Secret Sea Org

Secret v. Confidential

This post is in response to the May 15, 2025 poll extended to May 29, 2025. Be sure to get your votes in on this weeks’ poll.

There is a big difference between secret and Confidential. Secrets are those things that are whispered between people – shhhh, don’t tell. They are usually things which should not be kept secret, things which are only not shared because someone needs things hidden. Confidentiality, on the other hand, means that a person can come to you with information regarding finances, or other things, such as a legal case, and know that they can trust you not to share those things.

Hubbard liked to say that everything was confidential. It was just secret. He made us all feel like we were in on a big secret with him. He was hiding. And Scientologists as a whole, and the Guardian’s Office and Sea Org in particular, were his personal protectors.

When reading his Flag Orders with open eyes, I see just how bamboozled I was. He was just trying to keep Sea Org a big secret. We were not supposed to let anyone know Sea Org even existed. If he could convince us that it was in our best interests to stay in hiding (something he preached was a bad thing) then he could keep his con going.

And, we went along with it.

Flag Order 2415 specifically states that Sea Org is a secret.

We succeed if we are least noticed. Yes, he specifically states that. This is in the basic Sea Org hat. The very first handbook a Sea Org member reads when they start Sea Org. It was something I read on my second day in Sea Org. I read it, I kept on reading. And I stayed in Sea Org.

Flag Order 2366R gets even deeper in the secrecy weeds. Now we are told that we can’t even mark our mail as Confidential. We have to use codes to say something is confidential.

The interesting thing about this is that I bought into this at all. Why in the world would I believe that all of this cloak and dagger operation was OK — for a supposed religion? It is frightening to look back and see that the group thing so easily overrode rationality. There are dozens of similar policies in the 253 pages of the Sea Org Handbook. The initial handbook that a person starting Sea Org reads. Dozens of times, they are told that everything they are doing from there on out is a secret.

But the secrets weren’t just kept from the outside world. Each person in Sea Org was so compartmentalized that they were required to keep secrets from most of the other people they knew. The only time a person was supposed to blab was to tell on someone. Or confess their own sins. Looking back at the reality of even that small piece of day-to-day life in Sea Org, it’s amazing that anyone who leaves ever recovers.

Learning that it’s okay to talk to others and that what you are doing in your daily work is not a secret that you need to hide from your coworkers is an interesting concept to relearn once a person takes the leap back into the real world. Some people are never able to make that leap because there is so much difference. There is so much programming occurring on a day to day basis in Scientology that it’s almost impossible to put the toothpaste back in the tube.

But secrets are never good. And Scientology “confidentiality” was not confidential, it was only secret. Once a person figures that out, they may have a fighting chance of making it on the outside.