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Hello. I am an exscientologist...

TheOriginalBigBlue

Gold Meritorious Patron
It'a always early until you factor in 2:00 Thursday, then it's always late.

Thursday at 2:00 pm is always a bummer. If your stats are down then it's lower conditions, cut pay, no libs and beans and rice. If they are up then you get to take your libs knowing that next week you have to beat last week's stats and that will probably require staying up until 2:00 - 4:00 am through the week, that is, unless you deliberately covertly crash your own stats so much that you will be able to show upstats for the next 3 or 4 weeks just to milk 1 or 2 more libs or at least laundry time. Ugh.

The honeymoon has worn off long ago. You have done lowers so many times you lost count and the other staff sign off your liability formula eagerly just to get you back on post because all their stats are down and they have been on beans and rice for months and getting $10.00 a week instead of $50.00 and there is no Personnel Enhancement auditing (sec-checks not included). At this rate they won't make OT for another 20 years but that doesn't really matter because by virtue of having joined the Sea Org they are considered instant OTs already.

It's all good.
 
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Emma

Con te partirò
Administrator
Hi screamer. Welcome to ESMB. :welcome:Sorry I don't think I said "hi" when you arrived.
 

EZ Linus

Cleared Tomato
Hi screamer2, Love the avatar! Hope we didn't get off to a bad start or anything. Welcome welcome!

Yes, the lingo in and of itself was part of the indoctrination. (If that's what you were saying.)
 
Thursday at 2:00 pm is always a bummer. If your stats are down then it's lower conditions, cut pay, no libs and beans and rice. If they are up then you get to take your libs knowing that next week you have to beat last week's stats and that will probably require staying up until 2:00 - 4:00 am through the week, that is, unless you deliberately covertly crash your own stats so much that you will be able to show upstats for the next 3 or 4 weeks just to milk 1 or 2 more libs or at least laundry time. Ugh.

I realize that, as a SO member, you think you're on a vital mission, but I wonder if anyone ever completely blew off a week for that purpose. You just let yourself take it super easy and casual for one week, such that your statistics plummet, then deal with the immediate consequences, and then let your stats slowly climb from there. Well, I'm sure they make it so you can't get away with that. I suppose the guilt might also eat at you, thanks to the brainwashing.

But still, when you're tired, you're tired...
 

TheOriginalBigBlue

Gold Meritorious Patron
I realize that, as a SO member, you think you're on a vital mission, but I wonder if anyone ever completely blew off a week for that purpose. You just let yourself take it super easy and casual for one week, such that your statistics plummet, then deal with the immediate consequences, and then let your stats slowly climb from there. Well, I'm sure they make it so you can't get away with that. I suppose the guilt might also eat at you, thanks to the brainwashing.

But still, when you're tired, you're tired...

No, you are right. To consciously and deliberately crash your stats for a week just so you have the chance to have the next week upstat is unthinkable to a Sea Org member - but it is amazing how one can develop the ability to do things necessary to survive "unintentionally". To be in the Sea Org you put a lot of things on automatic. Just look at the self censorship of thought. After a while it's like your left hand doesn't know what your right hand is doing. There are so many valid reasons the stats can be down. And I'm not even including the fact that people are avoiding Scientology like the plague. They ripped off another staff member, they traded your best guy for their loser, there wasn't enough money in the FP (Financial Planning) for the most basic things, there was a Hill 10 (Emergency) that pulled people off post and they were up all night or for several days, on and on. It's all completely unsustainable and after a while everyone understands that on some level and resist though they may, rollercoastering stats become a tacitly accepted way of life.
 
Big Blue, I can understand what you're saying, coming from my ex-Catholic perspective. I was in a religious order, somewhat akin to the SO, for a few years. I got out pretty easily, because the grip on me, though it was a similar mind-f--k, was not nearly as "overt", if I may steal that term back from Scientology, LOL.

PS - Sorry to derail the thread a bit. I'm very happy for, and interested to hear more from to screamer2..
 
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cleared cannibal

Silver Meritorious Patron
No, you are right. To consciously and deliberately crash your stats for a week just so you have the chance to have the next week upstat is unthinkable to a Sea Org member - but it is amazing how one can develop the ability to do things necessary to survive "unintentionally". To be in the Sea Org you put a lot of things on automatic. Just look at the self censorship of thought. After a while it's like your left hand doesn't know what your right hand is doing. There are so many valid reasons the stats can be down. And I'm not even including the fact that people are avoiding Scientology like the plague. They ripped off another staff member, they traded your best guy for their loser, there wasn't enough money in the FP (Financial Planning) for the most basic things, there was a Hill 10 (Emergency) that pulled people off post and they were up all night or for several days, on and on. It's all completely unsustainable and after a while everyone understands that on some level and resist though they may, rollercoastering stats become a tacitly accepted way of life.


How about a hurricane ? Is that a valid reason?

Airports closed and power off, curfew imposed.

Will they have to do lowers?

Would have been hard for a FLAG member to have been up last week.
 

TheOriginalBigBlue

Gold Meritorious Patron
How about a hurricane ? Is that a valid reason?

Airports closed and power off, curfew imposed.

Will they have to do lowers?

Would have been hard for a FLAG member to have been up last week.

No excuses! The hurricane was an opportunity to disseminate the workable 3rd and 4th Dynamic technology of Scientology. People should be breaking down the doors to get on course and do auditing after witnessing the many miracles of local OTs, Volunteer Ministers and Sea Org members helping to prepare for the storm and then the recovery effort.

This was a time for Scientology to give back to the community and they wouldn't fail to meet expectations!
 

Enthetan

Master of Disaster
No, you are right. To consciously and deliberately crash your stats for a week just so you have the chance to have the next week upstat is unthinkable to a Sea Org member - but it is amazing how one can develop the ability to do things necessary to survive "unintentionally".

I did this on one post I had. Of course, by that point I was already close to the "screw this shit" stage.

I was in a position where I had the ability to defer products from happening, stat-wise, so that they were counted the following week. At the time, the "libs" policy at Flag Bureau was that you got a full day of libs every other week, IF your stats were up that week. So I had a situation where one week would count towards whether I got my libs, and the next wee wouldn't, so my stats started resembling a saw-tooth pattern. Of course, later they changed it so you would only get libs if your stats were up that week AND on a three-week trend.
 

TheOriginalBigBlue

Gold Meritorious Patron
I did this on one post I had. Of course, by that point I was already close to the "screw this shit" stage.

I was in a position where I had the ability to defer products from happening, stat-wise, so that they were counted the following week. At the time, the "libs" policy at Flag Bureau was that you got a full day of libs every other week, IF your stats were up that week. So I had a situation where one week would count towards whether I got my libs, and the next wee wouldn't, so my stats started resembling a saw-tooth pattern. Of course, later they changed it so you would only get libs if your stats were up that week AND on a three-week trend.

You make a very important distinction between deliberately depressing stats by lower production or rather by deferring the stat into the next week. Conditions assignments were always done on a 3 week graph line trend as I recall but I think libs were based on week over week stats. Were libs always every other week? I seem to recall that they were every week in the 70s/80s. I think LAOs were based on Conditions so you had to keep your condition Normal or above 3 weeks running until you left. Of course, your post would probably be below Normal when you returned so by taking an LOA you were virtually signing on to a guaranteed lower conditions assignment - one more reason to skip LOAs.

But they must have figured out people were gaming the system to get libs, ergo the 3 week thing. I'm sure that was inevitable. The stat system might work if it was based on sanity but the stat system in Scientology is completely insane. Their system creates sharp spikes and drops due to inconsistency and constant disruptions and the stats that they use don't promote sustainability - they promote cannibalism for short term gain. LRH said that policy is only needed where the thetan isn't there or something to that effect. In other words thetans should be able to instinctively understand what is needed and wanted and what is most logical if they are in present time and unaberrated. I always thought that was a great concept and very consistent with the idea that we are trillions of years old and have already done everything many times already. But, then Scientology policy goes on to micromanage absolutely everything in order to remove any and all individual decision points in order to manufacture a completely unthinking robotic society. It always struck me how fundamentally contradictory LRH's concepts of what thetans and people are contrasted to how he treated them in reality. He really didn't trust anyone to succeed - at best he only trusted them to not screw up...much.
 

screamer2

Idiot Bastardson
You make a very important distinction between deliberately depressing stats by lower production or rather by deferring the stat into the next week. Conditions assignments were always done on a 3 week graph line trend as I recall but I think libs were based on week over week stats. Were libs always every other week? I seem to recall that they were every week in the 70s/80s. I think LAOs were based on Conditions so you had to keep your condition Normal or above 3 weeks running until you left. Of course, your post would probably be below Normal when you returned so by taking an LOA you were virtually signing on to a guaranteed lower conditions assignment - one more reason to skip LOAs.

But they must have figured out people were gaming the system to get libs, ergo the 3 week thing. I'm sure that was inevitable. The stat system might work if it was based on sanity but the stat system in Scientology is completely insane. Their system creates sharp spikes and drops due to inconsistency and constant disruptions and the stats that they use don't promote sustainability - they promote cannibalism for short term gain. LRH said that policy is only needed where the thetan isn't there or something to that effect. In other words thetans should be able to instinctively understand what is needed and wanted and what is most logical if they are in present time and unaberrated. I always thought that was a great concept and very consistent with the idea that we are trillions of years old and have already done everything many times already. But, then Scientology policy goes on to micromanage absolutely everything in order to remove any and all individual decision points in order to manufacture a completely unthinking robotic society. It always struck me how fundamentally contradictory LRH's concepts of what thetans and people are contrasted to how he treated them in reality. He really didn't trust anyone to succeed - at best he only trusted them to not screw up...much.

If your "stats were up" you had some leeway. How much leeway you had was based on how much of the "sacrament" ($) you routinely dragged into the GI (gross income, later "corrected gross income".
 

TheOriginalBigBlue

Gold Meritorious Patron
If your "stats were up" you had some leeway. How much leeway you had was based on how much of the "sacrament" ($) you routinely dragged into the GI (gross income, later "corrected gross income".

This is true. It also depended upon who you knew - did somebody with authority have a personal interest in you. This wasn't always a matter of favoritism, just that they needed you or recognized that you served a purpose or had an aptitude that wasn't easy to replace. If you garnished favor with LRH that made a big difference down the line. The point being that in spite of all the lofty policy things are extremely arbitrary in there.

All that being said, the list of people who were ever granted Kha Khan now reads like a list of condemned prisoners in retrospect.
 

Wilbur

Patron Meritorious
You make a very important distinction between deliberately depressing stats by lower production or rather by deferring the stat into the next week. Conditions assignments were always done on a 3 week graph line trend as I recall but I think libs were based on week over week stats. Were libs always every other week? I seem to recall that they were every week in the 70s/80s. I think LAOs were based on Conditions so you had to keep your condition Normal or above 3 weeks running until you left. Of course, your post would probably be below Normal when you returned so by taking an LOA you were virtually signing on to a guaranteed lower conditions assignment - one more reason to skip LOAs.

But they must have figured out people were gaming the system to get libs, ergo the 3 week thing. I'm sure that was inevitable. The stat system might work if it was based on sanity but the stat system in Scientology is completely insane. Their system creates sharp spikes and drops due to inconsistency and constant disruptions and the stats that they use don't promote sustainability - they promote cannibalism for short term gain. LRH said that policy is only needed where the thetan isn't there or something to that effect. In other words thetans should be able to instinctively understand what is needed and wanted and what is most logical if they are in present time and unaberrated. I always thought that was a great concept and very consistent with the idea that we are trillions of years old and have already done everything many times already. But, then Scientology policy goes on to micromanage absolutely everything in order to remove any and all individual decision points in order to manufacture a completely unthinking robotic society. It always struck me how fundamentally contradictory LRH's concepts of what thetans and people are contrasted to how he treated them in reality. He really didn't trust anyone to succeed - at best he only trusted them to not screw up...much.

I also always thought the Birthday Game, in its practical reality, was nuts. The idea of keeping an eye on your stats and managing your area by them made sense, if it was YOU who managed them, and no senior could assign you a condition or punish you for temporary dips in the graph. Then you could make sensible decisions, like, do I stay up all Wednesday night to get my stats up for this week, knowing that the result will be that I am like a zombie all day Thursday and effectively lose a whole day of production in the next week? Or do I do the sensible thing, get a good night's sleep on Wednesday, and be fresh for Thursday. Or do I hard-sell a public to buy services they don't need from money on account, because it will help my stat this week, knowing that in the end the public is going to get disillusioned with Scientology, when the money they had put aside for OT levels keeps getting sequestered for book packages they don't need? The answer to dilemmas like this are OBVIOUS if you are managing your OWN stats, and being treated like an adult by the org. But the Birthday Game makes lunatics out of the best-intentioned people.

I remember that every Thursday afternoon, we would have stupid compliance reports (CRs) to do for some program that was being run by CLO. We would run around the org, sticking up a poster and taking a photo of it, or putting a stack of books on the table and photographing them, for the CRs, and then just put everything back the way it was. An utter waste of an afternoon. The programs were useless, so we only worked on their targets on the Thursday afternoon. Only the easy targets were picked for execution. The programs were utterly useless. It reminds me of the robotic way in which large corporations are run today, and has similarities to how government departments are run. The SYSTEM becomes the THING, and real production disappears, in favour of meeting targets that have nothing to do with reality.

The lunacy of how orgs are run SHOCKED me.

As a student on the Tech Training Corps, I quickly gave up counting how many words I'd looked up, how many demos, etc. At the end of the day I would just look at what my points were for yesterday, ask myself whether I felt I'd done more or less today, and estimate the points accordingly. To me that was far more honest than inventing clay demos to do to get my points up, simply because I knew my points were going to be down.

I think the fundamental problem with the stats thing is where the person isn't trusted to manage their OWN conditions. You are barked at by a senior for being down stat for the week. It breeds short-termism, running around chasing your tail, distrust, and treats you like you are unable to manage anything successfully without being beaten with a stick.

I'd like to think that Hubbard designed it that way to keep people distracted. But I don't think that's the case - I think he believed that the system was effective and 'scientific'. Which speaks loudly to how much real experience he actually had of running an organisation. He may well have been able to expand an org while he was in there, by the power of charisma. But the fact that he told so many stories of org stats crashing when he left the area tells me, not that he was superhuman, but that when his system was applied, it didn't work. It was (and is) nuts.Which is why I was never all that interested in the OEC course.

It took me weeks to get through Staff Status II, at a time when I was looking up every word, and spending a whole day going around in a word chain. And I probably knew more about how to handle a post effectively at the start of SSII than I did at the end of it. Common sense goes a long way when it comes to effective organisation....

W.
 

TheOriginalBigBlue

Gold Meritorious Patron
I also always thought the Birthday Game, in its practical reality, was nuts. The idea of keeping an eye on your stats and managing your area by them made sense, if it was YOU who managed them, and no senior could assign you a condition or punish you for temporary dips in the graph. Then you could make sensible decisions, like, do I stay up all Wednesday night to get my stats up for this week, knowing that the result will be that I am like a zombie all day Thursday and effectively lose a whole day of production in the next week? Or do I do the sensible thing, get a good night's sleep on Wednesday, and be fresh for Thursday. Or do I hard-sell a public to buy services they don't need from money on account, because it will help my stat this week, knowing that in the end the public is going to get disillusioned with Scientology, when the money they had put aside for OT levels keeps getting sequestered for book packages they don't need? The answer to dilemmas like this are OBVIOUS if you are managing your OWN stats, and being treated like an adult by the org. But the Birthday Game makes lunatics out of the best-intentioned people.

I remember that every Thursday afternoon, we would have stupid compliance reports (CRs) to do for some program that was being run by CLO. We would run around the org, sticking up a poster and taking a photo of it, or putting a stack of books on the table and photographing them, for the CRs, and then just put everything back the way it was. An utter waste of an afternoon. The programs were useless, so we only worked on their targets on the Thursday afternoon. Only the easy targets were picked for execution. The programs were utterly useless. It reminds me of the robotic way in which large corporations are run today, and has similarities to how government departments are run. The SYSTEM becomes the THING, and real production disappears, in favour of meeting targets that have nothing to do with reality.

The lunacy of how orgs are run SHOCKED me.

As a student on the Tech Training Corps, I quickly gave up counting how many words I'd looked up, how many demos, etc. At the end of the day I would just look at what my points were for yesterday, ask myself whether I felt I'd done more or less today, and estimate the points accordingly. To me that was far more honest than inventing clay demos to do to get my points up, simply because I knew my points were going to be down.

I think the fundamental problem with the stats thing is where the person isn't trusted to manage their OWN conditions. You are barked at by a senior for being down stat for the week. It breeds short-termism, running around chasing your tail, distrust, and treats you like you are unable to manage anything successfully without being beaten with a stick.

I'd like to think that Hubbard designed it that way to keep people distracted. But I don't think that's the case - I think he believed that the system was effective and 'scientific'. Which speaks loudly to how much real experience he actually had of running an organisation. He may well have been able to expand an org while he was in there, by the power of charisma. But the fact that he told so many stories of org stats crashing when he left the area tells me, not that he was superhuman, but that when his system was applied, it didn't work. It was (and is) nuts.Which is why I was never all that interested in the OEC course.

It took me weeks to get through Staff Status II, at a time when I was looking up every word, and spending a whole day going around in a word chain. And I probably knew more about how to handle a post effectively at the start of SSII than I did at the end of it. Common sense goes a long way when it comes to effective organisation....

W.

I enjoyed your post.

It is kind of a unique experience to actually live in such a dystopian Catch-22 world. I did learn a lot from it but not what they intended or promoted. It taught me what to avoid.

See, I now think LRH knew exactly what he was doing. You can't divert that much money from a unit without causing a constant state of catabolism. Scientology orgs are like a concentration camp survivor that is living off of the metabolizing of their own muscle tissue. Maybe early on he was concerned about maintaining a balance but when it reached a certain critical mass I think he accepted a much higher attrition rate in terms of lost public and lost staff in favor of fewer people who were more fanatical. The stat system was always designed to bypass the kind of individuality you describe so upper management had an institutional rational for micromanaging.

As you say, Scientology programs don't work. They don't work because they are based on Scientology evaluations which are based on Scientology logic. Scientology logic attributes everything to some kind of abstract mental phenomena which may exist but probably doesn't. How much of Scientology logic is actually based on LRH's belief in BTs, drugged BTs or Targs? For him to think the entire population of earth was infested with these invisible mind altering critters means that all of his administrative technology was based on a huge lack of faith in human credibility so that is the unspoken senior datum in everything.

LRH was motivated by control. Yes, he amassed a fortune but he died in an RV. I think we can agree that he wanted money but he needed to control people to get it. I think everything about Scientology policy can be defined by LRH's personal desire for control and a fundamental lack of faith in people.

The Birthday Game was/is an abomination. It is the consummate stat push in the name of he who coined and condemned stat pushes. We were taught that the goal was to produce a viable final product, avoid overt products, service the public, quality, quality, quality and then they give us this crap! No longer are we working together with other orgs, now they are the competition, the other guys. Who can beat themselves up more to give LRH the most wonderful Birthday present of having the best stats and the most over regged abused public and staff - oh, and let's not forget how humble LRH is/was. He didn't want to be worshiped like a god or anything like that. In Hymn of Asia we really get that he is just a man and I especially liked the bit about how there can be love for insects.
 
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