View source for Government and Organization (SHSBC 661101)

'''Series:''' Saint Hill Special Briefing Course (SHSBC)

'''Date:''' 1 November 1966

'''Speaker:''' L. Ron Hubbard

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Thank you. Thank you very much. We have a lecture here today because I – for the sole reason that I haven’t put in an appearance lately.

That is the sole reason you’re having a lecture. There isn’t anything you don’t know; there isn’t anything at all. Now, there isn’t anything you don’t know, anything, there isn’t anything you need to know.

You are all – wise, totally omnipotent, totally omniscient (got to get some misunderstoods in here) and the last “O,” ornery. I mean, I shouldn’t… Yes, well, anyway, I’ll define those words for you, you know. “Onmiscient,” that’s knowing everything, you see, and “onmipotent,” that is totally powerful. And although you are all these things, of course, some of you haven’t totally made the grade.

So, I thought I’d give you a talk today on some changes in organization and as a subject which is as far from most of your interests as an Advisory Council. And I begin with a word of warning that you had, in actual fact, better be interested in what these things are because you’re looking at some – thing that is governing your destinies and if you don’t have a good government, you don’t have good organization. In view of the fact there isn’t any such thing on the planet as a good government at the moment, that I know anything about, why, we’re in the field of total invention here, and this will be a brand – new Scientology first: We walk up to a good government.

Everybody admits, when thoroughly pressed, that a benign monarchy is the best form of government. But in view of the fact that a benign monarchy cannot be succeeded, why, it possibly lacks a great deal in its longevity Over a long period of time, why, governments that are set up as benign monarchs get unbenign monarchs sooner or later, and they develop themselves a Nero or something, and everything goes appetite over tin cup.ƒ Well, man is so afraid of a vicious turn in a benign monarchy that he actually can’t have one, and he says then that he has to have other governmental forms. But the highest governmental form is a benign monarchy.

I’ve had royalists – even in this day and age there is such a thing as a royalist – anarchists, communists, Republicans, Democrats, Laborites, Tories, all sitting wound in  GOVERNMENT AND 2  ORGANIZATION the same room and the only kind of government I could get them all to mutually agree upon was a benign monarchy. That was the form of government on which they would agree, with this single proviso, that there was no way to succeed it. Once the benign monarch kicks the bucket, why then, what happens?

Well, catastrophe occurs because you get unbenign monarchs, and he inherits all this power and he starts suppressing people. In other words, sooner or later, any government which is set up on a one – man proposition, and so forth, by inheritance, runs the risk of having a suppressive fill that role. So, man is attempting to prevent suppressives, and in his effort to prevent suppressives he also prevents decent government.

Now, in the first place we can say that a benign monarchy is the finest form of government but there is one thing wrong with it, is no benign monarch can wear all of his hats. And by the very fact of being unable to wear his hats he, of course, can become so exhausted that he cannot govern effectively. Or, on the other hand, he gets so disgusted that he doesn’t.

Having been through all such cycles – not just on this track but on earlier tracks – I speak with some authority along this line. I’m not saying I was always a king; I remember one time vividly being a garbage man. But the main thing in which you should be interested in this field is the fact that you have, if you keep it in operation, the mechanism which prevents governments from becoming unbenign.

If you go ahead and remedy hors de combat – give you another misunderstood word. It’s what used to happen to you when you were a knight. That is, pardon me, it’s what happened – always happened to the other fellow.

And when you let go of this data concerning suppressives and potential trouble sources – if you let go of that technology, if that technology goes out of control and that technology is not understood – then you inevitably will have bad organizations and will eventually have an organization which will be no better than the best of the Earth governments, which is pretty bad. Now, the thing which makes a government bad, of course, is it gets a suppressive amongst it. And one suppressive breeds another suppressive.

You’ll find out that a suppressive wants nothing around him but suppressives, and you eventually get your red – tab generals who are advocating wars of attrition. If you want to know the type of government with which you are dealing, look at the type of war it fights, and if it only fights wars of attrition – which is to say, grind away each other against each other – then you know that nobody’s – nobody wants any victory. Victory is not being envisioned.

What they are looking for is simply a method of knocking off as many troops as possible. Now, once in a while you rail against a general, or something like this, you see, and say he’s not a good general. Well, actually what you’re objecting to is he normally doesn’t care whose troops he knocks off his or the enemy’s.

GOVERNMENT AND 3  ORGANIZATION I’ve been taught very harshly along this line, and the best military training is to do the most in the least time at the least expense and keep your own people from getting banged up. You severely outlaw the fact that you bang up your own people; your objective is to bang up the enemy. And what you – what you are – your objective is, is to win.

That’s the objectives of war and a proper conduct of war. I haven’t stated it a la textbook, but that’s it. Your objective is to win and you wish to win at – in the least time at the least cost and at the least number of casualties amongst your own people, and also, if the problem of rehabilitation comes up into it, actually with the least damage to the enemy.

Because you always have to put the enemy back together again anyhow, you see, if you – if you win. This then is a proper war. And I’m not talking to you about war; war being good, bad or indifferent.

Conflict is conflict and it does exist. But I want to point out to you that the last four wars, and the one that is running currently are all wars of attrition. They have no goal to win, to actually conquer and absorb territory, and it didn’t matter in any one of those wars how many of your own troops got killed, and there was no strategy based on this, but a tremendous amount of sacrifice strategy.

You want to know what kind of government you’re dealing with, look at the kind of wars they fight. Tells you at once how many – direct index – how many suppressives are in that government. Now, all governments are a body of beings against the individual.

Now, they can be less against and more for the individual, the better they are. And when they’re totally bad, why, then they’re totally against the individual and totally for the group. Now, I wouldn’t name any names or designate any specific government, but a government is suppressive to the degree that it is (quote) “benefiting the group” and is antagonistic toward the individual, until the individual is totally out and the group is totally in.

That is the reductio to total suppression. Now, it can go in total reverse for which the philosophy is anarchy, where the individual is everything and the government is nothing. And you’ll find out that doesn’t work either.

So these are the two extremes: where the individual is everything and the government is nothing, and where the body corporate is everything and the individual is nothing. Those are the two extremes of the pendulum, and as it swings between these two, we find, oddly enough, that both ends of it can be totally suppressive. When only the individual has any value and no corporate body or no organized body of any kind has any rights in the face of the individual, you find then that any bully, any bum, any suppressive is then totally at liberty to knock anybody in the head.

There is no restraint of any kind against any individual suppression of any kind whatsoever. And on the other side you have the organized suppressives who are making very; very sure that their suppressive organization completely crushes the individual. GOVERNMENT AND 4  ORGANIZATION When you organize something, remember there are two extremes.

Remember there is no such thing as a perfect government and that the individual is about as close as you will get to a perfect entity or unit. So therefore, why any government at all? Well, we have historical precedences and we find out that any body, any group that existed without internal understandings and organizations and so on, succumbed to any group that did so organize.

And that fact alone is actually why you have to have a government, why you have to have a body corporate, why you have to have an organization. You got where you are today because you, on the long – ago backtrack, did not organize together with your fellow thetan as a free being, and you let any bunch of clunks that wanted to do people in form up into any kind of an organized body that could then overwhump the living daylights out of you, one by one. Do you see that?

This is the missing item on the track. The missing item on the track was organizations amongst decent people. Because they themselves have perfectly good intentions and because they themselves had no idea of suppressing anybody else, they of course didn’t organize at all; they felt totally omniscient, omnipotent, able to handle anything and everything all on their own two feet.

Now, I want to give you this one point: This one point is, you didn’t handle it on your own feet. You faced up and ran into organized groups. And when you as an individual collided with the organized group, whether they were well organized or badly organized, you came a cropper.

It is very interesting that any group of organized humanoids can defeat any individual thetan. Organized humanoids! Well, of course, any – any – given enough ants, they can tear down a mountain if they go at it in an organized fashion.

So, an organized body and organized beings can accomplish more and continue further than the individual. Now, this doesn’t necessarily hang one with a compromise, this hangs one with a necessity of discovering something about the laws of organization. And if one has discovered something about the laws of organization and if one then practices those laws of organization, why, then we’ve got a chance to keep the road open and wrap it up.

But if it’s not organized, we haven’t got a dog’s prayer. Do you understand? Now, you say, “Well, one Operating Thetan can defeat…” Oh yes, it’s true – in one battle, in one instance.

But then one day he’s doped off He didn’t win that day, and that was the only battle he had to lose. See? He won a thousand, he lost one and that was one too many.

Well now, if each one of you wanted to live as an armed camp or if each one of you live – want to live in total hiding, why, all right, all right. But as organized beings you don’t have to be that – that alert, you can relax. You can relax as long as the organization functions and as long as the organization itself does not become totally suppressive of the individual.

Well now, the only thing you’re trying to prevent is harm to the individual. You’re not really even trying to prevent an individual being deprived of rights. I notice these days we talk a lot about rights.

I notice also that only dishonest people have rights; honest men don’t have any rights anymore. If you get knocked over the head and robbed, why, you spend the next three days  GOVERNMENT AND 5  ORGANIZATION being interrogated by the police. They never go out and find the guy who knocked you over the head. “Why were you standing there?” The laws that are growing up these days: If you leave your keys in the car you are liable to arrest.

Why? Well, you’ve put temptation in the road of somebody, is the charge. I don’t know, a police body ought to be able to pick up these people that can’t resist temptation; I think that’s what they’re being paid for.

But, therefore, our problem is simply to have an organization that can function, that is minimally suppressive of the individual, minimally restrictive but maximally effective. How you work that out… Well, there’s I don’t know how many policy letters written through 1965 and into 1966 which cover the basic patterns of organizations. I think it’s the first time the whole subject has ever been reviewed.

I think many of those laws – the first time they’ve ever been brought forward and brought into view, and the data is all there. Its final forms and so on are not necessarily in concrete as an organization is. Now, there are certain things that an organization has to do.

An organization under a benign monarch who is pretty, pretty good, does not have to have much say – the individual does not have to have much say. Why? Because nothing is being done which is contrary to, you see, his long – range good benefit.

Nobody is suppressing him. If it comes to such a person’s attention, and so forth, he normally takes care of that sort of thing. So minimal say, you see, is necessary.

But when you start to turn over things to a body corporate or a governing group and so on, this confidence in a benign monarchy and so on is likely to get shattered because various things happen. You do get little zones of suppression and so on, and then it is safest for the individual to have a say. So, you would say normally – you would say normally – that in the absence of a terrific whizbang of a leader, see, that the individual should have a say.

This is where democracy in its basic philosophy enters the scene. Now, to expect the individuals by their individual opinion, and that alone, to guide the destinies of a group or state is pure idiocy. It makes every single individual anywhere involved in nothing but government, and to hang around the neck of every citizen even the idea that he is responsible for all the rules, laws and actions of government, and that he must keep up his intelligence lines – having no more to work with than the dirty stuff they call newspapers these days – that he’s to keep open his intelligence lines so as to be brilliantly informed on every issue which comes forward.

Boy, you’re going to get a government which is just a clown government – it’s a totally clown government. Now, democracy is, of course, an absolute form. It’s an attempted absolute form.

And there isn’t any democracy practiced on the planet today and as far as I know there never has been any and there was no democracy in ancient Greece. Those were about fifty land owners, when it was first kicked together, that a dictator or tyrant (Pericles, I think his name was) was trying to tell them they ought to take responsibility for  GOVERNMENT AND 6  ORGANIZATION the state. He was either too busy or he’d gotten disgusted, see.

And he told these fifty jokers that they ought to form something called a senate and ought to debate the affairs of state and decide them by majority rule. As near as I remember, that was the way it was. Boy, if that sounds like a democracy, you name it!

They didn’t even represent anybody in the state, so they weren’t even a republican – they weren’t even republican, you see. I don’t know how they say the Greeks invented democracy. But anyhow that’s the way it is.

I’m sure later on they had something where the mob stood around and when they said, “Hang him!” why, a guy got hanged, you see. Now, if you’ve ever had very much to do with mobs, you won’t want to be governed by one. In the first place, if you had to go around and collect the individual opinion of everyone you were governing before you could act, it would be so many years between the incident and the action that no government would occur.

Now, one needn’t go so far as another Greek institution whipped up by Plato, called communism. Oh, you think I’ve got things reversed. No, Plato invented communism with commissars at the head of it.

Read it some time and you’ll be very interested. You see, the purist is the Russian; he’s the purist in government, and he – the type of government of Sparta and so on was tried for a while. And I notice Sparta isn’t there anymore and so on.

But Platonian government is what exactly you have today in the Kremlin. Very interesting. Now, his type of government – although Aristotle talked about the pendulum that swung between the two extremes – his type of government is an extreme and at the other end of the extreme politically there’s anarchy.

So you have the total body corporate and the individual just a poor nut who is stepped on, under the Platonian forms, and between those two you have something called republicanism. Now, republicanism is representation of subgroups by an individual, and there we’re coming somewhere into the mean. Now, if you limit the type of person that can be chosen to represent that group, if you limit the number or types, if you would make it necessary for him to have certain accomplishments in other words – in your case you would say, well, he had to have a certain IQ and he had to have a certain Grade, or something like this, you know.

You’d say, “Well, nobody below Grade IV can stand for assemblyman,” do you see? And you had a right to examine his auditing reports and credentials, you see. Well, you’d be fairly safe, you see.

Then that individual grouped together with other individuals, making a body corporate of some kind or another like a senate or an assembly or something like that – that individual, then, being a specialist in the issues at stake, and not having also to carry on another job, could then become sufficiently informed of what was going on and have enough time to think about it, to actually govern. Do you see? GOVERNMENT AND 7  ORGANIZATION Now, this – this then is probably the direction government will go under Scientology, if Scientology has much influence upon government.

Probably be a representative form of government which is really republican government. When they say this is a republic or that is a republic, they’re talking through their hat. They don’t know their governmental forms.

There’s never been a planet as politically illiterate as this one. Economics are politics, you know. There is no subject called “economics,” really; there’s communist economics, and democratic economics, and other kinds of… They’re a bunch of mixed up kids.

But a republic is where people are governed by their – by representative beings. There is a being chosen by the people to govern them or be part of the government, you see, and then that person governs without any further yikyak back and forth amongst the people, do you follow? But if some weighty issue which is going to change the form of government comes along, why, a republican form of government is supposed to place it to referendum, but that’s simply to change the status quo.

We’re going to change the form of government; we’re now going to have one representative for a hundred thousand people instead of one representative for ten thousand people. Well, they’d better have that to referendum because they’re shifting the form of government on which it had been agreed. But this is essentially government by representation.

Now, there was a country one time, which got into a lot of trouble with another country. That isn’t a very informative fact, is it, because it could be said about any two countries that have ever existed. But the first country was England, and it got into a lot of trouble with America.

And it was simply America at that time; it was the Colonies. And they made a fatal mistake, they had taxation without representation. And for England, even up – at this late date, to be talking about being a democratic form of government is somewhat funny because England does not permit the representation of her Commonwealth in Parliament up there in London.

Tells the Commonwealth, don’t you see, that it must have representative forms of government but it itself is not representative. Do you understand? The Commonwealth, for instance, is not part of the Parliament in London, which governs its destinies.

And it was that omission which caused the American Revolution. There wasn’t anybody, part of the American scene, who came over and sat with a say and a vote in Parliament in London. And the resentment of that was so extreme that they dreamed up a whole bunch of other excessive this and that, and eventually poor old George III lost his American colonies.

It’s an error. It’s not a mistake by men, it’s an error in technology. Now let me point this out, that there can be errors in technology which cause great political rifts.

For instance, America would have been probably enormously better off if it’d never cut loose from England. You talk about a bunch of inexperienced goons who took over the government at that time and laughingly carried on what was – what was government, kee-ripes! One of the first things they passed after they revolted for the rights of man and everything else – you know, they revolted to make the individual free – the first thing they passed, I think, were the Acts of Sedition by which if you put the slightest criticism of anybody that were friends of theirs  GOVERNMENT AND 8  ORGANIZATION in the paper, you could be clapped in jail forevermore.

And I don’t know how many years that was law. So they certainly were not fighting for individual freedom, because their first action was to pass the Acts of Sedition. Do you understand?

They were not actually fighting because of excessive taxation, because when they got in power, they really went to town. They were fighting for representation. They felt they could not be heard and that causes an ARC break, and it is simply in the field of your technology right down the board.

When a group feels it cannot be heard, it ARC breaks. Just like the individual, who feels he cannot be heard, ARC breaks. Do you follow?

It is an ARC break which also always precedes a war You will find some time or another when Hitler – just to take the most recent and most savage conflict; although there have been a lot of brush fires since – Hitler must have, at one time or another, probably very early in his career, said something which wasn’t acknowledged. He said something he considered very important and that wasn’t acknowledged, and it wasn’t acknowledged by a lot of countries or just one country, do you see, and that gave him an ARC break. And then they later on said things which he didn’t acknowledge and by piling up the ARC breaks they eventually killed something like thirty million men, and I think that’s too many people to knock off because of an ARC break.

They needed an E-Meter. But governmentally – governmentally, then – as long as you are dealing with emergency situations, the best government to have around is a benign monarchy, if you have total confidence and trust in the benign monarch. Because it’s all emergency anyhow, see, and there’s no time to consult anybody anyway.

Well, that is not really, then, a type of government which can continue long because the benign monarch, as an individual, running a body corporate, of course, can get tired. He can get disgusted. He can get overworked.

He can get this. And he certainly cannot acknowledge everybody who speaks. He hasn’t got that many hours in the day.

Do you see? So, this form of government is all right for a very, very tight operating period. But unless it is backed up by a body which is representative of the people being governed, then you will get a dissolution of the organization.

Do you see? Now, the nominal head of the state could back off to practically figure – head or emergency, heavy – cavalry-type action. In other words, if things went too wrong, why, they could whistle him up.

Do you see? But ordinarily the thing would run along by a – some representative body corporate and then you would have a workable government. Now, why a body corporate?

Well, a body corporate has great liabilities. Once you share the responsibility amongst a number of individuals, none of those individuals feel a total responsibility for the situation, so they really don’t think fast enough, they really don’t think and act fast enough. So you have to be careful never to have a generalized body corporate.

They must be terribly specific in its representation. The individuals in it must be representative of very definite,  GOVERNMENT AND 9  ORGANIZATION specific zones or spheres. We can’t have… Well, we could have a senator from a state.

That’s all right because he, of course, can be heard by the – through him the state is heard. But remember he’s a senator for a state. There’s a horrible blunder that they pull in businesses – and I don’t know how businesses live, and many of them don’t – and that is, to have a board of directors.

Now, you can get a great big board of directors, each one of whom nebulously represents the stockholders. Each one of whom represents…? Wait a minute.

Whoa! You’ve got cross – representation here, so that nobody actually has any representation. You’d have to say, “This board member represents stockholders 1 – 100, and this board member represents stockholders 100 – 200,” do you see?

Then you would have a representative form of government. Because that is a body corporate representing. And if it goes along that way, is nothing more idiotic than a body corporate doing a representing.

For instance, all the commissars in Russia, I think, represent the Russian people. Everything they say, “The Russian people! The Russian people!” There aren’t any “Russian people.” There’s no such thing.

I don’t know how many Russians there are in Russia. I think it’s about one two-hundredth of the number of people in Siberia in that part of the geography. The rest of them are Tartars and Mongols and Slavs and “God-help-us’s”!

Now, these nuts, they all run around “The people! The people!” Creeps! Jurisprudence goes appetite over tin cup when it says, “The People versus John Doe!” Oh, creep!

I never heard of the guy; I’m one of the people. That is just generality that goes into suppression. Now, the primary characteristic of a suppressive is generality; he speaks in generalities. “Everybody says you are a bum.” You know? “They are against you.” And you get off into that “The People versus John Doe.” It’s totally a suppressive mechanism.

Well, maybe – maybe somebody’s mad at John Doe, but let’s hear who is mad at John Doe. I don’t care if it’s 150 people, let’s get them by name. Do you see?

We could even say the police chief is mad at John Doe because he killed Richard Roe, see. Police chief’s funny; he doesn’t like dead bodies, you know, something like that. But that would be the truth of it The people are never against John Doe.

Similarly, “the people” can never be represented by John Doe or Richard Roe or anybody else. If they are represented, they could only be represented by one person, which is why a benign monarchy is the ideal form of government. There’s no cross – representation.

They know who their representative is, if they hold him in power simply by verbal support. It’s the guy in charge, do you see? So it’s this, aside from its ability to act rapidly, that makes a single – man government look very efficient, because, in actual fact, the people are represented by one person whose name they know, do you see.

GOVERNMENT AND 10  ORGANIZATION But the second he gets a body of advisers – the second he gets a body of advisers – we cannot then say that that body of advisers represents the people, because the people don’t know them. Now, we would have to segment off the entire governed group into segments, if we had more than one representative, then that representative would have to represent exact, precise segments. Now, maybe he represented them by appointment; maybe he represented them by election; maybe they – he was nominated by the – by some governing body and afterwards, with somebody else, voted upon by that section of the people, but they know when they finish up who represents them.

Now, when too many of them are represented by one person, then the distance becomes a bit great and they feel that they are not represented. Do you see? So again, they’re not represented.

Now, he is their voice to be heard, and they know that when they have a bone to chew, why, they can write or speak to this representative. And they know – regardless how clumsily – that he will say something about it or do something about it. They have confidence in this, and therefore they feel that the hat which they’re wearing – government – has been deputized and is being cared for.

But, now communications go two ways. So supposing we had a body corporate which was composed of representatives. Each representative representing exactly some geographical area and, you know, the people of that geographical area, and supposing… I’ll show you where modern government violates the living daylights out of the – out of the formula and again re – ARC breaks every – body.

Well, let’s take – let’s take for – just for fun, the state of Colorado, see. Notice the United States in its great wisdom has two senators for the state of Colorado – instantly violates representation. Doesn’t have a senator for northern Colorado and a senator for southern Colorado; it has two senators for Colorado.

Pff! Silly! violation. Now, it has various electoral districts, so they really tend to count on their representative because they do have a representative for that electoral district.

Now, that’s a direct representation. But let’s take this thing, and the state of Colorado, now, happens to be governed on a somewhat autonomous basis by another corporate body. Now, that corporate body can receive orders from the central corporate body called the United States government.

So there’s a state government can receive orders from the Federal government. Do you know that there is nobody in the legislative Colorado assembly hall who has a sign on him saying, “The United States government.” The United States government has no representative in that state legislature. They got a bunch of covert agencies that sit around, all around the state of Colorado, see, and get more and more numerous.

But the truth of the matter is the assembly itself does not feel that it can address the United States government because it isn’t sitting there. Do you see that? Some assemblyman, no matter  GOVERNMENT AND 11  ORGANIZATION how well he represents an exact section of the population – and they have one representative in that assemblyman.

He can spit and fume and damn and curse, “What’s happening to the United States government,” but he really damns it and curses it much harder because he knows the United States government is never going to have an inkling of anything he is saying. He knows he’s never going to be heard, even though they have a senator, because the senator actually doesn’t represent the assembly and wouldn’t in any event. The assembly doesn’t send a package to the senator saying, “This is what we feel about the situation.

Why don’t you go into the Senate and straighten this out?” There is no direct line from the legislative assembly of the state through to the national legislative assembly. In other words, the communication lines are messed up and the communication lines don’t repeat back. Now, those are technical flaws in government.

There is a subject called government. There’s a subject. And it is as precise as you can get But before you can do anything about the subject of government you have to have the technology of Scientology in order to improve and detect the abilities of people, and you have to have the entirety of our ethics technology in order to detect suppressives.

And if you don’t have those things you couldn’t form a government anyway. Now, you also need the communication formula; you need to know about ARC breaks. And, of course, nobody knew anything about that, so don’t be too hard on them.

They had none of the technology necessary to form a government. So they’ve been making do somehow. Now the proper way to have formed this up in Colorado, let us say, is if they had to have two senators, why, he was North and South Colorado – see, one for North and one for South Colorado.

They’d had to have divided the place in half People would have to have a very accurate idea of who their representative was, but if they’ve got a senator, why have they got a representative? Now, you’ve divided people’s attention, and their attention really doesn’t divide well. They shouldn’t have a senior and a junior and a representative and a senator and dhrrhw!

You know? Let’s get them all confused, see! No, a certain section of Colorado could be represented in the state – it could be represented in two different places, you see?

It could be represented in the state of Colorado, the State Legislature, and it could be represented in the corporate body as far as that goes. That’s perfectly all right, as long as then those people so represented could be heard in the places which were making the laws which affected them – a line of protest existed, a line of ideas existed. Do you see?

Be perfectly all right. There’s two zones and bodies making laws which affect them, so therefore they had better be heard in those. Now, how about the state of Colorado?

Well, you’ll notice the Federal government and the States are – in the United States – you might not know this, but they’re at each other’s throats all the time. They talk about States’ rights, they even fought a great war called the Rebellion but  GOVERNMENT AND 12  ORGANIZATION the Yankees call it a Civil War. (I have to be careful, you know, Mary Sue’s from Texas. I have to use these properly.) So we had a great war occur in the United States over States’ rights and Federal rights.

Well, how did it come about? Well, the war came about because of the ARC break occasioned by the fact that the state legislature could not be heard in the national body, and the national body had no representative in the state legislature, so there was no two – way communication formula. So of course they got to war.

So, then the study of government parallels the study of what breaks down governments. Now, when an individual has no way to speak to this huge sprawling thing called a government, and when he’s just a dog, why, what is the final frame of mind? He goes into apathy about it.

He becomes inactive about it, and you can no longer then have any kind of representative government because he’s just off the subject. So, what does it do? It goes into a dictatorship at either end of the extremit – extremis.

It either goes into a dictatorship by being a total people – versus – the – individual, as Plato, Russia, so on. Or on the other side it goes into a total dictatorship where the dictatorship is not agreed to, supported or anything else but is just every man is that dictator. It goes one way or the other: dog eat dog; every man for himself don’t you see?

It’ll go one way or the other. Now, what – what do we find here, then, as a middle road? We find a representative form of government as a workable middle road, providing the representation is specific and exact and isn’t so large and so overwhelmingly huge that it cannot – the representation cannot be appealed to by the individual.

That can be pretty big, because every individual isn’t appealing simultaneously, and when they all start appealing simultaneously) why, the representative knows he’s got to do something in a hurry. So, now do you get a little better grip on how these things should be organized? Well, the cause of war is incompetent government.

The cause of breakdowns between a group and the society which surrounds it can also be incompetent government. Incompetent government. But the group that surrounds it may be so incompetently governed that the inner group has to be almost perfectly governed to work its way forward.

We happen to be in that peculiar condition. It’s not that we don’t have flaws. We have lots of flaws.

But I assure you of something, that we are actually operating far, far, far, far better than most bodies operate. We’re pretty good. We’re pretty good.

Now, the main thing to know is that we keep trying to be better. We’re very far from self – satisfied about the whole thing. And what you see happening right now is an effort of betterment, not an effort of failure, but an effort of betterment.

You only better, of course, when you have a down statistic or when you have too much work or too much this, that or the other thing. You don’t bother to better those things which are  GOVERNMENT AND 13  ORGANIZATION already soaring into affluence. In fact you better not try to better them, if they’re already awfully good.

The more you tamper with them the worst off you’re liable to be. But you can reinforce an affluence by finding out what made it an affluence, but you damn well jolly better be awfully, awfully right before you move anything. Now, the main thing here in – we get in representation is you have certain people who represent you.

Now, because you have a qualification system (persons have been with the org or they haven’t been with the org for a long time), you have a system, a statistical system (person is known to have high statistics or always has low statistics), you have a grade system of state of case, and you’ve got the entire Ethics technology of weeding out suppressives; and you tend, then, not to desperately need an elective action. Do you follow? Things run well or they don’t run well.

And as long as somebody is actively taking care of it, why, those of you who are doing other things aren’t necessarily interested along this line. But this can be bettered; this can definitely be bettered. Now, somewhere up the line you will run into actual representation – actual elective representation where probably certain nominees will be submitted for an elective action, do you follow?

That sort of thing. Because as we get bigger it’ll be necessary to do this. Actually we’re pretty small today; we all know each other But as we go forward, as we go forward and get larger, this will require refinement.

Just at the moment it doesn’t particularly require balloting and all that sort of thing because we’re all wearing this hat or that hat or the other hat. And we already have a system which tends to inhibit and does correct mismanagement where it occurs. Now, you could get too safe with this system, so therefore, somewhere up the line, very exact representation will have to occur.

As I say, we’re not big enough yet to do much about that. But we’ll move it this far; we’ll move it this far: we’ll fix it up so that no junior body – no junior governing body – may be ordered by a senior body on which it is not represented. And reversely, that very senior governing bodies should not order junior governing bodies on which they do not have a representative.

See, now that gives us a two – way comm situation. Now, what we’ve done just now is totally reform the Advisory Council, but totally, sweep bang! Works like this: The International Advisory Council would be made up of representatives of continental parts of the world and executives who represent types of divisions of organization.

Big! It’s about a fifteen – man Advisory Council. Now you say, “Well, how in the name of God can you ever get any government done with that many people?” Well, if you handle it exactly this way you will be in: that nobody may bring up or make a motion which has not been – he cannot initiate, you might say, a motion unless that motion has been formed into an issuable directive.

If he wants a policy letter passed then he jolly well had better written the whole thing up. He wants a directive passed, he jolly well better have written the whole thing up. GOVERNMENT AND 14  ORGANIZATION Now, we give the chairman of that body – whichever is the chairman – we give that chairman of the body the power of absolute veto.

The chairman says, “That is enough of that,” and that is enough of that, unless three – quarters of those present vote to have it continued. Takes three – quarters to vote to continue this nonsense about whether or not Distribution should do its own info packets or not. Get the idea?

The main trouble with these bodies is, is they get some guy who keeps running on and on and on, on some hobbyhorse and keeps discussing or reporting to such an endless degree that no other business can occur, and it becomes very tedious, you see. So, if he is offering something, which on first glance does not seem to be germane to the situation and so forth, and is going to take up the corporate body’s study too long… To study it, it could be referred for special study to somebody else for a report at the next Ad Council meeting. After all, they’re meeting once a week, you see.

Now – then that could be referred back when refined down, do you see? Or it could be taken up and fixed up right there as it is, or it could simply be shut off and cut off and thrown in the wastebasket and that is that. Unless he can get three – quarters of the members present interested in his info packets, he’s had it!

Do you understand? Now, this makes for some of the efficiency of absolute dictatorship. Because absolute dictators can always get something done.

Well, in this particular case you can get something done and it doesn’t leave the Ad Council afterwards with somebody, some nebulous somebody, having to write up all the bills or resolutions or directives that were passed. Because look – a – here: if they were wrote up afterwards those weren’t the ones that were passed, were they? Do you see?

And that’s what they have trouble doing: getting something passed in Ad Council and then getting it written up and issued. So, we’ll just put this more on a legislative basis. And this is the way, by the way, it’s done in the United States Senate.

They don’t do all things bad. But therefore, if somebody wants a directive, let’s say that Ad Council is composed of continental representatives; now these are representatives which represent the continental areas. In other words, they represent every organization and all the Scientologists on that continent, in that continental area.

They represent the lot, see. They’re specifically a representative of the continental Ad Council. But more importantly, they represent all of the other orgs and they represent all of those people, too.

So, therefore somebody from part of that continental area, some individual who feels he has been done in and he feels he’s being done in by the local org or something like that – well, he in actual fact could write to his representative there, in the international body. Now, more important than this, as this expands out he would find out by election that he had a representative also in his local continental body, and that would be the person to whom he would appeal. Do you see?

But we’re not that refined and it doesn’t have to be that big. So in this case I imagine that whopper’s continental representative for Western United States and so on will probably get himself quite a – quite a bundle of correspondence. GOVERNMENT AND 15  ORGANIZATION Now, he eventually sees there’s some abuses out there or something like that, or something should be taken up, and so he’ll probably get something done.

Now, if you have to wait for an Advisory Council… This is where the United States senator goes around the bend and up the pole; he’s not in charge of anything in the first place. He’s just in charge of somebody as a corporate body but he himself can really do nothing, and this makes him so stupidly helpless that he’s silly. Now, if an emergency situations develops, any member of that Ad Council could issue what is called an Urgent Directive.

It’d be an urgent bill, really, if you were talking about it governmentally. But it’s an Urgent Directive. It’s something that’s got to be done right now, right now; it can’t wait till tomorrow.

All he’s got to do is get a majority set of signatures. He’s just got to tear around to the various members and say, “Hey, can you sign this, Joe?” You know? And he can get his directive out promptly and at once, providing of course that the Ad Council then appoints a Board of Investigation to investigate the situation to find out if that was the right answer or the wrong answer, or if some other answer is needed, or whether no answer was required at all, so as to wipe out that directive so that we’d – or modify the directive, so we don’t keep introducing arbitrary laws in from every quarter, see.

His directive is only good until a Board of Investigation has investigated it and written a right directive. Do you see? So, that these emergency directions then have a tendency to be wiped out; they have to be wiped out.

These laws don’t go forever Furthermore, unless a policy change occurs, an Ad Council law is only good for a year anyway. That’s been into force for a long time. They all expire at the end of the year; very often some very important things expire and nobody notices that they’ve become customary in the meantime.

Now, the Ad Council, then, would be composed inter – on the international basis – it’d be composed of the continental representatives from each continental district and – of which there are five, and probably one from Saint Hill, since it really isn’t part of a continental district. And then to these are added a bloke called a Divisional Organizer Now, this fellow is the representative of every divisional secretary of that type of division in the whole world. Now, this divisional secretary has the job that you always expect Mary Sue and I to do, which is compile, down to the last comma, all of the materials and specifications.

Well, in the first place, it’s gotten to be too big a job. One can’t possibly do that and wear his hat, too. And these things are transient and the type of division requires certain things.

And it requires its policy letters. It requires supplies. It requires know – how of various kinds.

It requires material. It requires some kind of an internal training program to get things in, and these things also change and are transient, don’t you see. Well, take the Distribution Division, man, it can’t go on with the same info packet forever It requires info packets, and requires this and requires that and requires a field staff member program.

Well, that field staff member program has to be changing all the time, to keep it  GOVERNMENT AND 16  ORGANIZATION whizzing along. And then congress programs – this guy’s also responsible for all the congress programs there are. Do you see?

And dating them and so forth. In other words, for that type of division, he’s responsible for every piece of its organizational materials and everything that applies to that type of division. So if some secretary of that type of division in Poughkeepsie or Keokuk hasn’t got any policy letters that cover so – and – so and so – and – so well, they would write to this fellow to find it out.

If an org can’t get its books, it knows who to write to. It writes to the Divisional Organizer Dissem, Worldwide, see. And he would catalyze it and go ahead and do that and he would know exactly where orgs stand.

Now, he is judged by the statistics, the composite gross divisional statistics of that type of division in the world, so if his statistic is down, why, he obviously then would get into a field of authority. He’d say, ‘And there’s this org and that org and that org.” And let us say he’s a Tech Sec – he’s the Divisional Organizer Tech – and he would say, “Boy, those three orgs are just pulling my statistic right out down through the bottom, and that is finishing me. And therefore, I demand a change of secretaries in those orgs, and I actually think you ought to change the Org Exec Sec in those orgs and I think…” Oh, you know, he’d start getting very militant, you see.

Well, he’s a member of the Ad Council; that’s the place for him to get militant. He can give all the suggestions he wants to give, but he can’t give an order unless it’s okayed by the Ad Council. It must have been passed by the Ad Council.

He must write it up in advance, and it must be passed as a bill. And it’s actually issued on the divisional color flash of that division. It applies only to those divisions.

He can get an order Yes, he can get an – he can get a Board of Investigation on Keokuk and – and all of this. Yes, he can do all these things, but only by getting it passed by the Ad Council. Do you understand?

So he actually is not directly running that type of organization, so then he doesn’t operate as a bypass of the Org Exec Secs of those organizations and HCO Exec Secs of those organizations, and so he can function. Do you see? Now, reversely, we will have it fixed up so that aside from the continental representatives in Continental Advisory Councils and so on, there we will put in a Saint Hill representative – that is a WW representative.

Right at the moment it will simply be the LRH Communicator He is considered to be the representative. So, he could be talked right at, right directly, because he is the representative of the body which is the governing body, don’t you see. He doesn’t have any authority there.

Guy will probably – his ears will probably be pinned back most gorgeously many, many times. But nevertheless the governing body can be talked to. And, of course, they’ve got their own representative, and they can pass things through to their own representative and get that squared away So the governing body can also explain to the lesser governing body what the score is.

In other words, various communication lines take place. GOVERNMENT AND 17  ORGANIZATION All right. Well, how about representation between the Continental Org and these little orgs?

And what about their Advisory Councils? Now, these are independent and individual orgs. This would be the pattern which will be adopted for Saint Hill and we simply abolish Ad Comms and we make every divisional secretary a member of the Advisory Council.

All the divisional secretaries and the LRH Communicator; otherwise HCO gets left out without a proper vote. See, it’s only got three divisions whereas Org has got four. So therefore, you get an eight – man Advisory Council operating in much the same way, so that the personnel of the organization is surely represented on the Advisory Council because their secretary is a member of it.

So therefore, that communication goes sideways. And now we don’t have reverse representations into these divisions. But then we’re not up to a size where it’s required, but sooner or later there will have to be one.

There’ll have to be a representative of the Advisory Council in that division. All right. In this particular way, then, you can see that a Continental Organization which has three organizations and itself – which is quite common – it has three other organizations and it has itself Well, that makes four Advisory Councils composed of secretaries and executive secretaries.

That gives them nine – man Advisory Councils, see, ten – man with the LRH Communicator. Now, what – what is its relationship, then, with its junior orgs? Well, of course, in the case of Johannesburg, why, Durban would have to have a representative in Johannesburg.

So would Cape Town, and as they develop up the line they’ll have to have this. They are going to get into ARC breaks, and they’re not going to amount to a hill of beans until they can get into a position where they can do this. Do you see?

So, what are we dealing with here when we’re dealing with organization? Just to give you an insight into the matter, we’re dealing with the basic formulas of technology, we’re dealing with basic ethics technology. Now, if you’ve got that many people – if you’ve got that many people coming up the line – you’ve got that many people with a say and a vote, you have, of course, minimized the possibility of something going wrong on the suppression line, do you see.

You’ve minimized that. Now, the whole thing being cross – policed by statistics, gives everybody a look right straight in on the plate of the officer operating because statistics are statistics. You can’t argue with a statistic.

You never explain a statistic. And the reason statistics go bad, of course, are some of the lousiest reasons you ever heard of under the sun. It’s incredible.

You’d have to be running an organization for quite a while before you finally fell wise to this very interesting point: that a statistic doesn’t ever happen. It’s always made. Good or bad, it is always made.

And although somebody sitting right here right now won’t believe this, maybe…  GOVERNMENT AND 18  ORGANIZATION See, if you’ve had trouble with a statistic, stop going at it on the basis that it happened. It isn’t something that occurred, it was something that was manufactured – down or up – and you’ve got to find out what is manufacturing that statistic. It has a source.

It isn’t sourceless. It’s just one day – for weeks people have been walking by the bookstore and they’ve been buying books. And then just one day they didn’t walk by so you had a down book statistic.

That is not the way it happens at all. And the errors are always gross. They’re always ridiculously gross.

I always wonder how you can miss them when you do. The errors are so fantastic! The reason why the bookstore statistic went down is they locked up the bookstore and nobody opened it.

And you can be fooled as an executive, sitting maybe forty, fifty feet away from the bookstore – but not actually going to the bookstore, you understand. Sitting there and handling despatches and that sort of thing, suddenly see your book statistic go down. And then you start tearing it all to pieces and getting out terrific bookselling programs, and you go brrrrrm! and braaaam! and you work, and you’re trying to get rrrn! and so on, and “Why aren’t they…?” and “We need new books,” and that sort of thing.

You never walked down there fifty feet and found out that the thing was locked! You couldn’t have a book statistic; there was nobody on post! And by far the greatest source of down statistics is no personnel on the post at all!

It’s not even subtle, you know. They just didn’t – didn’t appoint a D of T. Or if they appointed one, for the Day org, he also had a day job so he was doing his work in the evening!

It’s gorgeous! It really is. It’s incredible!

So that I often wonder how anybody can stand around and let one of these statistics go down, see, because the truth of the matter is, it is a minimal amount of alertness required. Now, when an org’s gross income starts down and stays down and starts going out of the bottom, you immediately say, “They need to be more ambitious. There’s too much entheta in the area.

The newspapers are bad…” Tzaaa! Blaaah! Well, nuts!

You know what I found it was in Cape Town once? They hadn’t opened their mail box in three months! That wasn’t very mysterious, was it?

Found out about it because it’d gotten full and had slopped over on the window ledge and it was running all over the floor, and one of the people going in said that they had gotten one of my bulletins because they’d found it there and so on. It was very horrible because they were a member of the public that wasn’t supposed to get the bulletin! So you can talk all you want to about clever management.

I’m a very clever manager I have a very, very good statistic as a manager, as I think you’ll admit. Totally aside from research or anything of the sort, just pure management statistic is good. All right.

Now, where does it break down? It just breaks down because I don’t go down and find out if the bookstore is open. See, by the time I’ve looked into the bookstore to find out if the bookstore is open amongst twenty some orgs.

Obviously. Now, when you multiply this factor by another hundred factors that could also cause down statistics, why, you immediately see that it  GOVERNMENT AND 19  ORGANIZATION isn’t feasible to have a one – man government. He’d have to have eyes in the back of his thetan.

He’d have to have one of these thousand – eye eyeballs like a fly. People don’t do these things willfully. They just don’t notice.

And you can get a framework, a form of attitude going in an organization if you get too long a stuck flow. If your orders are going this way, this way, this way, this way, this way, you get a stuck flow of order, and you tend to produce an apathy at the other end, a lack of initiative, if nobody can ever talk up. Let’s say the Ad Council keeps ordering the Dist Division, the Ad Council keeps ordering the Dist Division, the Ad Council keeps ordering the Dist Division, and the Dist Division at – doesn’t have any Distribution Secretary.

I mean, it’ll happen many times just that way, you see. And eventually everybody in the Distribution Division is just kind of in total apathy and they don’t come to work. And when they come to work they just sit blankly and look at the paper in front of them, and they don’t quite know what’s wrong.

Everybody seems to be mad at them. Actually nobody’s mad at them, don’t you see? Communication line is totally broken down.

They got a stuck flow. But if they were simply on the receiving end and there was no representation of – on the Ad Council of the Distribution Secretary, this could happen in any corporate body or in any area. It doesn’t have to be anything like a backflow.

It has to be an existing channel for one, do you understand? And if one exists for one, every once in a while somebody’ll come along and test it, see: “Is the line open?” And then they find it open so they’re perfectly happy. A lot of people want to talk to me, and I know why they want to talk to me.

They want to talk to me for only one reason: they want to find out if I am there and they can talk to me. And they haven’t got anything to talk to me about. It’s very remarkable.

I’ve had – I’ve had I don’t know how many people… One time I interviewed thirty – five people after a four day congress where I’d lectured day and night. I was absolutely dead tired, falling to pieces, and I actually interviewed thirty – five people. There wasn’t one single one of them had anything to say to me at all.

They took up a lot of time but they didn’t have anything to say to me. So, after that I didn’t interview people after a congress. What – what is, then, the primary problem of government?

And what have you got to solve in all such things? What’s the primary problem which if it isn’t solved will cause revolt, revolution, upset, tear – apart, bad morale, and that sort of thing? There’s only one problem in the problem of government, because there is no such thing as a corporate body except as a postulated thing.

They’re only individuals. So the problem is to obtain an equable, not-too-oppressive (notice how that’s phrased) relationship between the individual and the governing body, and between the governing body and the individual. And that’s the problem you’re trying to solve with government.

How are you – how can you achieve this relationship with the minimum amount of uproar and upset? And it’s  GOVERNMENT AND 20  ORGANIZATION just the – the relationship between the individual and the corporate body, and the corporate body and the individual. It’s two ways: a corporate body which has insufficient authority and cannot act swiftly enough will make horrible mistakes and do lots of individuals in, and a setup where any individual can clobber the corporate body with total impunity will cause a tremendous amount of upset and suppression, because they’ll also go around and clobber other individuals if they’re able to clobber the corporate body.

So the problem is trying to set up something that resolves these two things: the corporate body, the individual. Now, the individual must be able to get some semblance of justice from the corporate body, and he’s entitled to a certain amount of bright management – doesn’t have to be very brilliant, but he’s entitled to it – and the corporate body is entitled to expect a certain contribution and compliance on the part of the individual. And between these two things, if those are solved fairly well, then you’ll find out you have a working organization.

That’s actually all it takes to make an organization is just resolutions to these problems. If you want to find where any organization on this planet is falling to pieces – . I wouldn’t go so far as to say that they’re all falling to pieces; I’m sure in some bush tribe somewhere there is some organization on the planet that isn’t incipiently violating this so wildly that it is falling to pieces.

I know of no civilized government that has a very, very high statistical certainty of future. I don’t know of any. Empires on this planet have a tendency to last very brief periods.

It’s fantastic that the British Empire has lasted 350 or 50 years. It has. It’s gone on quite a while.

One would ordinarily have expected it to fall to pieces long ago. The Roman Empire is supposed to have lasted a thousand years and so on, and they bragged about it and talked about it and yapped about it and so forth. And that doesn’t count right in my history books.

I don’t know how many years the Roman Empire lasted but it was no thousand years, man. But it’s one of the longest lived of recent empires. But all these other empires are dust.

And why are they dust? It’s they didn’t equitably solve the problems related to that relationship which I just described to you. One can never solve it perfectly, but he can try very well.

And when you get consent of the governed by representation in the government, and when you get respect for the governed on the part of the corporate body – when you get those two relationships pretty well functioning, why, the thing will go on and on. There is no reason why, theoretically, they could not be balanced to go on for a very, very long time. There is no reason why an empire couldn’t go on for a very, very, very long time.

There are empires which – not on this planet – which have gone on for a very long time and that was – that’s one of the reasons. They were not necessarily elective empires even. They weren’t, weren’t elective, they – but there was a big consent.

GOVERNMENT AND 21  ORGANIZATION But the odd part of it is, they were based on state of case. If a guy couldn’t pick up his telephone with a beam, why, he wasn’t a fit guy to govern. If a guy was in that good a state of case, why, of course, he was pretty good as a governor.

You know. I mean it was – it was a caste system based on ability, so you got a – you got a selection, you got an immediate selection. Of course, anybody who saw that somebody like that was strong or clever or something like that – he was perfectly willing to say, “That guy represents me,” and would tend to fall into line, you see.

That was great as far as he was concerned. You get the idea. Well, I thought I would tell you about this change.

I don’t say that that won’t be changed again, but these things are necessary to adjust from time to time. The governing body which can govern ten thousand people is not the governing body which can govern a hundred thousand. Various problems arise and these things need adjustment.

But when you put in an arbitrary such as a government, you must put in a review of the arbitrary. A postulated form of government is an arbitrary. So having postulated that governmental form, why, for heaven’s sakes, put a Board of Investigation in a few months or a few years later to find out how it’s running in order to make any adjustments necessary.

And people will do this in any event. In the United States they passed their Bill of Rights. Ages after they passed their Constitution, they found out they had to have these Bill of Rights.

And they sort of looked it over and they changed the status of the president and they changed this and they changed that. And they’ve changed it along the line from time to time with amendments to the Constitution. But in actual fact, nobody was reporting back to the body that organized it in the first place – the body or the person who organized it in the first place – so they’ve never given it a thorough overhaul and it’s getting pretty messy.

Just at the present time, it’s getting pretty messy. For instance, it used to be all Congress and now it’s all executive. Talk about a total shift of authority.

Well, of course, you can’t have it all executive, but the reason it’s shifting all executive is Congress did not represent the people. But they could – they could say, “Well, we voted for Joe Blow and he’s president, so therefore, he’s representative of us.” Do you understand? So in the absence of representation you get people trying to assert a single – man representation.

They’re sure he represents them. Well, these are the things which you try to solve. But a governed people who do not understand the ramifications of its government or the theories or postulates or other things which go back of government, or the laws which underlie the systems of government and so on, can be pretty dismayed.

They can be led around and confused and get upset at the wrong places and so on and become very uncomfortable. Because they individually are afraid that the relationship between the governing body and the individual, and the individual and the governing body – they’re afraid that those relationships have not been resolved and will not be safeguarded by the government or the action which they are protesting against. GOVERNMENT AND 22  ORGANIZATION And maybe – maybe the thing is set up to represent them but nobody’s let them in on it, and so they tend to break down.

You will have a lot to do with this in the future, it isn’t really a dry subject. Anything is a dry subject about which nothing is known I imagine government and so forth has been one of the driest subjects anybody ever heard of. But its very – very fact that it is a dry subject has caused its history to be written in solid red.

And nobody has dug it so a lot of people have killed a lot of people trying to prove things they didn’t know in the first place. So I wish us far more success with regard to this. Thank you.

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