I wonder about that too. When I was in, scngsts impressed me as pretty intelligent and literate, even the ones that had only a high school education. There were a few exceptions, but not many. Of course there was no internet then and scn didn't have the terrible PR that it has today. We couldn't just google scn and find out all this shit. I suspect scngsts today are a lot dumber than we were years ago.
I pretty much agree with your assessment. As a recruiter our favorite target demographic were 18 - 21, High School grads or first 2 years in college, while they were in a rebellious period and before they were invested in jobs, homes and family. They had to be the kind of person who would tolerate a complete bait and switch - the difference between what a recruiter promised them and reality, at least until they could be properly indoctrinated on the EPF. The other prime recruitment demographic would be 2nd and 3rd generation where they are conveniently pre-indoctrinated.
In earlier periods people in the US were less focused on living standards. Now we are heavily focused on detailing our living arrangements. No private bath, internet, phone or plasma?! That wasn't in the brochure. Just look at Miscavige's obsession with pimping out Ideal Orgs. That was never Hubbard's thing and he even advised against it. Orgs were supposed to be clean, presentable and suitable to the purpose but not extravagant. Sure Hubbard put a bounty on opinion leaders and celebs and he wanted rich and influential public but it was still mostly a movement for the "capable" masses. DM is clearly aware of how people's preferences have changed so how do you build a work force that is supposed to cater to such a snooty public when staff need to be indoctrinated into tolerating such a low standard of living?
So the eternal question: Why do otherwise intelligent people join the Sea Org and stay?
I even thought about this while I was in the Sea Org living in a congested dorm, being eaten alive by bed bugs. We could see each other on post with big red welts on our arms and going up our necks and over our faces - so degrading. Rice and beans, no TP, bad teeth. Clearly there were mature successful looking people on staff. Higher echelon units like the CMO had better berthing, their own chef and servants. So maybe they selectively retained these people with another standard of treatment? Going "Over the Rainbow" to be closer to Hubbard was supposed to be normal and sane, unlike what we had because of somebody's failure to apply standard policy...which would eventually be corrected in the next LRH ordered Eval. But stick around long enough and you will see even those people eventually get RPFed or disappeared.
The only answer I have to this is that people will endure a lot if they think it will enable them to attain Bodhisattva - the ability to recall past lives and full operational awareness between lives. To choose your affluent parents in the next life and remember where you put the keys to the bank lockbox in the last. Levitating ashtrays, curing cancer and saving humanity by virtue of the sheer number of OTs all being significant fringe benefits.
Millions of very intelligent people for thousands of years have been willing to sacrifice a lot out of faith in spirituality and the many magical attributes to being a spiritual being. Maybe these things are possible and maybe they aren’t but for people to join the Sea Org and stay in spite of what they are experiencing they only need to believe that Scientology actually makes this possible. But if anyone could do it then why need Scientology? It must be difficult and because it is difficult it must require dedication and the subject will be complex. The complexity of Scientology is like an irresistible puzzle challenge to someone who thinks they are intelligent. They don’t get it yet so they must push on to the next level for it to make sense, read the same things over and over. Half a million dollars, 3 or 4 decades, and thousands of BTs later it’s truth revealed so do you eat crow and walk away or double down on all the bad choices that got you this far?
The problem with intelligent people is they overthink things. We see it everywhere. Intelligent people buying into solutions that create or worsen the problems they are trying to solve. For all the complexity they miss the simple and obvious. I also think that there is an aspect of slavery or subservience that is part of human nature. On one extreme there is Stockholm Syndrome and on the other there is the innocent relationship between a child and a parent. I think Hubbard’s genius is that on some level he dialed into the sweet spot where an intelligent person could be enslaved. The smart young adult right out of High School is breaking away from parental control but doesn’t have enough life experience to recognize something like Scientology using their intelligence against them and manipulating their rebellion from one authority right back into another.
So we have this strange dichotomy (a real word, not just used by Hubbard) where people who choose to endure severe abuse, deprivation and degradation are believed by affluent intelligent successful people with high living standards to be able to train and audit them to a state of Bodhisattva.
I think this dichotomy broke down under Miscavige's abuse and purgings and he could no longer trust the workforce to run the con. It required people who had a semblance of compassion, sanity, free will and intelligence to convince the paying public that what they were being taught and the auditing they received was real and valuable. The more people were free to discuss the inconsistencies and logical fallacies of Hubbard and Scientology on the internet the more the bubble needed to contract to include only the most uninformed and vetted people. Uninformed doesn’t necessarily mean unintelligent. But people in the US, after nearly 70 years, are highly informed or at least have ready access to information so they must recruit people from countries with less exposure and where anything “USA” is held in high regard. But they need these recruits exactly because they are accustomed to denser housing and lower living standards so the staff vs public dichotomy deteriorates even further compounded with a lower level of fluency in English. This would help explain the abandonment of the lengthy Saint Hill Special Briefing Course and the obsessive emphasis on the more mundane Study Tech.
With enough bubble censorship, information control and heavy ethics why bother to maintain the embarrassing, expensive and tedious appearance of training and auditing when you can get people to just give you money for nothing - IAS donations for Status, Ideal Orgs and all the other lofty world saving
stated goals?
I think the Ideal Org agenda is an admission that the old con had run it’s course and all that remains is a final milking of the faithful before this too runs it's course and the bizarre dystopian reliance on video screens and ScioTV belies the lack of faith that the staff can properly represent and sell Scientology to a sophisticated public.