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'''Date:''' 1 December 1950

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

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This is the last lecture and probably the last lecture I’ll give for some time in a professional school I want to give you a very rapid resume here of a little philosophic plot. It may be of interest to some of you that all of the material in Dianetics continually stays in an evolving state. It has a number of drawbacks for such a thing to be in an evolving state. It has been in this state since 1930 and I didn’t even know I was working on it actually in 1930. 1938, 1940, 1945, 1948, 49, 50-this material at any point could have been cut off and we could have said, “Well, that’s it.” Now, does one just stop thinking, stop working in this field, for the benefit of a stability? Actually, I believe the stability in it would be zero. I believe that a body of ideas is alive as long as it’s being contributed to and being consistently reformed. An old Greek said, “The mixture which is not shaken stagnates,” and nothing could be more true than such a body of ideas. This poses, to some degree, a difficulty in the field of instruction. The instructor is very—he’s got a problem there that he’s got to put through a certain amount of information, and the information is so, and so, and so, and it would be very nice and be very comfortable if he could just sit down and take this body of information and for the next century teach nothing but that.

That’s what happened for instance, in the teachings of Aristotle. They remained constant and practically unchanged for about eighteen hundred years, and all of a sudden they were awfully out of date. They stultified the whole field of education. You’ll still find the remnants of scholasticism around in the modern university. (Did I say remnants?) (audience laughs) In other words, a body of information moves forward, moves forward rather rapidly.

It’s an oddity, however, in looking over Dianetics, the consistency of its changes. I am a little bit startled at that because there has been no effort whatsoever made to be very consistent. If tomorrow we were to find a technique which would sweep all the engrams off of the bank in fifty hours, that violated five principles that have been laid down with a club, practically, into the professional class, believe me, at that moment that technique as soon as proven, tested and so on would be released. There would be no block at all on its advance. The Instructors would probably all feel like going out and blowing their brains out. The certified auditors in the field, out of touch momentarily, would find themselves enormously lagging and so on. This is true though of any progressive society, which is a parallel. A progressive society is a group of ideas as well as a group of individuals. For instance, in any big company, let’s say, Western Electric, there is always a better model, an up-to-date model, in the research department than there is on the construction assembly line and being sold to the public. I know, for instance, that 1928 radio sets, which did not appear before the general public because of various difficulties with depressions and so forth, before 1936—1928 there existed radios which didn’t make their appearance in the general society before 1936. At this moment there exist many things back in the laboratories which won’t make their appearance—survival permitting— won’t make their appearance for another five years, something like that. Very up-to-date material.

There is a danger in advancing too much material too fast and in changing too fast and getting too little agreed upon before one releases it. I’ll give you a very pertinent point. Let’s take phonograph records.

Since the war there were a lot of things developed about phonographs and recordings and so forth, very early in the war, and some of them were brought out. And all of a sudden at the end of the war we had 45 rpm records, 33½ rpm records, tape recording records, wires, and we had the old, what is it? 78 rpm records, too. At the same time the Dictaphone company was still using cylinders. In other words, all of these types of recordings. But it got into the general public at a moment when it was unproven and unjustified which was which and which was best, and so the person who wishes to play records has to be equipped with a machine which can play this terrific barrage of sizes and types and everything else. Actually, there is no machine built which will play all of these records. I’ve seen one advertised once in a while but they omit the fact that there are wires and tapes, and I check over these— equipment. And we don’t have a unification of it.

I think record sales have probably suffered because there is a lack of agreement there, therefore a certain lack of reality about it, it can’t punch through with this reality Well, this is not comparable actually, to Dianetics. Dianetics keeps coming along a line of advance. This line of advance was codified about 1938 and everything which has come away from that point has had oddly enough, (and it is odd) a consistency That is to say, it was workable at any moment from there on, and when the processing came out and processing techniques started to evolve, it was just in the interest of making it faster and easier, and not having as much brilliance, perhaps, in the auditor. These techniques kept coming and they were refinements, refinements, refinements and so on.

At the same time, however, the reason why these new techniques kept taking place was because out in this direction the philosophic echelon kept advancing. There’s an actual correlation there.

Now, the prediction of new techniques is a very, very simple thing. Anybody who knows his Dianetics can take just a glance at a technique, he won’t even have to test it or anything else—he can take a glance at it and he’ll know whether it’ll hold together. There’s that strange consistency about this body of knowledge. It is a strangeness. It’s a trip which keeps on advancing and just because one gets to milepost a hundred and thirty-five is no reason why milepost fifteen vanished. I attest by that that it must be a fairly solid road.

I hope that it will keep on evolving out in that direction. I every once in a while, however, get a protest about the fact that it keeps on advancing. As a matter of fact, it is advancing faster than a body of information really should advance. But then so are the times advancing rather rapidly. There are certain urgencies, and so forth, in this which makes it necessary to go on and come very close together between the new technique which is in the research department and the technique which is being used.

Now, as an example of this, there are actually refinements along the line of what I have been talking about this morning, in advance of what I have been talking about. They’re still a trifle nebulous. I want to give you just a little taste of those, just to show you what I mean by an advancing philosophic echelon.

There is a fact that it doesn’t matter what numbers you put on these dynamics as long as they are more or less in the same order that they are numbered. One can very easily, for instance, begin with number one as big theta, and now lets use big theta in terms—let’s just bluntly, in terms of God—of course there’d have to be a comparable magnitude there. That would be number one, and you’d go into that. Number two could be considered MEST, and number three could be considered little theta, which is the pure thought line, which is a segment of big theta but is not the MEST side of the picture.

It comes down, then, number four would be life, number five would be mankind, number six would be groups, number seven would be the family, and number eight would be the individual.

Looking at it in that direction, one is not, as far as the dynamic within the individual is concerned, particularly of more importance than another.

Now, however, one could say that the end product of all this was the individual, and one could look in the opposite direction as people have looked, and say the end product of all of this was the real big theta, which is MEST plus little theta. The end product, in other words, is God. One or the other. But I’ll show you how it could be expanded. Here is your infinite number. It depends on which way this thing goes. There is something wrong, always, with assigning numbers of order. However these things are in order in that list. So that list is in an orderly progression. What comes before that list, what comes after the individual or what comes before big theta (that we’re now calling God) on this, that is unknowable.

There is some slight evidence carrying this out and oh, this evidence is very slight, but it’s being worked on at the present moment, that the individual who is here as an individual in this life was many times an individual in the past, you see? There is an early lives project which is going on right now. We keep telling people that these early lives are dub-in and so forth, just trying to hold this thing down. But the point is we don’t know yet completely, and until we have a big stack of validation material one way or the other we won’t be able to tell.

Now, it’s not necessary, evidently, to run those early lives, and if one does get into one he’d better run out the death of it otherwise it will restimulate it.

Now, for centuries they have been asking the question about God: “Who made God?” Everybody seems to be fixated on the idea of “Who made?” That is not pertinent to the problem. The manufacture of MEST, the manufacture of God, these are not really parts of the problem at all But what would be the order of magnitude? Possibly big theta. There might be other big thetas in dimensions and in terms, and as far as big theta’s concerned, this little theta which is combining with and going into harmonics with MEST and so forth—maybe that isn’t all the purposes of the big theta; maybe this progression goes out in a wheel fashion. Maybe there are other progressions which go out here from God, which are little thetas out there and there and there that are doing these various things. An infinity of progression is possible.

Now, what we have been studying and the reason why you consistently get the assignment of four dynamics is simply this: those are the dynamics intimate to life, intimate to man who is alive. Those are the life dynamics as such. That is a relatively low order of magnitude of observation, because life is little theta plus MEST. That’s little theta plus MEST, that’s life.

All right. Little theta plus MEST, for instance, would be the first bracket. Little theta plus MEST is your future, your family and so on. Little theta plus MEST, it would be the overall composite of the group, and as far as mankind is concerned there could be little theta plus MEST again. In other words, those are life but then life itself is little theta plus MEST. But then MEST, as we begin to expand out on this thing, of course is MEST, and little theta is little theta, and then big theta combines these two. So you see you’re actually not going out on a very orderly progression of magnitude or combinations. You’re going out in terms of trinities. You see? Here’s the individual, little theta and MEST. That’s a trinity and it builds up into the bigger one of the family, the individual, and the unit of life itself.

Now we go out on the next dynamic, we get three more and three more, only they’re enlarging magnitudes, each one of which has a substitution of the last one in it. There are all kinds of mathematical patterns, for instance, which can be offered to explain this thing. Not one of them, as far as I know, can’t have holes be found in it here and there—where it’s not quite as orderly as it ought to be. But every hole so far that’s been found in this wasn’t a hole of error which invalidated the past system. All it did was make more workable and make a little bit bigger the present system. It’s a problem of filling in unknowns, rather than a problem of shooting out errors. So as we go up along this line we find, for instance, that we could regard the individual as being the most intimate connection to big theta which we will know. In other words, we could consider the individual as an actual segment of God and a very close one. We could consider, for instance, as one religion does, that the closest well get to a knowledge of big theta is in the individual himself. Therefore, man could very well worship man as a god. See, part of man is God. Now, this is also expressed in terms of the soul, the spirit; there are just, oh, any number of these concepts. The individual is most awfully important because he is a basic unit that holds the rest of these things together, but the individual exists interdependently with all the other individuals. And as we look over the problem we cannot deliver to you—say, “Well, now . . .” (and this has been the big mistake in the past) “Now we are going to deliver to you the ultimate truth which man will ever know and everything he could possibly reach in the way of knowledge.” Somewhat the tone of Aristotle in some of his lines, really.

A sturgeon was a sturgeon, and the description of the sturgeon was so-and-so and so-and-so and so-and-so and so-and-so. Nice codification index, and so forth. There used to be a joke amongst the people who were trying to overthrow the Scholastics that if a professor were lecturing in class about sturgeons, of course he was lecturing out of Aristotle, and the sturgeons were probably sturgeons from that part of the world where Aristotle studied, and the sturgeons were quite different in other parts of the world.

This he would not mention, but he would say, “The sturgeon is so many inches long—coloration is so-and-so.” And if the student then didn’t accept that this was the sturgeon and so forth, why, he was flunked. The reality was Aristotle, because everybody had agreed on Aristotle and nobody thereafter was supposed to look at the world of life and matter and so on. Nobody was to look at these things. So the old joke was that if a professor were giving such a lecture and a sturgeon from some other part of the world had walked in on the lecture, and he had his Aristotelian sturgeon drawn on the board, he would have turned and said, “If one of you gentlemen will remove this strange beast I will continue with my lecture.” Now, in other words, this material was not to be compared with the real world, and that is the basic definition of authoritarianism. Anything which one is forbidden to compare with the reality which he sees around him is authoritarian, it is laid down as an arbitrary. It leads to an enormous number of errors. One is not permitted to compare this to the real world.

We are going out on an entirely free line. Nobody is laying down this material as authoritarian, saying, “This is the way it is and you are not to compare it to the real world; this is the way it is.” You compare it to the real world and if you find discrepancies in it, that is up to you to remark upon. For heaven’s sakes, remark upon it.

So, the material is very fluid. On any such material which is not being held in line authoritarianly, you can expect evolution and change. And that evolution and change will go forward and better the subject until such time as it is laid down, for some strange reason, by somebody who is being very forceful, as the authoritarian line. The second that happens the whole field stultifies.

Commander Thompson told me that Sigmund Freud was one of the easiest men to converse with that he ever tried to converse with. Other people might have had different opinions. But Freud kept thinking and changing things around and wondering and postulating; but talking to Freud’s disciples was a horrible proposition, because it became an authoritarian line. Freud had said this, therefore it was true, and it was not to be compared to the real world. Therefore, the whole field walked right straight away from comparing these things to actual observations.

You’ll find, for instance, in books on Freudian psychoanalysis: “A kleptomaniac when unable to steal anything always burns down the house.” That’s right, that’s a direct quote. “A kleptomaniac, when she steals anything, always has an orgasm.” That’s a fact. I mean, I’m quoting to you directly from some of the works which came from the works of Freud. These are secondary works. There’s nothing more idiotic than those two statements. These are not true. And yet some line had been found in Freud—nobody had bothered to look around. So in all the information I am giving you on the line of Dianetics, I have demonstrated to you by showing you that these things reverse in number, that they can be considered as triangles. You can actually go into this on the line of dymaxion geometry and compare these philosophic principles one way or the other. It is a plan of thinking, and a plan of looking at a problem, and as such a plan it is producing results. But don’t confuse the statements themselves as being the plan of thinking. This is a way of looking at things, it is a way of arriving at new answers. They are just as good as they are workable, and they are no better.

If discrepancies begin to show up along this line of thought anywhere along the line, believe me, say so. I will be the first one to shift any viewpoint on this.

However, we must be advancing along the line of a relatively solid idea, because it is predicting new data within its own body continually. It is an evolving idea and one could consider it as a growing idea; it has actual growth. A child keeps growing. That is his goal, more or less, to grow, for a long time.

Now, we have the consistency of this. There have been no marked inconsistencies. This is not particularly complimentary; it’s merely quite remarkable. The processing which I have talked to you about, the codifications I have talked to you about here in terms of processing during these last two weeks have been themselves a codification and an expansion of existing principles, expanded mainly in the line of easier communication of what can actually be done, rather than any new discovery. So one doesn’t immediately abandon everything which has occurred in the past, but it is in a better shape to relay. As far as the philosophic echelon is concerned, the new thing which entered in here is the consideration of a group as actually a little theta.

Now, we’re considering the group as little theta. We have very, very workable predictions here, because we can look around and see that it resolves problems. I don’t want to belabor this point. I just want to give you my own philosophic viewpoint on the philosophy and the science of Dianetics today; and I hope that just because I’ve said this, that and so on, that these things immediately are not closed to question. I had noticed some of that lately, and for heaven s sakes, no.

If any of these tenets go in and agree with medicine or medical practice, that’s fine. It doesn’t mean Dianetics versus medical practice. That’s not the way it’s working. It will modify medical practice, but Dianetics as a philosophy, a body of ideas and information and discovered facts will go out in the ratio to the fact that it is able to contribute to existing bodies of knowledge. And Dianetics should be able to receive from those existing bodies of knowledge contributions on its own. If it does that consistently and clearly, it will continue to be a growing idea, an expanding idea, and an accepted idea; and the group which is Dianetics, as represented by the Foundations, will continue to expand and grow.

The point is that a point of agreements have to be established. This is the central turmoil of Dianetics going out in this society. Not enough points of agreement has been established in order to make Dianetics, as itself, a startlingly large reality in itself. To those of us who study it, who see it in operation as a process, for instance, we don’t have much question about its reality Every once in a while we walk up to somebody and he says, “Well, I’ve never run an engram but I’ve run them out of a lot of other people.” Sometimes they will say, “Well, I’m not sure about engrams. I don’t know what they are completely,” so on; he’s a bit foggy about this thing. But we’re just addressing what? The engram and processing. This is a big body of knowledge. It is not a process of processing individuals. It extends into groups. It is an examination of thought as such and is a science of thought, not a science of removing aberrations.

There is your first point of misunderstanding, for instance, with past schools of mental healing. They look at this thing and because they are centered completely and closely on mental healing, they look at Dianetics and say, “Well, that’s all it does, it heals these aberrations.” And the doctor looks at it—in other words, they take out their selected parts out of it and they look at that and they say that’s all it is.

Well, that’s fine. Let them go ahead and do that. Actually Dianetics—and don’t let me underestimate this because I have already seen it in operation—is a highly contagious body of knowledge, merely because it maintains and continues along a line of evaluation of bodies of knowledge.

Dianetics is initially a science of thought which includes as its first echelon, epistemology, which is the study, the philosophic study of knowledge itself. And of course it enters into bodies of knowledge and it’s studying those bodies of knowledge. But it clarifies them and it amalgamates with them.

Dianetics has this strange quality of. . . [gap] . . . mechanism for a group—it picks this up to look at it and it says so-and-so and so-and-so. “But how does this compare with the umpty-gump treatment of arthritis?” And it starts looking this thing over and so on and so on, and then if this factor is introduced; “Dianetics does influence arthritis,” then the viewpoint suddenly is “Hmm, umpty-gump theory—no wonder it works, it moves the person on the time track. Certainly. Oh, yeah, that’s why that works. Well then, the stuff we’ve got here, that moves a person in time. Hey, wait a minute, we don’t want anything to do with this Dianetics, that’s foreign stuff and so on. But of course there’s no other explanation for that. I wonder if it couldn’t be moving a person on the time track. Let’s put somebody on a couch who has arthritis and we give them cortisone too and see if we can . . . Well, no, we shouldn’t have anything to do with that.” Only, ideas are not MEST. They can’t be laid aside. An idea enters, there it is.

So, the validation program on which the Foundations have been embarked (and which actually have lent an enormous amount of confusion into the various operations because it is an all-out rush) — there are many people vitally interested in this subject. There’s one boy back there in Elizabeth who is just day in and day out, day in and day out, just does nothing but go around and try to talk to doctors and get them to sign a little slip of paper that says, “Mary Jones was sick; she was very sick and she was under treatment at this hospital for twenty-eight months and so forth.” That’s all he wants. If he can get a signature to the effect that she was sick. Yes. There are the hospital records, here are electrocardiographs, here are these various things—trying to lay his hands on one electrocardiograph—anything there that says Mary Jones was sick. All he’s trying to put together is just this: “Mary Jones was sick. Here is laboratory or x-ray evidence and a doctor’s statement as to her condition.” Then, right in the middle of it, “she was given twenty-nine hours of Dianetic processing.” Then we have another doctor’s certificate and examination, and it says, “Mary Jones is well. Her state of health has been stable now, she appears to be in excellent condition.” That’s just the truth of the matter, by the way. And yet to just get the pieces of paper together, to persuade somebody, to actually verify the fact that these records are in existence, this has just been a gruesome task.

Here in August the confusion of the Foundation itself was enormously multiplied by the fact that I knowingly—knew that it would create a great deal of confusion—threw into an already staggering operation the processing of twenty persons selected by a psychiatrist. Crunch! But they said, “We haven’t got enough people to do this. We can’t do this well. It will probably be done poorly.” Crunch. “These people have got to be processed.” And the reason why they had to be processed is because I knew very well that no psychiatrist was going to say these people were sane and stable until they had remained so for about six months, and this meant that that series would not be valid until the spring of 1951. So the operation in August and September shook and staggered under the impact of this. There weren’t enough auditors to supervise this. It was hard getting the psychometry. The people here who handled finance and accounting, so forth, were not able to cast up the bills properly and get things in shape. In other words, the whole operation shook under this impact, and as a matter of fact is just now beginning to come out of it. Because that wasn’t all that was thrown at it. [gap] I wanted these people processed for ten days and then for thirty days—be given Rorschachs, TATs, Wechsler-Bellevues,5 Minnesota Multiphasic, complete medical examination with x-rays, laboratory tests, all the rest of it. It takes a long time to take twenty people in session. But the rush of the operation, the lack of proper administrative skill (which, by the way, couldn’t be supplied just like that!)—you just did it anyway. And it has cost the Foundation in the neighborhood of about twenty-five hundred dollars per person. Twenty-five hundred per person. That’s to create a reality. Because it says by the definitions of other people, people who are disinterested, by a psychiatrist who came in here from New York City, who is being flown back in here again to make an examination of these people at a stated period (by the way, in just the next few days). All of this was vital to the creation of the reality of Dianetics.

The second one creates the reality of it, it of course can’t be stopped as an idea, because people look at it and say, “It’s a real idea.” So the velocity of the idea depends in a large measure upon the reality of it. In other words how much agreement is there on this idea?

We get the doctor to agree that this person was well—that he was sick and he was well, because the public accepts and agrees that doctors are supposed to know something about people, sick, otherwise. Agreement. We get them processed by psychometry and everybody in the field of psychometry in the public agrees that intelligence tests measure something. They don’t know quite what, but they measure something. We have changed tests, which heretofore—they’ve never before changed with this wildness.

Now, there’s interesting data all the way through that is being collected, but it is collected in terms of creating an agreement. That agreement creates the reality. It assists the communication. There can’t be a terrifically wide communication of the information until the moment that the reality exists. But let’s not be angry in Dianetics, particularly at these various things that exist, because, you see, communication can’t exist, affinity and reality can’t exist— without some affinity too.

Fortunately there is always the affinity of what a man wants for himself personally. For instance, much earlier in the year several psychoanalysts were perfectly content to have their wives processed by Dianetics. That was for themselves. This was not in the body of their own idea. This was in the family, and that was vital.

All right. Now, the creation then of this general idea is already underway. A pamphlet is being made up here. The lithos are being set up in Elizabeth. This pamphlet is the January Bulletin. It’s going to be sent to the whole mailing list, about 85,000 people over the country. It’ll be published in such a fashion that it can just be handed out. It contains a series of psychometry on—one series on sixty-one cases, one series on eighty-six cases, and one series on seventy-six cases. It contains some specialized case histories showing changes in personality, mental health, self-adjustment, social adjustment and other things in individuals processed for only a few days.

These people were processed, all of them, for only a few days in Dianetics. Just a few days, with rather bad auditing, and those were the results. And they are astonishing results.

Now, for instance you process this one case. You give them before and after psychometry. Psychometrists in the field of psychology know very well that psychometry changes on an individual, he says, from day to day. Personally I can’t get it to vary the way they say it does. It’s fairly stable. It’s plus or minus relatively few points. Not the eighteen points that they sometimes . . . Of course if you wake somebody up in the middle of the night and give him psychometry when he’s still half-asleep you can get a wild variation, but being consistent and giving it at the same time of day you don’t get this great variation, plus or minus, that this psychometry can vary. And you take eighty-six cases and sketch it across the boards and you’ll find this same series, for instance, looks about like this. It’s numbered by cases at the bottom and here it is by percentiles of intelligence up the side here, and we get this first series is the “befores” and then we get the “afters.” It’s a solid line of advance. A marked and remarkable average of advance.

Now, somebody had graded these tests wrong. A psychometrist had graded one of the series of tests that had to do with mental health, had graded them with the wrong data sheet. Gosh! At the first time we looked at this thing it looked like the mental health of everybody had just gone completely to pieces. I said, “Something must be wrong with this. Look, you can’t put up people’s intelligence, increase their stability and desirability of personality traits and still have isolated tests over here on mental health.” They went back and they looked at it and, by golly, the professional psychometrist who had done it suddenly ate crow. “Oh!” We took the sheets and we graded them all over again under his supervision, because these all have to be done by people who are from other fields and not trying to sell Diane tics. They are just testing it. And we regraded them and we found out that we got almost this marked increase in mental health.

This is stuff that the like of which has never been seen before, just in this little pamphlet. And then we have a few isolated cases—a few isolated cases to show what can be used on a psychometric line. Very, very little of it is on a medical validation line, for this reason: we want every one of these medical validation cases to ride for several months after the processing so there’s no kickback on it. No kickback at all.

Now, there are some of these cases, by the way, who have been very bad off at the beginning of processing, that do a terrific wobble along the line. Up and down and up and down. People keep at it and sooner or later the case will resolve. They do a bad wobble, so it would be dishonest to fail to allow for a considerable gap in there.

Well, we’re picking up these cases. This first ones mainly psychometry and what it does. This puts reality into it, so it communicates faster.

Right now there’s another program going forward here, it’s on validation. Installing engrams. Brutal business, isn’t it? Installing engrams. Another one is restimulating engrams, with before and after psychometry. Take a person back down the track, get him into a hot engram; run him halfway through the hot engram, get it restimulated and bring him up to present time. You’ve given him psychometry before this point, now you make him take some psychometry. You haven’t laid hands on him, you haven’t hit him, beaten him or anything and then you take him back down the track after he’s taken his second psychometry, and you run him through the engram again. And by the way, you get a medical examination, too. If I were working this, by the way, I could probably shoot temperatures up, and more things like that. Give the person a momentary case of high blood pressure, change their posture, just go through this thing and— I’ve had a doctor, a medical doctor so worried, who was observing a couple of his patients being run, that he was practically tearing his hair apart. He was watching people rather late in the evening and I had sent them down the track and they’d gotten into a boil-off, and I didn’t have time to run them all the way through a boil-off because I was running two people, so I brought them up to present time.

Oh, one of them did work up a fever and the other one got all hollow-eyed and sunken and looked like he was about sixty, but he sat there perfectly content. And the doctor said, “Let’s lay off of this now and let’s do something about it in the next couple of days or tomorrow or something of the sort,” “What are you trying to do, kill these people?” And he said, “Well, it looks to me like they’re pretty bad off,” And he took their temperature, he showed it to me; he took their pulse, showed it to me, that they were exhausted, they were on the verge of exhaustion and so forth, I took them one after the other—I wasn’t trying to demonstrate this fact. Took them back down the track, the boil-offs were over, ran out the engram at the bottom of the line, got a good solid reduction on it, brought the person up, ran a pleasure moment or two, brought them up to present time—faces nice and bright.

This doctor thought he was watching black magic. But it isn’t black magic or anything of the sort. Something is only magic when someone doesn’t understand quite what’s going on.

Now, when we get psychometry of that character, that will be included in a hardcover book that will be out with these twenty cases. Next spring it will take to get that out.

The Foundation, as a group, is a dedicated group to the dissemination of an idea, and some techniques which reduce aberration, increase health and generally can pick up the tone of a society. That is a sort of a part of its mission. So far it has run along more or less with that as a statement of what it was trying to do. It was trying to get up this information and hand it out into society. People who weren’t immediately interested in validation programs would get out of touch with the validation programs. They wouldn’t realize they were still going on. They’d say, “Well, there couldn’t be possibly any research going on because I’m not there doing it,” Every man was operating as a whole Foundation himself, personally.

We look over this situation and we find out there couldn’t possibly have been, anywhere along this line, a group. It was not a group. It didn’t have all the rules and laws of group contained in it or any proportionate or large part of them. And so, naturally, people are being asked to operate as a group, and people look at them and wonder why they aren’t a group, why they don’t function as a group, why the Foundation—you see that immediately postulates that there’s a group, because you have a group name—Foundation is a group—why this thing didn’t go along smoothly and so on. It had been named but it wasn’t a group because actually it lacked several things which a group lacks, several things which a group lacks on definition lines.

What did it have, as itself, which was a goal for itself and for the individuals within it?

How far did it cover the spectrum, in other words? And it covered it hardly at all People that were working hard were operating on the third dynamic maybe for the nation, or the fourth dynamic for mankind, but not so much for the third dynamic for the Foundation.

They were working for an idea, but that idea was not a group idea. It was a philosophic and a processing idea, you see? So it was the rocky road to Dublin all the way along the line, until one sat back and looked it over carefully and analyzed what the devil was going on and what was wrong.

Did so immediately after developing these tenets on Dianetics and haven’t put all this into effect yet to make the Foundations a group, but the first act was someone came back here from Kansas City and started to amalgamate the thing into the first stage of its evolution into an actual, living group, not a dependency upon a number of individuals all of whom had the same idea. That isn’t a group.

Well, they started evolving it in that way. I went back to Elizabeth, put the first evolution of the tenets back into effect.

Now, the test of anything is whether or not it works, as far as we are concerned. And back in Elizabeth we figured out the group situation, so on, put it into certain lines, just used these tenets, and said this is the overall group structure. And this and several other factors entering in here, not quite making it a plain experiment, picked up the morale of the eastern Foundation, its workability and so forth (ascending whistle) came right on up because it’s starting into the first evolution of becoming an actual group.

Los Angeles has about a ten-day or two-week lag on that. Give you some kind of an idea how fast these things can happen. There’s a ten-day or two-week lag here. And this organization is nowhere near as good a shape as Elizabeth is right at this moment, but is coming up to it and because it is being evolved into that more rapidly will probably go past Elizabeth, Elizabeth then will have to be picked up along the line.

Everybody, up to a certain point, in this organization was my assistant, I mean everybody in the organization, I mean this isn’t a group. Because I was contributing that—I sit there in the center; it says, unfortunately (and this shouldn’t have happened) it says, “Hubbard Dianetic Research Foundation,” That was put on there, perforce, by the Board of Directors when they first got together, to make it possible to hold on to the name so that it wouldn’t get dispersed and infiltrated. It had to be laid down by an individual. Then I stepped back off of the thing and I did practically nothing more about it. And then the papers started lambasting Dianetics by lambasting me, and calling it a cult and all sorts of things, and saying things about me which just simply are not true. And I had to come forward and make a defense of myself, so again it goes into a Hubbard line, Dianetics doesn’t belong to Hubbard, This group doesn’t belong to Hubbard, This group is not under Hubbard’s authority. That’s one of the reasons why—it was an interruption, Hubbard could have, possibly, on an authoritarian line, exclusively, pounded the thing together as a controlled extension, which is what a dictatorship is. It’s a controlled extension. But that is a very bad way to go about anything.

One has to sometimes tend in that direction in order to pick up the immediacy of a situation, but any group which evolved along those lines would be a sick group because it isn’t existing as a group. It’s existing as a man and when it begins to exist as a man, something happens to that man, he’s feeling badly on Friday and he has a hangover on Monday and the whole group reacts, just like that.

You can tell an authoritarian organization by this: how much does it reflect the personality, so forth, and the ups and downs and the stress and strain of its head? How much does it reflect this?

You go aboard a naval vessel and you look around on a naval vessel and you look it over and you find out that maybe it’s a very unhappy ship, very unhappy, so on. Let’s look at the commanding officer. He’s an unhappy guy. In other words, you get this authoritarian line where orders are delivered without qualification of any kind whatsoever. The group is not living on ideas. Its own ideas are not being perpetuated amongst it. It’s living on orders. And these might be ideas, but they’ve got MEST in them. So they’re not ideas. They’ve got MEST in them, they’ve got force in them, because if they are not executed then the force, material universe force, is going to be entered against these people, bang!

If they don’t comply immediately, why, material force is going to be entered against them one way or the other or they’re going to be detached from the business of living—in other words, threatened as to their survival and so forth.

I am not talking, now, very much about the Foundation. I am using it and demonstrating to you with the Foundation just as a pilot project of group. Just as one of my preclears will occasionally suffer by having five engrams run just once over just to find out what would happen, so, I’m afraid, has the Foundation suffered just a little bit by being a pilot project. But it wasn’t even aware of the fact that it was a pilot project. But it is. What is the examination of the tenets of group?

Well, it’s about time it ceased to be, you see? It shouldn’t be in that category. It’s not the extension of an individual or an extension of an idea. That’s unfortunately true because I’ve been at this longer than anybody else. That doesn’t mean that I can do it better than anybody else or I can get better ideas than anybody else. Not by a heck of a long line. And it certainly doesn’t mean that a large number of human beings shouldn’t have perfect freedom of action within their own self-imposed, as a group, rules, regulations and authorities. Because an authority to the group is only really a workable authority when the group itself has evolved it and tested it.

This is the factor which makes a short-term group look so strange. See? It hasn’t had the time to pick up its own mores and precedent in the line of evolution.

Law comes about in this fashion: first there is a sort of a need for it and so somebody has a custom. This custom gets originated there and the custom exists amongst the people, and it gets modified as they use it; it carries along. And then the next thing you know, as a custom it is codified by somebody and then it’s written down and then it becomes a law. And incidentally, only laws which have gone through that cycle can be validly imposed. Laws which are arbitrarily laid down suddenly, without having gone through that cycle, aren’t worth the air that it took the legislators to discuss the passing of them. They can’t be enforced. For instance, it was not a custom in this society not to drink. It was a slight custom in the society to be secretive about drinking in some places, and it was a custom to be mad about it once in a while. And it was a custom to do a lot of talking about it. So all of a sudden somebody passed a law that said “Prohibition: Nobody can drink. Liquor is not available.” That law was not only never enforced, it might as well have never existed.

Now, the whole society was subjected to the exact point in the evolution of custom that liquor had progressed to: in secret, and get mad about it. That was where the custom had progressed to in the group; they all of a sudden froze it at that point. The custom didn’t get a chance to progress, and the law, of course, could not be enforced.

You see, the law doesn’t make the ideas of the group. Therefore an authoritarian organization can’t exist as a group. It can’t. It’s all right for a guy to get ideas and for people to agree or disagree with those ideas or to accept them, perhaps, and amalgamate them, but that isn’t enough to make a group out of In order to make a group—you see, a dictatorship, a nation which has suddenly gone into an authoritarian law level, the survival value of those societies is practically nil The Roman Empire was dead very shortly after it had its first dictator.

The Republic lasted, God knows! What was it? A thousand years! And then in two or three centuries, wham! They wind up the whole thing on a dwindling spiral by making an authoritarian group. They bought the people into the group, finally; they bought them in, with corn and games. But that group didn’t belong to those people and they acted as such, and it fell flat on its face because of it.

You could predict the end of any nation by its first appointment of an authoritarian regime. Also, you can estimate the place on the Tone Scale of that nation by its suddenly adopting an authoritarian regime.

The Tone Scale on terms of nations is terribly interesting. It’s covered to some degree in the book (that’s still valid). You see, as it goes down the line here—here are your four scales—[drawing on blackboard] up here it’s highly analytical. But this postulates that the group (I’m not talking about the individuals in it, I’m talking about the group itself) this postulates that it has a high survival value, very high survival value, but it also postulates that its thought is very fluid. People can join into this or take away from this, very easily. They can change this general idea up here. Also this group must be in the process of being enormously contributed to by everybody in it and it must be in the process of contributing to everybody in it. But there is a mean. All of a sudden if it ceases to let people contribute to it, but contributes to them, like we’re doing to Europe, it’s an authoritarian proposition. It’s buying them. It’s got to be a two-way concourse.

All right. After a while some force gets entered in here because something goes wrong and somebody enters in some force and it gets down into this band and then somebody enters some more force and the groups ideas are not quite alive; because the second the group itself starts to punish the individuals within it, it goes into a dwindling spiral.

The next thing you know, when it gets into about here, by the way, it revolts as a group. When the group starts down the spiral like that, it revolts. It goes completely over and changes polarity. The revolution of the group is exactly the same thing as thought changing polarity, because the group is thought; it can change polarity. The people in it are sort of just sucked into the idea that there’s a revolt. It’s going down the Tone Scale.

An individual may have come along who just suppressed the devil out of it, as one of its leaders, crush! Or another nation might have come along and gone crush against it. Something must have happened here, but it gets down to this point and it gets into this band, it reverses polarity. It’s on the way down. The thought itself, the group thought, reverses polarity and becomes reactive thought. The idea turns inside out and about this time it really has to be picked up by a dictator or something of the sort. And that is the natural evolution of the thing. The person is a dictator—a dictator comes in here about this point—the revolution inevitably produces this dictator, inevitably.

People in a group, for instance, are often persuaded to revolt so that they can be free and they inevitably get an authoritarian regime, not so much because somebody’s intended it this way—men have better intentions than you would suppose, I’m sure—but because what happens is the person who gets into the position is unable to give them back: He hasn’t in the past known some of these little principles here, and he is unable to give them back their own self-determinism, the self-determinisms of the group, and send them back up there again. If he could do that he would be able to bring the Tone Scale and the survival value of his nation back up, on up the line. But that has been a very hard trick.

Because when a group was on its way down it is already lacking, it’s used up quite a bit of its material, a lot of its MEST, the soil is very often quite exhausted, he’s got various problems. The group itself— individuals in the group—have been suppressed by it and the ideas which are brought in are not big enough. So it goes on down here, ordinarily. It’ll fluctuate in here back and forth for quite a long time and then it will get down finally into about here. It is on its way out. This is the Tone Scale of an idea, not the Tone Scale of the individuals in the idea. It’s on its way out. It’s dying. The people under it, because people are authoritarianly pressing against this idea, become themselves terribly apathetic. But they don’t die. They can wander off and join other groups and so forth, various things can happen, but they get apathetic and the Tone Scale idea comes down to here.

Now, suddenly, strange things can happen at this point. This is what we could call the “messiah point.” Somebody comes in and he starts talking about a new idea. He’s got a new idea. If it is a defeatist idea, the group will perish. If it is a negating idea of “Let’s escape MEST and run away,” the group will perish. If the messiah point is reached and all of a sudden an idea is entered into the group to this effect: “We must attack. A brand-new idea is formed and we must attack MEST.” That’s what the idea must consist of: must attack MEST. If the idea can be shaped up and if it measures into that, this group, unless its natural resources and so forth—considerably exhausted—even then I think it could pick up. It goes on up the line again and is driven up to the top.

When it gets up there it starts to get spinny and there’s too much MEST in it, because it has come up to the top having a lot of MEST entered into the turbulence. And it starts on down the line again.

Now, a group which is new and so forth starts at, let’s say, this point, and is driven up along the line with an “attack MEST” idea. That is to say, “We’ve got to attack MEST.” Actually the Foundation is attacking MEST. They haven’t recognized it. They are. They’re attacking, actually, a second echelon of MEST. They’re attacking aberration, which is the turbulence between thought and the material universe.

As a group they are attacking that, but it’s a nebulous sort of a thing to attack, isn’t it? So that has to be sort of formed up a little bit better as a recognition. It’s not up to me to formulate it. It’s up to the Foundation to do so. Just giving you the Foundation as a pilot project of all this. All right.

If it formulates itself as a group then, it will start on up the line, not because somebody has told it to go on up the line, not because I have told it to go on up the line or anything like that, but the fact that its attack on the problem can bring it on up to the top of the Tone Scale. But it has to be an attack on the problem as a group.

Now, every time in the past that men have started as a group, they’ve got a group, an idea—the idea being an entity, you understand, the group being the entity—have started on up the line like this. By the time they got to the top they were still terrifically active as people. And they got up to the top and they didn’t see an immediate goal to attack beyond that point. And in the going they had gotten so much in turmoil with MEST that when they got to the top the physical activity of the people and the actual perpetuation of the ideas of the group to reach that goal kept from being thoroughly keyed in—the engrams as a group, the collisions with MEST, force, so forth—kept them from being keyed in up to the moment when no goal was possible. Then the concentration, the necessity level of the minds of the group itself, of the idea—the necessity level lowered and we started to get key-ins. There is the “golden age.” The golden age is the end of a group, not its beginning. Has been in the past.

So, suddenly—the group has generally fought, in the past, for survival in terms of luxury, possessions, material objects. And they finally get so completely bogged down with these material objects, possessions—they get up to a point, nobody’s submitting any new ideas because there’s nothing new to attack, anybody says. Plenty of ideas of things to do, “Let’s go to the games,” and all that sort of thing. The group immediately starts on the dwindling spiral of keyed-in engrams, and this idea deteriorates because it has engrams. And its engrams are keyed in and eventually it will come down to the bottom of the line again and die. That’s the cycle of a group. Tremendous force, pressure and so forth. But at this point here, the only thing that’s the top, on the fourth there, the only thing which would save it was for somebody to give it a new goal. If it had a new goal and the idea were big enough and bright enough and people could see suddenly that they didn’t have everything they needed, that there had to be a new goal, they had to have some new target, something new to think about, some new reason to be and so on, (ascending whistle) keep them going up. Or if they had, as part of their mores and as part of their knowledge and part of their culture, ways and means to keep engrams on the group level from forming on the way up, they’d get up here as Clears; in other words, if they could pick up their engrams as they went on up the line—I am talking about engrams in the group, not in the individuals of the group. For the survival of a group, to find out how a group survives, one has to be able to exactly define the engram of the group and he has to have a process by which the processing of the group can be done—not as individuals. Fortunately the group borders over into the individual to such an extent that group engrams are quite normally little groups inside the big group. They’ll act as engrams and points of contagion.

Now, one has to clear those. One only clears all of this merely by letting in some light into the idea and clarifying the thought line. Any group starts up has three strikes on it, you might say, by being thoroughly connected to all the engrams of the past. Therefore this group would have to be pretty learned about what had been going on to really keep up what had been going on. Knowledge, knowledge, lots of knowledge, lots of information, no secrets, no communication interruptions, nothing hidden. And if it went on along that level it would succeed, providing it had a specific goal.

The Foundation went along fine—still using it as an illustration here—they went along fine up until the moment when they reached Plan B in the book. They had not had anything assigned as a Foundation beyond their own creation. There was no goal assigned beyond their existence. Now what were they to do?

Actually they had some things to do. One of them was to validate Diane tics. A lot of people are working on this, but not everybody. So that’s one of the palpitating heartbeats that keeps a group going, just this validation project. That will go on for a long time. That’s a heartbeat. That isn’t the central goal, then, is it? It doesn’t occupy enough, it’s not got enough space. This is how we are going about the business of surviving, not what are we surviving toward? What is our goal? What are we going to reach? What is the end product of all this work and formation that we’re doing here for the individual group? Where does it end? What is it supposed to do? What does this group offer the individuals who are in it? What do the individuals in this group offer to it? And what is the goal? Yes. What is the goal?

Now, the second that goal is defined thoroughly and adequately and it is an agreed-upon thing amongst the people who are members of this group, which is an entity, then the idea, the entity, becomes that much bigger as a group. So the Foundation at that moment would become, in actuality, a group. Its government would be government by its own election. And actually no group could possibly exist long as a self-determined organism which wasn’t able to exercise a power of choice, a good, solid power of choice on what was going on!

Actually, these groups do exercise a power of choice even when somebody is appointed to take care of them. Because somebody is appointed to take care of the group and the group gets restive, then that person can no longer take care of that group, you see, in the interest of efficiency. But this requires that the group have a bigger thought above it to keep it fixed up, so it had better be stable in itself. That doesn’t mean that it would be stable in itself. So there has to be some power of choice within this group. Then there is a tremendous confusion in any group where any point from which ideas are emanating is suddenly confused as the point of authority for action and being, I mean, you could confuse that enormously. In other words, that authoritarian action should be expected from the source of an idea. Groups evolve ideas. This group is always evolving ideas. I stand with the group, I pick up ideas, formulate them and so forth, work with it and so on. I’m working on various ideas of processing. People immediately turn around to me, because I work with ideas. Now, I’m just showing you how an authoritarian regime would go, using it as an illustration. The point would be “He must certainly be the administration of this group because he is a source of the ideas of this group.” Hmm. “He therefore must be the source of authority for this group.” And so it is. I mean, it could work that way very easily.

If I want a favor, individuals in the group cooperating with me but living with the same group—if I want a favor done and so forth, the group will do the favor. But it would be far better to have it on the line of a favor, rather than to have it on the line of an order. Because the second that this idea starts to become authoritarian on the individual, then these people are not contributing to that group because they aren’t the substance of that group. The body of the group then is laid away a little bit. So a man who is furnishing ideas to the group would be put in a very serious position.

A fellow by the name of Lenin got poisoned for it! He had an interesting aspect there. He was furnishing all kinds of ideas. He had picked up Karl Marx’s work and he was furnishing all kinds of ideas and everybody kept pushing him forward as administrative executive. They were in a point of turmoil and confusion; there was not much time and the only way he could regulate the group, he thought, was by an elective line. But this group did not need an elective, self-determined thing at the moment. It was at a point on the curve which was right here. It was in the throes of a revolution and it couldn’t be selective itself. It was impossible. It was on the Tone Scale at that point and it had to have an authoritarian punch! Lenin died. It wouldn’t have mattered who’d have killed him. The group would have killed him one way or the other; and the group expressed the fact that it killed him by accepting the leadership of the man who has very often, by rumor, been declared responsible for having done so, in spite of the fact that this group loved Lenin! It shows you the amount of convulsion which can go on when some of these little, simple tenets are completely overlooked.

Now, let’s take again the analogy of the Foundation. It has to be a group. What is its purposes? What are its ideas and so on? It doesn’t have a goal as a Foundation, you see, a Foundational goal! The idea of Dianetics is to do this and that; but as a group, and so forth, it has to have additional goals which will take care of the people within it, take care of these other various things all the way around the clock, because there are other things vital to the business of living. And a group must care for, to be a real group, must care for practically everything there is in the periphery of life. And that group is a true group in the ratio to the fact that it does compare with these things. For instance, the Elks Club is not a group. It is not a group.

As a university and so forth, it only occasionally furnishes the future of its individuals. Only occasionally. It’s assisting an individual, as a man-to-man sort of an effort, to go out and work with that group. See, it’s just giving an assist. Furthermore, the university does not offer within it such units as the family and so on. It doesn’t have the center units necessary. And neither do the Elks Club. Although families belong to the Elks Club.

You’ll notice one of these clubs will get started, these little light clubs—nothing against the Elks—but a little light social club will get started and start calling itself a group, and it tries to behave like one. It wonders why people don’t dash in suddenly and send out its full mailing list and people will starve and they’ll sweat along trying to get this thing to work as a group and the essentials are missing out of it as a group. So they have an awful time.

It’s got to have all these essentials as a group, otherwise it—don’t exist. But it is not necessary for the group to own a single piece of land. It can have an occupancy, just exactly the same as the people who stand on it—I mean, as much land as the people themselves have—but the group itself doesn’t own that land. Another little mistake that government makes.

All that a group can do is protect the land the individual owns. If it protects the land the individual owns, then it will continue to hold sway over the individuals. It offers protection.

All right. We look over these basic tenets. I’m not handing out solutions, because this lecture is not addressed to the Foundation at all. I’m showing you an analogy of this whole situation. We look over a national government now, just as we’ve looked over the Foundation; we find out what it offers and what it doesn’t offer. We find a national government right now is taking far more in contribution than it is giving back in service. The income tax and so forth. For instance, it’s taking contribution on the pretext, or the fraud, if you want to call it that, that it’s going to protect the personal property of the individuals who are dedicated to it. It’s going to also protect the persons of the individuals and 36.6 percent of the tax dollar is allegedly dedicated to protecting the person and the property of these individuals from incursion by other elements, groups, individuals—36.6 percent. The only trouble is, the weapon of today cannot be so protected. So the moment the atom bomb was delivered onto the national stage . . . [gap] . . . ceased to be able to fulfill their full functions as groups. And the individuals more or less sensed this to some degree. They are rather lackadaisical right now about war, infantry and so forth. They are waiting for the big punch. There’s going to be a bigger one, and it was talked about in the newspaper last night. MacArthur evidently has, according to Truman—which was amended later by the White House, (which just obviously confirms the fact that Truman was probably right)—MacArthur has, evidently, the right to heave one of these atom bombs into Manchuria. I’ve been in Manchuria. I don’t know what the hell he’d bomb! But they’ve got the right to do it. Well, people are kind of waiting for the big punch.

Now we’ve got this tremendous budget, in other words, which is supposed to take care of us from the incursion of other nations.

Why, all of a sudden, do we find civil defense motions? Civil defense. They’re getting very interested in civil defense. The American Red Cross—I was in New York City as much as a year ago and all of a sudden I got completely roped off in the traffic and so forth—the American Red Cross and the Boy Scouts and several doctors and so forth were practicing evacuation of an atom-bombed area. They had a little slip of paper from the government of the City of New York which said they had permission to do this.

One small organization outside of Philadelphia issued a little notice in the paper and said they were holding a meeting to discuss civil defense and the place was crammed! A place which was to accommodate a couple of hundred people received a couple of thousand. Just like that. They want to discuss civil defense. People are very serious about the whole thing. Very practical, too.

The government has gone under the thing that we are very tender-minded, for instance; we must be protected from these shocking horrors and so forth, but nobody knows better than the government themselves. There is no protection against this thing to amount to anything. They’re in a complete state of apathy about it!

Here in Los Angeles all of a sudden we find out that the city government of Los Angeles had borrowed, under Parks and Memorials Commission, something or other—a guy part time and a couple of secretaries. And this was the “atom bomb civil defense program.” And the newspaper reporters found out about this; they’ve been having a little bit of a holiday with this thing. Aha! What the hell is this? Do you mean to say that the groups, the officially designated groups to which we are dedicated and so forth, are suddenly not only not protecting property and so forth, but are actually in a state of apathy about their ability to do so? Like the city government of Los Angeles: “Can’t do very much about it, I guess, so . . .” But the citizens aren’t, the citizens aren’t. They will go around and . . . [gap] . . . about this, and the horrors of the atom bomb, what you’re supposed to do and what you’re supposed to do about this and about that, and ray burn poisoning, and the rest of that stuff. People study, study, study, study, study. One of the best bestsellers on this market right now is What To Do in Case an Atom Bomb Drops. A little pocketbook edition.

I’m afraid that the government hasn’t an element in it which can be supported by the people at this time. There must be something missing. Here we have an elective type of government, and if there was a solution being offered by the government, we would certainly be putting it into effect . . . [gap] . . . determine society. So we’re not putting that into effect, so the idea of it somebody is missing. The idea is decaying but the people aren’t. The people themselves are evidently trying to work under a new cooperative idea, and you get the first germs of its evolution in the fact that you get public meetings without government sponsorship. You get public interest in a government function: the protection of the person and the property against foreign invasion. That is the first germ of a new idea.

Anybody could come along and start pushing this idea. It’s right there waiting to be pushed. It’s an interesting thing. Ordinary course of human affairs, it would evolve very easily into a new kind of a government, if left alone—if left alone. If it weren’t hit from abroad. If missiles didn’t hit it, it could evolve into a new idea. [gap] It’ll change. We’re in a period of change. But it’s not going to get a chance.

The second that it suffers, I’m afraid, an onslaught from foreign source, an atom bombing, something like that—it doesn’t matter. I mean, we’re not interested now in the horror tale of whether it would kill off half of the people all at once, and I notice Japan’s very much of a going concern. But the point is that there’s no defense against it, particularly, so it’s going to catalyze. This is going to be a shock and it is going to be an engram which is going to be laid against the federal government, which will practically nullify it. There will be something else.

One of the main reasons why is the center of the federal government probably will cease to exist. Interesting.

What ripe, ripe ground this is for a revolutionary. Because the people at that time, and the whole group idea at that time, will be down here [tapping blackboard] into the 1 band.

Somebody could hit this country on an authoritarian line and actually do remarkable things on this authoritarian line. Yes! And it probably will happen. Probably some general of forces will find himself in possession of an untouched army corps somewhere in the continental limits of the United States, if these atom bombs ever hit. I’m just not writing science fiction now, I’m just showing you what the score is with regard to something like this.

The government goes out, but the second that first bomb hits, the trust and faith of the people in the government goes whom! Because they know there are no radar screens out there to intercept these things. The government hasn’t got them to . . . [gap] . . . a weapon against which there’s no defense. Now somebody else has got the weapon. So you can’t affect that, so somebody is going to come along on some specious or spurious grounds of some character—but just because there’s main disorganization, will insist that what we need at this time is not a self-determined state. “In view of the great emergency of the situation . . .” And in view of the fact that he has the Fifth Army Corps or something like that at his back, some joker with a few stars glittering will undoubtedly move in. There goes the first spark on this group.

Now, a new group idea, not having been postulated at that moment, will be absolutely vital to this operation. Unless it exists, the survival value of the group is very bad. It will go down into apathy. It will skid down from the dictatorship instead of going up, because a dictator cannot possibly introduce back into the society authority which he took away from it, so suddenly and quickly, and suddenly relax and withdraw, unless he has taken away also the aberrations which made it necessary for the setup to take place. You understand that?

Claudius the First, for instance, tried very hard to give the Roman Empire back to the senate and back to the people. He worked on it hard, and he was not able to do so. Once he’d taken this bite . . . [gap] . . . realized that he was dealing with a philosophic principle: a Tone Scale. The people were here, and they were fluctuating around here, and nobody had put them up to here yet, [taps on blackboard] and they certainly weren’t en route up to here. They didn’t have any future goal. After all, the Roman Empire had conquered the world. Where else did they have to go?

Alexander had gone out and conquered the world. Where else did he have to go? All they could do as a group was to fall back. They had reached their top scale and they were on their way down.

All right. It isn’t a question of whether or not this country would get atom-bombed. If one started to figure this out very closely, it isn’t a question of whether it would get atom-bombed or not. The odds are getting better and better in favor of that right straight along the line. The second we start talking about throwing atom bombs, and we were the first ones to talk about it again, we are just inviting them. So I’m afraid the future and so forth could be better thought about in terms of having a new set of goals, ripe and ready.

Wouldn’t be up to me to outline any goals or even to you as an individual to outline any goals, but it might help if somebody made suggestions with regard to what these goals might be. If those goals are there, and if they don’t include just plain self-preservation (which was never the first law of nature), if it isn’t this self-preservation thing which says, “Because we’ve been slapped, we’ve got to fight back, we’ve got to kill them, we’ve got to kill them, we’ve got to kill them!” That’s sensible, that is! That group could only have this as a momentary resurgence. That’s your relapse into apathy at the end of a war. People don’t realize how much of a borderline this whole idea has been going through since World War I. The psychosis of war, relapse. The goals get more and more basic, because more and more MEST . . . [gap] . . . thought and idea. The goals get more and more basic. The general tone starts coming down. So the only time a country has a goal is when it is fighting!

Actually the societies of men have been insane for a long, long while, if you measure them on the Tone Scale, because they are going from line 2 here, down to line 0 and back up to line 2 and there’s never been one yet which really, 100 percent, went up to a 4. It’s a very low order of fluctuation.

What the society needs at the present time more than anything else is some kind of an idea of what the whole society—and this isn’t including Dianetics at all—but the whole society should have some sort of a goal. What are they really going to do? What’s the country going to do as a whole? We had a big goal as long as we were moving west. But then we hit the Pacific Ocean. “Oh, what do we do now? Well, let’s develop everything.” “Well, we got everything pretty well developed. Well, now what do we do?” “Well, let’s fight!” This kind of thinking isn’t very good thinking in the periphery and arena of the world. So, at the moment General Zachariah Q. Swivel-chairbottom says, “In view of the existing emergency, the death of the president of the United States, the vice president, all cabinet members except three, whom we have just executed, the government of the United States is hereunder and hereafter to be conducted in the forms of martial law until the civil populace can be rescued!” And people will go on being rescued, being dragged up here and there, and then they will say, “You know, I don’t think that this Zachariah Q. Swivelchairbottom is a good guy. He hates subordinates.” And he will say, “Who said that?” And, “Oh, a fellow by the name of Smith, and a guy by the name of Jones over there and . . .” “Well, what town are they from? Well, is there any more dissension over in that town? What’s the name of the town?” “Jenkins Center.” “Any more dissension in that town?” “Well, we don’t know. Somebody over there said this morning he didn’t think that last communique of yours was very . . .” “They said what?” Because this guy, by that time, he’s really been slugged around. In addition, administration is a tough job. I don’t care which Zachariah Q. Swivelchairbottom it is, administration is a . . . [gap] . . . and it makes men nervous! And all of a sudden he is faced with this, faced with that; emergencies, emergencies. He’s found out that one man can run things in a very, very short space of time. He can get an awful lot accomplished because communications lines, they all come in to him and he has despatch riders running out and everything all goes across his desk. But then he has to back off of that spot. Management, by the way, is the process of backing off consecutive spots! So he backs off of that desk, but then this high priority comes in here and he’s got to form another desk. But that gets too tough so he steps back here, and the first thing you know, every piece of information he gets comes from one, two, three, four, five, six. Oh, yeah? That’s fine, only these guys are trying to hold their jobs and they’ve got relatives, and they have their own pet vendettas, and there was one of these guys, number five in this particular case, it seems like he was through Pumpkin Center once, or Jenkins Center, and doggoned gas station attendant spilled some grease on his pants when he was young. He doesn’t quite remember exactly what happened, but he knows this town Jenkins Center isn’t so hot, and here he hears of subversiveness. Subversive activities. That very word subversive — that there’s something coming up from under. To do what?

Of course Zachariah has no other choice but to say, “Well, let’s see, the Fourth, Fifth, Sixth and Seventh Military Police Divisions with their armored tanks, they’re just too fully occupied. You’ll just have to do something about Jenkins Center. We’re not quite sure what you’re supposed to do about Jenkins Center, so it’s obviously a foment of rebellion.” Something like that. So somebody goes over and they say, “What’s the matter with you people?” There’s a couple of guys in a sidecar talking wrong. “You’re talking in terms of the fact the communiques aren’t any good, and so forth. You know those are the best-written communiques ever been issued. Now, you know that!” And these guys say, “No, we don’t know it. The literary prose is terrible. It’s awful! And quite in addition to that it says that all city reservoirs shall be twelve feet deep and we’ve got one nine feet deep, but the thing sets up all right for our town. But you say they all got to be twelve feet deep because there might be water shortage. I don’t know what you guys are talking about around there. There’s no water shortage around here! Haven’t you heard? This is Jenkins Center, northern Oregon! No water shortage up here!” “We have to take care of those deserts down there in the south.” “Well, what are you sending us this order for?” “Well, it’s all right. Overall administration, these things have just got to happen, that’s all! Well, you go out and drain that reservoir down to the proper point where it’s supposed to be drained down to or well blast it up and so on. And by the way, you’re fired.” It starts small, but the next thing you know . . . [gap] . . . like the idea of being fired. And the next thing you know, somebody else, see, he kind of gets sour on this thing. He gets a communiqué that says, “Hereinafter, at four o’clock all shoes shall be polished by somebody named Betty.” And there isn’t a girl named Betty in the whole town!

Yeah! Just about like that, because administration is a tough racket. You try to hand this stuff out . . . Until you’re in an administrative post, people don’t really realize how confused it can get. Information that’s colored by self-interest, it’s colored by bad things; you take information from various sources and finally you hire an intelligence corps that gives you more information, only their reports, and so forth, make more administration. And then you get some administrators to administer the intelligence corps so that they can administrate the administrators. And the next thing you know, it’s so complex everybody’s passing around paper clips and going slowly nuts. So this sort of thing cannot be run efficiently on an authoritarian basis beyond the point where easy communication is possible amongst all members of the group. See? Easy communication.

Easy communication makes for the development of the ideas, the heartbeats on which they’re working to accomplish their highest goals. Communication makes it possible for the idea itself to live and survive, and we find out that ease of communication necessarily makes for a high affinity level. Affinity is just another word for little theta.

All right. When we find this is the case, then a group quickly slops over its natural dimensions unless it is so thoroughly amalgamated throughout the society by easy communication channels that it can actually get as many groups more or less doing the same thing. Then, if they’re still in easy communication with each other, the agreement can still exist. But not on an authoritarian level.

There is a natural group size. I don’t know what it would be, but there is a natural group size. It is that group size in which ease of communication currently, is very possible. Now, that keeps the affinity of the group up, their agreement goes along beautifully. In other words, the big idea runs.

An authoritarian line—every time a forceful order goes down, chips off a little piece of affinity, which cuts off a little more communication, which knocks down a little more reality and they go into this dizzy dwindling spiral and the dizzy dwindling spiral . . . By the way, somebody asked me the other day—I didn’t realize that people didn’t know quite what it was. A dwindling spiral is simply this triangle: communication, reality, and we break some of this affinity and a little bit of the reality goes down and then communication goes down, which makes it impossible to get some affinity as high as before, so a little bit more gets knocked off this and then this goes down and then communication and then a little bit more dwindles off of that and all of a sudden that one goes down, and . . . got a marching line of consecutive triangles here, actually And there is your dwindling spiral in progress until it hits the bottom of death, which is no affinity, no communication and no reality. And any group which embarks upon an authoritarian line, where administrative . . . [gap] . . . not compared to the general idea on which the group is operating and where everything is enforced by orders given without the consultation with the group itself and where the administrator does not exist because the group wants him and is not practicing as a servant of that group—he is a point of service to that group. When those things don’t exist, you get your authoritarian type of regime and enter the dwindling spiral. And when that dwindling spiral gets entered, boom!

Now, there are moments of emergency where (and this, by the way, is inherent in the evolution of groups)—there are moments of emergency where an individual will suddenly pick up and say, “This is the thing to do!” He is followed because it’s a good idea, not because he is this guy He is as good as the idea, and he should be followed as far as the idea, and no further. So in other words, when we talk of putting a group together, we see how one is going to be taken apart. [gap] · . · speak of an atom-bombed nation. Central government, which has been operating more and more on a little more and more authoritarian line all the time, which is trying to put up the semblance of contributing too much to certain members of the populace and which is taking too much from other members of the populace, which doesn’t have a parity of interchange for all the individuals in it, is creating classes and it’s creating various things. Authoritarian line, all of a sudden, bing! That gets hit suddenly and savagely by something which it cannot prevent.

At the moment when that happens, the admission is right there that the government was not doing that. That will be a moment of rage and revolution against the government even though it never fired a shot!

Even though the government is gone and now can’t be revolted against, people are going to get sore. They’re going to be mad.

They might be kept from revolting if their attention can be suddenly sent to something far away, you might say. This fellow says, “Russia did that to us. The solution to all this is to go to fight Russia. Immediately let’s go to war with Russia.” And he centers all of this rage which is suddenly accumulated and he channels it and sets up an artificial short-term goal and these short-term goals of course start into the dwindling spiral. You’ve got to have long-term goals to succeed. You have to think to get a long-term goal; that’s why very few governments ever evolve them.

Now your dwindling spiral goes on down the line; it coasts into nothing. But each time there’ll be a revolution a strong man will pick it up. A strong man can catalyze a group. A group can be catalyzed and is continually catalyzed by the few effectives within it. But it can only be catalyzed by them. The group itself must be catalyzed into a point where it carries itself. Where it governs itself, where it operates with its own consent. And if it’s to go up the line it has to be able to keep itself, as a group, processed of the things in the past. And if it does that, man might possibly be able to get up to a tone 4. Until that time he will be unable to do so.

I have certainly talked your ear off in this last lecture. I want to thank you very much for your patience.

[[Category:Lectures]]
[[Category:Lectures 1950]]