Ruthless (21 page)
Authors: Ron Miscavige
You can imagine the impression the entire show made on Lisa
Marie
and her husband. If these insanities are occurring with immediate family members of the leader of the entire church, what else must be going on with other families throughout Scientology?
For the rest of our visit to Clearwater, we stayed with Bobby Covington, Denise's
ex-husband
. Bobby's wife and their kids found the ensuing
cat-and
-mouse
games we played with the PIs exciting, and the games continued until we left town. We were followed the entire time.
Two weeks later, I began writing my story.
The Con That Is Scientology Today
The Catholic Church had a teaching known as indulgences. A sinner could receive a pardon for sins by confessing them and then doing good works, saying prayers and things of that nature. Indulgences were church doctrine even in its early days. By the late Middle Ages some marketing genius in the Vatican hit on the idea of dispensing with the prayers and good works and simply selling an indulgence for money.
In my mind, this describes perfectly the state of the Church of Scientology today. In earlier years, the organization obtained its wherewithal by charging Scientologists for the services of auditing and training and by selling the materials used in training, such as books and lectures. Scientologists considered these services valuable and were willing to exchange money for them. Since the early 2000s though, the emphasis has shifted to asking Scientologists to donate money for different projects in exchange for a pat on the back. In other words, something for nothing. David Miscavige has been selling Scientologists a bill of goods, and the con goes like this: In the past, Scientology's buildings were often rundown and did not present a good public image. The first Scientology structure to draw David's attention was in Buffalo, where the city planned to invoke eminent domain and take the church building, which lay in the path of a public works project. Around the same time, the world's most famous Scientologist, Tom Cruise, complained to David that he could not take a person he was trying to interest in Scientology into a local church because it looked so bad, or so I have been told. These events spurred David to come up with a program that is meant to turn every Scientology church into an “ideal” organization. The operation involves buying a building in a city and then renovating it to make it utterly posh, which, the logic goes, will attract people to Scientology.
To fund the extensive costs for these “ideal orgs,” David, through his minions, persuades public Scientologists to donate millions for the purchase of the building and then millions more to pay for the renovations. This might be excusable if the building then was solely for the benefit of the local area. This is not how David works, however. From his position, he dictates everything of importance that happens in the church, which means he controls those considerable real estate assets as well. Although owned by the local church, the new “ideal org” comes under the management of the Landlord Office at International Management headquarters, which puts it directly under David's control. It makes Scientology look bigger and, on the surface, as though Scientology is expanding. My son is nothing if not clever.
Making my point even more strongly is that many services once delivered regularly in Scientology organizations are no longer available. Volumes and volumes containing all of Hubbard's organizational policies were once for sale. These are no longer available on the church websites that publish Scientology materials. An advanced auditor training course involves studying of all Hubbard's books, all of his bulletins relating to auditing theory and procedures, and hundreds of his lectures. This massive course takes at least a year of
full-time
study, and the course has been a mainstay service for Scientologists since the 1960s when Hubbard inaugurated it. That course is no longer available, according to reports about the Los Angeles organization, which delivered it for decades. Other courses that thousands of Scientologists had taken for decades appear to be in a similar category. None of those course materials are available for sale on church websites. Excuses are given for their withdrawal, but apparently it is far easier and less work to harangue Scientologists for straight donations than to actually deliver services to them that take weeks or months.
A good friend of mine, Dave Richards, once compared Scientology in its heyday to what it is today. Richards knew about this comparison because for several years he was the director of the Founding Church of Scientology in Washington, D.C. Hubbard was always keen on measuring how productive every church organization was, and the church kept weekly production statistics. Richards told me that when he was running the church, it delivered 1,200 hours of auditing every week, enough to keep 50 auditors busy; today those figures may well match the entire amount delivered by the 150 or so midlevel churches all over the world. The Washington church regularly had 200 people in training to become auditors, and upward of 50 each week were coming in for introductory courses. For years Mike Rinder has published on his popular blog photos taken by former Scientologists of churches in various cities, and they are largely empty, not only of parishioners but of staff too!
Predictably, the “ideal org” strategy has backfired for everyone but David himself. The parishioners in the local organization drained their bank accounts, maxed out their credit cards, spent their children's college savings, took out second mortgages and otherwise accepted financial strain. The staff of the local organization, which ordinarily had difficulty paying the bills, now has much larger heating,
air-conditioning
and electricity bills. The new church is large and beautiful but stands mostly empty of people because the parishioners have been pressured into using their discretionary income and much more to put the building there in the first place.
David, however, has made out like a bandit, and I use the term advisedly.
Each new “ideal org” adds millions in value to the coffers of Scientology International. The most important performance indicator of Scientology's management is called Sea Org Reserves (SOR), which is the amount of wealth in money, property, whatever, that the church has saved up. According to Mike Rinder, the value of these new church buildings is added to the SOR statistic periodically, and doing so paints a rosy picture for management. David micromanages nearly every aspect of Scientology operations, and certainly every important one, and you can be sure that these new buildings in the Scientology real estate portfolio are some of his biggest chips.
David's position of absolute authority in the church brings to mind the analogy of a military strongman who lives a lavish lifestyle while the citizens of the country live in poverty. David has
well-appointed
apartments or living facilities in all of Scientology's major centers: the headquarters in Hemet, Los Angeles, Clearwater, St. Hill in England and aboard the
Freewinds.
As I have mentioned, he has only the highest quality food served at every meal. At the Hemet base, he had an exercise facility built that only he and certain celebrities such as Tom Cruise are allowed to use. Incidentally, because of my lifelong interest in exercise, I researched, found and bought the equipment for the gym. The church furnishes all his vehicles and transportation, including motorcycles, cars and vans. He wears suits tailored by top Los Angeles tailors and once received a $10,000 suit from one for his birthday. And speaking of birthdays, every April the churches around the world pressure their meagerly paid staff to buy birthday presents for him.
Rank-and
-file
Sea Org members receive a standard allowance of $50 a week for incidentals. Many weeks, however, this amount is reduced because of financial pressures, sometimes to zero. During some years we were paid nothing throughout most of the
yearâexcept
when it was time to shell out for David's Christmas or birthday presents. Still, after the weekly staff meeting at which everyone lines up to collect their pay, someone is there to take 30 or 40 percent of their pittance to help buy COB a new camera or
high-end
mountain bike or
high-tech
gadget. The same thing happens at Christmas when different organizations try to outdo one another to express their gratitude. Make no mistake: David's position of absolute power is a comfortable and
well-feathered
nest.
I recall a time when he walked in wearing a nice pair of shoes. “I got the shoes I told you about while I was over in England,” he said. “Custom made.”
“
Good-looking
shoes,” I said. “How much did they cost?”
“Fifteen hundred bucks.”
I was stunned. Fifteen hundred dollars is what I made in the Sea Org for an entire year's work. At that time, Sea Org members made $30 a week. Yet he had the wherewithal to drop $1,500 on a single pair of shoes.
David obviously saw the look on my face and told me in a somewhat embarrassed tone, “You know, these really do feel different,” trying to convince me that these nice shoes really were worth ten or more times the usual price of a decent pair.
All the booty David accumulates doesn't take a dime out of his pocket. Sea Org members are meant to be rewarded for their production. What they produce on their jobs is counted up weekly, and Hubbard recommended that, for stellar performance, staff should receive bonuses on top of their allowance. Dave has worked it out so that he receives not only weekly bonuses but also hefty
year-end
bonuses. The allowance that other Sea Org members receive isn't even an afterthought for him. A former RTC staff member who worked in its finance division told me that David would have shirts custom made at a cost of $200 each, and he would wear them
once.
Maybe this was for special events but still. Once? Scientology is supposed to be a church.
In comparison, other Sea Org members live like monks. Their weekly allowance would not pay for activities on a day off, if they were ever allowed a day off. I have already mentioned the difference in the food allowance. As for living quarters, unmarried men and women live in dorms for each, while married couples have single rooms. Quarters are not lavish by any means. Sea Org members are furnished with uniforms, but when items wear out, people are expected to buy replacements out of pocket. You can bet that church public relations executives will counter what I write by showing the beautiful facilities at the Gold
baseâthe
soccer fields, basketball and tennis courts, running path with exercise stations, the
nine-hole
golf course,
Olympic-size
swimming pool, the landscaping with manicured lawns and tended flower beds and functional but beautiful architecture. And they would be right: the facilities at Gold are first rate. Of course, staff members work in the production spaces for as long as 24 hours a day and rarely, if ever, get to enjoy the recreational facilities. At one time L. Ron Hubbard mandated that all staff should have one hour a day for exercise. It was to be in the daily schedule, he ordered. And at times, the staff was allowed this time. It would be implemented, and people would begin exercising. Two weeks later, some emergency, or “flap,” would happen and exercise time would drop out again, only to be resurrected some years later, again for a week or two. While David lives like a prince wherever he travels and flies first class or in Tom Cruise's private jet, the rest of the Sea Org lives like indentured servants, at best.
To be truthful, though, I would not begrudge him any of the perks of his leadership if he had remained true to the humanitarian objectives laid out by L. Ron Hubbard. Instead, David has managed to do virtually the opposite, for purposes, it seems, of keeping himself and a handful of
well-paid
lawyers living comfortable lifestyles.
I write all this to make what I think is the central point of my story: there is a world of difference between what I found workable in the actual philosophy of Scientology and how David has twisted it to his own ends. How did it come to this? How did a young boy who was an affectionate, happy, bright kid with a great sense of humor and a desire to help others grow into a man who surrounds himself only with people who suck up to him and lives a lavish lifestyle while those who work for him live no better than medieval serfs? What is the catalyst for such an unfortunate transformation?
I have concluded that it is the acquisition of power. Some who come into positions of power may be able to remain whole and true to themselves, but my son David has demonstrated beyond doubt that he is not one of them.
The degree to which David has deviated from L. Ron Hubbard's management directives since he took power in the 1980s has had several consequences that I don't think he ever predicted. The most significant of these, in my opinion, is the appearance of more and more people still practicing Scientology but entirely outside the church's control. The phenomenon of Scientologists' splintering away from the organization occurred even in its early days as people here and there fell into disfavor with Hubbard or vice versa and went off on their own. In the early 1980s, though, the first major schism in church history took place, and David was at the center of it.
The smaller Scientology organizations are called missions. They deliver basic
entry-level
courses and auditing and act as a feeder line to churches. Historically, there was always some tension between the missions and the
full-fledged
churches because missions were under looser control, they could pay their staff better and so forth. Often, the better, more highly trained auditors would opt to work for a mission, where the pay was better, instead of at a church. When David gained the position as Hubbard's gatekeeper, he stoked Hubbard's ire at the mission network as a whole. Finally, Hubbard ordered wholesale actions to curb what he thought were the excesses of the mission holders (the people who owned and ran their missions) and their continual stealing of parishioners from the churches. David and his henchmen were only too happy to flex their Sea Org muscle and oblige Hubbard's demands.
In 1982, David and his henchmen held meetings in San Francisco and elsewhere. According to published accounts, they gathered mission holders in a room and read them the riot act. Certain mission holders were declared suppressive persons on the spot, for the purpose of cowing the rest into submission. Missions were now going to come under church control, and their use of the church's trademarks would be strictly regulated. The result of this
ham-fisted
approach was destruction of the mission network, a purge of the most successful mission holders, a drastic increase in financial demands by the church, and the end of feeder lines into churches, which only put more stress on them. Shock waves went through the entire Scientology network, and the mission network has never recovered.
Some people, now thoroughly disaffected with management and the organization but still loyal to the principles and practice of Scientology, simply set up shop outside the auspices of the church and continued to deliver Scientology but at greatly reduced rates. The church now had a kind of
free-market
competition.
One of the people who began operating in what was called the Freezone was David Mayo, the auditor who helped Hubbard recover from the severe illness he suffered in 1978 and who held the highest technical position in Scientology for a number of years. In 1982, Mayo fell into disfavor with David and Pat Broeker, based, so far as I know, on the idea that Mayo was antimanagement for his objections to high prices for services, what he considered financial waste at the Gold base, and for injustices he saw happening at the time. Within a year he was no longer in the Sea Org. Still seeing value in the practice of Scientology, however, Mayo set up shop near Santa Barbara and began delivering Scientology auditing. Loretta and I seriously considered going to his group because the church donation rates were spiraling out of control. Scientology was no longer affordable for the average working person and, increasingly, became limited only to the wealthy. We didn't go to Santa Barbara, but only because of David's position at the top of the Sea Org.
Since that first major splintering, many more people have left the church but continue to practice Scientology. Today there are independent practitioners in virtually every part of the world where Scientology has adherents. In Israel, an entire mission broke from the church and now delivers the entirety of Scientology services to a growing number of Scientologists. A whole network of organizations that espouse Hubbard's methodologies exists, primarily in Europe, and it has no association with the Church of Scientology. The church is either powerless, or unwilling, to stop them. Any intellectual property arguments the church might be tempted to pursue against people using the ideas and philosophical underpinnings of Scientology outside the church would not go far, I think, particularly in light of recent studies of mine, which demonstrate that many ideas Hubbard claimed for
Dianetics
and Scientology apparently came from earlier sources.
A couple years ago a friend introduced me to the writers of the New Thought movement, which I mentioned earlier. Numerous books written 50 or more years before Hubbard developed
Dianetics
contain many of the same elements that Hubbard incorporated in his work, whether he was aware of these sources or not. One is
How to Heal Oneself and Others: Mental Therapeutics,
written in 1918 by William Walker Atkinson under the pen name Theron Q. Dumont. Atkinson was a tremendously prolific writer who turned out 100 books during the last 30 years of his life.
How to Heal Oneself
offers an explanation of the subconscious mind that appears in
Dianetics
and Scientology as the
reactive mind.
This is the mind that never sleeps and records everything that happens to a person. Atkinson's book also contains the procedure that became known in Scientology as solo auditing, wherein a person serves both as the counselor and counselee.
Charles F. Haanel's
The Master Key System,
written at the turn of the twentieth century, contains in its first lesson an almost exact description of the basic communication training drill practiced in Scientology for more than 40 years. Another book is
The Law of Psychic Phenomena
by Thomson Jay Hudson. Then there is
Working with the Law
by Raymond Holliwell. Anyone can find these books and many more through a simple search of the New Thought movement writers; many are available for free on the Internet.
I'm not discounting the fact that L. Ron Hubbard may have made worthwhile discoveries of his own that do not appear in these earlier works or anywhere else that I know of. But it bears repeating that many fundamentals about the mind and life can be found outside Scientology. The point, I think, is to find something that works for you and use that and discard things that don't. Maybe it takes a touch of humility to consider that perhaps you could learn more about yourself and your life. I understand and accept that many people will not even consider my words because Scientology has such a bad odor generally. I don't deny that the reputation is well deserved. At the same time, I can't help but equate that bias with the attitudes that early Christians held about Rome. Anything and everything about Rome was to be detested; so, because the Romans bathed, the practice of bathing went out the window for God knows how long.
Another point I want to make is that, regardless of what L. Ron Hubbard did in his personal life, Scientology makes available
common-sense
ideas that people can use on their own, without having to be connected to an organization or pledge allegiance to some cult or grand poobah or burn through their life savings or break up their families. Hubbard codified a great many notions that many people have found useful, and all of it is more or less freely available.
Someone once asked me what I think should be done with the church. I have seen Scientology at all levels, from Frank Ogle's Keystone Kops Tuesday evening meetings in a café to its international headquarters in California and every place in between. I have known Scientology from when it was a comparatively footloose and
fancy-free
association of people having fun and finding things out about themselves to the controlling East Germanyâ
under-the
-Stasi
cult it is today. I have studied Scientology thoroughly and in depth and have had personal subjective experiences that I would term miracles, so I know there is value in Hubbard's work. I also know that many of the same principles exist in other places without the organizational baggage that comes with joining a Scientology organization, as currently constituted under my son David. For these and other reasons, I think I am qualified to offer an opinion.
I could propose many reforms, but three stand out. First, the disgraceful practice of disconnection should be abandoned completely and utterly. This is the poison that Scientology throws into its own well on a daily basis. Making people disconnect from their loved ones or making their loved ones disconnect from them is unconscionable any way you slice it. This practice affects me, even to this day. It must cease.
My next reform would be to grant a general amnesty and forgive everybody who ran afoul of the church for whatever reason. With no strings attached. Just a straight “You are forgiven.” This, of course, might have some repercussions for church order. Hubbard said that when you attempt to straighten out a disordered area, things usually get a little messier before they become more orderly. The church would have to be ready to face those repercussions, but in the long run forgiveness would soothe many troubled waters.
The final reform would be to knock off the obsession with shaking down Scientologists for money to fund new buildings that they don't need. Start offering simple services that people can afford, and that will help them improve their lives.
I don't say that this is all that needs to be done to reform Scientology or that it might not still be riddled with bad policies if these three restructurings were enacted. Still, in my mind, these are the greatest wrongs that I see Scientology inflicting on itself and anyone connected with it.
Will any of these ideas be implemented so long as David remains in control? Not on your life. Still, one can always hope and dream. When you stop dreaming, you die a little, a wise man once said.
Is there enough of value in Scientology to make it even worth salvaging? Only time will tell, but so long as David remains in charge, it is a moot point.