PC: “David Miscavige is the SP destroying Scientology!” Auditor: “Thank you. Your needle is floating.”

Aaron Smith-Levin, who has great sources, stated in a podcast today that Scientology’s total global membership is down to 26,000 members. This includes all thetans: Sea Org, staff, and publics.

Aaron added that 20 years ago the IAS, which is Scientology’s unincorporated membership association, had 50,000 members listed.

Part of the massive departure was David Miscavige’s gluttonous 2007 cash grab called “The Basics” in which all Scientologists were forced to purchase multiple sets of L. Ron Hubbard’s so-called basic books. These ponderous tomes established Dianetics and Scientology doctrine and worldview. Dianetics, which is called “Book One” inside Scientology, anchors the basics.

Miscavige claimed “SP Transcriptionists from the wrong side of the gene pool” had altered these LRH books and that he, Miscavige, had engaged in the Herculean labor of restoring them. Therefore, it became necessary for Scientologists to throw out their old Hubbard books and buy new libraries priced at $3,500 – $5,000. Some Basics sets included Hubbard’s lectures on CD and this added to the price.

Miscavige heavily promoted the Basics. The PR photo below makes Scientology look like a television game show. Play stupid games and win stupid prizes:

We estimate that Miscavige’s greedy debauchery has netted Scientology >$120 million USD to date. Scientologists were required to buy multiple libraries. Miscavige decreed that a set of his new LRH Basics library collection had to be mailed to all of the libraries in the world. Scientologists were expected to make large donations to fund this massive library dissemination project.

Online Scientlology watchers reported that sets donated to libraries were either thrown away by libraries or sold on their weekend book tables for $1 per book. Libraries optimize space for books in demand and reference sources and routinely dispose of or sell the torrent of unwanted books they receive from special interest groups, cults, self-publishers, etc.  We purchased several new Basics books at the Santa Clarita library in this period for a few dollars.

Sea Org members were all given quotas of Basics libraries to sell or else they would be punished. Phone banks were set up and SO were not allowed to sleep until their daily phone sales quotas had been met. Former SO remember the Basics as a horrific time.

“The Basics Evolution” as it was called, caused thousands of Scientologists to leave as they saw Miscavige’s program for what it was: Greed.

Many Scientologists who left were angry at Miscavige’s implications:

• L. Ron Hubbard was too stupid, or too lazy, to bother reviewing the final drafts of his canon.
  x
• L. Ron Hubbard and his aides were too stupid to spot the SP’s on Hubbard’s lines as they gleefully and secretly trashed Hubbard’s writ. This contradicted Hubbard’s claimed technology of how to spot SP’s and thereby shatter their suppression. If Hubbard could not spot SP’s on his own lines, then Scientology is a lie! 

Miscavige went so far as to declare that Dianetics was unreadable. The audience applauded when he said this; it was a group admission that Dianetics is unreadable. Of course, Miscavige claimed his new Basics revision of Dianetics made it readable.

Bottom Line: The 2007 Basics cash grab cost Scientology a significant loss of membership; particularly older Hubbard-era Scientologists who were cash cows. The Hubbard-era members would pay >$100,000 for their L’s and the OT levels, but asking them to fork over $50,000 to furnish wog libraries with LRH Basics was a bridge too far. These people voted with their feet and left.

Ten years earlier Miscavige had already lost thousands of Scientologists when he forced “The Golden Age of Tech Phase 1” onto the membership. GAT 1, as it is called, changed Hubbard’s definition of the floating needle; this was blasphemy to Hubbard-era Scientologists who ascribed to the infallibility of Hubbard in all things.  

When stats crash in Scientology, there is an axiom which states “repeat the successful action.” This means that a person or an Org must identify what action caused stats to boom in the past and repeat that action. 

This is happening now as young Sea Org members, and a few old ones, are on Instagram pushing people to buy and read Dianetics.

Why?

The previous successful action driving the Dianetics push occured in the mid-1980’s when former SO marketing exec Jefferson Hawkins, author of Counterfeit Dreams, lead an effort to promote Dianetics on television and in a series of clever ads. 

Hawkins’ efforts put Dianetics back onto bestseller lists decades after its release on May 9, 1950. The sales boom included cheating as Scientologists were ordered to purchase multiple copies of Dianetics from bookstores to help push the book onto bestseller lists.

The cheating was caught and widely exposed. The LA Times reported on the fraud.

What makes Sea Org members on Instagram both absurd and comical is Miscavige’s 2018 promise to Scientologists that his $100 million spend on Scientology TV would boom the Orgs and flood the Church with millions of new members. The Church charmingly calls its new recruits “raw meat.”

Scientology TV was dead on arrival and so Miscavige now needs wog social media to push a book that is still unreadable and ridiculous despite Miscavige’s claimed improvements. You can put lipstick on a Marcab, but it is still a Marcab.