I came across this issue from 1982 the other day. It contains an interesting paragraph:
All you have to do is look at where Scientology was in terms of numbers of orgs and missions even a few years back and where it is now to know. All you have to do is count the additional countries using it year by year. All you have to do is count the memberships of the Churches. And you know conclusively that while the enemy goes down, whatever the bombast, Scientology is going UP.
“Ron” clearly offers 3 ways of measuring the success of scientology. The number of orgs and missions. The number of “additional countries” using scientology. And the membership of the churches.
So, how is scientology doing in 2021, nearly 40 years after this was written?
Terrible.
Number of orgs and missions:
WAY less missions now than there were in 1982. Perhaps only half.
The exact same number of orgs today as in the 80’s — a handful have opened, and a handful have been closed down or combined over the last 4 decades. The number of orgs has been around 150 internationally since the 80’s. There are numerous states in the US and even more countries that still have no scientology organization at all.
Number of additional countries using scientology:
In What Is Scientology? published in 1992, they list 74 countries and show virtually the whole world except some green areas in Africa, the Middle East and South East Asia have “delivery” of scientology services. Even mainland China (which has banned scientology subsequently). I cannot be bothered to see where they might have given a more up to date list, but for sure there are very few, if any additional countries to add to this list. Not a single new org anywhere in Africa. Or the MidEast. Or SE Asia except Taiwan. Still not a single org in all of India or China.
Membership of the churches:
They have never given out these numbers. Back in the 90’s they claimed there were variously 7, 10, 13 million scientologists. None of those numbers were even remotely near true. They now falsely and vaguely claim “millions.” The maximum number of members of the International Association of Scientologists never even reached 100,000. Today it is more like 20,000.
By Hubbard’s metrics, scientology is going DOWN. Steeply and unrelentingly.
Hey Mike. Glad to see you doing well/good. Did you ever tell the story of the operations against me? If not, I would appreciate a few words. Thanks and good luck. Dennis Erlich
Hi Dennis. Welcome.
No, I havent told the story, though honestly I only have somewhat peripheral information as you were the focus of RTC, and they didn’t tell us much. Is there something in particular you would like to know and I can attempt to answer it.
For those who do not know the history of scientology, Dennis was one of the first people involved with putting the OT levels on the internet, resulting in him being sued, raided and having his computer seized by US Marshalls. This was really the beginning of scientology’s internet demise, the heavy-handed efforts became a cause for free speech advocates.
Hall of Heroes.
The subject of “how many scientologists” was what finally prompted me to look on the internet about scientology after being in almost thirty years.
I had been in events and heard the claims, and had seen stats presented by the church. I had thought to myself that the numbers didn’t match what I had seen, and I had been involved and around orgs quite a bit.
Spreading lies about numbers has always been accepted as good PR for the “church” and is a standard practice supported by many many ways of justification.
It’s going to be tough covering up the new empty normal.
In this directive he begins by saying that all great movements are ultimately attacked.
But do I remember correctly or not, that at that time he had gone into hiding for not being taken by the authorities for tax reasons and for having infiltrated the US government? He pulled it in but blamed others, as usual.
What elegance in trying to alter the reality of the facts!
The area where he truly excelled was explaining away why things failed.
To total insignificance and begone.
You forgot to add body thetans! Ha! Now who looks silly!
When you add all the body thetans then Scientology is straight up and vertical! Power moving up into infinity!
I had several friends living in Clear Water that I’d visit yearly in 1967,68,69,70,71,72,73,74 & 75. We noticed “something was up” in the later 1974…..DK how to explain it but it DID seem like the area was being “scouted” by a group of people.
Little did my friends know that things were about to change in a BIG way, that downtown would be no more the way it was for decades. Little by little the intrusive COS pushed/forced it’s way in buying up land & buildings & homes left & right. People began to feel “uncomfortable”…..then again, good money was being offered by “interested parties” & the homes sold quickly despite their age or condition. Same with the buildings.
If you weren’t willing to sell, you felt unwelcome in your OWN community. Pressured to sell & just “go away” somewhere else….like the next town or farther away. New faces, new people, oddly dressed people trolling the streets looking in storefronts…..wandering around as if on a Mission…..
I would never have thought anything like that would have happened, but it did. As time passed, COS completely took over…….so sad, so unfair, so sickening.
https://www.scientology-fso.org/history-of-clearwater/the-church-of-scientology-in-clearwater.html
scientology’s version of reality, that link, is a far cry from what I remember from 1975-1980. So WHAT if a couple of building façades were restored to their original condition if no one is interested in looking at them any more?
TBT, I liked the unrestored structures aesthetically. They had been updated to “Modern Florida”, which has its own esthetic and fits the current area better.
Amen Jere…..I DO remember “back when”….it had the vibe many appreciated, charming, old worldish. Now as you so clearly stated…it looks quite ordinary. No one really goes downtown anymore unless their part of COS.
How sad is that? Many of the long time owners have been gone out of Clear Water for decades. They’d be back if things would go back to the old way, which they never will.
These same friends literally hate what’s happened to what was once THEIR TOWN.
Taken over, they’ve run businesses & owners out permanently.
The 1979 edition of WIS* listed 23 “churches” and 118 missions in the US. The number of churches has gone up, but in good part because in the 1980s a number of missions were made into Class V orgs as either as part of their confiscation during the “mission massacre” or due to dubious “stat pushes” resulting in many cases in small and failing mission-sized orgs like Battle Creek, New Haven and Long Island, among others.
In 2015 someone using the CofS website locator and states’ corporate records found 79 nominally active missions. But the missions are collapsing at such a fast rate as business dwindles and the aging franchisees drop away, that within about the last year the website stopped listing them separately, and now lumps them in with “churches” – plus no longer even provides full lists, just location-based lookups, conveniently making it impossible to easily get the full picture.
From what I’ve seen I think the website only shows about 2 dozen missions in the US, though they seem to now only list those that have their own dedicated location, ignoring a number that linger on in back rooms and spare bedrooms. But a lot of the locations in the 1979 list were similarly insubstantial, like home-based auditing practices in the era of solo “field auditors” who were then being forced to buy mission packages; so it’s hard to compare exactly, but I’d say the total is down to a third or a quarter of what it once was, with the proportion of actual active locations similarly close to decimated.
As for counting the membership of the “churches”, we can look at the promo and social media photos from major events and see that even big orgs in major cities can only count on about 3 or 4 dozen mostly graying diehards to show up, perhaps rarely somewhat more. That probably adds up to 1,500 actual active members at best, with maybe a couple of thousand more mostly involved in getting upper level services at AOLA and Flag.
* The book “What is Scientology?”
3 or 4 DOZEN would be an ENORMOUS field in today’s scientology. That places like NY org had hundreds in the Academy any random night is not what Dwarfenführer® wants: people demanding SERVICE for the money they paid. That might result in them demanding RESULTS, and we can’t have that, can we?
We DO get the entire picture from that: Ain’t no one there, the corporations calling themselves scientology are doing nothing of note. Decades ago, they at least got into the newspapers, perhaps even ran the rare TV commercial, but no longer; Dead on the vine; or what remains of the vine. And there’s little of the mouth-to-mouth promotion which seemed to be the primary recruiting source back then. Davey don’t WANT all those unwashed masses coming in and stinking the place up. Heck, they might even want *SERVICE* ! Can’t have THAT, can we? Just money straight into his coffers. With nothing to deliver, life is SO much simpler. He can concentrate on PUNISHING people, his one remaining joy in life other than guzzling fine whiskey like it was rotgut
I remember in 1975 Hubbard said the world would end in 5 years. I was pregnant with my first son and I felt terrified for him. The pressure was on! No time off. Sweat program after working 16 hrs that day so that radiation wouldn’t kill us. lol. I never trusted him after that unnecessary scare. 🤪
RoseMarie. I remember that written. In another from earlier 70s (50 years ago) he said there was almost no more petroleum. Another great prediction.
At that, he took a very early scary story about what is now called “Peak petroleum”. The scare-mongers are STILL dredging that one up and are conflating it with global warning for added effect. Hubbard would have loved the current world: So many DANGERS to combat with the ‘tech’, NOW, NOW, NOW! BUY this sure-fire cure, DO this radiation-fighting course, get “CLEAR”, or suffer the consequences, NONE of which came to pass. He was just another of those apocalyptic preachers prophesying disaster time after time, showing no shame or embarrassment each time they’re proven wrong. But the sheep eat that folderol up, paying through the nose to be one of the “saved” if it does come to pass THIS time. It’s a great racket if you’ve got the constitution to lie that often and that outrageously. Only the greatest conmen have been able to pull that off.
Jere, Hubbard was a “merchant of chaos” in his own way like that – though of course typically he liked to accuse others of being the fear-mongers. Sometimes he actually latched onto more blatant end-of-the-world type stuff like that; but talk such as of a “prison planet” and the implicit threat of being enslaved by supposed implants for countless lifetimes, is the same sort of thing just in a less conventional framing.
It taps in to basic human vulnerabilites related to cognitive biases. Like other belief systems before, and since, Hubbard resorted to leveraging it himself – rather than, say, educating people about it as a pitfall. On a related note, it’s telling to me that despite his pretenses about “Logics” and all, Hubbard never taught about even the basics of common logical fallacies – and, in fact, exploited those as well.
If there is any sort of real “implant” it is our innate tendency to fall for things like that – and Hubbard did nothing to help people avoid those traps, instead deviously taking advantage of them.
As we see all the time the Orgs are constantly looking for staff and they will take virtually anyone and promise them anything to get them to join. Many of the Orgs/missions like St Louis and Atlanta only have a handful of members. We see in the flag videos that many of the $ci/SO members getting on and off the busses speak with an accent. $ci is on its last legs.
Gordon, it’s dead, but hasn’t quite fallen to the ground and rolled over, yet. It’s just Davey doing his version of a puppet show, which will last as long as it holds his interest. He’s certainly got the money to keep it up as long as his poor little body holds up under the strains he submits it to.
Off topic a bit, but related to Jon Atack’s video yesterday about holocaust deniers https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eLLH4cJYHVE
Excellent for those of us still recovering. Jon’s two recent interviews with Mike are also excellent.
In church this morning the pastor mentioned a book “Think Again – the Power of Knowing what you Don’t Know” by Adam Grant. Sort of a self-help guy but he has a good point. If knowledge is power, then knowing what you don’t know is wisdom.
From the book:
The Overconfidence Cycle – Pride->Conviction->Confirmation Bias, Desirability Bias -> Validation -> back to Pride. This is the classic self-imposed blinders on the chronic Scientologist. Only seeing what he wants to see, everything he sees confirms what he already knows. Tunnel vision tighter and tighter until the entire real world is just a distraction on the road to total freedom. Which turns out to be total enslavement. In Jon’s video he mentions motivated reasoning, a similar idea.
The Rethinking Cycle – Humility -> Doubt -> Curiosity -> Discovery -> Humility.
Sort of how the scientific method really works (not Hubbard’s fake version).
You have to be willing to rethink your basic core beliefs, to humble yourself in the face of contradictory new information, to actually look for answers instead of casting about for something that confirms your already hide-bound prejudices. That breaks you free from the closed-loop echo-chamber trapped world of the hapless former Scientologist. Free from the organization but still firmly ensconced in the echo chamber.
The only way out is truth, and the only way to discover truth is to actually look. Good advice for all of us, not just former Scientologists.
I lived in Clearwater the past few years and recently moved to Alaska. Way up in Fairbanks. I don’t even know of there is an org or mission in Alaska. Maybe in Anchorage if there is?
That list of nations where from what is scn book shows how perpetually and to the core they are liars and PR.
It makes me laugh that it includes for example Poland which until last month they claimed that it had finally been opened. But then it wasn’t before? Registered liars.
But karma works despite scn and all this crap helped them hit bottom faster. If you deliver emptiness you will end into it one day or the other.
They lived by the lie, died by the lie. There is symmetry in life and reality.
This brings to mind that old chestnut which I have tweaked to correct an obvious error on Ron’s part: “We are going down while the world goes up.”
If you consider recovering from the “bullbait” of Covid, scientology hasn’t moved off the “empty” side of the dial while the rest of the world springs forth with all its pent-up energy. Yet they feel a need to lie so transparently that a child will see the errors.Poor, poor scns (literally). The only thing going UP in scientology is the clams’ level of debt. Nowhere is scientology advancing other than McSavage’s assets under control.
Off topic:
Your comment made me think of something, Jere.
I distinctly recall a Sea Org member telling me that if the Sea Org had been “doing their jobs” 9/11 would not have happened. Yes, this SO guy did say these exact words to me at a Scientology event. It was shortly after 9/11 and he was couldn’t have been more serious.
Now, I’m wondering if Sea Org Members believe that if they had been “doing their jobs” that Covid 19 wouldn’t have happened. I’m wondering if they believe this, if they are being told this.
Going DOWN as the world sails past in quiet indifference.
Thousands in the streets in Clearwater in the late 1970’s. Huge meetings in the auditorium at Flag. Sand Castle lunch wait every day because of hundreds. A constant stream of e-meters carried between buildings. Folders by the tons generated. Briefings every hour. All this is gone forever. Hubbard generated BS and people stayed with him for as long as possible. In the end, he was a below average thug who wrote one book that sold a few copies.
in the BEGINNING, he was “a below average thug who wrote one book that sold a few copies.”
In the End, he was a failed con-artist lamenting that he’d FAILED to enslave very many people, at most a few thousand. Throughout, he milked the system for all he could get away with, and squirreled it away as securely as he could conceive.
yes
In 2018 Jonny Jacobsen did a series of short articles at medium:, starting with the official (COS) counts.
https://medium.com/how-many-scientologists-are-there-really/1-the-official-version-8b77457a33ac
Great read!
In 2017 I did a guesstimate of total membership since the 50s
https://forum.exscn.net/threads/estimates-for-new-members-and-total-membership.44306/
The list of countries delivering Scientology is absurd. Oh, and by the way … Puerto Rico is not a country. Puerto Ricans are American citizens.
Still, not too bad for a group that considers East US to be on a different continent from WUS. They gotta get the stat UP, SOMEhow, if only by inflating PR into its own country. If, by wild chance, they get any permanent scn presence in Curaçao OTHER than they non-cruising cruise ship, the “Fleecewinds” it’ll ALSO mean the Netherlands Antilles will have to be a new country of its own just to keep up.
Thanks Mike for keeping the light shining on the Reality of Scientology -vs- their PR.
They covertly infiltrate other religious groups to gain support. They covertly safepoint legal groups for influence. They covertly (sometimes overtly) investigate anyone who could affect them adversely. They covertly train their spokespeople to lie convincingly. They covertly…… oh, you get the picture.
If they would only implement “Science of Survival” to themselves as regards the 1.1 band.
No such luck, Jim, though that would be too tough on the surviving families — having to deal with a scientology “Jonestown”. I don’t wish any of that “stuff” on ANYone — except maybe the tiny tyrant, who would be the prime mover of such a tragedy.
Truth be told, I hope the punching Pontiff lives a good long life —of contemplation of his sins. May he be haunted by the screams of all of the victims he tortured any time he sleeps— or passes out, rather.
Yay!!! It can’t go down far enough as far as I’m concerned.
Keep up the good work dave; before you know it, what’s left of your church and it’s members will join you in Hell.
Miscavige, I just met a man named Miscavige
And suddenly that name will never be the same to me
Miscavige, there’s no love at all with Miscavige
And suddenly I’ve found how horrible a sound can be
Miscavige, say it loud and there’s discord playing
Say it soft and it’s light years from praying
Miscavige, I’ll never stop flaying Miscavige
Scribe, you just butchered a sacred West Side Story tune, and I’m on the floor 🙂
You’ve inspired me to do a parody of Ideal Morgue Fundraising to the tune of “Tonight”…or maybe “Gee Officer Krupke”.
And then there could be “The Clam Song” to the tune of “The Jet Song”…ah, the possibilities…but I’m too tired now, its late…feel free to take the reins, Scribe. You’re the Master.
Am I incorrect in thinking “Scribe” would be the “Mistress”, instead of “Master”? I’m sorry if I’m wrong and it upsets the good scribe.
Hi Jere,
I believe Scribe is a man.
Actually, I’m fairly certain based on prior evidence…but I’m not 100% certain.
Yo Scribe,
Maybe you want to jump in here?
Clear this up for Jere if you’ll pardon the expression?
Then again, maybe you don’t.
Maybe you’d prefer to leave this issue a classical mystery sandwich.
This way we’ll always wonder and never really know 🙂
No real biggie: Scribe is … Scribe! Whichever gender, a giant with a pen, constantly entertaining, often enlightening. I don’t know why I brought the subject up.
Indeed, you have described Scribe, pun intentional 🙂
The current members are already, IMO, in a Hell of Davey’s making.