinlein influenced the murderous cult of Manson.

Charles Manson’s Science Fiction Roots

New Republic       by JEET HEER           November 21, 2017

In 1963, while a prisoner at the federal penitentiary at McNeil Island in Washington state, Charles Manson heard other prisoners enthuse about two books: Robert Heinlein’s science fiction novel Stranger in a Strange Land (1961) and L. Ron Hubbard’s self-help guide Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health (1950). Heinlein’s novel told the story of a Mars-born messiah who preaches a doctrine of free love, leading to the creation of a religion whose followers are bound together by ritualistic water-sharing and intensive empathy (called “grokking”). Hubbard’s purportedly non-fiction book described a therapeutic technique for clearing away self-destructive mental habits. It would later serve as the basis of Hubbard’s religion, Scientology.

Manson probably didn’t delve too deeply into either of these texts. But he was gifted at absorbing information in conversation, and by talking to other prisoners he gleaned enough from both books to synthesize a new theology. His encounter with the writings of Heinlein and Hubbard was a pivotal event in his life. Until then, he had been a petty criminal and drifter who spent his life in and out of jail. But when Manson was released from McNeil Island in 1967, he was a new figure: a charismatic street preacher who gathered a flock of followers among the hippies of Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco.

Manson won them with a doctrine of communal bonding: They would be a family and share in all things, including love. Manson’s made-up religion was a cut-and-paste invention that borrowed from many sources. As The New York Times notes, Manson’s philosophy was “an idiosyncratic mix of Scientology, hippie anti-authoritarianism, Beatles lyrics, the Book of Revelation, and the writings of Hitler.” But the sci-fi component was pronounced. Stranger in a Strange Land provided the Manson family with its rituals (water-sharing ceremonies), terminology (“grokking”), and promise of transcendence (Manson’s followers hoped that, like the hero of Heinlein’s novel, they would gain mystical powers). The dream of mind triumphing over matter was also the sales pitch of Dianetics.

The Manson family, of course, had a twisted definition of love, which they wanted to keep for themselves. For the outside world, they wanted a violent race war, which would end with them ruling over the survivors. Towards that end, the Manson family went on a killing spree in August 1969 that left nine dead and earned them a notorious place in history. ...

Manson went to jail, and remained there until his death on Sunday at a hospital in California’s Kern County. Amidst an ongoing assessment of his historical relevance—the Manson family killings have been popularized, by Joan Didion and others, as the death knell of the 1960s—it is worth revisiting how two books, steeped in utopian ambitions, played a role in a country’s unraveling. It was hardly an accident that Manson borrowed heavily from both Heinlein and Hubbard. No two writers better illustrate the tendency of science fiction to generate cults.

Heinlein and Hubbard first met in 1939 and immediately hit it off. To his wife Leslyn, Heinlein described Hubbard as “our kind of people in every possible way.”  (The friendship between the two men is described in William Patterson’s two-volume biography of Heinlein). They were both prolific pulp writers, contributing heavily to Astounding Science-Fiction, which was revolutionizing the field under the editorship of John W. Campbell. Astounding’s major claim to fame was that it specialized in “hard science fiction,” which was rigorously based on extrapolations from actual science. This claim was a bit self-serving since Campbell always had a taste for pseudo-science, but it’s undeniable that Heinlein’s own work, grounded in his education as an engineer, brought a new level of plausibility to the genre.

Heinlein was in an open marriage with Leslyn, a poet and script editor. He had a habit of encouraging his close male buddies to take Leslyn as a lover. As Hubbard would later marvel, Heinlein “almost forced me to sleep with his wife.” Sharing his wife’s body was a form of male bonding for Heinlein, and it served as a precursor to the communal orgies that he imagined in Stranger in a Strange Land, which helped the members of his imaginary religion form group solidarity.

Hubbard and Heinlein also shared an interest in the supernatural. Together with their friend Jack Parson, a rocket scientist, they investigated the teachings of the occultist Aleister Crowley and tried their hand at black magic.

Hubbard may have suffered from some form of post-traumatic stress disorder following World War II. (He served in the Navy, and later made up stories of his wartime adventures; in reality, military records show that Hubbard’s wartime service was “substandard.”) His attempts to create a new science of the mind, culminating in the publication of Dianetics, can be understood as an attempt to self-medicate. The first article about Dianetics appeared in the March 1950 issue of Astounding Science-Fiction. Campbell was an early enthusiast, crediting Dianetics with helping him cure his chronic sinusitis. (The cure was psychosomatic and temporary.) Many science fiction writers in Campbell’s orbit, notably A.E. van Vogt, Katherine MacLean, and James Blish, got caught up in the Dianetics craze.

Campbell eventually became disillusioned with Dianetics, but moved on to becoming an advocate for other forms of pseudo-science...

Unlike Campbell, Heinlein kept clear of Dianetics. But Heinlein was nonetheless fascinated by the way his old friend Hubbard had created a pseudo-science that eventually became the religion of Scientology. This planted the seeds for an idea: What if someone created a religion like Scientology that actually worked—that did give people transcendent mental power, such as mind-reading and levitation? The result of this thought experiment was Stranger in a Strange Land, which remains Heinlein’s most famous novel. One of the heroes of the novel, Jubal Harshaw, a polymathic pulp writer who is very successful in seducing women, is clearly an idealized version of Hubbard.

Heinlein meant Stranger in a Stranger Land to be a jape, a satire on religion. While Hubbard had turned science fiction into a religion, Heinlein was trying to turn religion into science fiction. But many readers took it all too seriously. In March of 1969 at a film festival in Rio, Heinlein met a charming actress named Sharon Tate. A few months later, she was murdered by a cult that took inspiration from Heinlein’s novel.

No literary genre has been so fertile at generating religions as science fiction. Heinlein’s work was the springboard for many competing sects, and he called himself “a preacher with no church.” Rare among the many intellectual gurus whose fame mushroomed in the 1960s, Heinlein was a beacon for all kinds of people: hippies and hawks, libertarians and authoritarians....

Heinlein’s ability to excite cultic faith among all sorts of groups speaks to the power of science fiction as a literature of ideas, especially during utopian moments like the 1960s, when the future feels open. Heinlein’s book was not alone in gaining a cult following, it was joined by J.R.R. Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings, Herbert’s Dune, and Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness. Each of these books spoke to a desire for an alternative reality, just as older social norms were breaking down.

As vile and sociopathic as he was, Charles Manson did have a gift for absorbing the zeitgeist, which is one reason he held such a powerful sway over the cultural imagination. Manson picked up Stranger in a Strange Land in the same spirit that he learned to strum a guitar and offer exegeses on Beatles lyrics. It was a way for him to ride the wave of cultural change. Manson remained infamous all these decades not just because he inspired mass murder, but also because he did so by manipulating some of our most powerful myths.

Jeet Heer is a senior editor at the New Republic.

https://newrepublic.com/article/145906/charles-mansons-science-fiction-roots

“In Korea, one even senses a fear, like one induced by the Mafia, among the opposition to the Unification Church, and … outspoken opponents speak of death threats.” Prof. Sontag, 1976

Tahk Myeong-hwan was murdered four weeks after Sun Myung Moon spoke about him as an opponent.

Tahk Myeong-hwan was attacked with car bomb

Tahk Myeong-hwan was offered a bribe of $450,000 to discontinue research into the Unification Church

UC members sent more than 200 text messages to Cho’s cell phone, saying, “We’ll kill you.”

Abducted and beaten up by the Unification Church in Korea

1. Freedom of the Press in Korea – Unification Church style

2. Freedom of the Press in Japan – Unification Church style

Prime Minister Kishi of Japan, organised crime and the Moon involvement in Japanese politics gained protection for the UC

The Mysterious Death of Robert Boettcher in 1984

Donald M. Fraser’s house was attacked by an arsonist just after his investigation into the Unification Church. It was only saved by good fortune.

Moon’s followers poured a pot of urine and feces on the head of a Seoul University Professor of Religion.

In 1975 Korean Unification Church members physically attacked many Christian pastors