Politics & Power Quote by L. Ron Hubbard

Hubbard’s genius here is bureaucratic jujitsu: he concedes the accusation (authoritarian structure) only to relocate the blame to a faceless, meddling state. It’s a move designed to feel candid while doing what propaganda always does best - shifting causality. “If there is” softens the admission into a hypothetical, but the next clause snaps into certainty: the government “brought [it] into being.” The organization becomes not an aggressor but a victim, forced into hard edges by external pressure.

The second beat - “St. Hill is trying to correct itself” - is the sound of a system laundering its own authority. “Correct” implies a moral calibration rather than a power struggle: discipline becomes self-improvement, compliance becomes healing. That framing is crucial because it recasts internal control as therapeutic necessity, not domination.

Then he lands the real payload: “It doesn’t know what it’s trying to correct because nobody has told it what to correct.” The line weaponizes uncertainty. If there are problems, they’re undefined; if there are standards, they’re withheld. Government becomes simultaneously omnipotent (it creates authoritarianism) and incompetent (it won’t specify violations). It’s an argument built to make oversight impossible: regulators are accused of causing the very harm they’re investigating, then faulted for not offering a roadmap to fix it.

Contextually, St. Hill Manor was Scientology’s UK headquarters during years of mounting scrutiny. Hubbard is speaking to protect institutional legitimacy, but he’s also speaking inward: reassuring followers that any tightening of the screws is reluctant, reactive, and ultimately righteous. The subtext is clear: trust us, distrust them, and interpret control as defense.