Introduction

INTRODUCTION

I told you all the stuff about Scientology that’s already been said about Scientology, ad nauseam. And you want to hear the rest of the story; you want to hear the other side of the story. And I told you that that is a waste of my time – I’ve tried to tell that story and it’s always wound up in the editing room floor. Because we have a mimesis problem in this culture which is this obsessive copying, like sheep. And it applies to the media and it applies to documentarians that I have dealt with.

Virtually anything that strays outside the agreed upon narrative doesn’t see the light of day. So, I consider it a colossal waste of time and that’s why I insisted and you agreed, that if I do that for you, you are going to do it under one condition and that is that, if I don’t like where your edit is going, or is headed, or being produced, I have access to everything that I told you – all cuts, and can use it as I see fit – I publish it if I want to. And since you agreed to that, I agreed to go ahead and tell you.

Now, this mimesis problem – it’s a sort of a form of denialism where, in this culture particularly, of this click-bait culture, most news, most documentary work, is created to serve a particular public. They are trying to re-enforce ideas that people have, or trying to sell ideas and get people to adopt narratives. And what it is, is that people adopt narratives and then they are fed stuff that reinforces that narrative. And if it reinforces the narrative, it reinforces their views and they will go with it. If it doesn’t agree with their chosen narrative, they just ignore it. And so this is the rest of the story on Scientology that just gets ignored because it doesn’t fit the easy narrative.

You know, I've have had this experience with a number of media, a number of documentarians, where I attempt to tell it and there’s just this sort of, unconscious kind of look, this hypnotic glaze kind of goes over their eyes and they kind of sit through it. No follow up questions, no nothing. It just kind of goes through like a blank and then they're right back to peppering about the scandalous stuff that they can, you know, that’s already been said a hundred times to try to reinforce the official narrative.

That narrative incidentally – this whole sort of talent pool for the anti-Scientology media, comes from what I call the Anti-Scientology Cult, which in essence is a troll-farm. It’s a number of blogs and social media network sites where a lot of people just pile on and obsess over Scientology. What the sheep on the farm don’t understand, the participants, the vast majority of them, is that there is only three farmers in the farm system. It’s what I call the troika. There’s three people who supply virtually all the memes that these people exist to replicate and then pass on.

And what the sheep don’t understand, is that the three are doing it solely and utterly for profit. In other words, it is all presented as if this is some selfless, noble, heroic idea about helping “former Scientologists” right.

The one thing that you should know at the outset, is that the troika – you know they rail about this supposed strict hierarchically controlled religion. Well, the interesting thing is the watchword with all things A-S-C, or Anti-Scientology Cult, are hypocrisy. They literally accuse Scientology of that which they themselves do and intend. And they consider that they have a hierarchy – the problem is that each one of the three parts of the cluster, thinks that they're in charge. I’ll get into that in more detail as we go.

But there is one thing that they all agree on, and that is that the Bible – the definitive “narrative” of the anti-Scientology cult – is Going Clear by Lawrence Wright, the book, as condensed and done in a movie by Alex Gibney, that they consider “the Bible”. That is the base narrative that they just continuously repeat and regurgitate and then try to add new names and new faces to try to perpetuate and continue to run. And so I think that it is probably best to begin by addressing the bible of the ASC.