Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief

by Lawrence Wright

When a preclear voices a criticism of Scientology or expresses a desire to leave the church, the auditor’s response is to discover the “crimes” that the client has committed against the group. In Scientology jargon, those crimes are called “overts and withholds.” An overt is an action taken against the moral code of the group, and a withhold is an overt action that the person is refusing to acknowledge. Hubbard explained that the only reason a person would want to leave Scientology is because he has committed a crime against the group. Paradoxically, this is because humanity is basically good; he wants to separate himself from the others in order to protect the group from his own bad behavior.