going-clear-scientology-hollywood-and-the-prison-of-belief-by-lawrence-wright-2

Scientology because, quite frankly, they’re scared,” Koppel observed.
“Oh, no, no, no, no.”
“I’m telling you, people are scared,” Koppel insisted.
“Let’s not give the American public the wrong impression,” said Miscavige. “The
person getting harassed is myself and the church.”
Koppel then lobbed what seemed like an easy question for a man who had spent so
much time preparing for this encounter. “See if you can explain to me why I would want
to be a Scientologist.”
“Because you care about yourself and life itself,” Miscavige said eagerly. He gave the
example of communication skills. “This is something that major breakthroughs exist in
Scientology, being able to communicate in the world around you,” he said. “There’s an
actual formula for communication which can be understood. You can drill on this
formula.”
“So far in life, I haven’t had a whole lot of trouble communicating,” Koppel drolly
noted.
“What in your life do you feel is not right, that you would like to help?” Miscavige
asked. It was a classic Scientology technique, to nd a subject’s “ruin,” the thing that
was blocking his access to happiness.
“I feel perfectly comfortable with my life,” Koppel replied.
Miscavige switched tactics. “Let’s look at it this way, then, what Scientology does. If
you look out across the world today, you could say that if you take a person who’s
healthy, doing well, like yourself, you’d say that person is normal, not a crazy, not
somebody who is psychotic, you look at a wall and they call it an elephant,” he said,
extemporizing. “And you can see people below that—crazy people, criminals—that I
think society in general will look at and say, ‘That breed of person hasn’t something
quite right because they’re not up to this level of personality.’…What we are trying to
do in Scientology is take somebody from this higher level and move them up to greater
ability.”
“What about the folks ‘down there’?”
“We don’t ignore them. My point is this: Scientology is there to make the able more
able.”
“Another way of saying that is: you’re interested in folks who’ve got money.”
Miscavige objected, claiming that the money in the church goes to good causes. “We
are the largest social reform group in the world,” he said, adding that if a person stays
in Scientology long enough, he’ll have plenty of money. Then he referenced Sawyer’s
report again. “The one girl there that was complaining about it, a girl named Vicki
Aznaran, which by the way, this is a girl who was kicked out for trying to bring
criminals into the church, something she didn’t mention.”
“You say a ‘girl.’ I think we’re talking about a grown woman, right?”
“A grown woman, excuse me,” Miscavige said. “She violated the mores and codes of
the group.”
“Either you have made an accurate charge against someone or—what a number
of … the pieces written about Scientology suggest is that when you have a critic before