LDW, I suspect all-time numbers are a bit lower. Looking at CF counts, which seem to run about 20,000 to 30,000 per org on average from the appeals for help with filing we’ve seen here, multiplied by about 135 orgs worldwide that would come to something over 3 million (about a third of that in just the US) – with a lot of room to argue over whether it is overly generous and includes too many people, such as those who gave their address at a stress table set up somewhere; or not enough, because it doesn’t account for missions, and other activity prior to the establishment of the orgs that exist today. Maybe because of possible corrections both ways, it’s still a pretty good ballpark.

It’s indeed a very telling inconvenient truth, that Scientology has had contact with so many people but is actually connected with so very few of them. Just the dead weight central files of the orgs, which they have trouble scraping up and cajoling enough active members to even be able to reorganize, highlights the incongruity – and it’s perhaps also telling of those who remain, that the members who work on those projects, apparently aren’t too disturbed by the contradiction literally right in front of them.

🙂 @ Joe.

Wow, you’re right! I never fully perceived that before. “Hard sell” in Scientology EQUATES to “caring” about the person. Hard sell IS caring. And so it follows that in Scientology, if one “soft sells”, one does not care!

This always grated on me somewhat but I sort of understood the viewpoint. Sort of.

What really drove me wild was the Birthday Game, wherein one not only HAD to sell but HAD TO SELL BY THURSDAY AT 2PM!

This I 100% HATED. It was, frequently so NOT caring of the person, so blatantly NOT GIVING A DAMN about the person in front of you!

This person say’s he/she will buy (whatever it is) but needs a few more days because the check is coming in, the loan is coming thru, etc. etc., whatever. The person is obviously sincere; one can SEE that. The person is 100% in agreement with you, totally WITH you and one can SEE that. Ok, so WORK with the person, make him or her right, keep the ARC in, let the person buy the damned book or service or make the fucking donation in a few days…right?

Ooooooh, no! Nononononono 100 x NO! HAS to be tonite! Has to be NOW! Now, now now now now!

“Can you put it on a credit card? Let’s see if we can increase your limit so that we can get it done right now! Can you BORROW IT from your mother/father/boyfriend/girlfriend/friend/sister/brother/garbageman etc. etc. etc….? How can we make this go right so that this gets done right now? Let’s DISAGREE with the physical universe and blow out all the stops AND GET THIS DONE RIGHT NOW…”

Oh My Freakin’ God.

If ANYTHING convinced me that the person regging me did not give a tinker’s damn about me , it was THIS.

I’m in sales. If and/or when I have a person ready, willing and able to avail themselves of my services, someone obviously WITH me, who shares the need for some more time because of so and so, who is RIGHT THERE WITH ME and giving me his/her SOLUTION tto how its all going to happen and how he/she is going to work with me – I would NEVER in a million years damage the rapport between this prospect and myself, sully the trust, create anxiety in the person etc. by carrying on like an inmate in an asylum that, NO, it all has to happen NOW NOW NOW… because of some arbitrary time limit I’ve set up for the completion of the transaction, that does not take into consideration the needs of the person in front of me! I mean, slit my throat! I would never do that! No one in their right mind, in the business world, in the real world, would behave this way! One might much prefer for one’s OWN reasons that the “sale” occur right away, but when one has a “live one” in front of one, one WORKS WITH the live one, doesn’t one?

Whew what a rant this morphed into. Well, it did drive me nuts, back in the day. I used to feel so invalidated. “Don’t you BELIEVE me?”, I’d ask them. “I told you by next Monday and I’m not lying to you! I promise!”

Well, no, sorry. Now now now.

And today I can articulate the depressed, kind of hopeless feeling I got back then when I experienced this kind of treatment. I couldn’t put it into words then but I can now: they didn’t give a damn about ME…it was their stat. I mean, duh 🙂 But at the time I guess I wanted to believe they cared about me. Qu’elle idiote moi 🙂

Yes, in the early days the people I met at the Dianetics counseling group (outpost of a mission) were really nice people who just wanted to help others. If they hadn’t used scamology crap but just counseled people from their heart I’m sure they would have succeeded financially and would probably still be around today.

Aqua, your comment made me think of how it’s another example of Scientology co-opting the English language for their own ends.

In the policy “hard sell” and other places, to care about someone is redefined to mean that you have to doggedly manipulate them into doing some kind of Scientology service.

To say to someone, “you have to care” is like asking them to turn on the Care Switch™️.

You care or you don’t. It comes from the heart.

People who are in the Scientology bubble remain troubled by the subject of dissemination. They just don’t want to do it, and that feeling emanates from a gut level and remains with them despite any cheery expressions of their desires to do so.

The steps Scientology recommends you take to disseminate to new people are from Hubbard himself, and these steps lay out this orchestrated method which essentially boils down to you manipulating the person “for their own good” in order to get them onto “the bridge”.

All of this focus on finding a “ruin” is to direct the prospect’s attention onto something that is upsetting to him, self-defeating, unresolvable, etc., and is reliably something that his attention naturally drifts to in the first place.

But another thing the “ruin-finding” step does is it diverts the prospect’s attention away from the noisy alarms of his own bullshit detectors—to distract him from his “gut” response to being manipulated.

It doesn’t matter what the prospect says his ruin is, the answer is always, “Scientology can help you with that.”

For a person to share with you his inner-most secret, that thing that makes him feel most vulnerable, requires him to place the highest trust in you.

For you to take that trust and use it to manipulate him into getting into Scientology, using the rote steps of the dissemination drill is the very first betrayal he will experience from an association with a scientologist.

People in the bubble know that, if only deep down.

👍👍

What a story! Thank you for sharing. Mike Rinder thank you for this blog!

Linear13 offered:
“This ridiculous ‘dissemination‘ drill would be an excellent Regraded Being Strip. ”

And FUNNY!