by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2017 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I put on Arts & Entertainment
for the last episode of Scientology and the Aftermath, the eight-part “reality” series hosted by apostate
Scientologist Leah Remini and this time featuring, instead of ex-Scientologists
(aside from Mike Rinder, who had once been Scientology’s principal “enforcer”
until he got thrown out of the church),
reporters who had covered Scientology and been victims of its take-no-prisoners
attitude towards its critics. (The longer this show has aired, the more it’s
shown how Scientology head David Miscavige and President-elect Donald Trump are
really alike in their thin-skinned natures and the viciousness with which they
respond to all criticism. At least two
letter-writers in this morning’s Los Angeles Times have commented that the Ringling Bros. and Barnum and
Bailey Circus hasn’t really closed — it’s just moved to Washington, D.C., only
now the ringmaster is one of the clowns.) One of the three people featured in
this episode was Lawrence Wright, journalist who first wrote against
Scientology in The New Yorker and then
expanded his articles into a book called Going Clear that was largely about the disillusionment of writer-director
Paul Haggis (Crash) and ultimate
departure from Scientology, and who noted that “most religions don’t have
secrets” (as another anti-Scientology writer once commented, the Roman Catholic
Church doesn’t charge you $100,000 before they let you read the Book of
Genesis; in Scientology you’re told that you have to reach “Operating Thetan
Level III” before you’re psychologically well-developed enough to handle the
tale of mad scientist Xenu and the origin of all human problems in his
dastardly experiments on the planet Teegeeack, now known as Earth) and
“Scientology is a religion that locks you in from the inside.”
Another was Ray
Jeffrey, an attorney who took the case of Debbie Cook and her husband, Wayne
Baumgarten, when they were sued by the Church of Scientology; Cook, Jeffrey
explained, was “a victim of her own success” as head of the Flag Land Base, the
pinnacle of the Sea Organization (Scientology’s governing clergy, reporting to
David Miscavige, who runs the church as chair of the Religious Technology
Corporation, which holds the copyrights to all the writings of church founder
L. Ron Hubbard); she was summoned to the Scientology Vatican in Hemet,
California (though the city government of Hemet tweeted the program producers
to stress that the Scientology base camp is not in Hemet but in an unincorporated stretch of Riverside County
just northeast of it) and got to experience Miscavige’s management-by-assault
style up close and personal. A third interviewee was perhaps the quirkiest:
ex-Moonie turned cult deprogrammer Steve Hoxsan, who recalled doing a tour with
an apostate ex-Scientologist and comparing notes on how similar the cult
indoctrinations were in both groups, including controlling every waking moment
of the cult members’ lives (and keeping them awake as long as possible because
sleep deprivation itself is a powerful form of mind control), giving them
enormous amounts of esoteric material to read and regurgitate on command (while
cramming them so full of this sort of information that they never have time to
read anything else or to think critically about it), keeping them from any
other sources of information and telling them essentially that the rest of the
world is lying 24/7 and only the cult
leaders and his or her authorities are to be trusted. It occurred to me that
this sort of indoctrination goes far beyond cults; as I’ve written in these
pages before, medical schools do the same sort of thing to their students, and
even beyond that there have been entire countries, including Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union (especially
under Stalin) and Communist China (especially under Mao), that have been run as
cults, with the added evil that no one chose to be in the cult: they were just inducted into it and
subjected to its power by being born and living in the wrong country at the
wrong time. Mixed in with the interviews were a number of questions Remini and
Rinder had received on Reddit, most of them pretty obvious, including one about
Scientology’s attitude towards homosexuality — which, according to Remini and
Rinder, is publicly O.K. but privately, or not so privately, condemns it as one
of the lower elements on L. Ron Hubbard’s “Tone Scale” of human behavior —
though they did not mention that
Hubbard drove his Gay son Quentin to suicide.
I’ll acknowledge that the massive
amounts of negative information about Scientology that have surfaced over the
last decade have changed my point of view about it from regarding it as a silly
phenomenon but one that mainly harmed people by taking their money, to a sinister
cult comparable to the Moonies, Children of God etc. Indeed, the Church of
Scientology is literally worth billions of dollars, largely because Hubbard
made the conscious decision that instead of recruiting members from the
down-and-out (as the original Christians and many other more recent cults had
done), he would seek members from the upper socioeconomic strata to make sure
they would have the ability to pay the Church large amounts of money for its
“services.” He also consciously recruited celebrities to serve both as
financial supports for the Church and as walking, talking advertisements —
Remini remembered that when she was on the TV series The King of Queens she was under intense pressure from the Church of
Scientology to recruit her co-star, Kevin James, only he already had a religion
that suited him and he was quite happy with, and he wasn’t about to abandon it
for anything else. One point Scientology has pushed in its recruitment is that
it doesn’t regard itself as an exclusive faith — it tells people they can stay
a Christian, Jew, Muslim or whatever they are and also be a Scientologists —
even though its internal documents say that Scientologists are expected to
embrace it “to the exclusion of other faiths” — which hasn’t stopped Louis Farrakhan,
of all people, from publicly embracing the technology of Dianetics and
Scientology as a way Nation of Islam members can make themselves better Muslims
(there’s a bizarre clip of him saying just that in this final program!). Though
this series was supposed to stop at the first eight episodes, Remini dropped a
big hint at the end of this one that she may continue it — and if she does I
hope she goes into the biggest point she failed to mention this time around:
the enormous dossiers the Church of Scientology has on all of its members through their E-meter “auditing” sessions,
which the Church can use in any way it likes because Scientological auditing,
unlike the conventional psychotherapy it resembles, is not protected by confidentiality restrictions.
