View source for Research and Discovery-Part II (500629)

'''Date:''' 29 June 1950

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

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A Clear is definitely established as far as I’m concerned. I have made no modifications on it. It’s one of these things that swings in fairly close in to being an ultimate. There is no reason to modify it that I know of since its definitions are very precise and what you will find at the end of the track will be equally precise. No, there are no modifications of any character or kind on it. The subject is not well covered in the book. It is probably a little better covered in the article in A.S.F. than it was in the book.

There is a paper on the analytical mind which gives you some sort of an idea what the analytical mind is. The Clear, after all, operates on the analytical mind. And we would have to know the functioning processes of the analytical mind to understand completely a Clear.

Male voice: The point that I was trying to make is that there seem to be two schools of thought here. One is that the Clear is an absolute state which can be obtained by anyone in due time. The other thought seems to be that Clear is a goal toward which one should aim; whether or not one—it is possible for one to reach that goal remains to be seen. There s a slight difference between the concepts.

Second male voice: Ones infinity and the other is definite.

Male voice: Yeah. One is a direction and the other is a goal.

No, the state of Clear is an obtainable goal.

Second male voice: Obtainable?

It’s an obtainable goal, certainly.

Second male voice: That intensely. Can you presume . . .

It’s an obtainable goal, that’s right.

Male voice: By everyone.

Yes. Unless somebody has been monkeying around with a scalpel.

Male voice: Again the question has come up, has been asked of me, well, supposing the person has had some past experience there that has been highly traumatic, not necessarily involving neurosurgery; would that or would that not preclude his becoming a Clear?

Ah. Ah, we’d have to go back to definitions here, and it’s a very easy thing to do. Let us redefine the Clean Not redefine it, just define it again.

A Clear is a person from whom all engrams have been removed, leaving his optimum state of analytical and dynamic ability. This means simply this: it is a state which is obtainable by an individual. If that individual has had a long, rough life which has left physiological marks upon him, he is not precluded from the state of Clear. There is no modification of the physiological state that doesn’t modify a Clear.

It is the optimum state which a person can obtain currently, and that state is obtainable as it is. Let us say that he has had an eye shot out. When he becomes a Clear he doesn’t immediately possess a new eye. Nor does he suddenly glow like a neon light. He has had his engrams deleted so that he can make a fully analytical appraisal of the situation, so that he can operate then on the optimum solution basis.

Male voice: On his optimum? But it’s his optimum. And it is almost an absolute, as far as he is concerned. It is as good as he can get on the basis of having his engrams removed, and this is pretty damn good. But if he is walking around with a wooden leg, or if his education was all in Russian and completely excluded reading, writing and arithmetic and included only “Long live Stalin,”2 I’m afraid at the point of Clear he would still be in a state of “Long live Stalin” and he would be able to compute the optimum solution on this, of course.

The difference here is one of an optimum human being and an ideal human being. Now, unfortunately the ideal human being cannot be postulated. What a man might be had he never had any engrams, had he been able to be reasonable and rational his whole life, had he been able to select and assimilate all the education, all the opportunities of his life—what he would be is something else. He would be very close to an ideal, given the genetic intellect and dynamic to make him a desirably intelligent and forceful human being. So we go down the street and we find a fellow who, in an aberrated state, he’s made a very, very poor show. Nothing much has happened to him in life that’s bad but he’s still made a pretty poor show. He is not terribly aberrated. We clear this person and we find out that he has achieved his own optimum, and it may not be very fantastically high. It’ll be way above current normal, but it’s not high in terms that we consider a Clear should be. So it is not a constant. You can’t say when a person attains Clear, he then has these specific facial characteristics, no more than we can say that a classic paranoid-schiz is always five foot eight-and-a-half inches tall as some of the psychiatric texts would lead us to believe.

He is not a new norm! He is himself, without the things he didn’t want in himself, if you get me. He’s optimum for himself. Now, that’s going to be pretty good in lots of people. It’s going to be pretty low in a lot of other people. It’s going to be awful damn high in a lot of them.

Male voice: I think it’s an excellent idea to clarify this for our auditors in training here, because there are so many of our guests and visitors whose interests exceed their intelligence . . .

You can say that twice!

Male voice: . . . who want to come in and see the two-headed Clears, complete with wings and neon halos! And I think that it’s sort of advisable to have some more or less standard answer for people like this.

A person, when he has had deleted from his reactive mind its total content, when he has his entire life in full recall, when he is no longer plagued with psychosomatic illnesses, attains a desirable optimum level for himself He is not a constant. You don’t take a hundred people and clear them and get a hundred tin soldiers. Nor do you get a hundred mechanical computing machines.

The thing that has been overlooked is the terrific factor of personality. Personality is a large factor. It’s born into a man. What happens to him when you take out his aberrations is that his dynamics intensify and his ability to reason is then dependent only upon his native computing ability and is limited only by his education and viewpoint. There is a Clear.

It’s very easy to define, and believe me, it is pretty damned easy to test. People keep saying, “How do you test a Clear? How do you test a Clear?” [gap] What one does is he continues the person on into therapy and he goes on down the line and he tries to find locks which are unrelieved. If he finds a lock which is unrelieved, he’ll find an engram which wasn’t suspected. Or he goes straight into the engrams, painful emotion and so forth, and he just looks up and down and around and around and he looks and he looks and looks and looks and he can’t find anything anymore that even faintly resembles an engram, so the fellow could sit in present time and he can remember, by the way, on a straight line clear back to conception, and—hold your hat—a little bit before. But he remembers this in a straight, wide-open channel and it’s all real to him and there it is.

It isn’t the fact that he’s suddenly possessed of eidetic recall, because he isn’t! Eidetic recall is a trained mechanism whereby one learns. You know, when we were scouts and so forth, we were supposed to go down to a store window and look in the store window and after we trained for a few days, we could finally pick out sixty-five items out of a store window when we looked at it for five minutes or something like that. Well, that’s a trained, educational mechanism. That’s learning to sweep an area, so you look at a page, there it is.

We go back—and this is a hell of an unfortunate thing—we go back and we’re cleared and we pick up and we find out that we weren’t bright enough at that time to look at the pages, to look at the page numbers to scan it and so forth. So the tape that we’re looking back on is going like this across the page, and you can sort of shuffle it on through like this, sort of fast, and run it through fast, but you sometimes have to run through half a book to find the exact reference. If we’d been bright enough when we were very young to realize that Dianetics was coming forth . . . !

This got Don, by the way, into a flat funk one night. He sat down and he all of a sudden realized that when he got to the state of Clear it would not have changed his education a single iota. It wouldn’t have changed his background, it wouldn’t have changed any of it. His experience level and so on would be the same, Male voice: You mean to say a Clear can’t go back and kill his parents and get another set of parents to raise him?

Nope, can’t be done. No, can’t be done. But Don was faced with this horrible fact that he still had had an unhappy childhood and that two or three times, well, that when he was seventeen or eighteen and he wanted to write a book, he wouldn’t have the book because somebody deterred him when he was seventeen or eighteen. He didn’t write the book, he would not now have the book! But somebody discouraged him from going on with electrical engineering to its nth degree or nuclear physics or something of the sort, he wouldn’t, when Clear, suddenly have the diploma on his wall. His aberrations and environment had robbed him then, and he now reaches an optimum state. The Clear doesn’t worry about it, however. It’s only on the way toward, A Clear will pick up what he can salvage, and he will make a damn good job of salvaging it.

Yes?

Male voice: Ron, you say that he won’t have anything more; he will have much better ability to draw forth from what he has gathered.

Oh well, yes, but what I mean is he won’t have any more data.

Male voice: No, no. But he will have all the data that he had. And before maybe he only had a hundredth of the data or a thousandth of the data. But now he has all the data; this makes him appear to be pretty smart.

The Clear, by the way, doesn’t run like an encyclopedia. The current educational aberration says that in order to be educated one only needs to have a vast command of page numbers and books. The most important part of his education, unfortunately, has been neglected, and that’s how to think.

A person has to be educated how to think. A person learns how to think. A Clear can now learn how to think. He doesn’t automatically come into possession of good thinking processes. He may never have had them. And now he can sense the fact that he doesn’t have them, however. And now he wants to develop them. And he can develop them rather rapidly. So when he reaches the point of Clear, he’s stepping off into an educational run. And he goes on from the state of Clear in education.

A chap—General Semantics Institute—writing this morning, was mentioning that: that general semantics and Dianetics went hand in hand. He’s absolutely right. Because the reform of language and so forth and how to think, how to look at things, how to differentiate, all of these things are of vast importance to a Clear.

A person can get up to a point there, he has no more aberration and there’s no more false data in the bank that is going to be thrown at him and enforced upon him by pain. Now he is free to think about any part of his life that he wants to think about and all of a sudden he finds out that he hasn’t enough data. And so he starts on getting data. He’ll start aligning it. A person at the state of Clear doesn’t sit around and gaze at his navel; this is something else that’s important. None of these people, not one of these people have I been able to slow down and stop actually long enough to thoroughly investigate! They take off!

Male voice: Incidentally, Ron, would it be interesting to put that letter from Mr. Hamilton on the tape, as part of the . . .

Yes, we could.

Male voice: Yeah. Here it is. “As I see it, the process of clearing . . .” This is a letter from the Institute of General Semantics signed by Ralph C. Hamilton: “As I see it, the process of clearing doesn’t automatically furnish a man with a system of evaluating and a scientific orientation which will enable him to live most efficiently in our present socio-cultural environment. Nor is it supposed to. It simply removes his engrams and frees his analyzer. “Now, an Australian bushman with a freed analyzer, to take an extreme example, still doesn’t have the scientific data and orientations necessary to sane evaluating, by our standards. Conversely, general semantics, which we believe provides an optimum orientation for sanity, probably can’t be adopted fully by a normal aberree full of engrams, “To oversimplify, Dianetics will clear his engrams and general semantics will give him an optimum 1950 orientation for sane and effective living. We hope that workers in Dianetics can be persuaded to give thorough consideration to the notion of Dianetics and general semantics as a working team. To this end, I am inviting information, advice, suggestions and so forth from Dianeticists on Dianetics and its role. In return, I hope that we workers in general semantics can contribute something of value to Dianeticists and Dianetics, “If you and other workers in Dianetics could come to our summer seminar workshop, we might cooperate to our mutual benefit and to the eventual benefit of people everywhere,” That’s signed “Ralph C, Hamilton,” We are dealing now with the field of education. There is Educational Dianetics, It is a rather precision proposition. For instance, it starts out with definitions of a datum and continues on through on evaluation. It covers the field of logic and the thinking and evaluating processes of the mind. It covers the optimum way to teach and so on.

Well, all that is very well, and all that—all this in general semantics is very well. But remember we have suddenly moved into the field of education. And here opinion can exist. Opinion and the self-determinism of the individual. And this is not something you could enforce. Opinion, You will no more be able to push down the throat of a Clear, by the way—there are some other aspects here which should be mentioned— you’ll no more be able to push down his throat how he should think or what he should use for the basis of his thinking than you would be able to knock the Empire State Building over by just sneezing. So it puts education straight out of the authoritarian realm. Education goes into a very, very strange state on this, Male voice: Top level.

Yes, because it says, “The mind, if it’s going to be right, reserves to itself the right to evaluate,” And if the mind is being forced to evaluate, it cannot then guarantee that it’s going to be right.

Now, it may see reason and it may say, “Ya-ha, yeah, that’s right, Mm-hm, we can use that. We can use something else,” And then the fellow says, “Well now, Professor Blimp over at Oxford says definitely that the rear end differential on the Conault Integrator4 is nothing to use in a problem like this.” “Well, I think it’s useful.” “Well, I know, but Professor Blimp says it isn’t.” “Well, I don’t think it’s right.” And it gets tough right there.

Male voice: Terrible problem.

This poses a very bad social problem in the field of education because education has its own social problems. It means that a man cannot have thunk a thought in the year 1900 and still reign supreme. He will have to thunk another thought in 1910 at least.

Continued usefulness and indispensability is a factor. It also teaches that altitude training is no good. For instance if any of you have occasionally detected me snarling didactically when some patient was walking around in a small circle with spots in front of his eyes . . . But I don’t think any of you have detected me saying, “You’ve got to believe this.” I’m highly antipathetic toward the idea of forcing something on somebody, because if you force it on him, the use of it for him is limited. And a problem is as solvable as reason can be applied to it.

That’s a funny thing to say, maybe, but it works this way. If twenty of us are thinking about something and looking around about it, and each one of us running as a self-determined unit on it, no one of us is standing around waiting for somebody else to solve it, there are twenty brains working on the same thing. If they’re working in a self-determined way, we’re going to see progress. If nineteen people are going to stand around and look at the twentieth one and expect the twentieth one to start turning up all the answers and just use what he says by rote, we’re not making any vast advance because there are nineteen idle brains.

Male voice: Or if nineteen people vote “yes.” Yes. We’re not asking in this for—stating that there should be vast disagreement. Because if a thing is observably workable or right, it’s only observably workable or right if somebody else agrees that it is. [gap] Well, there’s plenty of evidence here, general semantics was of use to Dianetics. It definitely was. I started going back looking, by the way, one time, for the first time a word had appeared. It was obvious to me that the first time a word had been defined would carry more weight—due to some experiments I’d made in hypnotism—it would carry more weight with its first definition.

There might be some misdefinitions. I discovered some very interesting data this way. I found out that although the child might have had the word “slaughter” defined accurately in the first grade in school, the word might have been defined when the child was two years of age in a highly incorrect way. And that the child would still then carry forward the habit of defining “slaughter” to himself, from the time he was two, but remember its definition at the time it was taught to him when he was six.

That was very interesting to me. Next I found out that the word very often meant an action which had nothing to do with the meaning of the word. So therefore the word would be upset by this action definition. Papa, for instance, had a habit of breaking the furniture and saying, “God, God, God, God, God,” which meant that God equalled Papa breaking furniture to the child. And this was not an accurate definition of God so a little bit later the child would go to Sunday school and he would hear that God was the God of vengeance. And he’d say, “Yup.” But what he would see would be Papa. And in such a way misdefinition as far as I can see—and this was very early in my researches—misdefinition was undoubtedly responsible for a lot of this. And I started looking for where it got misdefined. It was obviously the source of a lot of trouble. And it got misdefined in the reactive mind, out of sight.

I started looking for the most hidden moment of definition and the most hidden moment of definition turned out to be an engram. And the rest of the mechanics more or less fell into place. So general semantics has been definitely of use. The definition of a word. Korzybski might have gone a lot further than he went, but he went far enough to be a hell of a lot of use.

As a matter of fact, to Breuer’s first belief in the subject of mental catharsis and to Korzybski belong the only acknowledgments that Dianetics really would care to make. Because it was general semantics furnished some data and Breuer furnished some data.

Sigmund Freud is not in there. I’ll be polite sometimes to a Freudian and say, “Yup, Freud was a great boy,” but actually Freud, when he started to do thinking on Breuer’s work, jumped the gun, went over into the libido theory, then in 1911 saddled us with the delusion theory, and as far as I can tell, was wrong all the way on up. But Breuer was pretty right. It was Breuer’s theory that full recall equaled full sanity, as near as I can discover from the papers around.

The jump is from Spencer9 to Breuer to Korzybski to Dianetics.

Male voice: Didn’t Freud enter in that equation there, full sanity is full recall?

Well, if you want to be very technical, that’s not his equation.

Male voice: No. He merely indicated it.

He indicated it, and he was working very hand and fist with Breuer and he disagreed violently with Breuer right afterwards.

There’s evidently some natural formulas of thought on which the mind does run. One of those natural formulas is the optimum solution. A Clear runs on the optimum solution. That is to say, the solution must take into account the majority of the dynamics, as many dynamics as possible in relationship to the time involved.

That is to say, a solution isn’t optimum—altruism is not an optimum solution, for instance, because that neglects the first dynamic. And there may be situations in which altruism has to be used as a solution, but it would not be the real good solution. The solution whereby the boy stands on the burning deck and goes down with the ship is the lousiest solution in the world. That just doesn’t even begin to be optimum. But if by staying there his comrades could escape, that, judged on the basis of time, becomes an optimum solution although it completely wipes out the first dynamic.

Male voice: What do you mean by “a Clear is judged good”?

Well you see, one had to find out what “good” meant. And you may be taking “good” on your own basic definition of what good is. Somebody was objecting one day on this basis: “I wouldn’t want to be a Clear. He has to be good.” And I said, “Well now, what do you mean, ‘good’?” “Ah, you know, ‘good’: wear clean clothes and go to Sunday school and so on.” And I said, “Well, let’s get our semantics straight. We took ‘good’ because it was the closest word to what we meant, and we have to define ‘good.’ A good action is one which is creative and constructive; in other words, ‘good’ is then creative and constructive. “Evil . . .” Male voice: It goes right back to the “survive.” Yes, well, creative and constructive; and evil is something which is destructive. Now, those are both modified by viewpoint. So it’s a relative value. Something that’s good for one person would not be good for another, perhaps. So we have to evaluate “good” each time in terms of the individual or the race or the town or whatever.

Male voice: Wouldn’t it—on any level, “good” be, for optimum solution, a mutual good rather than say, a heroic self-sacrifice . . .

Now, that’s right. You look this problem over and inspect it very carefully and you’ll find something quite amazing. You’ll find out that it’s not a good solution to kill off Russia. That’s a bad solution. Time might at this moment dictate that it’s desirable on the basis of time alone, but it’s not a good solution. A solution is as good as it contains creativeness and constructiveness for the greatest number of those concerned in the dynamics, and as bad as it contains destruction.

Now, it is impossible to work out any problem that does not contain some destruction. Destruction is going to be present whether you will or no. You want to build a new building? You’ve got to maybe destroy an old one. Or let’s be reductio ad absurdum and say, “Well, we have to build a building here, it’s going to be a big, beautiful palace, gorgeous.” And we had to kill the grass, didn’t we, in order to dig the foundation? So it was a “good” thing to do, but it contained some destruction. I can’t think of any major action which doesn’t contain some destruction. So it’s a relative problem, very relative, from individual to individual. Now you say a Clear is good. Therefore the Clear naturally tends to resolve a problem in terms of the optimum solution, which of course includes terms of minimum destruction. But that doesn’t say that he won’t kill. Nuh-uh. Because that might be the destruction contained in the solution. And it may be on the basis of time that he has time to do nothing else but kill. And a man would certainly starve to death in a hurry if he didn’t at least kill vegetable cells. You can’t look it over on . . .

What has snarled us up here is the Hegelian grammar system that we use. A grammar of absolutes. There is “accurate.” Well, that’s supposed to be a precision point. There’s no such point, “accurate.” A thing is this and that.

Absolutism—in Dianetics it’s considered that the absolute is unattainable, but it can be approximated.

Now, the more closely the individual approaches the absolute—the more closely he approaches the absolute of potential survival, the more right he is, actually. But remember, all four dynamics have to be taken into consideration.

In other words, the more right he is, the better he’ll survive. And the more wrong he is, the worse he’ll survive, until you get down to his lowest level of death would of course be the death of mankind. That would be about as wrong as we could get.

We can’t reach absolute wrongness, because absolute wrongness would be the vanishment and destruction of the entire universe. That would be one person—if one person were absolutely wrong, it would postulate this impossibility that the universe would fall in. That is a mystical. . .

Male voice: Yeah, but that is based on the idea that the maintenance of the universe is good.

Yes, we could go back to Schopenhauer and dig out his tomes and look them over and find out that the best thing to do is just stop procreating and just stop in our tracks and then that’s wonderful. The only trouble is, observed data on this varies widely from the works of Schopenhauer.

As I have rattled around in the world, I have found uniformly this to be the case: That the more evil man thought his fellows and the universe contained, the less he himself was surviving. That is to say, his survival potential was lowered in that ratio.

Male voice: That points up one of the greatest intellectual fallacies that there is. I ran into it in the army so much. “What if everybody did that?” That is a postulation that there s an impossibility.

Yeah.

Second male voice: That fits in with voting. If you find you cant vote at the last minute, and you feel guilty about it, and you justify yourself by saying “Well, I’m sure there wont be any ties in this election, so therefore my vote wouldn’t have counted anyway . . .” Mm-hm.

Second male voice: . . . and somebody else says, “But suppose everybody took that attitude!” Well, here’s something interesting about this—we are falling rapidly down into a philosophic dissertation here. But there’s something interesting about this, nevertheless. It’s that voting—we have been taught pretty well through our people like, well, Freud and psychology and so forth’s busy teaching us, the individual doesn’t count. It’s the big mass of individuals. Somebody has gone all out and whole hog for a very specious thing. Somebody had a manic on the third dynamic, and a zero on one. “And well, the mass, that’s the thing, yes sir! Now”—we’re getting right back to adjustment now—“this fellow is maladjusted. Oh, he doesn’t conform.” Well, that fellow can be pretty valuable to his fellow human beings, believe me. Because if everybody conformed, we’d all be dead. So they say individuality should be submerged into the mass. It so happens that our friends down here in Washington have run into something which they themselves do not recognize in their formulation of the welfare state and their emphasis upon the mass rather than the individual.

It is absolutely necessary, if one sets up a sort of a kingdom, to have people dependent upon it. So the way you make people dependent in a state is to make them indigent. And you have to go about actually making them indigent in order to make them utterly dependent upon the state. And when one has succeeded in doing this, then he has an opportunity to rule supreme over these people.

That’s very wonderful—maybe—for one man to rule vast millions, but I’ve never yet found what was really wonderful about it. The nation is as good as it has individuals. And we start talking about this thing called masses, masses of people, the social level, adjustment to this level and all that sort of thing, we’re talking not just balderdash, but we’re talking death for our race and for man.

Adjustment of the individual is the same problem. So it’s not how many people will do the same thing, it is whether that thing is right or wrong. Here we have a case of voting. Well, voting’s pretty sloppy, awful sloppy. For instance, did you and I get a chance to vote on whether or not our ships and planes would go firing into the people of Korea? No. In other words, a government, if it were a true democracy, would have to run on an instantaneous, almost, voting system. It should be able to get in the opinion of the people as a whole within an hour. And actually in this day of advanced communications, it would be absolutely possible. It would be possible for all of us to register an opinion in Washington and for that opinion to be completely integrated in a matter of a very few hours. And we’re not asked for that opinion. No, we put it through secondary things and it goes indirectly and so on. So the actuality of it is we have two patients here for some insane asylum, and we’re told that these are the two candidates for an office and we can vote for this one or we can vote for this one. And people throw in a protest vote for a third one.

It’s idiotic for anybody to believe at the present moment that we’re running on free determinism as far as the people are concerned because we definitely aren’t. They say history goes along just a certain length of time and then finally the social order congeals and brings about just exactly the right conditions, and then suddenly out of this potpourri there springs an idea.

It’s like they talk about folk music, “the music of the people.” And we go out listening to folk music and who do we hear? We hear Stephen Foster and we hear this fellow and we hear that fellow. They’re individuals. There wasn’t a piece of folk music sprung spontaneously up like mushrooms in any society in the world.

Homer was Homer. And the situation was not optimum for the appearance of Homer, and Homer didn’t suddenly begin to sing because the situation was such and so. No. That is cockeyed.

They say that history does not depend upon individuals. It is absolutely true that there has to be some combination of circumstances for the individual to make use of. But it is not true that the individual is negligible in history.

We have too many examples of it. And yet we’ve been fed the sheep psychology so continuously about “the individual has to adjust,” that we’ve begun to curse those who don’t adjust. And if we kept this up down the line very far . . . I read a newspaper story the other day that might interest you. There was an election over in the Balkans. Newspaper reporter went out through the sticks, talked to the peasants. Seemed like people could either vote for the nationalist regime of this country, or they could vote for Soviet Russia to take over. They had the choice between a bunch of fascist hide-binders on the one hand and a bunch of communist loops on the other. And the returns, of course, registered in the direction of the most pressure and propaganda. But there was—this reporter made this point—there was no issue brought forward before the people on which they themselves would like to have taken a vote. If the issue had been rugged individualism, there would have been no question how that government would have gone. Both the fascist regime which was being offered them and the communist regime which was being offered them would have been swept over the falls. Neither one could have won in the face of an issue which said the individual is important. That’s peasantry talking. That’s the land. That’s the guy with his two hands that’s got a chance to stand out in the fields and think a little bit. He knows the world runs on individuals and by individuals, not crowded masses of sheep.

There’s this little factor too that’s quite interesting, although this seems to be a long way off Dianetics, is that a sheep society does behave like sheep. You get up on a herd of sheep, flock of sheep, and you sing out with a loud shout. There may be a cliff right behind them, but if you sing out loudly enough, nothing stops them from the other side, they’ll go straight over the precipice.

They stampede. When they are starting that stampede there is no stopping them, they just keep going. The only thing that stabilizes them or that could stabilize them would be individuals who wouldn’t stampede.

Male voice: A goat.

That’s right. A goat society is a hell of a lot more preferable than a sheep society any day. And Dianetics does have this great and grave difference between psychology (as it’s formulated in the university) and itself. And that is that the psychologist is teaching sheep psychology. Adjustment. And Dianetics is teaching, with malice aforethought, complete and utter maladjustment.

Male voice: Ron, I have another question about Clears.

Yeah.

Male voice: What about—what do you have to say about the emergence of basic personality and the goal of basic personality?

Basic purpose in the basic personality. We’ve covered that, haven’t we?

Second male voice: Yes.

Yes, we’ve covered that. I’ll briefly answer the question, that it does seem that genetically, in some strange way, woven into the woof and warp of the personality is a basic purpose in life which is stated in rather general terms, but it lies there. And you can take a fellow and clear him and maybe you are clearing him toward his educational goal which was being a civil engineer. And when you get him all finished, he takes up the guitar. He has always tried to play with music, and the further he goes toward Clear—maybe his family pressed him very solidly in toward engineering—and the more you clear him and the more compulsion you take out of his case, why, the more he inclines towards his own basic personality. And he’ll finally look back and he’ll see all the instruments that he’s taken up and he starts to integrate his musical experience. His basic purpose was to make music.

It’s a fascinating thing when you get the splits in life where the compulsion and education has driven the person far off his goal. You usually have a bit of a failure when this has happened.

Male voice: Ron, I have a question on the relative value of the four dynamics.

Yeah?

Male voice: I understand they’re progressively more important. Do you think that there is any finite relationship between the importance of. . .

You mean from dynamic to dynamic in an individual?

Male voice: Yes.

They vary in importance. They’re quite variable in one individual. I imagine we’ll find individuals who when cleared will still be awful strong on one and terribly weak, maybe, on four. And maybe only mediumly strong on two.

Male voice: One point that was brought up, Ron, is the question of whether women in general, when cleared, tended to have anything at all on number four. The idea of this particular person was to say that not as a general rule . . .

I would hate to express such a highly generalized opinion.

Male voice: Yeah.

Boy, that would really be generalized.

In the aggregate, when you are clearing a person, you are bringing into view an individual And he becomes more and more and more individual. He becomes less and less and less a conformer. And his basic personality has very strong high spots in it. And you start taking the weak spots which were aberrations out of the valleys and you’ll finally get nothing but a range of mountain peaks. It’s very interesting.

Male voice: Well, the idea was that there should be a different set of dynamics set up for male and female. I don’t agree with that.

The female does have a strong, strong second. So does the man. The female does, as far as I’ve observed it, tend to be a little more conservative than the male. The male has a greater tendency to wrastle around the world and change it. And the female has a tendency to try to stabilize it to a point where she can raise children.

I’ve observed this. I am sorry if it offends anybody, but it is her job to make sure. After all, she is incapacitated for a certain length of time in her life, and she can’t easily transport or move through an unstabilized world, little children. And she keeps an eye on this, pretty close, and she will protest before the man will against what seems to be a wild and radical departure from past activity. But I dare say that what confuses the male and female is because so many men are in Mama’s valence and so many women are in Papa’s valence that you couldn’t make an accurate estimate of what a woman potentially was and what a man potentially was.

Now we have got an opportunity to compare the two. There is a difference, and it’s marked enough so that I’ve already observed it considerably.

I don’t want to keep you on and on. This has been a bit of a departure from therapy.

You can only be sure of this when you are clearing somebody: that he will become more and more and more self-determined. Self-determined in what direction, you will not be able to regulate. He will become stronger and stronger and not necessarily more willful. He will become more cooperative as long as he has something with which to cooperate. But don’t try to cross him up and force something down his throat.

An army of Clears would be absolutely unbeatable—and utterly uncontrollable. We won the American Revolution as long as we let our people operate as self-determined individuals. And we lost every battle where these rugged individuals were herded into ranks. It is a nice lesson. (Recording ends abruptly)

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