The weekly show where I answer viewer’s questions from the comments sections of my Q&A videos or sent to me by email at AskChrisShelton@gmail.com. This week, the questions I take up are:
(1) I am interested in the period of time when all smaller Scientology orgs were told to have only OTs to run them – could you explain this policy? Were you the manager of Pacific Orgs when this was being implemented? Any insider stuff about how this change worked in practice would be interesting. Like, did the OTs actually want these posts? Most were public Scientologists, I think.
(2) If Pat Broeker had taken charge of Scientology when LRH passed away instead of David Miscavige, how different do you think Scientology would be today?
(3) I run a day program for disabled adults. I’m curious as to how the cult feels, discusses or treats the disabled. I haven’t seen anything about it on Leah’s show.
(4) Greta Van Susteren’s sister is a world-renowned psychiatrist. Would Greta, as a celeb, be allowed to remain connected to her? What if a normal public Scientologist had a psychiatrist sibling? What kind of pressure do you think the Church puts on Greta to “handle” her sister? Would Greta have to get constant auditing to “handle” her relationship with her sister?
(5) I have a couple of questions about the Flag World Tour video which has been on YouTube for a while now. Was this video produced to bring more public to Flag after the death of Lisa McPherson? That is, if there was a drop in numbers at Flag after the tragedy. Secondly, what were your opinions of the video and Flag’s big promises both when you were in Scientology and after you left?
(6) I have a question regarding auditing and crimes etc. In A&E’s program on Scientology, a young lady said her father came to her and apologized for molesting her. When you’re being audited and you’re remembering past lives, could you remember doing a crime in a past life, like killing or raping someone? If so, could you then go up to someone you have harmed in your previous life and apologize? The audit-ee may be innocent but has to recall crimes from a past life, basically making up nonsense. Forgive me if this is an odd question and delete it if its not appropriate.
(7) Hello, I was googling “What is Scientology?” and there was a “free” online personality test. I was going to take it just to see what it said, but it asks for your phone number. That scared me because I’ve heard of them harassing people, so what do they do if you put in your phone number?
(8) I was wondering if you had any information on Will Smith and his family being involved with the church. Did you ever see them at events or at Celebrity Centre? They seem to be keeping it on the down-low.
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If you haven’t already, check out Yoo Byung-eun, South Korea. His Cult, Evangelical Baptist Church, is known as The Salvation Sect in their country. Responsible for events of 2014 sinking disaster of the Sewol Ferry where 300 teenagers died. Very interesting with scary similarities to Church of Scientology & others.
Hi Chris
Thanks for your great video productions. They really are fantastic, and not just because they are real meaty and knowledgeable, but because they successfully manage to avoid the whinging and whining tone and the bunfights that tend to be so common among many of the critics.
However, in Q&A #127 you were a bit vague in your reply to the question on Flag, so let me help out with some reflections about my experience of Flag as a Pre-OT on OTVI and OTVII between 1991 and 1996, until I bailed out upon the release of GAT.
The claim that Flag is the “Mecca of Technical Perfection” is both ludicrous and preposterous. I first arrived at Flag in late 1991. As an experienced turnaround manager of large manufacturing operations and also as a highly trained evaluator in my local org, I knew a bit about organization and management.
From the first moment I arrived at Flag, when I was starting out on OTVI, I found the whole place to be a pathetic mess of disorganization, particularly in the areas of auditing and training. It doesn’t help of course that Scientology organization and management tech is frozen solid in a nineteen forties style bureaucratic mindset.
Unless you were some kind of a celebrity, once you got to Flag, you were basically like a piece of shit in a boot camp. And just like in the army, there was endless waiting and endless boredom until you got a brief turn at being audited.
Auditing itself was easily gamed by feeding the much vaunted Flag auditors fake F/Ns by imagining something pleasant and serene, and they are none the wiser for it. This worked perfectly well on Sec Checks too, making one wonder where was that much vaunted technical perfection of those Flag auditors. And there was faking in course work too, especially on M9s where twinning to check out the same tedious material for the umpteenth time over the years, it was easy to radically speed up the proceedings with a willing twin.
On OTVII I had three major realizations. The first one was fairly early on the realization that I was willingly brainwashing myself into becoming a storm trooper in the cause of Scientology. Of course at the time the interpretation I put on that was becoming a white night in the service of truth, justice and the Scientology way.
The second and third realizations came much later in the game. The second realization was that I was just mocking up my BTs, just as I previously realized, when I supposedly went Clear, that I was mocking up my reactive bank. In other words, that I was just making it all up, whilst being eagerly egged on in the process by the Flag C/S-s. I should have realized already at the Clear stage that the whole thing was just a sham and a load of bullshit, but no, it took me another almost twenty years, hundreds of thousands of dollars and an enormous amount of time wasted to finally realize that. I was a mug, for sure, taken for a ride by my own wishful thinking.
The third realization was that therefore the entire ramshackle Scientology construct was based in lies, the much touted OT abilities simply did not exist, and Scientology was just a scam to make money even at the cost of bankrupting its clients. That led quickly to a realization that I was just a mark for the deviously dishonest sales tactics of the Scientology operatives, and that I was a complete mug to have swallowed their bullshit lock stock and barrel. GAT was then the last straw, the straw that broke the camel’s back.
When at Flag, there is always an unspoken contest between the client who tries to get through the procedures and leave for home as quickly as possible, and the Sea Org operatives at Flag who do their utmost to delay the procedures and put the client through all kinds of interminable hoops and obstacles before letting him or her go home. And never mind that all kinds of urgent business had been put on hold at home, never mind that the client’s business is going to the dogs while he or she is at Flag, or even that a family member had just kicked the bucket and there is a funeral to go to half way around the world. None of these are considerations as far as the Sea Org operatives are concerned at Flag. They are never in a hurry, except before 2 pm on Thursdays, when they are in a rush to squeeze out more dough from their hapless clients.
The moment you arrive at Flag you get hit on for money, and hit on hard, hard, hard on all kinds of pretexts, and you really got to be pretty tough-minded to be able to resist that unrelenting pressure. The night I first arrived to start on OTVI, a brutally aggressive Sea Org woman point blank demanded forty thousand dollars for the Super Power building. She was like a blood sucking leech, and couldn’t get rid of her for days. Then there were the regges from several directions, who wouldn’t let me get out of their clutches to get on with OTVI until I coughed up more money for services and/or Hubbard material I neither needed nor asked for. And this sort of thing was particularly infuriating when one was about to leave Flag for home, rushing to get the the plane in Tampa, and a regg would put the gun at one’s head and demand that one buy just one more thing before departing. Then there was the hard sell recruiting drive to join the Sea Org, while the IAS was demanding fortunes with sob stories about their supposedly monumental struggles against the suppressives of the world. And it was exactly like this on OTVII too, exactly the same every time I arrived at Flag for the six month checks too. I sure was an absolute glutton for punishment, wasn’t I?
One last thing. Given the utter confusion, incompetence, ignorance and disorganization all around me at Flag, what I found both particularly irritating and thoroughly ludicrous even then was the high and mighty attitude of the Sea Org operatives, like they were the be all and end all of all capability and wisdom in the universe, in possession of some arcane knowledge that only a select few were party to. They were so full of themselves and up their asses that even as a loyal Scientologist at the time I found the Sea Org bunch at Flag to be totally insufferable.
One more thing Chris. I mention above that at my local org I trained as an evaluator, on the big evaluator course. However, there were many problems and ironies with that course, and I didn’t intend endorsing it by mentioning it above.
Scientology evaluation tech had gaping holes and huge gaps on the one hand, a multiplicity of redundancies on the other hand, and a ponderous over-bureaucratization on the third hand, so the whole deal was really like a case of physician heal thyself: eval tech was crap, truly a case study of how not to evaluate. If I attempted to apply it in real life, whether in commerce or manufacturing, I would have been out of a job instantly.
The irony of it all was that neither the staff at the local org nor the Sea Org hierarchy uplines were the slightest bit interested in actual, real and actionable root causes that even with all its flaws and deficiencies their vaunted eval tech could have exposed for all to see, so timely and rational measures could have been applied to remedy them.
I used to be gobsmacked reading evaluations produced by Scientologist Evaluators, mostly Sea Org operatives.
On the one hand, there seemed to be a distinct and deliberate aversion to put their fingers on actual root causes. On the other hand, the Sea Org Evaluators – and never mind the local org people – wouldn’t have recognized an actual root cause even if they bashed into it; they seemed to wallow in some wishful thinking daze that completely blinded them to any actual hard fact on the ground (no doubt because in their delusional universe hard facts could be instantly as-ised or pustulated away at will). On the third hand, when they identified a root cause, it was never ever an actual and actionable root cause. Never ever, not even once, not even by accident.
Every one of those Sea Org evaluations that I have read were actually suppressive in the actual Scientology sense of the word, and achieved exactly the opposite of what they set out to do. Those green behind the ears Sea Org youngsters, full of themselves but without without a clue, who were sent down from the AO to do evals, were actually merchants of confusion, or like the man who had an argument with his wife, then kicked the dog as the solution for his problem.
If they were trained FEB graduates, which was very, very rare indeed, the Green Vols and the Management Vols were their Bible, and the essence of the management philosophy was that if the theory did not fit the facts, then to hell with the facts. This philosophy and wishful thinking permeated the entire organization from top down, from the Sea Org management ranks to the last little monkey labouring day and night in a local org for peanuts or nothing.
As state of the art organisation and management had actually been my bread and butter, I could only stand aghast and totally gobsmacked at the spectacle of all that boorish, retarded and ignorant ninteen forties style autocratic amateurism. I washed my hands of the whole thing and never concerned myself with the organization and management of Scientology ever again.
Chris, do you still have my earlier comment on Flag, or have the system swallowed it up?
Mike
Hi Mike. I did get them all and just approved them. Sorry for the delay in responding. Interesting comments!!!