Scientology's Justifications

I discovered, over the years, that when I found myself spending a good portion my time thinking up reasons why "it really is OK that I did that", it was always a sure sign I really shouldn't have done that.

Doesn't make any difference how very, very good my justifications were, if I found myself looking for reasons why something is OK, deep down, I knew, it wasn't.

Which is why I find it so very interesting that so much of any discussion with a Scientologist ends up being about all those wonderful justifications they have for what the Church of Scientology is doing and has done over the years.

And, oh! Do they have good ones! Hundreds of them. They don't make much sense, there isn't any proof for many of their justifications, but they cherish them and defend them with great passion. You risk their terrible anger if you dare question any of these vital justifications!

• Their primary justification is that those people have been out to destroy the church since before it even existed. Oh, yes! Those people. You know, the evil psychiatrists, teamed up with the evil drug companies. Now, you do have to ignore the fact that they have never, ever, ever come up with any proof of this, but they do love this one. It's the church's favorite justification for their bad behavior. Go ahead, ask them -- but don't ask them for any proof, none exists.
  
• Another really nice justification is that the evil U.S. Government with their CIA, FBI, IRS, XYZ agencies are plotting against the Church of Scientology. Oh, yes. Plotting. (Of course, the fact that the FBI raid on the church found tons of evidence of the worst domestic spying operation ever against the U.S. Government which was carried out by the church, and that L. Ron Hubbard fled the country--must be ignored.) No, no, it's the government that is evil, not the church!
• How about the famous International Bankers conspiracy, mentioned by Hubbard in his "OT III - Wall of Fire" tape. These wealthy folk are, even today, funding all the anti-Scientology activities. Oh yes. No proof. No evidence. But "Ron said it" so this one is a keeper. (Hmmm, there are a lot of critics who are still waiting to receive those checks. LOL!)
• "Other religions have done it!" This is a true classic. I used this one myself when I was growing up, "But Joey did it too!" The way I work it out, it seems like because other religions have committed crimes, fraud, abuses, lied, trampled people's rights, the Church of Scientology gets to do those things too. Say what? You'll see Internet trolls using a variation of this one: "Why single out just the Church of Scientology? All religions are bad!" Somehow, the logic of this one escapes me.
  
• "How can you spend any time criticizing the Church of Scientology when children are starving in war-torn Slobovia?" (Or any other horrendous things happening in the world.) What the church is desperately trying to do is distract and divert attention from their crimes. They are saying we are only allowed to criticize one thing at a time -- and the Church of Scientology isn't the worst. Sorry, we're multi-tasking critics! The fact that something truly evil is happening somewhere else, does not give the Church of Scientology a free pass to do a lot of not-quite-so-evil stuff.
• "All those who dare to criticize the Church of Scientology are just anti-religious [or bigoted or mean] people." It is rather difficult for the church to explain why these "anti-religious, bigoted, mean" people are only criticizing the management of the Church of Scientology, not Scientology, not any other religion, just the organization of the Church of Scientology. This "justification" isn't working too well outside of the church. Internally, to Scientologists, it might be working just fine.
  
• Those damaged by the Church of Scientology "pulled it in". This is a Scientology twisted version of karma, where the victims cause the bad things (meaning being screwed up by the church) to happen to themselves because they were "bad". Note that this is never applied to all the bad things that happen to the church -- no, they never "pull it in"!
  
• We're on a mission from L. Ron Hubbard to save the universe. If all else fails, this justifies everything. If you're saving the universe, well, that's pretty much a blank check to do any crimes, abuses, fraud, lies, anything you want! I think this might be David Miscavige's favorite.
  

And there are many more. Get into a discussion about Church of Scientology crimes with a True Believer and you will get bogged down in endless justify-justify-justify. Do you think they feel guilty? Yes, they do. Their endless justifications show it. Many of these justifications, those directly from Hubbard, are built into the Scientology belief system.

So, it seems quite obvious to me, from all the evidence, that the church knows, deep down, that what they're doing is wrong. They obviously know they are breaking the law, since they work so hard to cover it all up. They know they are trampling peoples rights to Freedom of Speech and Freedom of Religion because of their endless justifications. They know they need lots of justifications for what they've done.

An organization that uses criminal means to carry out their plans, like the Church of Scientology does, is, by definition, a criminal organization.

That's the bottom line. Church of Scientology is a criminal organization.

Boy, do they need lots of justifications to try to make that come out right.
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Scientology's Admin Tech

Hubbard obviously believed that he was an administrative wiz. He wrote thousands of administrative "Policy Letters" over the years, covering everything from the broad organization structure down to the minutiae of how to clean windows, handle your "in-basket" and how to write letters.

Each and every policy letter is supposed to be followed to the letter in every Scientology organization. That means all the churches and every business using Hubbard's technology.

Some of the dictates from Ron are fairly obvious and seem to work well enough. But overall the result of applying all his policy letters is to cause an organization to, at best, struggle for survival and, more commonly, fail.

There are many examples of how bad this "tech" is. For instance, the whole structure is designed for extreme micro-management. It just invites every level of management to meddle in every employee's job. However, to keep things simple, I'll just expand on one good-sounding but hugely flawed concept.

Statistics.

It sounds okay. Every job someone does has one or more statistics that count the number of products that particular job produces. All the statistics are carefully graphed and actions are taken depending on whether the "stat" went up or down, and by how much.

Sounds like a lot of busy work, but doesn't sound harmful, does it?

It is.

Statistics: a good way to destroy your organization.

Oh, it's a real good idea to know how many widgets your company sold, and how much money in and money out. In general you do need that kind of information and every business does that kind of record keeping.

But every person, every job?

Here's the key part of this "tech". As part of the "handling" of statistics, if a person's statistic is up, that's good, they get rewarded. If their statistic is down, that's bad, they get punished.

Of course. What else would you expect?

And that is not the way to intelligently run a business. Anyone with real world business experience can see what's wrong immediately.

Judging a person's performance on their job by only counting "things" produced in a time period focuses attention narrowly on today or this week. Long-range ideas that might interfere with production for a few weeks, but would greatly improve things long-term will always be abandoned. Actions that improve quality, but decrease quantity must always be ignored. Things that would improve customer service, but which interfere with "getting the stats up" will never happen.

And, because the managers at every level are rewarded for "up stats" and penalized for "down stats" the whole structure becomes narrowly focused on "getting the stats up", every person, every job, every level.

The inevitable result of "stats" is "stat push". This is a heavy demand for ever-higher statistics from management and the frantic doing anything and everything to be able to report higher statistics by the worker.

Imagine a job, a section, a department, a division or a corporation where things like planning, scheduling, improvement, coordination, cooperation, responsiveness are all ignored in favor of "getting the stats up". That's chaos and disaster. It's deadly.

Imagine what happens when a worker must endlessly report higher and higher numbers of products, "or else!" Either the quality goes out the window, or the numbers are faked. As the demands for higher "stats" continue, it is, inevitably, both.

Another side-effect is that the statistics become less and less connected to reality. This is why the Church of Scientology reports eight million members (or is it twenty?) when reality is so much less: They have counted the "Scientologists statistic" for years and the statistic has been a flat-out lie. This is why you can't get off the mailing list: That would cause the "bulk mail out" statistic to go down, and that can't happen. This is why Scientologists get super-hard-sell pressure phone calls for money on Wednesday night: Stats are reported on Thursday and must be up "no matter what!"

The end result is crap products, upset employees, angry customers and eventual and inevitable business failure. And that is solidly built into "statistics" as defined and managed by the Hubbard Administrative Technology.

And, while statistics is considered one of the more important pieces of Hubbard's Admin Tech, it isn't the worst, by far. But that's enough for a sample.

A few times, some Scientologist has attained managerial status in a department of a major corporation and secretly implemented Hubbard Admin Tech in his department. Not going to name any names, but the departments so "enhanced" became disaster zones. Customer and employee complaints helped upper management track down and eradicate the Hubbard Tech to recover sanity. It really doesn't work.

For the True Believers of Scientology, this is hard to take. Their business fails and they blame themselves for not "applying it correctly". But the harder they try, the more exactly they attempt to apply Hubbard's instructions, the deeper they get into trouble. Unless and until they recognize that the fault lies with Hubbard's policies, they can't escape the endless downward spiral of hopelessly applying his policies more and more strictly while their business tanks and their employees suffer.

The Church of Scientology runs strictly on Hubbard Admin Tech. You will have noticed how effective they are. Anyone escaping from Scientology's Sea Org has horror stories relating to Hubbard's Admin Tech and the organizational insanity it engenders. This is just another reason why the Church of Scientology has failed, is failing and will always fail.
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