TheOriginalBigBlue
Gold Meritorious Patron
...as opposed to:
BLA BLA BLA Hubbard good, Hubbard great, Hubbard is the greatest!!!!
Hubbardhu Akbar!!!!?
That's it? I'm beginning to doubt your resolve here.
I can see how one would be confused about Miscavige though. On one hand you have extremely intelligent people like Jeffrey Augustine making the strong legal argument that Miscavige has no legitimacy as Hubbard's successor. This serves to support a legal argument against his authority and the corporate structure and ironically this can be interpreted by Hubbard loyalists as a rational for maintaining faith in Hubbard and Scientology's credibility and excusing Hubbard for all of Scientology's evils.
But on the other hand Hubbard didn't put Miscavige in ASI to transfer 10s of millions into his personal accounts out of a lack of trust in Miscavige. The Scientology corporate structure and it's actual power structure have always been carefully kept undefinable and at arm's length to hide Hubbard's direct financial and managerial control. It is a mafia model using complicated structures and straw men. When looking at a mafia and trying to understand who the successor is you don't look at the Secretary of State filings and Board Minutes, you look at who the most powerful lieutenant is and by all accounts that was Miscavige. Hubbard was paranoid. Do we really expect that he would put his mafia successor in writing? No, he would keep his options open to the end. Why set the groundwork for a coup if you don't have to? Hubbard's modus operandi was to toss people under the bus when they acquired enough power and respect that represented a threat. It was always a fine balance with him. Build them up and tear them down, then build them up again a little more in his image each time. He needed powerful reliable henchmen who he felt confident could be controlled. Why would he care about a power struggle after he was dead? Miscavige was the obvious natural consequence of all of Hubbard's actions and inactions, or for our true believers, overts of commission and omission.
I'm also convinced that if Hubbard was still struggling with his own personal BTs up until the day he died that he must not have fully trusted any other human being to be completely BT free either and if anyone could still have BTs then how could they ever be fully trusted? In his eyes we were all hopelessly degraded. Also, Hubbard's core belief was "Do as thou wilt shall be the whole of the law". Or, in Scientologese, "Be at total cause over Matter Energy Space and Time". Of course, that is impossible as long as there is another thetan out there doing the same thing so by definition Hubbard's goal had to include being at total cause over all other thetans as well. So we are back to "Do as thou wilt shall be the whole of the law". Clearly defining a successor somehow just doesn't jive with all this total control. I'd also add that having people under him engaging in power struggles served to keep them weak enough to not contest his control and indeed, we see that as a pattern - all the levels of management, orgs, missions and public in competition, mistrusting, and doubting the levels of devotion of each other. In spite of his decrees against musical chairs, and in this context I mean excessive transfers of staff as opposed to Miscavige's imaginative torments, from my experience musical chairs was always the status quo. Eventually it occurred to me that this served a greater purpose and now I'm convinced it was to maintain instability so the entire organization could be more easily manipulated. Again, not formally naming a successor fits this pattern of paranoia, obsessive control and management through contrived instability.
Scientology isn't just a belief system, or an organization - it is a culture, and Miscavige epitomizes that culture just as Hubbard conceived it.
