The continental investigations unit is now dead!

[Reyne Mayer]

Scientology is currently a dictatorship. At whatever point Darth Midget decides it's time to pull the plug, that's when it will happen.

My guess is that will happen when the cashflow situation becomes sufficiently negative that it will impact his retirement plans.

when hasn't the CofS been a dictatorship?

and dictators -- and con men -- usually stay in the saddle until the bitter end, that's the way their minds work (or don't). think Bernie Madoff or Muammar Gaddafi.

DM is doing 'ideal org' openings at a pace to last him for the rest of his life, and he has enough money in reserves to keep all the buildings open with skeleton crews for as long, so i think it's likely that's how it will play out unless some real black swan event

 

[Karakorum]

i have trouble imagining anything in the near future other than something legal, a prosecution and/or a challenge to their corporate structure (including tax exemption) that would result in either external oversight or dismemberment. they are doggedly persistent in their will to 'survive' if nothing else.

i think COVID has just pushed them over the demographic cliff they were headed towards anyway with an aging core membership, maybe accelerating the process by as much as a decade if you figure that as sort of collateral damage, on top of everything else they may have lost a significant number of people whose interest and allegiance has shifted to Qanon and the like.

DM has enough money stockpiled and enough building projects lined up to keep up the illusion of 'expansion' for the rest of his natural life. the local orgs may end up like Christian Science reading rooms with skeleton crews, but that could take fewer than a thousand people.

i do expect that the virtual abandonment of Int Base and the seeming shift to Clearwater will turn into an outright consolidation at flagship sites with lesser known properties quietly disposed of, but then renovation and construction at prominent campuses will just be billed as more 'evidence' of expansion....

You can run an org with a skeleton crew, especially if nobody is coming to do services.

But I question how can you keep control with OSA and ethics under skeleton crews? I'm not sure that covid caused simply a demographic blow to scn. I assume that it is the damage to scn's control mechanisms that was the greater blow and one that may potentially do the entire structure in.

 

[Enthetan]

But I question how can you keep control with OSA and ethics under skeleton crews?

You can keep control by legally having control.

If every Scientologist public and staff left tomorrow, DM would still have control of the assets, to use and distribute as he saw fit.

It may be that he no longer cares about maintaining the illusion of delivering services.

 

[HelluvaHoax!]

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The IAS should not even exist, if Ron Hubbard policies were being followed. Donations without services in return are straight up forbidden and under Hubbard, the orgs did not do this, even if one reckons the services delivered to be worthless. IAS donations directly steal income from the orgs and these IAS events do not bring in any *NEW* public to become Scientologists and who will buy services and bring income into the orgs.

.

Why shouldn't it exist? Because everyone was supposed to follow Hubbard's policies? LOL

Your logic is absurd, because even L. Ron Hubbard did not follow his own policies. When Hubbard regularly went "off policy" or "squirreled" standard policy, nobody (including Hubbard) would admit it. They simply went along with Hubbard's gimmick of calling the alter-is a "monumental new discovery and breakthrough!"

As far as your theory that Hubbard's policies prohibited "out exchange" donation schemes, that is manifestly untrue. In fact, the entirety of Hubbard's grade chart and bridge to total freedom were nothing more than donation rackets where marks were defrauded after paying many hundreds of thousands of dollars for non-existent magical powers.

The only difference between donations to one's "bridge" and donations to the IAS is the following:

AFTER DONATING A HALF MILLION DOLLARS TO THE BRIDGE, A
SCIENTOLOGIST IS PROHIBITED FROM SHOWING HIS OT
GAINS BECAUSE IT IS HIGHLY CONFIDENTIAL.

HOWEVER, AFTER DONATING A HALF MILLION DOLLARS TO THE
IAS, THE SCIENTOLOGIST IS ALLOWED TO SHOW HIS LAPEL
PINS AND/OR POWER BOWLING TROPHIES.

​

RECAP: All Scientology donations are enrichment rackets for the benefit of the cult's top guru(s). Scientologists don't realize that because they are constantly being distracted by being ordered to write fancy success stories and/or forced to keep their TRs in and not laugh while listening to other Scientologists pretend that they acquired miraculous OT powers. Scientologists who successfully pass this torturous bullbaiting are given valuable "GET OUT OF ETHICS CARDS".

/

 

[onceuponatime]

Nailed it, as always.

Interested in how long you think they can maintain their "death march,"
being they own so much real property, presumably have a ton of money
in the bank still, and a pod of whales willing to fund more cash every year.

What do you think could be a surprise "kill-shot event" they would not be
able to survive? A sort of cascading collapse? Or has it already happened
with Covid?

I agree with what @Reyne Mayer posted. I don't see any sort of instant/immediate collapse happening. The only possibility for that would be some sort of legal threat. Even then, with the amount of money they have, I think they could maneuver and survive. They would lose some members, but others would think it was just another plot by the evil SP psychs.

Covid has accelerated their collapse but its more of a continued shrinkage than a collapse. They can continue to exist in some form for a long time, they have the resources. But we will see more and more of what we're already seeing. Members will be concentrated in LA/CW (or just CW), SO members manning Class V orgs, etc.

Right now they continue to push expansion, and they probably won't ever stop pushing that because it's part of the illusion. But I wonder when they will switch from expansion to programs designed to keep the doors open. Stuff like manning 5-10 key org posts with SO members and doing it on a widespread basis. Of course it will still be marketed as expansion, if they even bring it up at all.

In a way I think this Exec training program is part of that. I think they are counting on the Execs trained on this program to stick around for 20+ years and "carry" scientology into the next generation. The quals were extremely strict for it and they weren't accepting anyone over a certain age. I'm not sure if everyone on the program understands that by being part of the program they really signed up to be on staff for the rest of their life (or be declared SP). But even this program won't be enough, I would bet we will see more and more SO members manning Class V orgs.

Since when is anything in the management structure based on LRH policy? Why is the COB RTC running everything? What happened to the watchdog committee? Why is the CMO circumventing all command chains?

The whole thing would still be a farce and a mess if ran strictly according to LRH policy. But it is not even ran according to that, it is just ad-hoc management based on off-the-cuff comments made by Davey.
Moreover it is implemented by a dwindling circle of aged, sleep-deprived zombies who are just trying not to land on the RPF again.

Well that goes without saying, they will say whatever they want, off policy, blah blah blah. We know the real reason is because DM wanted it or made some passing comment about it.

You can run an org with a skeleton crew, especially if nobody is coming to do services.

But I question how can you keep control with OSA and ethics under skeleton crews? I'm not sure that covid caused simply a demographic blow to scn. I assume that it is the damage to scn's control mechanisms that was the greater blow and one that may potentially do the entire structure in.

I think they've already lost control to a large extent. As more and more people leave, the only ones left will be the extremely dedicated, they don't need much control, they will do whatever they are told.

As membership shrinks and becomes more concentrated it will also be easier to control.

 

[Karakorum]

You can keep control by legally having control.

If every Scientologist public and staff left tomorrow, DM would still have control of the assets, to use and distribute as he saw fit.

It may be that he no longer cares about maintaining the illusion of delivering services.

I wouldn't mind that. If they stop delivering services and all the celebs and whales walk away, Davey can peddle off all the real estate and go be a pro pimp in Vegas for all I care.

 

[Reyne Mayer]

You can run an org with a skeleton crew, especially if nobody is coming to do services.

But I question how can you keep control with OSA and ethics under skeleton crews?

maybe that won't matter too much as local orgs shrink, perhaps being dominated by a few Sea Org sent out to prop up each of them -- come to think of it, that might even become the new ethics/control mechanism. the main centers in LA and CW will be easier to keep reined it.

 

[Reyne Mayer]

Your logic is absurd, because even L. Ron Hubbard did not follow his own policies. When Hubbard regularly went "off policy" or "squirreled" standard policy, nobody (including Hubbard) would admit it. They simply went along with Hubbard's gimmick of calling the alter-is a "monumental new discovery and breakthrough!"

As far as your theory that Hubbard's policies prohibited "out exchange" donation schemes, that is manifestly untrue.

yeah, certainly as an outsider it appears to me that 'source' was always changing and adding on to, and even occasionally backtracking on, what he'd previously come out with. it seems to me it was his continual introduction of 'latest, greatest' things that were supposed to do what earlier introductions had promised but failed to deliver, that was what kept the CofS going and the cash flow coming in. and when he needed money and 'stats' there could be varieties of 'quickie clear' introduced, for example.

and i've run across early accounts of him either accepting outright gifts from his followers, or charging them exorbitant fees for special treatment including personal sessions when he was in need of money. also, if you look at at prices of the old 'congresses' and the like and index them for inflation, some at least were extravagantly priced only affordable to the 'whales' of the day. there were also some outright gifts he took -- like at least one of his fancy cars, i think -- plus gifts he took like the former Maharajah's estate at Saint Hill, which Ray Kemp loaned him money for that was never repaid.

plus i just recently found this example of another, from Mike Goldstein who had worked with him personally on finance -- the old man finding creative ways to deal with the 'problem' of not having anything new to sell members with money who'd already done everything currently offered:



and yet somehow people wonder where DM got his ideas -- and, presumably, the internal justification that he's just continuing on in the vein of the founder, his mentor?

 

[Karakorum]

maybe that won't matter too much as local orgs shrink, perhaps being dominated by a few Sea Org sent out to prop up each of them -- come to think of it, that might even become the new ethics/control mechanism. the main centers in LA and CW will be easier to keep reined it.

So... what, now every SO on a mission to an org will go through an inv-style training for investigations? That stuff takes months to get someone to a mildly efficient level. I know, trust me - I had to replace people and whenever we got a new guy we were struggling until he/she got proficient enough.

I can see someone inside scn making that suggestion ("hey, let's just disperse the tasks among existing SO member out in the sticks!"), but I can't see that ever working out. In my experience, maybe 1 in 20 people had what it takes to do these things correctly. Worse yet, to do it properly and get to the real truth you can't have absolute faith in the e-meter. Because if you run interrogations strictly based on what the meter spits out, you will get nowhere. Garbage in, garbage out.

So if all who remain are the old generation tech-fans... these are exactly the sort of people that are unfit to perform int-level ethics interrogations.

I lay it all out in this here post
Quoting myself:
"People who tried to do interrogations based only on the meter would fail and were entirely useless as investigators. The meter alone would almost never get you to the truth. You had to observe the accountable unit for physical reactions, changes in their tone and sometimes just flat out shower them with tons of questions for many hours and then compare notes looking for inconsistencies. And then of course all the work with files and recordings and evidence, KRs and witness accounts..."

That's another thing: Is every one of these many, many SO members gonna be given access to everyone's ethics file and the whole database and all the PC folders and all the confessional recordings and transcripts? Wow a single unsupervised SO member somewhere in Albuquerque will now have access to all of this?

One more thing: The strength of having inv centralized and all in one place is that if there was an urgent and huge case (think a dozen accountable units, money shenanigans involved), the CMO could come and say: "Drop everything you are doing and have all of your team work on just this one thing!"

If you disperse these responsibilities across many individual SO members each in some random org, you will never be able to pull them together to handle such large complex cases in any reasonable amount of time. I mean we were doing all-nighters and months with 4-5 hours of sleep per night to handle all of it.

If you disperse this among individual SO members "in the sticks", then you will need probably 5 of these new SO members to do the job of every single "centralized" inv analyst.

In short: You will need much more manpower to do it and they will all be doing a far more lousy job. And if there's one thing scn lacks is manpower.

Also if you will have just 1 SO per org doing this, how will you do these 10+ hour long tag-team interrogations?

One more thing - we got most orders via CMO. So will they send these orders via phone calls now? Or will there be 1 CMO person per org as well?


I'm just seeing more and more problems here. If this change was some sort of conscious decision on the part of Davey, then he had just shot himself in the foot with a 16 pounder.

 

[HelluvaHoax!]

So... what, now every SO on a mission to an org will go through an inv-style training for investigations? That stuff takes months to get someone to a mildly efficient level. I know, trust me - I had to replace people and whenever we got a new guy we were struggling until he/she got proficient enough. I can see someone inside scn making that suggestion ("hey, let's just disperse the tasks among existing SO member out in the sticks!"), but I can't see that ever working out. In my experience, maybe 1 in 20 people had what it takes to do these things correctly. Worse yet, to do it properly and get to the real truth you can't have absolute faith in the e-meter. Because if you run interrogations strictly based on what the meter spits out, you will get nowhere. Garbage in, garbage out. So if all who remain are the old generation tech-fans... these are exactly the sort of people that are unfit to perform in-level ethics interrogations.

I lay it all out in this here post
Quoting myself:
"People who tried to do interrogations based only on the meter would fail and were entirely useless as investigators. The meter alone would almost never get you to the truth. You had to observe the accountable unit for physical reactions, changes in their tone and sometimes just flat out shower them with tons of questions for many hours and then compare notes looking for inconsistencies. And then of course all the work with files and recordings and evidence, KRs and witness accounts..."

That's another thing: Is every one of these many, many SO members gonna be given access to everyone's ethics file and the whole database and all the PC folders and all the confessional recordings and transcripts? Wow a single unsupervised SO member somewhere in Albuquerque will now have access to all of this?

One more thing: The strength of having inv centralized and all in one place is that if there was an urgent and huge case (think a dozen accountable units, money shenanigans involved), the CMO could come and say: "Drop everything you are doing and have all of your team work on just this one thing!"

If you disperse these responsibilities across many individual SO members each in some random org, you will never be able to pull them together to handle such large complex cases in any reasonable amount of time. I mean we were doing all-nighters and months with 4-5 hours of sleep per night to handle all of it.

If you disperse this among individual SO members "in the sticks", then you will need probably 5 of these new SO members to do the job of every single "centralized" inv analyst.

In short: You will need much more manpower to do it and they will all be doing a far more lousy job. And if there's one thing scn lacks is manpower.

Also if you will have just 1 SO per org doing this, how will you do these 10+ hour long tag-team interrogations?

One more thing - we got most orders via CMO. So will they send these orders via phone calls now? Or will there be 1 CMO person per org as well?


I'm just seeing more and more problems here. If this change was some sort of conscious decision on the part of Davey, then he had just shot himself in the foot with a 16 pounder.

.
You stated:

"In my experience, maybe 1 in 20 people had
what it takes to do these things correctly."​

Your theory therefore holds that 5% of people have the personality characteristics necessary to savagely investigate, interrogate, invalidate and incapacitate innocent persons who disagree or interfere with the ruthlessly fraudulent cash grabs of Galactic Savior Hubbard and "Minister" Miscavige.

Hubbard, however, was not as pessimistic as you when he concluded in his scientific findings that—only 2.5% of the population have the necessary anti-social traits ("to do these things correctly").



.

 

[Enthetan]

maybe that won't matter too much as local orgs shrink, perhaps being dominated by a few Sea Org sent out to prop up each of them -- come to think of it, that might even become the new ethics/control mechanism. the main centers in LA and CW will be easier to keep reined it.

I think DM is going to run out of Sea Org members. I think he's not getting many new ones, and the old ones are getting old.

 

[Enthetan]

So... what, now every SO on a mission to an org will go through an inv-style training for investigations? That stuff takes months to get someone to a mildly efficient level. I know, trust me - I had to replace people and whenever we got a new guy we were struggling until he/she got proficient enough.

Another option: stop caring so much about doing investigations.

If somebody is in some sort of "quid pro quo" sexual relationship: stop caring.

@Karakorum Could you give us a rough breakdown, by category, of what INV would investigate? Sexual stuff? People defrauding/embezzling from CoS? Scientologists defrauding/embezzling each other? Scientologists assaulting each other?

For some of this stuff (assault, rape, seducing minors), I could see giving the affected Scns permission to pass it to the police, with the demand that they keep Scn org out of it.

 

[HelluvaHoax!]

.

I think DM is going to run out of Sea Org members. I think he's not getting many new ones, and the old ones are getting old.

.
Embedded in every crisis is an opportunity. The very elderly are still a much valued resource to handling the planet!

This would be an outstanding time for Minister Miscavige to announce "the missing link" in PLANETARY CLEARING which was located in a recently discovered audiotape briefing by Ron from the early 1960s.

The exciting news is that the COS is now forming the WWW CORPS* and there are already hundreds of new recruits on full time study, after which they will form crack teams and spread out across the globe to debug all Ideal Orgs and make them Super-Ideal!



* WWW CORPS: The Worldwide Wheelchair & Walker Corps


.

 

[ILove2Lurk]

^^^ So cruel!

 

[Reyne Mayer]

So... what, now every SO on a mission to an org will go through an inv-style training for investigations? That stuff takes months to get someone to a mildly efficient level. I know, trust me - I had to replace people and whenever we got a new guy we were struggling until he/she got proficient enough.

i get that you were probably admirably invested (!) in doing your job well.

again from very much an outsider perspective, what i imagine is more like what Enthetan writes about above, that organizationally they'll just stop caring about it. SO members at local orgs could handle ratting people out for the most blatant crimes, and other stuff would just start to go by the wayside.

after all, wasn't 'source's' approach very much callously utilitarian, and ends-justify-the-means -- like don't investigate a staff member who's really high performing? so if it's not so much about the actual 'crimes', why not lay off investigating the (few remaining) staff members who aren't high enough performing to get labeled 'kha khans' or whatever? smaller orgs will tend to generate fewer crimes, anyway. i can see that doing that might have some long-term consequences, but those chickens might not come home to roost until after DM has shuffled his mortal coil, which seems to me like the current operating basis for much of what is going on....

or int management might even hope, unrealistically, as i suspect they may be doing with many other thing like all the big new buildings that end up empty, that some upcoming reversal of their dwindling fortunes will put everything on a different footing:

 

[Karakorum]

@Karakorum Could you give us a rough breakdown, by category, of what INV would investigate? Sexual stuff? People defrauding/embezzling from CoS? Scientologists defrauding/embezzling each other? Scientologists assaulting each other?

Could be various things, but for example:

1. Falsifying stats.
2. Various other severe breaches of LRH policy.
3. Severe examples of "forwarding enemy lines", spreading subversive rumors or otherwise damaging morale.
4. Sexual stuff other than the garden variety. At the same time, we never had pedo or rape cases, so I assume they were handled by some special people, not by inv.
5. Relatively minor financial shenanigans ie: people not sending money quick enough up the lines, keeping some cash on hold to make "investments" on the side etc. Major financial shenanigans would usually end up being taken directly by some int bigwig or special mission etc, so not by inv.
6. Various org conspiracies potentially involving many people (ie: 6 people in the org conspiring to hide some flap from the management).
7. Safety cases (aka workplace accidents, other than the garden variety bruises etc).
8. Superiors abusing subordinates.
9. Various claims of staff on staff or SeaOrg on SeaOrg crime ("I think dude X stole my XYZ")
10. Breaches of security, including information and communication breaches.
11. Anything that management decides is a particularly gross negligence, dereliction of duty, sabotage... basically could be anything that is seen as a flap and is perceived to be of sufficient magnitude.
12. Unauthorized sale of emeters (potentially to squirrels etc) or other such stuff.
13. People not adhering to disconnection, leaking stuff to 3rd parties or to "squirrel groups" etc.
14. Particularly gross examples of lack of discipline.
15. Various staff or SeOrg actions that might be bad PR.
17. Something really bad happens and everyone knows who is guilty. But we were still sent to check if anyone else "knew, but failed to report it".
16. Last but not least, could be anything that would normally fall onto local EOs, but for some absurd reason the CMO comes and orders us to do it.

 

[Karakorum]

i get that you were probably admirably invested (!) in doing your job well.

Don't get me wrong, I'm happy to watch this crash and burn.

At the same time, I spent so much time doing this stuff that I can't help writing about all that this will mean and all that could and will go wrong. I guess it is like a doctor that can't help but to comment on the well-being of a ruthless dictator.

don't investigate a staff member who's really high performing?

During my reign of terror, the mindset was: "Investigate always, file everything. If the decision is made not to punish the AU due to high stats, then it's no longer our business. He/she will screw up sooner or later and whatever was done will be in the db for future use."

 

[HelluvaHoax!]

.

^^^ So cruel!

I know!

I wrote the post and then deleted it for that reason.

But then when i refreshed my screen I noticed that the post was STILL there waiting for me to press "send". It's a quirky thing on this website that just deleting a post doesn't fully delete it and the post pops back up if one hasn't posted something else.

I took all this as a "sign from above" that the universe still needs gallows humor, so I clicked send.

.

.

 

[Type4_PTS]

I think DM is going to run out of Sea Org members. I think he's not getting many new ones, and the old ones are getting old.

Something that amazed me back in the '80s when I was at Boston org was when I saw a number of times Sea Org Missionaires that were there recruiting people right off the street for the S.O. They had no prior exposure to Scientology before walking in or getting body routed in earlier that day or that week.

If the Sea Org needs new members I can see them doing the same thing now, especially with people in third-world countries that would jump at the chance to get free housing, meals, and $50.00/week. I believe some were recruited that way that are now working in Clearwater, and once they get over here and have a change of heart after working 110-hour weeks they're in a bad position. Their passport was taken upon arrival here, locked in a safe they cannot access, and they'll be threatened with a freeloader's debt if they leave. Plus it will fuck up their eternity for the next 50 trillion or so years.

 

[Karakorum]

Something that amazed me back in the '80s when I was at Boston org was when I saw a number of times Sea Org Missionaires that were there recruiting people right off the street for the S.O.

Stat-pushing induced by desperation?