View source for Forget and Remember, Good and Evil (1ACC 531019)

'''Series:''' 1ACC

'''Date:''' 19 October 1953

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

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This is October the 19th, first morning lecture - this is Monday morning.

Dick wrote in the other day and he said he had it all figured out now. He finally had found out that the wide-open case was trying to make something come to pass and that the occluded case was trying to chew everything up and make it all go away. This is an oversimplification but it's something for you to work with.

The wide-open case and the occluded case are both doing the same things but in different ratios. The whole subject of occlusion has been very poorly understood. It is best understood by somebody who was occluded and who isn't occluded anymore.

If you ran some implosions, however, on an occluded case for a little while, you would begin to understand it very well. You would find that this person has been a point which has been under constant bombardment by MEST universe waves and rays for so long that his defenses keep getting driven in, driven in, driven in, driven in.

He is in a slow-motion implosion. He's in a 74-trillion-year implosion, except at those times when he happens to hit a vacuum; and he's not fond of vacuums. They take things away from him much too fast. So he resists exploding and he can't help but implode. And so he gets smaller and smaller and less and less and he thinks he's less and less and he identifies himself with space and he becomes nothing.

Man is trying to do two things and this is what we're going to take up this morning - trying to do two things - mixed or one or the other: he's trying to make nothing out of something or something out of nothing.

Now, a person who is sane does either of these two things equally well. He decides what's contrasurvival and he suddenly decides that's - well, he'll get rid of that and he does. And he decides something else is prosurvival, it works out, and so he makes more of it.

When a person is no longer in an optimum state of mind, he begins - and that's from 2.0 down on the Tone Scale - he begins, as he descends the Tone Scale, more and more to make nothing out of any something - no pro- or contra-survival about it, you see. It just could be made as a blanket statement that that is what this person is going to do regardless of what course he goes on. He is going to make nothing out of something.

And he, however, retains down to a fairly low level on the scale, an adjudication, if you could call it that, and he has become reversed. So that, if there's any differentiation going on, it is to make nothing out of anything good; and the only somethings he makes, is to make something out of anything which might be bad.

You see that very clearly with the entheta which people below 2.0 handle. Their acceptance level of entheta should be very obvious to you. They're trying to make nothing out of something.

Now, above 2.0 and for a little ways up the scale to about 4.0, they are trying to make, according to the existing cultural pattern, something out of nothing if the something will promise to be good and prosurvival in their existing form - whatever is adjudicated to be prosurvival - and they try to make nothing out of things which are contrasurvival. And this becomes very marked until you get at 4.0 a person won't pay any attention to bad news. People can come in and pound bad news at him like mad and he pays no attention to it at all. It just doesn't register. But people come in with good news and he's very alert. Compare this to 1.0 on the Tone Scale and we find out that this person will pay no attention to good news at all and will pay every attention to bad news - really stop the whole show to listen to some bad news.

Well, in terms of communication, you've seen this in Science of Survival, that works out right there: A person is letting bad communications go through and then less and less communications go through and then - you see, it's a cycle that turns over - finally at the bottom any communication goes through because nothing is being relayed or registered at all. The guy is dead.

Well, let's look at this phenomena as an effort to understand - remember "try to understand it" - as an effort to understand the operation of Homo sapiens.

The next two or three days I am going to try to give you some insight, as you will or if you wish, into the behavior of Homo sapiens because right now it is an apparent imponderable. In the first place, survival in a static form is undesirable, very undesirable. Survival on a persistence level in terms of form is definitely, positively and without any doubt undesirable.

Goodness with no badness is undesirable and you'd have no randomity at all. And an adjudication which keeps a person from exerting constant and continual effort in the direction of work - no reward or rewardedness is not part of it - the ability to obtain pain and other sensation is the right side of the coin. The ability to exert effort - tremendous quantities of effort in any direction, but not even particularly toward a goal - and the ability to have pain and inflict pain is the right side of the coin, but on a basis of scarcity only. No more reason behind it than that.

Pain becoming scarce at length becomes inhibited and being inhibited during that small band is undesired until it suddenly drops into desire for pain and goes on down through the lower cycle: desire for pain becomes enforcement of pain, becomes an inhibition of pain. And we have a society at this time who is trying madly to inhibit pain and, of course, the more they inhibit the scarcer it is.

You can run on a preclear their parents preventing them from having pain. And they cheer right up when they get these incidents adjusted and out of the road.

Pain after all is sensation. A sudden pull-out or push-in of anchor points will deliver the sensation of pain. And when it becomes very, very scarce, you get all sorts of covert mechanisms in the society which will deliver pain, but one has a good reason for it.

Surgery is one of these. The electric shock is one of these. Electric shock is both pain and effort - covert method of obtaining it. "If you really want pain, go insane," that's the motto low on the scale - "If you really want pain, go insane." Nowadays, the prefrontal lobotomy and that sort of thing, a fellow can really get himself butchered up beautifully.

Of course, where this ends his own future ability to re-create in one lifetime and so forth, this is bad so long as we consider that the business of living as it goes forward today is good.

And we have to ask ourselves the question, "Is it desirable to go on living?" A fellow by the name of Schopenhauer has given this far better treatment than I could this morning in this morning's lecture. And may I recommend to you "The Will and the Idea" by our friend Schopenhauer. A more bitter tirade against life I don't think was ever written. Wonderful. The way you defeat the whole works and stop the clock in all directions is simply: "Don't procreate! Don't eat. Don't live. Slow it all down to nothing. Period. Bang! You've won." A little earlier in the last few millennia, a fellow by the name of Zeno came out with a book called Apatheia and Zeno's Apatheia is just apathy, that's all, is, "You can't win anyway so why try?" Well, that's really a floppy one; that's really floppy.

Schopenhauer I favor, as the - if you want to get extreme and so forth about this whole - I favor this if you had nothing else to do anything with. If you had no way at all of adjusting the situation, if you were caught and mired down in a trap from which there was no escaping, then Schopenhauer, within the realm of reason and within the realm of philosophy as it has been practiced, has said about all there is to say on the subject. I don't think a more bitter man ever lived. But of course, he's saying this with anger and we get the basic trap of this universe.

This is a love-hate universe. What do you think a ridge is? A ridge basically is a symptom of anger, hate. If you really want to get somebody mired beautifully, get him to hate something and start cutting his communication lines on hate.

You'd say hate is unacceptable. No, it isn't. Christianity made it scarce. Those Christian cults which have best succeeded, however, and when it was really roaring across the countryside and hillsides through America, boy, you were supposed to get down there and really hate that devil. That devil was something that was a concrete thing. There was no doubt about that devil at all. In fact, he had far more importance than God or Christ. You had fellows like Billy Sunday, an ex-baseball player. He played to tremendous crowds, stadiums full of people. And he'd get up there and he'd start talking about "fighting the devil." He'd been a baseball player and chewed tobacco and had been wicked in all directions until all of a sudden he saw the light. And he used to get up on the stage and he'd roll off his coat and roll up his sleeves and stand there with a pugilist posture and dare the devil to come up on the stage and fight him, see. Very dramatic! And America bought this just like mad. Of course, this fellow was trying to be "Sunday." And you had him very successful at it.

So that Christianity and religion of that character actually only works on two emotions: hate and love. There isn't any in-between about it and you've got a love-hate universe going.

Now love, the way it's defined, is really not admiration. It's just a sort of a surrender. There's too many gradients of it to just say love and then let it go. What do they mean by love? Well, you've got to love your neighbor. I never saw anybody jumping out of the front door of the house and rushing over, throwing his arms around old Mr. Jones or something like that; and yet they understand this, that people will tell you who never did that, that they love their neighbor. It's a sort of a flat, no-emotion proposition of "let's all lie down and die."

And you've got, then, the other condition: you've got to hate evil. Well, the whole tenet of resistance to evil is one to which I recommend you as an auditor for an investigation of what has happened to your preclear. The theory of resistance to evil. Denial of self and resistance to evil are two keynotes in understanding what goes on in a preclear.

People have made him resist evil. Now, you can see readily that if you have two objects and one object is made to fight the other object, the two are going to set up resistances to each other in terms of electronic flow, in terms of just mass against mass, in terms of heat, and so on. These things are going to hang up and neither one of them is going to go anyplace. Keep that in mind, neither one of them is going to go anyplace. Resistance to evil is the way to make a man evil.

This explains to you the astonishing decays in the past of churches and their priests. They will resist evil and resist evil and boy, they really get nice and evil. You can't have a pure line of communication which goes into an evil spot because at least that part of the communication line which is in the evil spot is going to become evil.

What is evil? Well, evil would just be anything you'd care to make it - just anything. There is no thing under this sun, under the sun anywhere, that you can set up and say, "That is evil."

And I guess you would get evil defined as something you didn't like. So, if you started resisting everything you didn't like, you wouldn't have anything you liked in a very, very short time.

The panacea for all ills in this universe is not love, but actually admiration. Admiration melts everything down. So, if they get you to resist evil, they're turning you away toward things you can't admire so you never have a chance to melt it down.

What's evil? It's what you don't like, that's what's evil. What's good? Well, it's that thing you like, that's what's good. Real easy.

What do you like? Well, you walk down the street here and you'll find one fellow would just love to run over little schoolchildren. Well, you'll find the society won't agree with him. He could just dote on the idea of the maimed and dying and the screams thereof. Well, the society wouldn't agree with him but as far as he's concerned that's "good."

Well, let's just go over this with great rapidity here and not labor the points anywhere.

Let me explain to you another tenet now. There was resistance to evil, that's one; denial of self is another. And this one - and this is more important than either one of them because it's what starts every argument in this universe and that is the hidden standard, the theory of the hidden standard.

All art criticism is leveled from the hidden standard. All discipline is leveled from the hidden standard. All behavior correction of your preclear when he was very young was leveled from the hidden standard.

What is the hidden standard? You could also call it the "pretended standard," because the hidden standard doesn't exist. And it's just a pretended standard which is never stated. And that to define the hidden standard one would say it is a pretended standard which somebody else has that they're telling you about which actually doesn't exist.

Anytime someone comes along to a young artist and says, "Well, yes. Uh-well, maybe if you work a little harder and practice many more years, perhaps you will come up to a good, sound craftsmanship," and so forth, and then they pass on their way. And they leave this poor, young artist floundering with this unsolved problem which is: What the hell is an artistic standard? There aren't any.

I had a writer one time tell me, "My God, I wish I were a carpenter. If I were a carpenter I could build a chair and then I'd know what I had built. And these other people could sit down in it and find out that it didn't collapse and they'd know what I'd built! But when you write a story, you just never know." Of course, what he was fighting was the hidden standard.

Well, let's get this into a little, little more understandable category, a little more understandable category than the art because nobody will ever understand art; that just depends upon an opinion and there are undoubtedly certain laws in this universe which mix up colors and wavelengths which match in harmonics; only every time any artist disobeys these completely he becomes famous and is called a great artist.

Anyway, let's take it in a more practical basis. What was the hidden standard of your mother that such a thing existed as a good boy or a good girl? The hidden standard of your mother? They, Mother and Father, both had the ideal, the hidden standard, that there existed such a thing as an ideal daughter or an ideal son and they never told you what it was. They just pretended that there was this standard.

You see, there must have been this standard because they must have been talking from knowing something. You see? They must have been talking from something they knew because it was obvious that they had something in mind when they said, "Good little girls don't whistle." If there was no hidden standard then a child never did anything. A child just disappeared or died - it was gone.

So they must have had some kind of a pattern: “A good little girl was a little girl who wore..." And you'd find most kids would be going around in this fog, "Let's see, a good little girl wears a certain kind of pigtail and a certain polka-dot dress and behaves in a certain fashion at the table and is quiet - quiet when Papa wants to sleep. Let's see, and has graceful manners, whatever they are, and never asks for quarters or dimes and never gets her polka-dot dress dirty and never gets her pigtails mussed up." And if the child were to carry it forward logically, ad absurdum, they would find out that the best little girl there was, was simply a little statue that stood in the living room or something of the sort and permitted itself to be looked at and looked in its turn. It would be a pathetic thing. Because every child is trained from and every child educated from a hidden standard. Nobody ever shows the child the standard.

The army very often is very satisfactory to a boy. Every once in a while he will get into the army and he'll really find that there isn't any hidden standard about it. He is told positively what a good soldier is. A good soldier keeps himself thus and so, reports here at this time and there at that time, answers back quickly, goes through this communication formula. Nobody cares what the good soldier does on liberty as long as he doesn't beat up the air police or something. And he must report back; he mustn't lose his gun. And when action comes along he's supposed to obey his orders and use his body for a bulletproof vest. And this is a good soldier and he can define it and that is the standard of a soldier.

Well, of course that standard is very satisfactory up to the point where the fellow actually puts it into practice. Because it doesn't work. You could be the most ideal soldier that anybody ever heard of and you would get exactly noplace in the army or the navy. You'd find out everybody simply and immediately forgot about you. You provide no randomity whatsoever.

Yet you see this officer or that officer or that sergeant or this sergeant or that private or this private = they're bums. You know they're bums but they kind of hang around the captain all the time and they carry hot water to the right places and they keep their uniform sloppy as hell and they don't know their drill manual. And if the enemy ever came along, far from using their body for a bulletproof vest, they would probably use it at the other end of a communication line in the rear echelon back there where the generals are - and you can't get that much further to the rear, you'd back off of Earth. And this is the guy who all of a sudden finds himself the sergeant-major. And you say, "It can't work out that way." Go and look. So there's a hidden standard.

What is the hidden standard of being a soldier? Well, if a guy wants to get on and become a good soldier, he certainly can't use the exposed standard. So the first and sharpest lesson that a private ever learns is just that lesson, is "Don't be the obvious standard." There is some other standard which he cannot penetrate.

And all through this universe a person has been fighting toward a standard toward which he can't penetrate. Far from something being completely haywire, like a misplaced cog in your preclear's brain, there isn't a cog there. It's a missing cog. It's something missing rather than something wrong and the missing thing is the hidden standard.

You see, a thetan actually could be something. All he'd have to say is "I'm it." He's always trying to be and never becoming. He's got to be something. Everybody convinces him of this. He's got to be something. Nobody's very specific about what it is and it's usually something he knows he can't be.

But he's got to be something somewhere and so he will try to be a body. Well, that isn't good enough. He has to be a name too. And then he finds out that isn't good enough because he has to be an object.

[End of tape. The lecture continues on the next tape.]

1st ACC (19 October 1953) FORGET AND REMEMBER, GOOD AND EVIL PAGE 1/ NUMPAGES 7

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