So let's say you somehow ended up involved in scientology. Depending on your level of involvement, here is the duress level you could expect.
CELEBRITY: Even The Lawn Ornament kisses their asses. (Lawn Ornament is the Official Scientology Code name for David Miscavage. He is called that because of his similarity to one of those anachronistic miniature lawn statues of a coachman holding up a lantern)
RICH PRECLEAR: This person is paying for auditing. They are treated with kid gloves since they are bringing in MONEY. All Scientologists beneath this level are indentured servants.
ORDINARY, GARDEN VARIETY SCIENTOLOGIST: This person is doing courses whenever possible and affording an intensive (25 hours) of auditing maybe once a year (after they have initially emptied their savings and possibly taken a second mortgage).
Hubbard's guiding rule on this is, "We'd rather have them dead than incapable". By incapable he means, non-scientologist.
They are expected to be on course weekdays during the day, or evenings and weekends. Duress is applied if their "points" are down. Scientology courses are done from a checksheet which the person supposedly does at their own speed. They get points for each action they perform. Daily and weekly they have to keep graphs and if the slope of the line is downward, they get admonished in greater or lesser degrees.
If they don't show up one night, the next time they show up they instantly get sent to the "ethics officer" and get interrogated until they admit some transgression. There is never any excuse such as "I had a flat tire". It is always the person's fault, either they are PTS or "went past a word he didn't understand". This interrogation is quite often done on the E-Meter (used as a lie detector) and is called a PTS interview. Even at this beginning level a person's defenses are being broken down. Admittedly, for some, there is a fascination with the organization and all the strange new things. Thus some are more susceptible to this bullshit.
If this person talks to non-scientologists and starts to doubt scientology, they get quick training on how to deal with it and pressure like you wouldn't believe. If none of the methods for dealing with non-believers works, the ultimate solution is to "DISCONNECT" from the source of discord. Here is where families get broken up.
Scientology pretends to have an internal justice system, but it is completely dysfunctional because there are no checks and balances. The senior person at an org commands with absolute authority and determines the outcome of a Committee of Evidence ahead of time. There is no one to appeal to because as long as the money keeps flowing, no one above is allowed to do anything. It is like "Cohagen" in "Total Recall".
If a person is "upstat", they are not allowed to be investigated. They could be burying babies in the basement, but as long as the money continued upwards to the Sea Org, everything is fine. This tunnel vision management, total focus on the goal whatever the means, has historically always been the modus operandi of ruthless and successful dictatorships. Thus, if you are good at stabbing your associates in the back, planting evidence, falsifying statistics, blowing your own horn, and maintaining good personal PR despite a lack of real production, you will do well on staff, but that is later.
FSM: An FSM is just like the former category, except they are authorized to sign people up on behalf of the Org. They get 10% to 15% of the amount the new victim "donates".
MISSION STAFF: Missions are tiny orgs. They are only allowed to deliver up through Grade IV rundowns. At one time they were operated as "Franchises" where the Mission Owner had some degree of autonomy. After 1982 however all autonomy was squeezed out by Miscavage and his goons. (Read the declaration by Peter Green for more information). Mission Owners who didn't go along with this were declared "on the spot" and their assets confiscated under threat of copyright and trade secret infringement. In other words, a Sea Org goon sat each Mission Holder down and showed them a pre-typed-up criminal complaint that, unless the Mission Holder signed over their Mission, the Sea Org would press charges. Most of them were stupidly thinking L. Ron Hubbard would never have let this happen and was going to correct it all. What they refused to believe was that L. Ron Hubbard was the person who ordered it done.
That is the price of blind, stupid obedience. Let that be a warning. Many of these Missions Holders like Bent Corydon, Dean Stokes, Peter Green and Kingsley Wimbush had dedicated decades to building their Missions and they were destroyed overnight by Miscavage and Hubbard. Really sad. And that's not the worse. The Missions that kissed ass were fined $15,000 per day for every day they had certain "off policy situations" existing. Of course the "off policy situations" were trumped up and there was no due process involved. Eventually, to my knowledge, all the Mission Owners were divested of their missions. The missions were turned over to lower level Mission Staff and the Mission holder was dismissed.
Mission staff work the same hours as Org Staff, sometimes more. In some Missions people worked from 9:00am to 10:00pm every day with Saturday night and Sunday day off, sometimes. Here one is truly entering the world of indentured servitude and even self imposed slavery. People are promised all sorts of free auditing and services but almost to the letter none of this is ever delivered.
The work is truly volunteer work as pay is mostly non-existent, except for registrars (salespeople) who get a percentage of the rake, of course, since scientology is about taking in money, not delivering anything of value. In virtually all the cases, the staff have to rely on handouts from parents, live at home, or 8 people to a 2 bedroom apartment. There are usually one or two working cars that everyone shares communally.
CLASS IV ORG: This is similar to Missions, but worse because Orgs have Sea Org members on location all the time. The purpose of the Sea Org is to forward command intention. What that means in practice is to terrorize staff members into producing. The Sea Org is to Scientology Staff, what the SS was to the German Army. It is a special branch loyal directly to the Founder. Sea Org members can push around "outer" org staff with impunity because there is nowhere to go to get injustice dealt with except the Sea Org and their arrogant attitude can be basically summed up as "Non Sea Org staff are useless, out ethics, off source degraded beings but we tolerate them because we need slaves who understand at least the terminology of Scientology so that they can take orders".
It is rather ironic that, the best technical people are quite often mercenary scientologists, non staff, non Sea Org, who work for hourly rate. This grates at the Sea Org to no end because the Sea Org is incapable of producing high quality technical terminals, so they often have to hire class IX auditors from the ranks of the techinically competent. To be higher than class IX you have to be in the Sea Org. The reason really top tech people aren't Sea Org is, you have to be smart to be good. And just because you are class XII doesn't mean you are good.
ASHO: American Saint Hill Org. If you want any services higher than Grade IV you have to come to one of these first. Either in Saint Hill England, Flag in Clearwater Florida, or ASHO in Hollywood. At one time, when Power Processing was necessary, you had to come here. (For some reason in the 1970's it was discovered that Power Processing wasn't necessary for Dianetic Clears, which 99% of people turned out to be after getting Dianetic Auditing. Of course for the prior 10 years Power Processing was considered mandatory, 100% standard etc etc even though this was later considered unnecessary. Anyone stating Power Procesing wasn't necessary would have of course been declared suppressive and fair game but if L. Ron Hubbard said Power wasn't necessary, well, that was OK you see, it didn't matter what the fact or truth was, it just mattered what L. Ron Hubbard said. What a joke).
Anyway, at ASHO you have the first level of CONFIDENTIAL materials being the Power Processes. The reason they are confidential of course is that L. Ron was afraid of being laughed off the face of the Earth for charging people $300.00/hour for this:
"What is?"
"What isn't?"
And a few other examples of selling snow to eskimos. Of course you had to pay up front before you ever saw these materials otherwise you would have got back on your plane and gone home!
The confidential materials bring a whole new order of paranoia and brainwashing to the picture. ASHO in Hollywood is almost entirely Sea Org manned. The level of duress increases dramatically because here you also live on site in sea org "Berthing".
In the Sea Org you can't watch television. L. Ron claims that the decline in production in the western world coincides with the advent of canned entertainment, and that before television, people had a 14 hour day of production. So therefore Sea Org members can't waste their time with canned entertainment getting caught up in fictitional television stories. In other words, television makes his slaves work less so it is forbidden.
Dungeons and Dragons was also banned for a year by the way because staff were playing it too much. I guess they had an hour or two before going to bed at 1:00am and they were playing D&D, laughing and carrying on and their keepers didn't like them having fun.
In the Sea Org you can't have sexual relations unless you are married. So lots of horny twenty year olds get married so they can have sex. They also end up pregnant and have kids. The future of the kids is pretty bleak because a Sea Org parent does not have any time to spend on the kids. They are dropped off at 7am in the Cadet Org and not picked up until 11pm most of the time. Even though people theoretically have 2 hours of "family time", a day, this, like anything else not directly producing money, gets sacrificed by "necessity".
It seems very restrictive and you'd wonder why anyone would fall for it, but the Sea Org has it's ways. First of all, the people who join are trapped for several reasons:
1) They have usually forsaken their real life for a life of religious retreat and thus have given up their careers in the real world. This is done very idealistically but in fact they are being fed into a huge virtual meat grinder which chews them up and spits them out when it is done with them. 10 years later they find themselves out on the street having to construct a career from the broken bits and pieces of experience they had before they joined the Sea Org.
2) Since they eat, sleep and live on the whims of their seniors they become dependent on the Sea Org for all their base living needs. To escape the Sea Org is impossible because they have no money. Where are they going to go with $20.00 in their pockets? If you have ever been to downtown Hollywood, you know it's not the kind of place you want to be, alone, broke, with your cult searching for you to bring you back into captivity.
3) The Sea Org offers a route to "redemption" which is much easier to face than options one and two; the RPF, Rehabilitation Projects Force.
Now I could write a book on the RPF, and probably will someday, but suffice it to say it is true slavery. Without delving too deep the basic idea is you do all the grunt work around the Org. You can't talk to anyone unless you are spoken to first. You have to wear a gray rag to signify your status (like the scarlet letter) and you eat the scraps left behind after the other staff have eaten). This is were you get sentenced by the scientology Kangaroo Court called a "Comittee of Evidence" when you commit some major infraction like asking a senior Sea Org member why THEIR statistics are down.
One of the ways that people survive in scientology is they are forever optimistic, believe it or not. Even when scrubbing the Org toilets with a toothbrush they can be joking and having fun. This is because on one level they know this is all a joke and that they are play acting some kind of "hard core" military operation.
In a Sea Org Org there is also a lot of verbal abuse. One Sea Org member can swear as much as a whole platoon of marines, and smoke as much to boot. This is understood to be the ideal type of person, one with irreverance and a cockiness about everything. More often than not the grunt Sea Orgers get called into a room and as a group get called just about ever imaginable slur to their faces.
I know it is in bad taste to mention Nazi's on Usenet, but in this case, it is not a comparison. The mood existing at ASHO is such that some of the senior staff carry shwagger sticks and goose step. You think I'm joking don't you? I'm not. Look, if they can walk around in toy sailor uniforms, it is a short step to carrying around the accoutrements of any historical military body they feel is appropriate to the task at hand, and believe me, Nazi Germany is VERY appropriate to the task at hand when it comes to scientology.
For more info on the Cult of Scientology point your web browser here
and hold onto your chair! http://mail.bris.ac.uk/%7Eplmlp/scum.html
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