A little background may help the uninitiated understand why we say this is a huge gamble by Miscavige, and one whose timing is particularly risky.
In 1996, a decade after the death of L. Ron Hubbard, David Miscavige revealed his first “Golden Age of Tech,” which made significant changes to the way auditors were trained. These were supposed to be improvements, but for Scientologists who believe that L. Ron Hubbard’s ideas and processes cannot be improved on, it was highly controversial.
Jason Beghe has explained in interviews that his disillusionment — and that of many others — began with the Golden Age of Tech, when he was asked to redo expensive levels of training. As others have told us, they remember thinking, “if the church discovered errors in training, why do we have to pay for the fix?”
Since then, resentment about the way Miscavige has altered Hubbard’s original books and teachings has been building. In 2007, Miscavige republished “The Basics” — Hubbard’s essential books of Scientology teachings — saying that many errors of transcriptions had been found in them. Scientologists were put under intense pressure to buy multiple sets of the new books, which, with new editions of Hubbard’s lectures, were sold for $3,000 a set.
Even loyal church members couldn’t help thinking it was more cash grab than anything else.
There’s just no doubt that Miscavige is facing an exodus of longtime, loyal members in recent years, many of them fed up with the way he has made changes to Hubbard’s original “technology.”
And now, he’s doubling down.
