View source for Rightness and Wrongness (SHSBC 630827)

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

'''Date:''' 27 August 1963

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

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All right. What is this? Audience: August 27.

Twenty-seven August AD 13, Saint Hill Special Briefing Course. All right. If I can get the text written on it, these two new students will be getting Sci- entology-a Scientology I process known as “Acquaintance with Saint Hill.” We’re making strides here at an incredible rate of speed on a lot of things, and I’ve been working hard on getting processes arranged as to their exact uses and getting exactly what you can do with a case and how to put a pc’s tone arm exactly under the auditor’s control so the auditor doesn’t have to worry about it and so forth.

There have been quite a few breakthroughs of great importance here recently. And all this stuff is going down in bulletin form, and I thought this morning-I was sitting there, I was thinking to myself, “Well, this morning, here I should be putting it all down in a bulletin; I’ll probably go out there and put it in-down in a lecture,” don’t you see? And then having put it down in a lecture, then I won’t bother to put it down in a bulletin, you see?

Then you’ll all forget about it because it was just in a lecture, don’t you see? Horrible. So it left me in be- tween, you see?

So I didn’t know whether to give you a lecture on the subject of what I was currently doing, you see, and what you needed to know, or throw away the lecture and put it down in a bulletin, and it left me in a terrible confusion So I guess the best way to resolve the confusion is just tell you what I know about it-and also write it down in the bulletin. But you probably won’t see the bulletin for a long time, so you better get it here. Very complicated.

Are you sufficiently confused about it? If I keep on this way, you see, you won’t in a moment know whether you’re reading a bulletin or listening to a lecture. And this is Russian technology, Russian technology: how to convince somebody that black is white and that he’s somewhere else when he isn’t.

Lubyanka Prison, I think, they practice this sort of thing. A guy is walking down to an interrogation, a woman dentist will step out from a secret door in the hall and start examining his teeth. See, totally non sequitur.

The guy is trying to understand this, you see? And while he’s busy trying to understand this, something else unpredictable happens to him, see? Guys  RIGHTNESS AND WRONGNESS 2  come in looking tough with big rubber hoses, and so forth, and offer him a cigarette and talk about his wife, you know?

It’s all th-th-th-th-th-th, See? When he gets through, he doesn’t know what he is or where he is, so he joins the communists. The use to which mental technology is put in this universe, remember, is put that way and is put to the use it is put to in this universe because people don’t know what they’re do- ing, because there is no mental technology.

Now, if you stop and think about it for a moment, the purposes of mental technology must consist of survival, with its consequent domination-necessity to-and must, therefore, thereafter, consist of being right and wrong. It may be somewhat mysterious to you how these three things fit together in a channel, but they do. This fellow is trying to be right, trying to be right, trying to be right.

Why is he trying to be right? He’s trying to be right about the most aberrated things you ever heard of He’s always trying to be right. If you as an auditor look at this bloke who is suffering from alcoholism or dope addic- tion or something like this, there’s one thing that you can always be right about, see?

It might be that it was made available to him while he was in High school and he was being blackmailed into it and he was this and that. And it might be this and it might be that and it might be some- thing else, and it might be because his medulla oblongata has slipped-a lot of might-be’s, might-be’s, might-be’s-but in actual fact all he’s trying to do is be right. And if you want to be right about him, then you should realize that the reason he is drinking or hitting dope or some- thing like that, or doing anything else he’s doing, or cooking bad dinners or anything else- whatever else this person is doing which is apparently weird or contrasurvival-is in actual fact his effort to be right.

And you can always be right about somebody’s aberrations when you recognize they’re trying to be right. That is the lowest ebb of aberration. Sounds completely weird.

Well, that’s because a thetan can’t do anything else but survive, and in order to survive you have to be right more than you’re wrong, so you get obsessed in being right. This is ele- mentary, my dear Watson. Do you follow that?

If you go out here and make a practice of being wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, you’re not going to survive. See, if you’re always going to be wrong-you go out here and you get on a motorcycle, and you turn the petrol on and you turn the spark on full, advance it all the way, and-particularly one of these big boys-and kick the kick starter, and so forth, you sail somewhat gracefully over between the handlebars because the machine kicks back. Well, if you consistently do this, why, you’re apt to be nonsurvival in the extreme.

You follow this? So, actually, right and wrong are the tools of survival and nonsurvival. In order to survive, you have to be right.

In order to get somebody else to succumb, they have to be wrong. You follow this? RIGHTNESS AND WRONGNESS 3  You see, actually, no great military commander ever wins a battle on anything else but the wrongnesses of the enemy.

And he compounds these wrongnesses up to a total attack which really makes them wrong. So even they realize they are wrong, and of course at that moment they no longer survive. And the point you degenerate into succumb from survive is the point where you recognize you are wrong.

That is the beginning of succumb-the recogni- tion that you are wrong. Naturally then, if that is true-and that is true; that’s not sensible, it’s true-naturally this follows, then, that if a person is surviving at all, if they are “thetaning” at all, no matter inside of what mass, there must be some residual rightness, even if it’s only an insistence upon rightness. So rightness goes hand in glove, immediately, with survival.

So this works itself back and forth into an aberrated A = A = A. If the individual is surviving, he must be right. It can even go to-if an individual is undertaking an action, it must be a right action, if he is surviving.

Do you see how A=A=A this becomes. In fact, it becomes complete idiocy from the lucidity of its beginning, because in actual fact there was no reason for a thetan to worry about survival in the first place. See, he has to enter this lie into the scene before he gets off into this other series of lies.

He starts worrying about his own survival. Now, we can well ask, “How does he start wor- rying about his own survival?” Well, he worries about the survival of something else and then identifies himself with it. You see?

He says, “This thing has got to survive, and I am it, so therefore. . . .” and here he comes, his next lie - and he needn’t make this fantastic lie at all, but they manage it-and that is “I am now worried about my survival.” And actually, it isn’t until he takes that step that he goes halfway round the bend. See, he’s practically finished now. There is no reason at all, just because you have built a bunch of sand castles and are protecting these sand castles from destruction by the tide or naughty boys-there’s no reason at all that you can’t go on protecting these sand castles ad infinitum and safeguarding their survival.

You don’t have to take the idiot step of becoming a sand castle. See? It isn’t until the individual takes that idiot step of becoming a sand castle that he himself becomes worried about his own survival.

But at the moment he becomes worried about his own survival, he then enters into the necessity to dominate in order to continue to survive. Best way to protect your sand castles, of course, is to dominate anybody who would threaten to destroy your sand castles. That’s elementary, isn’t it?

You have to be tougher than the other tough boys on the beach, in other words. You have to dominate their behavior to the degree of restraining them from destroying the sand castles. This makes domination a necessity, if you’ve already entered the game of survival.

See, you don’t even have to have become a sand castle to start dominating. Now, what happens now? What happens now?

The game of domination consists of being right and making the other fellow wrong. And that is all the game consists of. There isn’t any other-I mean, out of this vast universe, you finally shake out this one little, tiny, idiotic  RIGHTNESS AND WRONGNESS 4  simplicity, you know, and it all makes everything look silly, you know, when you come to think about it.

Russia and the United States-the great game. Well, that’s silly! The game is silly.

Rus- sia has to dominate the United States in order to survive; therefore, capitalism has to be wrong; therefore, communism has to be right. The United States has to dominate Russia in order to survive, so communism has to be wrong and capitalism has to be right. What’s wrong with this?

Well, what’s wrong with this is there isn’t any capitalism to amount to anything. Ha! And there’s practically no communism.

That’s getting idiotic about that stage of the game, you see? Anybody can see that one. But let’s go back to why does Russia have to dominate the United States and why does the United States have to dominate Russia.

Well, that’s because Russia is liable to de- stroy everything in the United States, and the United States is liable to destroy everything in Russia. Now, let’s look at this a little more closely. Why are they liable to destroy everything in the United States and Russia?

Why is this liable to happen? I don’t think you have any more answer than anybody else does. Exactly why?

Well, that’s because Russia is threatening to destroy everything in the United States, and the United States is threatening to destroy everything in Russia. And that’s why the United States have to be very careful not to be destroyed by Russia, and Russia has to be very careful not to be destroyed by the United States. You see, this is very elementary.

You work this thing out. You don’t need these Ruskian idiocies pronounced at great length to explain the international situation, to see, actually, what is taking place. Yes, but Russia is devoting so much of her production capacity to weapons and rocketry and other things in order to dominate the United States, that communism is failing.

And the United States is devoting so much of its production capacity-it actually amounts now to three quar- ters of the total production capacity of the United States and three quarters of the total engi- neers, scientists and technicians of the United States are involved in this effort-that it is de- stroying capitalism. Because, you see, it “has to” in order to keep the effort going, in order not to be destroyed. Well, this is a typical game.

And you start examining this game on the basis of survive, dominate and right and wrong, and where’s the right and wrong come in-you start to examine it, or examine any game on the basis of just these things: survival, domination and rightness and wrongness. Examine the game and immediately the rightness and wrongness that you see residual in it appears to be pretty mixed up. Well, the United States would be very wrong to destroy its economic stability and prosperity in order to destroy communistic economic dominance or prosperity, see?

And re- versely, communism would be very wrong to destroy any benefit residual in any communistic system, if there is any, in order to knock out the capitalistic lines, you see? She’d be wrong to  RIGHTNESS AND WRONGNESS 5  do that, but she is doing it and she is doing it on the supposition that she is right. And the United States is doing all this on the supposition that it is right.

So you’ll see that A=A enters into the situation where rightness becomes wrongness. And people will defend the most fan- tastic wrongnesses on the basis that they are being right. As you audit people, if you specialize in this particular line-as you audit them you will sometimes be appalled by the justification of the person’s own actions.

You’re utterly appalled. Gauze is armor plate compared to the argument that they will put up, don’t you see? I mean, they put up this thin facade. “Well, you see, the reason I left my wife-reason I left my wife is because she seldom, uh-very, very seldom, uh-was ever home, you see, to put out my bedroom slippers.

And therefore, I had to leave her.” “Well, why wasn’t she home?” “Well, she was working and supporting me.” And you say, “End of scene. Rmrmrm.” And yet he will go right on leaving, you see, and staying “left,” and perpetuate this ac- tion and defend it down to his last breath. I can see it now, the hammer and sickle flying over the White House, you know, and all of the arguments and press releases that are coming out from the White House saying, “Down with Russia,” you see? “Down with Russia.

We are absolutely right to continue to support capitalism.” Then you’ll say finally, “Well, what is capitalism?” “Well, capitalism is all the workers are told exactly where to work, and exactly how much they’re going to get, and all the property belongs to the government, and a capitalist gives you a clenched-fist salute. That’s what ... And we are being right.

This is a right action. And it’s right, what we are doing.” Well, maybe the actions were sensible. If you look down along the line, you see, you’ll see some sensible actions being-taking place, and this is what throws you.

Because you can see some sensible actions going forward through all this, and you may understand some of this, but what you don’t understand is how right this is, or why they don’t recognize that the consequences of it are just wrongness, and that they are actually being very wrong while they are saying they are being very right. You go over to Russia and say, “How come you got income tax these days, bud? How come your workers all get different rates of pay, and status symbols seem to be entering in here, and what’s all this about some unions being organized, and well, what’s all this going on here?

This doesn’t look like communism to me.”  RIGHTNESS AND WRONGNESS 6  “Oh, yes, yes, yeah. Oh, this-this is communism. This is communism.

You see, a good communist-a good communist loans money at interest. That’s the definition of a good com- munist. And we’re perfectly right in everything we are doing.

And that is really correct com- munism.” And you look at this and it just becomes complete idiocy to you. You don’t see whether you are coming or going, you see? What is all this about?

Well, you see this sort of thing taking place on the international front. It’s very, very easy to recognize at that level of action. Very easy to recognize.

But it’s not quite so easy to recognize when you see this skid-row bum. He’s just all soiled from having spent the night in the gutter, you see? And you smell the canned heat on his breath, you know?

And there he is, you see? He’s about ready to hit the chutes. Now somebody tells you, “Why is he doing it?” “He is doing it because it is a right action.” You say, “Oh, no!” 4’Yes,” you say, “he’s being right.

He is asserting the rightness of being a skid-row bum and canned heat and all the rest of that. And he’s asserting that as a rightness. And that is why he is doing it.” Well, you see, you’ve undercut the simplicity and you’ve left a large zone of unreality, because the society itself has worked out all kinds of rightnesses and wrongnesses on its own bat as to why he’s a canned-heat eater, see?

They worked out this fantastic...... Well,” they say, “after all, he probably had few opportunities in his youth.” The guys who want more appropriation for the university say he never had a chance to get a university education, you see? The milk producers who want to sell more milk said, “Didn’t have enough milk and there wasn’t enough strontium 90 in it.” Everybody has got explanations for this, so you come down to the final, last-ditch ex- planation, which is the right one, and nobody recognizes the rightness of the explanation.

He is asserting the rightness of eating canned heat. Why? Because everybody has always tried to make him wrong.

His automatic response is to be right, so he has no choice but to eat canned heat. Get the idea? Now, if he at any given instant says, “I am wrong to eat canned heat,” he’ll collapse.

He’s finished. He may go into a coma. He may even die.

I mean, it’s on that elementary basis. It’s a fantastically elementary situation. What is it all about?

Well, behavior doesn’t necessarily have everything to do with the whole track, you understand? Behavior is behavior, and then people have tried to aberrate it one way or the other and have tried to twist it around one way or the other and mess it up and make people do some other way, but the science of life still remains the science of life. RIGHTNESS AND WRONGNESS 7  The factors of life still remain the factors of life.

And if you were to delete all of the GPMs and incidents and everything else, you would not have removed the basic laws on which Scientology is built. That’s interesting, isn’t it? Come to think about it, you get so in- volved in erasing things.

These simply enforce and exaggerate and destroy freedom of choice. They destroy freedom of choice over the exercise of the ability to be happy or powerful or normal or active, or something of the sort. They destroy power.

They destroy freedom of choice. They destroy the ability to be self-determined or to be pandetermined about things. They make a person one-sided about everything under the sun, you see?

And they simply use basic and residual law-unwittingly, by the way-to exaggerate cer- tain things which then lead a person to enslave himself. And the basic mechanism of enslave- ment is survival-the insistence upon surviving, followed by the necessity to dominate, fol- lowed by, then, the necessity to be right or wrong. The necessity to be right or wrong then becomes as irrational as the original postulate to survive.

And these postulates go downhill, and you will find in them the most incredible situations you will find. You will blink-I told you about this, you look for it. And one of these days you are really going to blink at what somebody is doing in order to be right.

They just become totally concentrated on the last way they can be right. This is how they can be right! And everybody’s working all around them, on top of them, pounding them, publicizing them, kicking their head in on the subject, and the more that people kick, why, there it is.

Then the person will go more degraded. You’ll see sometimes a person who is only nominally degraded-they’re a politician or something like that, see? And you’ll see this person go downhill and become a covert criminal and slip a little bit further and a little bit further.

And you’ll see him out lecturing for the Salvation Army, protesting against the very thing which they recently held to be right. This individual has sort of died a death now. He is talking about going to heaven.

He’s talking about being dead. That is mainly what he’s talking about. You very often go into-you go into a church of one of these older faiths, and you’ll find the minister up there haranguing and screaming, you know, about “the evils of the demon rum,” or something like that, to the congregation. “Stay ye away from that pub, bud,” you know?

Yelling, you know? And he goes back to his study, you see, and he takes this little nip of medicine to fortify himself, you see, after the exertions of his lecture. Now, these birds who are working this hard were working inevitably and invariable in the field and area of death, because they are right down to the point where you get an aber- rated rightness and wrongness; cessation of survival is so threatened that it becomes imminent.

It actually gets dramatized before it happens. And you’ll see somebody turning against religion because of the amount of hypocrisy in it. You know, the guy is saying, “Well....” Well, the Roman Catholic church probably lost its grip on the world which it’s trying to reassert now by killing off the Buddhist.

I beg your pardon, the better interpretation is that it’s only those in charge in Vietnam who are members  RIGHTNESS AND WRONGNESS 8  of the Catholic church. That actually isn’t everybody. There are some Presbyterians there, too, in the American troops, and so forth.

I have opened up a chapter here which is leaving you blinking just a little bit. I’m sure somebody is going to make the assumption sooner or later, though, that if the only government in the world being maintained in force actively by US arms is a Catholic gov- ernment, that that government’s turning against another religion has something to do with something here that we haven’t quite put the finger on. And we add to the fact that that same government is attacking the only other organization on the face of Earth who doesn’t believe in death forever, we begin to ask interesting questions.

You probably hadn’t linked the attacks on the Buddhist up with US arms supporting the government of Vietnam, nor the attacks of the FDA against the FCDC in Washington, DC. Yeah, everybody else is all right. Criminals, they’re fine, and so forth.

Everybody’s all right. But it’s just these two organizations on the face of Earth plus one other, the Theoso- phist, who talk about reincarnation and who talk about coming back to life again and who talk about these other things. And it’s an oddity that just in the last two or three years all three of these organizations have been furiously attacked by the US government.

Sort of an interesting puzzle, isn’t it? Well, don’t worry about it. We’ll get there before they do.

This is just an interjected thing. Now, they’re evidently asserting a rightness about death. I know it’s mean of me, it’s cabalist, it’s rabble-rousing for me to infer that the majesty of government is actually being used to further some foul, religious end in some way and to cause everybody to be dead.

But I’m very interested in the fact that the Church of England, of all organizations, right down here in the form of a vicar (who, I think, has had to move since). This bird-I’m looking at a face or two here who were present in this-was being very censorious about our giving death lessons to young children. Story went around the world.

What do you think this guy does every time he stands up there in the pulpit? It gives one to wonder, you know? He’s talking about going to heaven and all this sort of thing.

He’s giving death lessons to little kids. Diana came home from school one day crying. She was going to a local school up here.

She wanted to know if all this stuff about poor Christ was true. And I gave her the hot dope, and-well, as a matter of fact, I did. I was very reasonable about the whole thing.

I said, “Native populaces have their religious beliefs, and wherever you are, you must remain tolerant of the current beliefs,” and so forth, and she took this in. But it’s interesting that this bird down here is asserting how wrong it is, don’t you see, to give children death lessons while he himself is giving them death lessons. Only our death lessons are straight dope-this is what happens with regard to death-but his are a darn lie.

Somehow or another, this makes him right. How does this make him right? Well, you can just go round in circles trying to figure out what’s the rightness and wrongness of this, you see?

RIGHTNESS AND WRONGNESS 9  Why should a powerful state attack a truthful philosophy, you see? Why, you know, why some of the calmest and most decent people in Asia-the Buddhists-why are these people be- ing attacked and shot down and their pagodas burned and that sort of thing Why? What ... ?

And you can go round and round and you can get real confused and you can get real upset. Well, there’s always one stable datum. There’s always one stable datum: Somehow, whatever they’re doing-no matter how mad the action may appear-is undertaken by them to be right.

Now, you would actually have to get them on a meter or get them to explain and put in a long, long itsa line on this subject and get off the automaticities until they finally told you the rationale. And the reason it isn’t a rationale is because A=A=A along the whole line. You just would not be able to believe how or why this guy had to, you know-canned heat.

You ask him a question, “Now, how does it make you right to eat canned heat?” You say, “Well, he sure can’t answer that, you know, because-ha-ha! It’s ruining him. Everybody has been down on him.

The ‘I Will Arise’ and everybody else is jumping him about this, and he’s been talked to by all the ministers and everybody. He’s read about how the evils that it’ll do and so forth. So, heh-heh, he can’t defend this one.” So, of course, one would never nor- mally ask that question; say, “How does it make you right to eat canned heat?” See?

Well, brother, only an auditor would be able to adventure this far, because you’re going to get a screaming automaticity. Well, it makes him right. “Eat canned heat? Well, that’s. . . .” Makes him right because “Rah-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da and ta-da-da-da-da-da,” and that makes him right.

And “Ta-da-da-da-da,” and that makes him right. And “. . . eat canned heat, and therefore this makes that right,” and it’s “That right and that right, and so forth, and so on and so on and so on and so on and... .” I mean, you finally get through, this thing has practically wound itself around the dial. And you say, “All right, now.

Now, how does it make someone else wrong?” “Oh, ha-ha-ha-ha-ha! So-so and so-and-so and so-and-so and so-and-so and so-and-so and so-and-so and so-and-so and so-and-so, and so-and-so and so-and-so and my father, and so forth and so on. And I parked my bicycle on the church steps there one day, and that old minister came out and-and he actually had the police take away my bicycle, and so forth, and he always was lecturing on the lectures of drink, you see?

The evils of drink and so forth and so on-ha-ha! There you are.” The guy says, “Wait a minute. That isn’t sensible.” And do you know, whether he has understood it very well or not, he will now have a very hard time eating canned heat.

See, here’s sanitariums, the Keeler Institute-Keeley, I think it is. (One has lie detectors and the other has alcoholism. I always got them mixed.) He’s been there. He’s been treated.

He’s been biochemically injected, you know? He’s been psychoana- lyzed. He’s been everything you could think of, see?

They’ve given him stuff that when he eats canned heat it makes him sick. He just goes right on eating canned heat. There wasn’t any  RIGHTNESS AND WRONGNESS 10  stopping it because of this block-this block he had.

And that intention is the strongest inten- tion in the universe. There is no stronger intention than that at a mental level. Above that, of course, you have the effort to dominate, and above that level you have the effort to survive.

These things are very strong, but I’m talking about a mental activity: a mental activity, a thinking activity, an intentional activity-strongest intention. Survival-that just happens, you see? Domination-that just happens.

Those are not intended things. You get down along the line of intended and it’s right and wrong. And that’s where that lives.

This becomes very remarkable. We’ve got this teenage girl. We’ve got this teenage girl, and she’s running around and having an awful time.

And she’s been arrested and lectured to and shown motion pictures and been horrified and hit over the head and defamed and threat- ened with kicking out of her home-that if she doesn’t behave on the second dynamic, you see? And she goes right on misbehaving and that sort of thing and so on and so on and so on. Now, this is an actual case history.

I had one in my office one day. Changed her whole life-almost accidental. One of the research cases that furnishes data that leads to data of this particular kind.

She was just trying to make her parents wrong. She realized it. That was the change of her behavior pattern, right there.

We didn’t even touch in that particular case on her trying to be right. She was just trying to make her parents wrong. Well, obviously, how could you make them wrong.

Well, you could make them wrong by trying to make them change their mind on what they insisted upon the most. And the diagnosis of how do you make a person wrong is, what does that person most insist upon? Therefore, if that person most insists upon this particular factor, then that is the one you must make them wrong on.

So the criminal tries to make the forces of law and order wrong, you see? The diagnosis taken from the viewpoint of the being involved is simply, what are these persons insisting is wrong? What do these people insist is wrong?

And then make them wrong on it. It’s a perfect Q and A, see? What they say is wrong: make them wrong.

You can’t get a closer identification than that, you see? Mother is saying, “Be a good girl, daughter. Be a good girl, daughter.

Be a good girl, daughter. Be a good girl, daughter.” Daughter, getting more and more antagonistic against the old lady-she knows now exactly how to handle Mama. You make Mama wrong.

How do you make Mama wrong? All you got to be is not a good daughter. Elementary, my dear Watson, see?

It isn’t what aberration the individual is dramatizing. It’s what aberration does the individual dredge up in order to make somebody wrong. That’s behavior.

It isn’t the accidental thing that you think it is. So we’ve got a schoolteacher. And he says, “Children, you mustn’t chew gum.

Chil- dren, you mustn’t chew gum. Children, you mustn’t chew gum.” Well, the characters that like him the least are going to chew gum. Don’t you see?

That’s how to make him wrong. You can’t destroy him overtly with 16inch guns, but you can cave him in trying to make him wrong covertly. And he’ll sit around and worry about those children chewing gum.

It does. It  RIGHTNESS AND WRONGNESS 11  serves to cave him in, too, a little bit, you know-a little bit, a little bit, a little bit. He may even go away sometime and stop teaching school and leave the children alone, you see?

This is fan- tastic. So a government which is trying to conduct decent law and order has worked against it, continuously, this factor: that bringing about decent law and order is wrong. Now, a govern- ment with that force pushed against it continuously, endlessly, on and on and on, will eventu- ally come to the realization of exactly what keeping law and order is: It’s being as criminal as possible.

See, it’s been made wrong to the point where it now identifies the right label with the wrong action. It knows how to be wrong: to be a decent government. See, on this broader perimeter you watch this thing as it works its way out.

If you can see that, it gives you a rather vast understanding of aberration. Now, whether or not you can reach this aberration is not the subject. This is simply, can you understand it?

Not whether or not you can reach it and do something about it with an E-Meter; be- cause this particular rationale, although it is very true, happens to have been booby-trapped by some very evil-intentioned characters on the whole track, who implanted goals which con- tain-and items and implants and GPMs-which contain in them right and wrong. And you start running an individual very long on rightness or wrongness, he is liable to collide with one of these implants and it goes into restimulation, and the cure is therefore barred. And you’re unable to cure him of this particular thing, because you can’t audit him on the process necessary to resolve that particular facet of aberration.

This is a barrier, in other words, that’s been installed. It is totally accidental that right and wrong are there, and he is not acting the way he is acting because he has that GPM. Now, get that through your head, see?

He’s not. That just intensifies this action, but it doesn’t bring about that action. That action would, in any event, exist whether or not there had ever been an implanter or not.

But unfortunately there have been some of these implants, so you can’t ordinarily say with complete security-oh, yes, you can without any security, and often get away with it-ask this little girl, “Now, how does being sexually promiscuous make you right, and who does it make wrong, and how does it make them wrong9” see, and get those two things worked out, and all of a sudden she’s completely reformed. She isn’t doing this at all. Oddly enough, she’s no longer able - this isn’t necessarily making her well - she’s just no longer able to get the power into it that she had in it; she’s no longer this interested in it; she’s no longer this fixated on it.

Because in any itsa line you will tend to trigger out enough to deintensify the force and power and concentration of the aberration. It’s very interesting that aberration is very hard to maintain. Let’s say this fellow is- he’s an accident prone.

He takes an automobile out and runs it into a brick wall; and he takes an automobile out and he runs it off the edge of an embankment; and he takes an automobile out and he runs into another automobile; and he takes an automobile out and he leaves it  RIGHTNESS AND WRONGNESS 12  parked on the train track, and so forth. And you let him come anywhere near this automobile- well, all of us have accidents to some degree, but he is carrying it to excess. And sooner or later somebody is going to notice the number of accidents this character has.

And if you as an auditor noticed this and you were just doing this job just for this thing in view-is just knock out the number of accidents this character was having with an automobile- you could first find out what he is having. In other words, he might be having wrecks or he might be having accidents, don’t you see? You have to find out “what is he having?” That is necessary, because you sometimes are very sure you know what the fellow is having, but that isn’t what he is having, see?

He might be having physical injury, see, not accidents at all. He might merely be having physical injury. So you have to isolate that factor, and that would be the stage of analysis.

This doesn’t take very long, by the way. This is nothing very laborious. This is more or less off the cuff.

Sometimes it’s enough to listen to him on the subject of these things, and he labels it several times for you, so you just use it, you see? That’s the ordinary off the cuff assessment. Nevertheless, you have to dignify it with an assessment.

It’s also the clarification of the auditing command. You say, “All right. Now, how would an automobile accident make you right?” or “How has it made you right?” or any such thing as this.

And you expect he’s going to have to sit there and fumble with this for quite a while. Oh, no, brother! That is-if you’ve spotted it-that is sitting right on top.

That’s the easiest itsa line you ever had anything to do with: “Brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr, and rrrrr-rrrr. And also rrrr-rrrr-rrrr-rrrr-rrrrr.” All right. Now, you’ve got to keep this thing balanced because you might run into a GPM, so don’t leave him on one side of it, see?

You see, the GPM would say just right and wrong. You’ve personalized it, so it’s “How would it make you right?” and “How would it make them (or another) wrong. “ do you understand? Them wrong, you right.

That is the way you bias this thing. You understand, the GPM is totally-it doesn’t care. There’s just a right and a wrong, so that you could also play this thing the other way to, as far as the GPM is concerned but not as far as the aberration is concerned.

Life is what has thrown this thing awry. All right. So, we say to this fellow, then, when he runs down and starts to catch his breath on the subject, and the automaticities are out of the way-you have to sort of sit back and wait for the automaticities to roll on this kind of a process-you say to the individual, “How would it make another or others wrong” or “Who would it make wrong and how?” I don’t care how you put it, you see?

But it’s “who wrong” out that way, you see, and “you right.” That’s the way the question has to be designed. And if the question is completely de- signed in this fashion, you will get another rolling avalanche that will finally wind up with some earlier life-that is, this-life, usually - key-in, cognition, of some kind or another. He’ll find the first person he’s trying to leave-make wrong on it.

Very often this happens. RIGHTNESS AND WRONGNESS 13  You don’t have to direct it very much. He’ll do most of his direction on it.

Then you turn around and you ask him again, “Well, how would it make you right and how would it make you wrong.” Well, it tends to make a repetitive-type process out of it. I’m not actually giving you a repetitive process. For instance, I’m looking at a student here that’ll be going over to a Central Organization soon.

There’s two or three bad boys around that organization that have been raising hell with themselves and everybody else. It’d take, in actual fact, a good itsa line and two questions to resolve the whole ruddy mess. “How does borrowing money make you right?” And a half an hour later, “How does borrowing money make others wrong” Now, it might not even be real to him, and he might have an awful time doing it, but that’s the end of that behavior. Now, this is processing actually below the level of recognition or cognition.

You can dig this one awful deep with a pickax. You can also do some weird things to a case in changing its behavior, going along this line. But too much of a good thing is too much of a good thing, and it’s a hunt-and-punch process.

In actual fact, contained in this is the answer to neurosis. Neurosis could be defined as an antisocial action or an antisurvival action which is compulsively undertaken by the individual. We just wrapped up the work of Sigmund Freud.

It’s as elementary as that. You understand we didn’t-if you don’t intend to make the person happy, and don’t intend to make the person cheerful, don’t intend anything except just to keep the person-fit the person better into the social framework, and if that’s all that mental therapy is for, why, you got it wrapped up. I think it’s faster than implanting.

Now, in the first place, the only condition for this sort of thing is we have to be more capable of communicating, perhaps. We have to be able to communicate to the person in that we would have to listen to the person. We’d have to listen to the person.

We’d have to ask the person a question. But we’d also have to get our hands on the person in order to do that. The cowboy in the black hat has to get his hands on the person to implant him too.

And they also have to do some communication, too, don’t they.? And then they create a hell of an ARC break, don’t they? I think they get twice as much aberrated behavior afterwards.

I don’t think it’s a solution. I don’t think the development of mental technology for the purpose of aber- rating people down to a level of powerlessness where they won’t bother us-I don’t think that’s a successful approach. Well, let’s just be practical.

This has nothing to do with decency or overt-motivators or anything else. Let’s just be cold-bloodedly practical, as cold-bloodedly practical as these characters fancy themselves to be. I don’t think that it’s valuable.

I don’t think it’s valuable technology. It’s valuable to know about it, of course, from your point of view. But as far as knowing how to implant people and calling that a mental technology, or knowing how to give somebody a transorbital leukotomy and calling that mental healing, knowing how to shoot somebody with some weird powder or something of the sort that makes them bounce about in the middle of the floor for an hour or two, it looks to me like all of those lines of action are  RIGHTNESS AND WRONGNESS 14  unsuccessful.

I don’t think they’re successful. They always have a hole in them, and the hole in them is that survival can futurely be threatened. Suppose anybody ever undid it: I wish I had a nickel for every implant station that’s ever been destroyed.

I’ve known thetans to make a career out of it. In fact, I’ve known thetans to tilt a planet ten or fifteen degrees, with the equivalent avalanches and glacial epochs and so forth, or pull the air cover of a civilization just because it went on implanting. In fact, there’s a lot of things happen because of this.

Why? Because somebody was implanting. I don’t think it’s a sensible solution at all.

In fact, I don’t think it’s a solution. I just think it’s a dramatiza- tion of rightness and wrongness. I don’t think there’s any more intention behind it than that.

Look at the amount of time and effort and energy expended. Why, in any given day the appropriation of the US armed forces is probably less than the Marcabian appropriation for the maintenance of implant stations. I think it’s expensive.

I just think they do it because they are trying to be right. I don’t see any other reason for it at all. They’re trying to be right and make others wrong.

That’s all. Now, you can add political significance just as you can on Rusk’s pronunciamentos: “NATO must be in accord with the Franco-Berlin Wall unity because the ruddy rods are all on the left side of the rifles,” you see? “And therefore, all us Turks must pull together with all us Hungarians because the great entente of northern Rhodesia must be maintained,” you see? Well, it’s not quite as insane as that, but in actual fact if you take it apart and examine it very carefully, the Aggregate sum total of it is insane.

It is not sensible. What’s the end product of it? The end product of it is no solution and a worsening condition.

Now, whenever you see this rightness-and-wrongness situation where somebody is acting simply to be right and making others wrong simply to make others wrong-you know, there’s no more action to it than that, no more reason to it than that-whenever you see that, you’ll see a worsening condition. Wherever that zone and area is, you’ll see things worsening. The young girl trying to make her mother wrong with sexual misbehavior: that young girl is getting worse herself and is making her family worse, don’t you see?

In other words, it isn’t that a status quo is being maintained. You’re getting a dwindling spiral out of this sort of a thing, see? It’s the last dregs of domination, this whole action, you see?

No matter how cov- ert it is, it’s still an effort to dominate. It’s like the guy lying on the ground with four knives in him, he’s still being right and the enemy is still wrong. It’s still his final effort, you see, to dominate the enemy.

And many of these methods of dominating the enemy exist. And it’s just an aberrated war which is in progress. Now, we look over this implant situation as an implantation proposition, and we can- not really assign to it any improvement of circumstances.

If any improvement of circum- stances existed, it existed for such a short term as to render it relatively useless. A short term on the whole track might even go to a hundred thousand years. That’s a short term.

That’s no  RIGHTNESS AND WRONGNESS 15  duration for an empire. They might say, “Well, we’ve got it all licked here. We’ve got it all solved,” but they haven’t.

They’ve just got a lid on, and you’ll notice the situation deterio- rates. The situation gets worse, gets worse, gets worse. So that any activity that enters in upon this type of a rightness-wrongness solution- ”We are doing what we are doing simply to be right and simply to make somebody else wrong”-any time any solution is entered which has that sole rationale, you can then expect a continuous worsening, not only of the person who is engaging in enforcing that solution, but also the people in that person’s vicinity.

So the whole thing becomes a dwindling spiral. This thing is going to develop a leak sooner or later. It’s going to blow out at the edges, don’t you see?

Any such situation is going to go blingo! someplace or another, because it isn’t a solution, it’s a dramatization. Now, you may not suspect it, but you are looking at the final ranks not only of neuro- sis but psychosis. That is the madman.

That is the madman. He sees spiders on the wall. Medical treatment consists of telling him there are no spiders on the wall.

This looks to me like one madman handling another madman, both with the same solution. The madman is say- ing, “I am being right and you are being wrong,” and the person (quote) handling his case (un- quote) is saying, “I am being right and you are being wrong.” Because of this basic agreement, you find many of these medicos winding up themselves in the padded cells. First place, they don’t understand what they are doing.

And they don’t understand that their solution is just as crazy as the patient’s assertions. Guy is having trouble thinking: cut his brain up. Can’t think.

Well, ding, ding, ding, here comes the wagon, man! This is nonsense, don’t you see? I mean, there isn’t anything to be gained in this.

I don’t see anything happening on the subject of medical mental healing but more insane people. The insane population of the world is going up, up, up, up, and the medi- cal doctors say they’ve got to have more people to take care of these insane and there have got to be more buildings to take care of them. Statistics are increasing.

Statistics are going up. There are more and more people going insane. And therefore, we got to have more doctors to make more people insane.

You begin to look at this after a while. You say, what the devil is wrong with a legisla- tor who won’t look over the fact the statistics are rising on insanity, therefore, the money we have been appropriating it for is being wasted? Obviously, there is no proper solution to this, we obviously have the wrong people on the job.

But they never do this because they’re en- gaged themselves in a rightness-wrongness type of piece of nonsense, and most of government is how to be wrong convincingly. So the end product of the thing is no solution, don’t you see? You want to know why they did this to you, or why you ever did something to some- body else.

Well, in the final analysis, the overt-motivator sequence hinges, basically, simply  RIGHTNESS AND WRONGNESS 16  upon this aberration concerning survival - the effort to dominate-which falls into a contest of “I’m right and you’re wrong.” Now, both sides are saying, “I’m right and you’re wrong,” and therefore, you get a double-clashing sort of a proposition. You have A saying, “I’m right and you’re wrong”; you have B saying, “I’m right and you’re wrong.” You get a natural commin- gling of their ideas. After a while they don’t know what the hell they’re talking about.

They don’t know what’s right. They don’t even know what they started out to say was right, you see? Now, a mental technology, so called, which engages itself upon the worsening of peo- ple, or making people wrong and making themselves right as an exclusive activity, is not in essence a very broad or a very intelligent technology.

This is hardly worthy of the name “technology,” yet it does have technology, don’t you see? It certainly is not a mental science which embraces very much understanding. There’s very little understanding involved in this thing.

Something like the psychologist or Pavlov: if you put a young man on the table and make a dog bark, the young man slavers. (I’m being sarcastic.) Well, I don’t know. I’m tempted to say on the subject, you see, “Well, I don’t know. I look around and I’m not having any trouble with slavering dogs.

I mean, why are we working on this problem?” It’s as idiotic a statement, you see, as their own conclusions. Stimulus-response mechanisms and so forth. Why be interested in a stimulus-response mechanism?

Aw, that tells us right there that somebody must be, interested in being right and making the other fellow wrong. Don’t you see? The stimulus-response mechanism-that’s as far as they ever advanced.

Stimulus-response mechanism. Well, stimulus-response be damned. The consequences of the stimulus-response is what is-the Scientologist is interested in.

And that goes at once into the overt-motivator sequence. You move right on upstairs from stimulus-response, you see, into a proper piece of technology. They seem to have avoided that whole piece of technology.

Why? Because they’re only interested in being right and making somebody else wrong, don’t you see? Now, a mental science cannot be worthy of the name “mental science” if it keeps dramatizing an unknown one of its parts.

See? That outlaws anything which continues to dramatize one of its parts, you see. It outlaws it from the proper name of a complete under- standing.

You said a science; a science would be a complete understanding of something. Well, if something is dramatizing one of its parts, it certainly does not have a complete understand- ing of life. Now, the sciences of life are difficult just to this degree: You are living.

See, you have a day-by-day interrelationship with the laws of life. And to rise superior to this, in any way whatsoever, is so phenomenal as not to have happened ever before. It’s one of these tricks.

It’s by your own bootstraps, don’t you see? And for a while, if you know all the aberrative angles, you find yourself batting about in the bottle like a bluefly, see? Every direction you fly, you run into something else.

If you started analyzing your own behavior in a single day  RIGHTNESS AND WRONGNESS 17  according to the basics that you know, and if you had all of them available in Scientology, you see-if you analyzed your behavior throughout any twenty-four-hour period, you’d find out, a short period of that time, somewhere along the line, you were dramatizing something. In fact, you wouldn’t have to do very much analysis. In fact, right now, all these people out in front of me are dramatizing breathing.

Auto- maticity: they think to stay alive they have to breathe. You tell some doll that someplace and his jaw would drop, you know? You say, “Well, you can’t live on Exnoo because there’s no air.” There’d be a lot of beings that would look at you awfully blankly. “What you want air for?

What’s the air supposed to do?” “Well, you know, air, you know, air-you got to have air, you got to have oxygen.” “What are you going to do on Exnoo that you need oxygen for?” They’d try to figure it out how you’re going to put it in bottles or sell it or you.... Maybe you got a new fuel for rocket ships has to do with oxygen; couldn’t make.... They’d finally understand what you were talking about.

They’d finally understand that you were peculiar. You get the idea? The total cessation of the dramatization of the game called life, you see, renders one, at first glance, in a very confused situation, since he’s trying not to dramatize its various parts, you see, and yet he inevitably must dramatize certain of its parts.

And then he finally comes to the conclusion, “In order not to dramatize life, you climb away to a large cave on the side of a very bare mountain and hope people will put crusts of bread outside, while you sit and meditate and don’t have anything whatsoever to do with life.” Now, by not having anything to do with life you have now rendered yourself free of dramatizing life. And oddly enough, there’s enough workability to that. You get away from all restimulative factors and your restimulation dies down, you see?

Get less restimulated, you feel quite calm. So you say, “Well, this is the way to do it. You don’t be any part of life.” No.

The real challenge of a science of life is to know it and be able to live-be able to live that life, you see? That’s the real challenge, and oddly enough, if you know all the answers you can always do that. It isn’t necessary - because you know a half a dozen lies, you see, that you think are answers, it isn’t necessary to go crawling off to some cave all by your lone- some, you see?

You can stand out in the middle of life and live life, don’t you see? The final challenge of a science of life is does it produce life? Not does it produce death.

When you analyze this thing all the way on down, it’ll leave you kind of buggy at first. You get all sorts of weird ideas. “Well, maybe I ought to stop auditing. Maybe I ought to leave auditing.

And maybe I ought to get back to my knitting or whatever else I was doing,” don’t you see? “And I ought to something or other. RIGHTNESS AND WRONGNESS 18  And then you suddenly realize that what you’re trying to do is drop part of what you were doing, you see, in order to get away from what you were dramatizing in order not to dramatize. You can get into an awful confused state, man.

You can sit around for days trying to sort something out along those lines. Well, that’s all right. It’s enough to realize, however, that you are in a situation where it can be sorted out.

And that’s a remarkable situation to be in. Very remarkable situation to be in. Myself, I’ve had to groove off the importances of existence-what are the important things?-because time, making a problem, you see, has made it necessary to concentrate on cer- tain importances of existence and wrap these various things up.

Well, that’s a very proper solution to the thing, but it certainly isn’t inactive. It’s flat out, man, flat out activity going along at a very high rate. I notice that there’s more and more of a tendency-more and more of a tendency as one goes along the line-to recognize more and experience more life.

He doesn’t have to work so hard to experience life. That’s one of the things. Person who cant experience very much has to work very hard to experience something and get all involved trying to experience existence.

Existence is all around them. Walk down the street and they’re experiencing existence., But to convince themselves that they are surviving, they think they have to stand under a truck. And that is another way of going about it.

They have to suffer impacts. They have to be in there living. What is living to them?

Well, living, to them, you see-find to some degree, is being right. They have to be convinced that they are being right or convinced that they are surviving or convinced they are dominating something, you see? And you take some king of olden times: why, there he sat upon his huge throne, and so forth, and all of his courtiers are saying bog-bog and bow-bow and walking backwards three quarters of the entrance hall, don’t you see, and bumping into the guards and messing it up.

All of which is simply designed to convince this fellow and convince others that he is domi- nating, you see? Well, I’d say he couldn’t have had much of an impression on people if he had to work at it that hard. That’s simply the mechanisms of domination.

You find anybody who has to work at it that hard, see, he’s practically dead, man. He’d be gasping most of the time. You find some teenager, for instance, out here going to dances and listening to music and diving and experiencing all sorts of weird new thrills and sensations and so forth; they’re trying to convince themselves they’re alive, don’t you see?

They’re half-dead about nine- tenths of the time. But they’re having a hard time of it. But a science of life should bring about living.

Now, there is a level at which rightness and wrongness ceases to be analytical or com- prehensible. And when we speak of aberration, it’s when it drops below that point. It isn’t  RIGHTNESS AND WRONGNESS 19  that trying to be right is wrong: It’s obsessively being right about something that’s obviously wrong that goes loopy.

See, that’s when that mechanism goes astray, and the level of neurosis is only reached when the individual is no longer able to select his own courses of behavior, when he is obsessively following courses of behavior in order to be right. Now, everybody has a few of these. You can all try them on for size.

This fellow is- eats salads. He hates salads, but he eats salads, and you just get on this. “Is there anything you’re doing that you really don’t like to do?” And this fellow says, “Oh, I just don’t like to eat salads.” You say, “Well, how does eating salads make you right, and how does it make some- body else wrong?” Now, you’re going to get into an interesting situation where you’re going to find out he has been already overwhelmed on the subject of salads. This thing is going to cross back the other way.

It’s a question of how was Mother right in making everybody wrong on the sub- ject of salads, don’t you see? And that is not a good processing question. That’s somebody else’s aberration, so we’re not particularly interested in that.

So we just bring him up to that point and this thing will snap. You’ve got a lot of these things, but by and large they have no value. They have no value.

It isn’t until a person reaches inability, weakness, stupidity and other suchlike things as a way to be right that the dwindling spiral is entered. Now, he’s being right by being unable. When you see that one loom over the horizon in any zone of behavior, you have approaching neuroses if it’s not there already.

And when a civilization goes all out for this, watch it, because it’s going to be dead tomorrow. The dust is going to be moaning through its temples and the tumbleweed rolling down its freeways, be- cause that civilization has already entered in upon the necessity to be unable in order to be right. The way to make somebody else wrong, then, is to be nuts-incapable.

Now, a dramatization, any dramatization (entering in upon this whole field of mental science), which brings about a further disability is wrong for that civilization, no matter how right that civilization thinks it is. And anything which enters a civilization into more life, more livingness, more ARC and so forth is, of course, by basic definition, right for that civilization. So, you see, it’s also capable-this also renders itself susceptible to understanding what one should do, as well as knocking out neuroses.

Now, anything that is mad in an individual, at some higher level, was okay. All madness is simply an exaggeration of some ability or capabil- ity; it’s some perversion or exaggeration of this. RIGHTNESS AND WRONGNESS 20  Let us take in the lower rungs of it-well, let’s take sexual misbehavior of some kind or another.

This, of course, is a lower-harmonic enforcement of the ability to create, see, way upscale. By the time you get this thing all mixed up and clouded up, and this way and that way, you get it down here, you got some sexual disability of some kind or another, and that is how the person is still being right about this upper thing, you see? So these things really enter along this line.

Way up here it was right-really right-you see? And then it came down a little bit, and it was a method of survival, and then it was a method of dominating, and then it was a method of being right in order to make others wrong. And then in that contest one got enough overts-the communication line did a switcheroo, don’t you see-so what was right about it is now wrong about it, but what is wrong about it is now right about it.

And we’ve got this thing all the way down to the bottom of the scale. It’s very recognizable where it came from, but it’s gone through all of this switcheroo, and down at the line it’s practically unrecognizable from its immediate state as far as a person’s behavior is concerned. This fellow is an artist.

He could paint. Let us say he could paint a side of a house, you see, you know, with a beautiful scene, you know. Prrrrrroooom-nothing to it, you know.

And you find this fellow down there nursing a girl’s shoe, you see, to his chest, you know? And he hides this all the time. It’s a girl’s shoe, and he sniffs it occasionally, you know, and it gives him kicks, you see?

I mean, it’s more or less the same channel, but there the upper-scale ability has become the lower-scale mockery. And you get these lower-scale mockeries all the time get the upper-scale abilities in trouble. And once in a while you go around feeling ashamed of yourself for having suddenly thought you could do something about the United States or something like that because some nut in the booby hatch is talking all the time about doing something for the United States, don’t you see?

Well, the difference is, is you probably could and he couldn’t-a slight difference of ability. Now, when you look over this whole panorama of behavior and what a person is try- ing to do, you enter in upon an ability to understand much of the nonsense which at the pre- sent moment you may only be protesting against. You just look around on it.

But this task is rendered very difficult by the fact that the explanations so obscure the kernel of insanity of the rightness-wrongness that it’s very hard to get at what they are really doing. I don’t know what the United States is doing today; maybe it’s having a revolution. But it’s being right about something.

It’s being right about something, and it’s making people wrong about something. We’re not sure what it is, but on a careful analysis or on an auditing level, we could discover those two points. The moment we discovered them, they’d all go unsnarl.

RIGHTNESS AND WRONGNESS 21  So a science of life actually is a science of examination of behavior, and behavior is based upon lots of ramifications, tremendous explanations in all directions, but narrowed right on down to the middle, looked at in its bare bones, it comes down to survival, dominate, right- ness and wrongness. That becomes the main line of behavior. I hope sometime when you’re looking at somebody who is sitting there picking bugs off himself, one after the other, cock- roach here and a cootie there, let us hope you don’t jump back to keep them from getting on you.

And let’s hope also you don’t try to convince him that there are no bugs there, because you are now playing the one game which makes him make you wrong, and at that moment, you will cut your communication line-just like that. So now he has only one purpose in view, and that is to make you wrong and make himself right. And you can cave him in, you can deteriorate him, you can put him further downscale, but you can’t bring him back up the line again.

It’s impossible. Because you’ve taken the one step to cut the communication line which could have made it all right. You see that?

So a dramatization of rightness and wrongness is not the answer to a dramatization of rightness and wrongness. And probably out of all the factors of a science of life, that one you would have to know, otherwise you would simply get trapped into the dwindling spiral of everything you tried to do anything about anyplace. It is the essential piece of understanding which is necessary to keep you free of going the chute.

Okay? Thank you.

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