Moonlighting
an Art of Dying Fragment
Moonlighting (secondary jobs outside the organization in order to buy food and pay the rent) was a touchy issue. Our Prince detested it, decried the need for it with one hand, while with the other never allowing staff to earn enough to live on church income alone.
Two issues rear their ugly heads for me:
The workability of His Technology — delivering what He promised, for one; and, for two, His love of money.
I’ve covered the workability in other fragments, especially the fragment on Big League Sales, but I should restate that my conviction remains unsullied that if His Technology had indeed delivered what Our Prince so often promised, every org in the world would have made more than enough money to support staff working full-time without the need to moonlight. As I have said elsewhere, people would have been beating down our doors for it, or more of it. We would not have been able to keep people away.
Also, as I put it in the Dashing Hopes fragment: The terrible and tragic truth is that Scientology has never worked as promised. Yes, it provides relief at its lower levels (much like psychotherapy provides relief, or confessing to your priest provides relief), but the vast spiritual realms forecast and promised at the upper (OT) levels were all but empty dreams, yet clung to by so many, so many.
For had Scio worked as promised, uniformly, for everyone, even the feeblest and most rudimentary reasoning would conclude that Scio would now — after over seventy years in play — be the largest, most coveted religion on Earth: you would not be able to keep people out, and those released and now pure spirit would never, ever, shut up about it. All this, had it worked, but, alas, it did and does not — at least not to the promised heights.
As for His love of money: I have come across more than a few accounts detailing Our Prince cherishing His money. Suitcases of it. The image of Scrooge McDuck diving into and taking a swim in his gold-coin vault comes to mind; love of money not for its purchase power, but for itself.
Some quote Our Prince as stating (in the late 1940s) that the way to make real money is to start a religion. While he may have said this, I do not believe that this was his motive for researching Dianetics and, then later, Scientology. But I do believe that his thirst for money for money’s sake was kindled and grew (out of all proportions) as the Scio universe grew.
I also know that Sea Org reserves, even in the 1970s ran in the millions of dollars, while staff either starved or moonlighted — Sea Org members did have room and board covered but food, at lean times, was reduced to rice and beans.
This love of and thirst for money is probably the greatest and darkest legacy passed on from Our Prince to the current powers that be, Chairman Dave included, for these days the Church seems to be about little else, and current reserves is reputed to range in the billions of dollars — while, I’m sure, staff still starve or moonlight (to buy food and pay the rent).
This picture, and reality, is so far removed from and alien to the dream and hope I nursed in 1969 when I joined what I thought to be the Sangha of world-saviors, the brotherhood of getting this planet out of the mess it was so obviously in.
It’s more of a mess than ever today — or at least in the same order of mess-magnitude as always; and Scio is not the world’s leading religion.
Enough said.
© Wolfstuff
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