Campbell’s per-word rates for his pulp writers might have also played a part. Quoting myself from an earlier topic about nutty religious woo:
The letter to his agent where the grifter mentions providing an alternative to Catholicism (one that grants the power to rape women) is right in line with this in terms of timing and scumbag thought process.
Hubbard’s religiose sci-fi is always the shiny thing about it, but presenting the occult in uncanny technical and bureacratic language – “auditing”, “dianetics”, “clear” – was apparently Campbell’s contribution and always seemed to me the deeper current of its appeal.
As I recall, Campbell encouraged his authors to use what later became Star-Trek-style technobabble to give a scientific sheen to concepts like psychic powers or magic that would have been more at home in fantasy stories than they were in SF ones. I’m sure that Jack Parsons and Heinlein also made their own unknowing contributions to what became a monstrous cult.
