Inside Scientology - Janet Reitman [44]
And so in June 1968, Jeff flew to England, excited to begin his new life at Scientology's worldwide headquarters at Saint Hill. Upon arriving, he was told that the church's promotions department had moved: the Publications Org, or Pubs, as it was called, was now located in Edinburgh, Scotland. Instead of settling into life at the manor, Jeff settled into a shabby, drafty, four-story building located "in an alley behind an alley." The place was filled with books, with a suite of editorial and design offices on the top floor. The hundred or so people on staff ranged in age from the early twenties to the midforties and had come to Edinburgh from America, England, Australia, and Scandinavia.
Scientology had taken off as a fad in the United States, and its popularity in the United Kingdom was nearly as high. At the close of 1967, the Church of Scientology in Great Britain reported it had made nearly $1 million that year —not as much as the Catholic Church, surely, but more than many new religious movements. At Saint Hill, where students now flocked from all over the world, the weekly income often averaged around $80,000. Working for Scientology, Jeff found out, was far different than simply doing Scientology. "We have a planet to clear," Jeff's supervisor told him on his first day on the job—a phrase he'd hear over and over again for many years to come. Staff members were paid £7 per week, which, amazingly, was enough for Jeff to rent a small flat with some friends, buy food and cigarettes, and still have a bit left over. He received most of his Scientology courses and auditing for free, but in return, he was expected to work every day and many nights, including weekends, with a day off only once every few weeks. "We don't keep a wog schedule here," the supervisor said.
Non-Scientologists were called wogs, a term thrown around liberally among church staff: "wog ideas," "wog justice," and "wog science." Hubbard began to use this offensive British slang term* in 1953 to denote any person who was not a Scientologist, in his estimation a "run-of-the-mill, garden-variety humanoid." For Jeff, who after the Kennedy assassinations and the conduct of the Vietnam War had, like many of his friends, bought into the idea of government conspiracies and other nefarious activities of "the establishment," wog was just another word for a member of mainstream society under the thumb of the Man.
The wog world, Jeff learned, was an "enturbulated" place. Enturbulated was a word that Hubbard made up and defined as "agitated and disturbed." There were many new words to learn in Scientology. Some were pure invention; and others were familiar but redefined by Hubbard. Ethics, for example, was a significant term in Scientology, perhaps the most significant. It was defined as "rationality toward the greatest good for the greatest number of dynamics." As one of the first lessons in Scientology, Jeff had learned that there were eight dynamics of existence, starting with your relationship with yourself, and then progressing to your relationship with your family, social group, society, plants, animals, the larger physical world, and ultimately, with the Supreme Being, however you chose to define that.
An ethical Scientologist, and an ethical person, in Hubbard's view, was someone who had successful relationships on all dynamics. But the most important relationship was with the group, or the third dynamic, which was understood to be the Church of Scientology. Upstanding members who made gains in Scientology, furthering the group's overall goals, were considered "in-ethics": in line with organizational principles. Those who misbehaved in some way were