Scientology A New Slant on Life 1965 Chapter 15
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Honest People Have Rights, Too
After you have achieved a high level of ability, you will be the first to insist upon your rights to live with honest people.
When you know the technology of the mind, you know that it is a mistake to use “individual rights” and “freedom” as arguments to protect those who would only destroy.
Individual rights were not originated to protect criminals, but to bring freedom to honest men. Into this area of protection then dived those who needed “freedom” and “individual liberty” to cover their own questionable activities.
Freedom is for honest people. No man who is not himself honest can be free—he is in his own trap. When his own deeds cannot be disclosed, then he is a prisoner; he must withhold himself from his fellows and is a slave to his own conscience. Freedom must be deserved before any freedom is possible.
To protect dishonest people is to condemn them to their own hells. By making “individual rights” a synonym for “protect the criminal” one helps bring about a slave state for all, for where “individual liberty” is abused, an impatience with it arises which at length sweeps us all away. The targets of all disciplinary laws are the few who err. Such laws, unfortunately, also injure and restrict those who do not err. If all were honest, there would be no disciplinary threats.
There is only one way out for a dishonest person—facing up to his own responsibilities in the society and putting himself back into communication with his fellow man, his family, the world at large. By seeking to invoke his “individual rights” to protect himself from an examination of his deeds, he reduces, just that much, the future of individual liberty—for he himself is not free. Yet he infects others who are honest by using their right to freedom to protect himself.
Uneasy lies the head that wears a guilty conscience.
And it will lie no more easily by seeking to protect misdeeds by pleas of “freedom means that you must never look at me”. The right of a person to survive is directly related to his honesty.
Freedom for man does not mean freedom to injure man. Freedom of speech does not mean freedom to harm by lies.
Man cannot be free while there are those amongst him who are slaves to their own terrors.
The mission of a techno-space society is to subordinate the individual and control him by economic and political duress. The only casualty in a machine age is the individual and his freedom.
To preserve that freedom one must not permit men to hide their evil intentions under the protection of that freedom. To be free, a man must be honest with himself and with his fellows.
If a man uses his own honesty to protest the unmasking of dishonesty, then that man is an enemy of his own freedom.
We can stand in the sun only so long as we don’t let the deeds of others bring the darkness.
Freedom is for the honest men. Individual liberty exists only for those who have the ability to be free.
Who would punish when he could salvage?
Only a madman would break a wanted object he could repair.
The individual must not die in this machine age—rights or no rights. The criminal and madman must not triumph with their new-found tools of destruction.
The least free person is the person who cannot reveal his own acts and who protests the revelation of the improper acts of others. On such people will be built a future political slavery where we all have numbers—and our guilt—unless we act.
It is fascinating that blackmail and punishment are the keynotes of all dark operations. What would happen if these two commodities no longer existed? What would happen if all men were free enough to speak? Then and only then, would you have freedom.
On the day when we can fully trust each other, there will be peace on Earth.