Speaker 1: Today, I'm going to be speaking
with Mike Rinder, who is a former senior executive of the Church of Scientology, as well as the
C organization. Mike, it's so great to have you on today. Speaker 6: Thanks, David, it's lovely to be
here. Speaker 1: So I've interviewed both first
and second generation Scientology members, I know that often the dynamics for one's relationship
to Scientology are different, depending on whether your parents were already part of
it when you were born or not. Talk to us a little bit about your path in. Speaker 6: OK, I'm second generation Scientologist,
my parents got involved in Scientology in Australia when Hubbard went there to do some
lectures in 1959. And so from a very young age, I was raised
in a Scientology family. And then once I finished high school, I joined
what's called the Sea Organization, which is the like the elite in a core of Scientology,
people that devote their entire lives to supposedly achieving the aims of the religion. They sign a billion year contract because
Scientologists believe that you live many different lifetimes and your spirit transcends
bodies. And so you commit yourself basically to an
eternity of service of Scientology. And I did that from the age of 18 until I
left when I was 53. Speaker 1: So there's already five branching
paths we could go down here. Let's let's address a few maybe of the sort
of nuts and bolts you say when you finished high school, a Scientology big on people that
are part of the Sea Org not going to college. Speaker 6: Absolutely. Hubbard. I mean, everything in Scientology is based
on what Hubbard's view of things are. And Hubbard had a very negative opinion of
educational systems and educational institutions, partly because he dropped out of college. But also he figured that he had come up with
a, quote, technology of study that made everything else sort of irrelevant. And because he believed that Scientology addresses
everything there is to know about life and the world, that it was far more important
for children to be educated in Scientology than educated in, quote, warg meaning non
Scientology stuff. Speaker 1: Got it. And then in terms of the Sea Org, I know that
other Sea Org former Sea Org folks I've spoken to say they got no salary, they basically
got housing. And then that was part of the way that the
church would exert control over them. Was that your situation? Speaker 6: Yeah, absolutely, David, that's
everybody who was in the sea organization is becomes basically an indentured servant
to the to the Organization of Scientology. In other words, you live you eat your health
care, whatever it may be, is provided by Scientology. You don't earn money per say. You get what's called a stipend, which can
range from nothing to fifty dollars a week. Maybe if you're lucky and you so you have
no resources available. You most see your members do not own a vehicle. They don't own a house. They don't have any sort of worldly means. Many of them joined the sea organization even
younger than I did. They don't even have a high school diploma. They don't have any anything that allows them
or would allow them to walk out into the real world and carry on a normal life. So the fear within the sea organization and
and it's something that is cultivated is that stepping outside of the organization is going
to be tantamount to committing suicide. You know, there's this old joke, not so much
a joke, but a statement that goes around in the in the Sea Org is if you leave the Sea
Org, all you'll do is end up living under a bridge or flipping burgers at McDonald's
that you don't have any any other avenue to pursue in life other than what we are offering
you. Speaker 1: So at some point you start to work
your way up and you start to actually you eventually become chief spokesperson and representative
of Scientology to the media at that point, or maybe put it a different way. At what point did you start to have doubts
about your everything that you were doing and what you had been told? Speaker 6: I started to have doubts probably
about five years before I left and I left in 2007 in the early 2000s. But you have to understand, David, that having
doubts is there is this enormous push and pull of what you've been taught in Scientology. And there is a very fundamental principle
that Hubbard uses to hang on to people, which is that your condition, whatever whatever
condition you find yourself in is your own. You've caused that that you've caused if it's
a bad state of affairs, you've caused it by doing bad things. And so when you and it even is down to the
level of if you're contemplating leaving this organization, it means that you've done bad
things to this organization. So you get this push and pull. Oh, my God, something's wrong here. Oh, my Scientology teaching tells me that
that's because I've done something bad and I need to look inside within myself and figure
out what that is. So and there are a lot of other factors that
go into it. Like I had two children and a wife. If I decide I wish to leave, then that becomes
a problem, because if I tell my wife, she's probably going to report me and then I'll
be stopped. If I don't tell her, I'm going to lose my
wife and children. So there's a and and that's just the sort
of most surface factors. Speaker 1: So talk a little bit about the
concept I've heard before about I will be prevented from leaving. And what I want to understand is as a general
thing, someone calls the police and says they're being held against their will, for example,
and police show up and, you know, you don't even really need a warrant in that situation. You're able to verify someone's well-being. Did you even have access to a phone? Could you even call police if you are being
held against your will? Speaker 6: Well, this this depends on where
you're at. If I saw where I was at Golden Era Productions,
the international headquarters of Scientology in Riverside County, you don't have commonly
access to a phone and the phones that are there in order to be able to make any call,
you have to go via reception, I say. But beneath that, David, is there is another
very well inculcated idea in Scientology that going to the police or law enforcement is
a big no no, this is just not done. Nobody goes to call the police or do something
that is outside of the world of Scientology to solve a problem within Scientology. Now, obviously, if you're if you're at the
point where you're ready to jump the fence and run down the the highway in the middle
of nowhere and hope that someone is going to pick you up, then you're not in that mindset. But it takes a lot of. A lot of thinking outside the bubble that
you exist in to get to that point right and bite by very definition, because you're in
a bubble of agreed upon thoughts and ideas and everybody else agrees with you and what's
right and what's wrong is all agreed upon. It's very difficult to think outside that
bubble. So that's that's why Larry writes so cleverly
called his book Going Clear Scientology and the Prison of Belief, because though there
are security guards, there's lights, there's motion sensors on the fences, there's cameras
everywhere, et cetera, et cetera. The real prison of Scientology and particularly
service members is here. Speaker 1: Right. And did you hear some of the former Scientology
people I've spoken to started to take issue with the practices as an organization, but
almost continued having the doctrine beliefs even after they left, were your doubts with
one the other or both? Speaker 6: With primarily one the the organization
and David Miscavige, Speaker 1: interesting, so your initial problem
was not you didn't believe the that aliens previously were here or you weren't doubting
that you were doubting the organization. Speaker 6: Correct. Why? It takes and you know, I obviously have spoken
to a lot of former Scientologists, a lot of former Sea Org members. It's sort of like a stage of peeling the onion,
of unburdening yourself, of ideas that have been sort of built into your DNA, almost particularly
if you're raised that way. And the easiest ones are the ones that have
a very physical manifestation, like being beaten up by David Miscavige is something
that's a very, you know, tangible here now thing. The ideas of that Dianetics and Hubbard's
book, Dianetics is a load of bunk, takes a lot longer to get sort of shed because it's
it's not so it's not so tangible. Speaker 1: That makes a lot of sense and I
mean, when when you it seems as though it takes in a sense more, although in a physical
sense, the decision to leave or try to leave seems like the piece that's most difficult. It seems that may be the beliefs that have
been ingrained in you your entire life are really the most difficult, although in a different
way. Speaker 6: Yeah, you're you're absolutely
right, David. And I don't think that there is anybody that
you will ever talk to who is a former Scientologist that will tell you anything different than
that other experience. Speaker 1: You talk talk about what it means
to be in the hole and your experience in the hole for two years. Speaker 6: It's well, it's really a prison. It was a prison that was created at the international
headquarters by David Miscavige in a double wide trailer, a building that was constructed
out of two double wide trailers. And the doors were bugged and the windows
were screwed shut. And there was a security guard at the only. Access point to the building and we were put
in there to figure out why we were suppressive persons, suppressive person in Scientology
means someone who is intent upon destroying mankind. Right. And Miscavige, David Miscavige, the the ecclesiastical
leader of the Scientology religion, as he likes to call himself, was. Always seeking to be the person who was the
dog, the big dog, the dominant personality in the environment, and kept anybody who was
a potential threat to his control of the organization constantly in a state of am I in trouble? Am I not in trouble? Am I going to be sent to to shovel in Louisiana? Am I am I in good graces today? And the whole was sort of the final manifestation
of this, where he basically took everybody who was at the senior echelon of Scientology
and put them in this prison and said, when you guys figure out why you're so bad, maybe
you can get out. Right. And that devolved in this, you know. Going clear gives a pretty good depiction
of some of what happened, the Alex Gibney movie, the HBO movie, but the the the truth
of the matter is it devolved into a sort of a Lord of the Flies world of people striving
to demonstrate to David Miscavige that they were more on his team than anybody else by
attacking the other people and saying, you know, you're a bad person or beating them
up or yelling at them or, you know, famously in the case of Debbie Cook, who was put there
and testified on the stand that she was put in a garbage can with a sign around her neck
and people poured water over until she was shivering in and being physically and verbally
abused. This happened as the sort of. Routine that ended up being in the hole and
it was pretty pretty. Both bizarre and horrifying and shocking and
a little unbelievable to think that that could be happening in today's United States of America. Speaker 1: Yeah, well, I think that's that's
the question a lot of people in the audience have, which is how is how is it happening? We're going to continue our conversation and
the full conversation will be posted on our YouTube channel. We're going to go to a break on the podcast,
TV and radio show. We've been speaking, of course, with Mike
Rinder, a former senior executive of the Church of Scientology and the Sea Org. The full conversation will be on our YouTube
channel
