View source for Rudimentary Data on Groups (501201)

'''Date:''' 1 December 1950

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

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This morning we are going to talk about groups. First part of the lecture I am going to give you the relatively rudimentary data that we have on groups and the last part of the lecture I’m going to give you an example of the Foundation as a group. I am going to use the Foundation rather just as a group which many of you have observed and you know something about, rather than for any other reason, to show you what happens in groups. I could, of course, continue to use governments. In the past nearly everyone who has been interested in the subject of groups has immediately looked at governments. Just why this is, I don’t know. Governments aren’t that important.

The groups in which man is primarily interested are small groups, where he is in relatively intimate contact with his fellow man. And it is here that the group works best.

The group could be treated from several slants. We could treat a group in terms of its evolution or we could treat a group in an almost mystical sense and we would arrive more or less at the same place. So I am going to treat them for you from both quarters.

Now, in evolutionary terms, it has been considered that man developed and evolved to what he is now by varying stages out of a principle known as natural selection; and in this development, which is entirely regulated by survival, he evolved certain definite methods of getting along. Every species evolved certain protective and attacking mechanisms.

Now, one of the things that man might be considered to have evolved is the pack, the group. That is the basic unit of groups. Man might be considered to have been a hunting pack. Man did not walk alone. And by the way, neither did cats. Man, as a hunting pack, found out that he could achieve more victories more often by being in a group, the combined strength of which would overcome his enemies. He could eat better and he got along better in general. After all, this is very obvious that a person—a member of the pack falls by the wayside, the rest of the pack can pick him up and carry him along until he is in a little bit better shape. There is an interdependence then. Actually up to a certain point, mans survival value rises in ratio to the solidity and interdependence of the group. There is an actual survival value, then, in groups.

There are many points here which one could touch upon along the way, such as the fact that one considers the “law of tooth and claw” as something that is the basic law of nature. I assure you if the law of “tooth and claw” was the basic law, and self-preservation of the individual—if these two were the basic laws—we wouldn’t have any people on the face of the Earth today. It doesn’t happen that these things are basic laws.

The group operated, of course, in a very, very close liaison. The next animal in order of intelligence below man happens to be an elephant. The elephant is a very, very smart animal. The elephant also goes in groups. The elephant, by the way, has quite a good-sized set of prefrontal lobes. Apparently quite an analytical animal. And you find these elephants in groups responding in a very remarkable way. Hunters in Africa are very often completely bemused by this situation whereby one elephant is wounded and two elephants will come alongside of him—one on either side — and prop him up and carry him off the scene. Interesting thing. That is a pack reaction.

A great many things have been written and noted about groups of this character, but interdependence is the point of greatest stress as individuals. But people in the past, such as Immanuel Kant, who sought to give innate moral sense to man and then immediately afterwards in his next book stated that man was paid very highly for having this innate moral sense because, actually, it was just an outgrowth of his own selfishness. This rather confused individual—I don’t like Immanuel Kant, by the way, because he completely stultified philosophy for about a hundred and sixty-two years. He was so confoundedly, resoundingly obtuse, abstruse, that nobody could follow along with him, but nobody dared go up against German articles and verbs of that resounding character, and—codified the whole thing, the whole field of philosophy, and it rather stayed that way. As a matter of fact, Dianetics is the first major breakthrough of philosophy for a hundred and sixty-two years. An interesting fact.

You see, philosophy—one of its main points of action is epistemology, and Dianetics is a study of epistemology which is the study of knowledge. You might not realize that when you’re working with Dianetics, that it is actually a study of knowledge, and almost incidentally has to address, then, the vessel and the computation point of knowledge, which is the human mind. Dianetics came along here as a study of knowledge and then ran into this area where all of a sudden knowledge—well, if you’re going to study knowledge, lets find out how close we can come to knowledge and we find there the human mind; so, let’s study the human mind and then let’s go on studying knowledge.

Now, what you’re studying in terms of processing and so forth— there’s a little bunch-up on the track on Dianetics, it’s terrifically important—one shouldn’t put that down any the less but way before you get there and way after you’ve gotten there, you’ve got the basic tenets of Dianetics. Dianetics may or may not be great or true or anything like that, but it at least turns around and upsets the tenets which were laid down about a hundred and sixty-two years ago. Man has been thinking along these rather stultified and, if I may say so, awfully stupid lines, that the group consisted of a number of individuals who, for their own self-preservation and for no other reason, somehow or other associated with each other. And that any pack was mutually self-supporting just so the individuals in the pack could go on living. The egocentricity of the philosopher that dreamed that one up is second only to the personal aggrandizement thirst of a dictator.

That self and only self existed is of course—it doesn’t work. You can’t look at a philosophy, you can’t look at mental processing and use this principle—that only self is important—and have the thing work. That is why there’s been no mental processing! Dynamic one. Dynamic one.

Now, I want to point out to you a point on this evolutionary scheme, regardless of the individuality of each member of the group as individuals. I want to point out to you a point on this line: that the more analytical the beast, you might say, the more cooperative his group seems to be. There is a definite justice in saying this. And the accomplishments and so forth of these groups advance in ratio to the active fact that these individuals are amalgamated into a group.

You come up the line and you look at animals. You get to elephants, you get up to man, and now we look at the various stages of man’s development and we find out that his society has come up to a point, now and then, where he has had a golden age. And we find out that his golden ages, very interestingly, are at a certain point where the self and the group and the future all have relatively equal stress and man is man, you see. There’s relatively equal stress just before these golden ages take place. This balance more or less comes into balance and then other factors, of course, enter in here—food, climate and the rest of it—but he will proceed then to have a golden age of one sort or another. And then through too much collision with matter, too many wars and so on, a force will gradually introduce itself into this society, and from running on dynamics one, two and three, very nicely, all of a sudden maybe dynamic two will fold off and he starts into a decline. Still talking about the evolutionary span here, of groups.

Of course, if dynamic three were to fold up, the group dynamic itself, you would have the same sort of a situation. He would go into a decline. You see, each one of these dynamics becomes blunted by the amount of force which is entered against it—the amount of suppressor entered, the amount of confusion and entanglement that it gets into with the material universe — and then this point will become blunted and once it starts to become blunted it’s liable to fold up all the way down.

All right, lets take just several societies just offhand and see where this happened. Lets take the Roman society—the pagan society there—the old pagans with their gods and so forth just before the onslaught of Christianity. Christianity came in and the pagan group-religious group, folded up and that whole group dived out of sight.

All right. Now let’s take another society where the second dynamic, the future, more or less folded up. I know of such a society, by the way. No reason to go on using classical references. There is a society down in the South Pacific where infanticide became a ruling passion. It was an interesting thing; it developed quite logically and naturally because they were living on a set of islands which had a limited food supply and naturally they wanted to keep down their birth rate and they started to keep down their birth rate with abortion, and where that didn’t succeed they murdered the babies after they were born, without much selection or anything else. The second dynamic folded up. And I don’t think I have to stress the obviousness of the fact, this group disappeared. There are very few members of it now. Then there is another group that folded up as a group, and folded up rather consistently as a group and—we’re talking now about groups. I don’t know how much you know about the early Christian church. There’s practically nothing in existence, historically, about the early Christian church. There are a lot of words written on pieces of paper but they are not particularly either informative and they are not completely innocent of having been altered, one way or the other, down through the years. For instance, the words of Christ probably weren’t even written down for about two or three hundred years, I mean to any extent, as far as I can find out. I may be wrong about that. But the early Christian church went in a sort of an overall effort against the Roman group. And they took off against the Romans at a mad rate and Roman courts and so forth tried to include these people into the laws and tried to exclude them out and it was a very, very bad proposition.

Some people had entered into the world who had something, and I don’t want to step on any toes on this, because actually it’s a completely different thing when you talk about Christ and the philosophy of Buddha and you talk about God and so forth, and you talk about an aberrated group. Because some of these aberrated groups have attached themselves to some of these causes doesn’t modify the cause any I’ll show you what happens here: these people attack a group without setting up in its place any kind of an actual group because this weird thing happened. First they were running on a strange kind of a first dynamic—it was the first dynamic of “MEST is no good.” They had turned around, more or less, and completely retreated away from the idea that their mission was to take over the material universe. They had gone out of balance to that degree and the next thing you know, everybody started to negate on the first dynamic. And these groups folded up with great rapidity.

Actually, the history of Christianity is a history of upstart groups which peel off and die as other upstart groups come on. It’s cyclic, it’s tremendously cyclic. What is fascinating is there must be something wrong with the general group.

Now, the main church that has carried along through this field doesn’t operate more or less that way and they were able to persevere by including in the groups various peoples as they came along. In other words, various modifications occurred in this group all the way along the line. They’ve had a very stormy time of it for about two thousand years in various places. You have to look at this thing bluntly as a cultural aspect.

The main thing is that the initial shock, you might say, that Christianity received at the hands of the Roman nation and that the Roman nation received at the hands of Christianity, formed a basic engram there.

I’ll give you some kind of an idea now about the magnitude of an engram in a group. The killing of martyrs and so forth by the Roman nation reacted in such a way. The people who had been drawn to the colors, to a large measure, had a great deal against the Roman nation anyway; that’s to say, lots of them were slaves, people who had been very badly abused. And these people with that shock of impact against pantheism, against the Roman government and so on—you see, people have a tendency, because of a misorientation here, to regard the Christians as a people who came in from someplace and attacked the Roman Empire, but this is not true. These were the citizens of the Roman Empire which were attacking inside. So we’re dealing here strictly in groups within groups. But we’re dealing with a group of Romans and these people attacked the Roman Empire, the Roman Empire attacked them and an engram was laid in. And boy, the thought was certainly reactive in that engram.

One of the things that happened was the people in the Roman Empire lived rather luxuriously as far as food, clothing and shelter was concerned, in Rome. Rome was a very large capitalism and stayed so practically to the end of her days, most remarkably. You talk about a capitalistic state, believe me, that’s one. I’m not talking on the side of being liberal, now, or capitalistic, either one. But here was this tremendous impact; the Romans bathed, so to revolutionize this group it was necessary to eschew bathing. The Romans practiced athletic skills and so forth, so to revolt against this group it was necessary to completely negate against any of such skills. One had to deny the body completely. He took no care of the body, used no oils or so forth, to preserve the skin. Oh, no! No. So that was knocked out. And the type of government—which after all was a government, I point out, which was good enough to rule the world for a long time. It went into a terrific decline and went into actually a highly reactive state itself; it had killed too many foreign armies and it had been, in itself, too often swept over. And MEST had entered in there a great deal, so they were pretty reactive already. But what was left of the Roman culture was not particularly bad: good food, baths, games, recreation; and most of the groups which stayed there and were still within the boundaries of the Roman Empire were enormous and prosperous cities complete with their arts and so on.

Well, when the revolution took place against these, anything which had been good in that group was negated against—complete reactive thought. Romans are painful: Romans eat, we don’t eat. Romans are painful: Romans bathe, we don’t bathe. Romans have codified laws and courts and governments, therefore we don’t have these codified laws, courts and governments. In other words, there was such a terrific negation—one can measure the violence of what took place about two thousand years ago in the terms of how it was negated against. It’s all very well for somebody today to say there weren’t any Christian martyrs. There must have been, to have caused this much pain in a society whereby everything that was good in that society would just be completely moved aside!  And out of this one thing we have  spiritual significance. That was the one thing that survived all this. But we had folded up three, two and one, in the process, and the Roman Empire dived. It was gone.

Good heavens. Any barbarian with a tin sword in his hand could come down over the borders and mop up any town. No armies were put into the field against anything. The internal government fell to pieces. The most weird and horrible governmental practices came into being. The entire coast of North Africa had been a granary and the agricultural pursuits there were pretty well abandoned; that’s because of armies going back and forth over it and the general upsets. But right up there to the fifth century this was still a great granary, still orchards; it was a beautiful countryside and it’s nothing but a raving desert now! It ceased to be along about the sixth, seventh, eighth centuries, into all this convulsion. By 1000, there wasn’t actually a civilized body of people in the Western world—I think it was about 550 A.D. the total population of Rome consisted of two wolves wandering in the Forum.

It rather gives you an idea of an internal convulsion. Has nothing to do with Christianity, it has nothing to do with Romans. I’m showing you a group which destroyed itself from within with another group and failed to create a true group. And by failing to create a true group to replace what it had abandoned or overthrown, it had to be supported in the most shaky fashion as a group. This had nothing whatsoever to do with the fact that Christianity itself continued to progress. But I point out that Christianity was picking up the sway over new groups which were coming into this area and Christianity would fire these new groups and they would come in and they would fold up. A cycle one right after the other.

Now, it wasn’t for a long time until the church itself decided that it had to be a government. It decided along about the time of Cesare Borgia that it had to be a good government, it had to be good management and that it had to have a group that would run ably and well. And succeeding this we have the church, the Catholic church walking in and being a government. And when it started to be a government, Europe pulled out of her Dark Ages, they started to really handle it as a group and we get the aspect of a king walking barefooted across the Alps to ask the pardon of the actual head of the governments of the Western world. Interesting that the world pulled together the second the tenets were refined to include the fact that the church had to be a government.

I am giving you very crude examples here and nothing I say should be construed as criticism of Christian tenets or Roman tenets or anything. It’s just an impartial survey of this field. We know there were Dark Ages, we know that these various things existed and I’ve taken a little time in the past to look them over. And particularly just a short time ago when I started into an active study of groups, all this data showed up again. It’s very important that a group went along just fine so long as it was running on one, two, and three. Now, we started to knock those out and any one of them knocked out would cause a decay of the group and it could be decayed from the moment one of these was knocked out.

Now, we look that over from an evolutionary point of view and we find out that man has succeeded in direct ratio to the amount of rationale and rationality which has been within this group about what the group was doing, how the group existed, what it consisted of—man progressed, his society progressed, he progressed as an individual. But the idea of the group is very prone . . . [gap] . . . shifts; until we have again entered a cycle where one of these dynamics is being knocked out, actually not much attention is being paid to it. In the past few decades, the stress has come off the individual, the worth of the individual, the value of the individual. Dianetics is a breakthrough along that line, by the way. It talks about the value of the individual. Actually the individual and the group, the future, mankind, all these things are almost equally important, but because it was introduced into a society where the value of a human being had been discounted somewhat and was on the decline, that particular individuality was punched up.

Now, the collective state is the big goal right now. Collective state. How long will that last? Boom! That is really going to be a steep dive when it dives. Now, just looking it over and looking over these tenets and predicting, one would say, “All right, when we knocked out three as a group and everybody became individuals, why, a society, any society in the past went to pieces. When we knocked out two, any society went to pieces. If we knock out one and don’t pay much attention to two—don’t pay too much attention to it either way, don’t negate against it—but all of a sudden say it’s all state, it’s all group, it’s not any part of the individual; the individual doesn’t amount to anything.” Do you know how bad that’s gotten, even in our own society? They are saying that the points of advance and so forth of man in history have nothing to do with individuals—it just happens that the group at a particular moment was ripe for something to happen and a fellow like Alexander the Great happened to be there, and so more or less just the whole situation opportunely resolved around Alexander and it went on from there.

That’s the philosophy of history in 1950, in the United States of America! Which one century ago was ruggedly individual to a point where, just up to a few years ago, they were using this: “I’m just as good as you are!” Thomas Jefferson said every man is created with equal rights under the eyes of the law All right. They narrowed that down: “Every man is created equal” Well, they meant this to be a right to their own individuality and some clever propagandist with more propaganda skill than he had brains came along and said, “All men are born equal. That means we’re a collective state, you see?” So of course the first dynamic is no good, it’s not here. History was made by these groups and they just sort of evolved in a fashion up to a point where somebody came along and made the history. You’ll read over accounts of Napoleon—it just “happened” that things were that way.

Actually this fellow Alexander the Great—you examine the fellow as a man, you find that there have been darn few men like Alexander the Great. Not that he was a man who was terrifically advantageous to the society to have, but let’s just talk in terms of personal courage and brains and we find . . . [gap] ...his army and go out and fight, and then he’d take a body of companion cavalry and he’d go right straight through the enemy ranks, go find the enemy leader and put him to flight or kill him. Of course at that moment his army would fold up. He won all these battles.

You find him facing a great walled city, and well, two or three days have passed and they are unable to do anything to the walls of this city because nobody can get in and open a door, clear over on the boundaries of the world as far as he was concerned. And you find himself and two other men—Alexander himself and two other men—insisting now they get thrown over the wall into the midst of the enemy troops, cut these people to pieces, cut their way to the gate, open the gate and let the army in.

You mean to tell me that the group was just opportunely set up and that anybody could have stayed in this man’s boots? Oh, no. I don’t think so.

You get a fellow like Napoleon—as crazy as Napoleon was and so on, he was at the same time an individual whose impact on the society was enormous.

By underestimating the value of the individual in the society, some mighty silly answers are going to be turned up here. Some mighty silly predictions are going to be made about the future of the various groups of the world today.

There’s a fellow sitting over there by the name of Stalin who is one of the smartest party secretaries, propagandists and so forth imaginable. This man is sitting on top of and holding in line hundreds of races. They don’t even speak the same language, and this fellow, by personal force — whether he’s bad or good, this is beside the point; whether it’s bad or good for Russia, that’s beside the point—but by his own personal force he is knocking into shape an empire. Of course we sit around and we say, “Well, collective state. Communism is just a collective state, they don’t believe in individuals, therefore Stalin—this is not really that sort of a proposition,” Well, what terrible confusion we get into about all this because we don’t look at the fact that here is a man who is knocking together an empire. He’s found out the ideal way of fixing up an empire. He says, “There’s only one number one in that empire and that’s me! And all the rest of you people are a collective state,” And of course they’re much easier to rule if there’s only one number one. And that’s one of the methods of government.

Now, here are individuals who suddenly surge up into the society from some quarter or other with military aims, with great governmental greeds and ambitions and just knock these groups kicking, The third dynamic, in other words, and the first dynamic, they get badly mixed up. You see? But they would a lot more of the time than they do. It could happen a lot more often than it does, because we’ve got a third dynamic there which resists back against this sort of thing. In other words, it picks up as itself. The group as itself is something. It doesn’t exist as just a group of number ones. It is, itself, a something and it resists this sort of thing. And unless there was that resistance we would keep getting things where this would go out, the third dynamic would go out more suddenly and more often than it does. Or the second dynamic could go out. In other words, these things depend for their stability on all three of these things being in pretty good shape: the individual, the future and the group itself. So you see, there’s a balance there.

Number ones come in, all of a sudden will take number three and blunt it, whip it into shape, do something with it. Now, it’s a funny thing but some of that has to be done. But when it’s done too much and number three is just staggered—the second number one dies, there goes the whole group. The empire of Alexander the Great, I don’t think, lasted twenty-four hours. The second that he died down in Asia Minor, his generals immediately got together over the table and they said, “This is yours; this is yours; this is yours; this is yours,” got on their horses, rode off in nine different directions and that was the end of the empire.

You see? It wasn’t a group. It was a first dynamic. One man had imposed himself so thoroughly upon the civilized world that the civilized world caved in the second this fellow disappeared. So that is not a stable state to be in, is it? That’s not survival. Not a bit of it. And yet, here’s this collective state. Its basic law could be summed up in the tenet—it goes along on the idea “The individual is not important,” it says. All right. That’s fine. “The individual is not important; what’s important is the mass.” Labor. Beautiful word, labor. I never saw management yet that didn’t work like dogs! I never saw labor yet that didn’t do a lot of management. But we’ve got “labor” here, and we’ve got the “peeeople,” and we’ve got all this thing and out of this we get a very interesting fact that if we followed its tenets reductio ad absurdum we’d get this theorem: five morons make a genius. Well, obvious!

All right, so this is not good survival. Not good at all. In the first place, a group is more or less carried on the backs, somebody has said, of a few desperate men. And there are enormously varied abilities in people, and a group has to look around for its leaders. The fact that it finds them, all too often, through their military prowess or some other thing, it just bespeaks the fact that the group is rather hard put all the time to find leaders—able individuals who will carry on the affairs of the group. That is a very tough one. So we have these interplays of these three dynamics. We can watch this in evolution back down through history and we can find out that by history it’s evidently correct to say that there has to be an adequate balance there between the worth of the individual in the society, the value of sex, the family and the future in society and the value of a group as such. It is not just a happy compromise. Each one of these things are fully developable to a high optimum and if these things were paid attention to, as we look on this thing as the evolutionary picture, we would find that the society would best survive which paid close attention to the fact that each one of these was important. And we find that a society will succumb as soon as it begins to neglect one of these as important.

That is a little cursory sketch of what you can learn by studying the history books, by looking it oven But there are other ways to approach this problem, many other ways to approach it. There’s the way of sitting down and beating your skull in for a while and just remembering everything you possibly could have picked up and everything that you have learned in Dianetics and a few things like that for a month or so and then trying to put together what you have left—what you’ve weeded out. And you take the rest of the tenets and you amalgamate them and you try to set the thing up one way or the other and get something that looks like Group Dianetics. The odd part of it was that this effort produced some results which predict. A lot of things in the past—see, Political Dianetics I hadn’t recognized was a completely neglected subject up to about six weeks ago.

You looked around, the world situation was whipping up to a point of acceleration; something had to be done about that. I looked around at the Foundation itself. Found out there must be something wrong here, there must be a missing datum or two, there must be a missing viewpoint. Somewhere here something needs to be rearranged, and particularly something needs to be learned. So it’s obvious that we can’t have settled much in the line of Political Dianetics if we don’t know the odds and ends of laws that make up a group in such a way that we just suddenly pick up one of these laws, look at it and say, “Well, that’s being violated here,” and look over here and, “Well, this is how you put that into effect” and all of a sudden have a smooth running organization. This sort of thought-action is very interesting.

Go up into the abstract, up here up into the last end of nowhere and look around and try to find some datum and be very careful not to get stuck up there and then get back and look at the real world and look at people and so on and try to get into the swim of it and compare this datum back and forth, back and forth, till you have something.

The line of thought which went on along about this was interesting but I won’t bother you with it. I will tell you this, that the mystical background, the philosophic background which went behind this ran somewhat on these lines: (this is not in chronological order as to how they were thought up) but the first thing that actually comes in here as a tenet is the fact that the group exists with a life of its own. We look at groups just as though there wasn’t a single individual anywhere in the group.  First, look at it just as a collective body and let’s examine it as such. We find that as a collective body it does have a life of its own and oddly enough, the group does not depend for its sanity to any enormously marked degree upon the sanity of the people who compose it. Isn’t that interesting?

It means immediately that we don’t have to clear all the individuals in the world to have cleared groups. That’s heartening, because all of a sudden one looks it over and finds that it would probably be possible within a year or two to clear up the major groups of the world by using various tenets. That’s a highly ambitious project. I myself would not tackle it, personally, all by myself. Maybe you’ll help me.

In other words, here is actually an entity. It does not smoothly compare with an organism composed of cells. The group, in other words, is not just an organism composed of cells. That’s not an apt analogy. We consider it a living entity with its own analytical level, with its own reason for being, and immediately the problem starts to resolve for us. The group does not exist necessarily for the individual; the individual does not necessarily exist for the group. Consider the group a special entity.

Once upon a time when I was a brash young man I used to be fond of saying that a government had no blood or body. It wasn’t something which could be attacked; that the individuals were the only thing that mattered in it, and so on. I’m afraid I have to eat some of those little early monographs because the point is that this thing does have, obviously, a life of its own. And we start looking at the thing as having a life of its own and the problem of groups begin to resolve and a lot of problems about men that I hadn’t known hadn’t been resolved, all of a sudden showed up and got solved. But one of the things that led into this was done a long time ago in Dianetics and that was the postulate of—this was one of the first things postulated and a lot of these things dropped out of sight because the people with whom I was constantly in contact over the last eighteen months weren’t so much interested in groups. And in order to simplify things and explain what I was calling then “Abnormal Dianetics,” which just addressed the mind only, I dropped out three of these elements. Therefore, we have talked about the four dynamics. There are seven. There are seven dynamics, not four. That just goes to prove that a fellow shouldn’t listen too much, in spite of what the society has to say about the fact that he who keeps absolutely quiet and listens all the time becomes a very wise man. I fail to see what happens with this wisdom which he’s accumulated if he never says anything about it!

All right, we have seven dynamics. [drawing on blackboard] We have the first, we have a self; the second dynamic as sex and future; the third dynamic as group; the fourth as man, mankind; the fifth dynamic is life. Life, just no matter where you find it. If you find it in dogs or cats or any of these other things, in jaguars or giraffes. Life. Life in a blade of grass, life in a tree. These things are all life. And life has a great deal more affinity for living objects than it has for MEST as such—inanimate objects. Life. And the sixth we will call—as I called it in the early days, theta. So what do you call this thing? There is a dynamic toward the preservation of, or the existence of, or the being of, bodies of energy. Call it God. Call it anything you want to. But it is that thing. It’s there. Man has striven toward it. We cannot equate a balanced equation about any society or man unless we really look this thing over and say “Well, there it is,” and then not make the mistake of getting into an argument about it, but just postulate it there on the basis that man has always more or less thought and researched about this. And in this direction, he has more or less sensed this, there is a certain faith that he becomes imbued with and which makes it possible for him to do things that he never would have dreamed of doing before.

Very interesting that we have to take into account this which science has, of course, completely, practically, ruled out. Science goes into the line and says, “Well, God is probably an exploding atom.” I am sure to a boy whose life is all wrapped up in electronics and who is sitting on the ledge of a cyclotron, that God is a cyclotron. To an author, God might be a book. And to a mechanic, unthinkingly, God might seem to him to be a very fine racing car. But that would be a rather shortsighted view, wouldn’t it, for each individual? So, we have to take into account the sixth dynamic.

The seventh dynamic is MEST—the material universe.

The second we begin to look over this array of dynamics, the problem, rather than becoming more complex because we have entered some new factors into it, simplifies. Now all of a sudden we begin to see that man has some other things in which he s interested. We have talked a lot—too much perhaps—about processing the individual. We talked to a point of processing the individual to where we forgot the fact that our probably main goal was processing the group if we wanted to pick mankind up and keep him from falling on his face here, as he seems on the verge of doing. All right?

Now MEST, of course—this is an odd thing, but man has an affinity for MEST. MEST kicks him back and he gets into terrible turmoils about it, and it can be very brutal on him and so forth, but he does have a certain regard for MEST. It may be only the regard of a bulldog who is standing over a bone, and at the other hand, it may be an actual affinity for an energy form. Whatever it is, he does have an affinity for it. One gets out and he looks at the stars—that’s MEST. He looks at light—all these various things which compose the material universe. Of course he’s attacking the material universe, he’s interested in it. We postulate that. Naturally he would be interested in these things. But all of a sudden we find out that an aesthetic enters into this—an aesthetic, an affinity. Aesthetics are awfully close on this line of affinity here someplace. I have really been looking over aesthetics, I’m trying to find out what made them aesthete, and I haven’t had much luck. But they’re in this problem here someplace. That’s a pink piece over on the edge of the board; we haven’t quite got that one yet. But we look over this one and we find out that we have a very good idea of what we’re doing here, all of a sudden.

Let’s look at the idea of MEST here. The wind, rain, snow, blue skies, all of these things are MEST. And we live on the stuff. And here’s space, and here’s time, and so on. And one of the first things that folds up in the aberree seems to be his attraction for this stuff The real world, you might call it—using that in a very qualified sense—the real world becomes less pleasant to him.

You remember when you were a little kid and you got up in the morning and there was dew on the rosebushes. Mmm. And the wind and all of the world looked so good. Everything was so blue and so red and so green. The world that one looked at—and the sun was so bright and warm—all of these things. That was very, very swiftly sensed by the individual. It was appreciated. There was a definite reaching out and an affinity with this thing. And then, all of a sudden, this dynamic began to be blunted by collisions with MEST, and then MEST became less and less one’s friend, and things started to look—”Ah, it looks pretty good.” They get up to a point of where — well, one gets to be twenty-five years old, is married, and he gets up in the morning, there’s dew on the rosebushes but it’s just something that gets one’s shirt wet. So here is MEST.

Now, each one of these dynamics is the dynamic—of course the definition of a dynamic is that something that we have which seeks the survival of something. In other words, we have something, each one of us, which seeks for the survival of groups. We have something that seeks for the survival of mankind as mankind. Also for life, also theta and MEST. If you don’t believe that, think of the horrible state we would be in right here at the present moment if there wasn’t a world to stand on! Man very much needs the material universe, and we certainly would— you’ve felt this sudden quiver of sharpness sometimes when some character comes along, like one wrote in Argos  magazine the other day, that all of a sudden the ice was going to form on the pole and overbalance the world. Always in the past, he figured out, the ice had formed on the poles and then suddenly by overbalancing gyroscopic action, the gyroscope would switch ends and the poles would be where the equator is. And oh, he had facts and data. He had every datum except one. He hadn’t compared his theory to the real universe. But that thing caused a considerable commotion through the length and breadth of man—the readers of that magazine—that the world might suddenly come to an end. And then we find Velikovsky6 publishing Worlds in Collision or some such thing. That, by the way, is the oldest and corniest science fiction title in the world. We have been writing about worlds in collision—we’ve been writing Velikovsky for—God! I know of fifty years! It’s to a point where in science fiction if an author sends in a story that has to do with the end of the world, the editor just picks it up, you know, and puts it in the envelope and sends it back to him again. Well, Macmillan, of course, on its very high level of operation, wouldn’t know about this sort of thing. And well, in other words, man got interested in this. But this fellow about the sudden reversal of the poles of the Earth had neglected one fact. It’s getting warmer, not colder, and it’s getting warmer to the degree that the South Pole down there has been melting for some time, and it’s melting at such a rate that there is actually a possibility that the seas of the world are going to rise a little bit here in the very near future. And I mean the very near future. Next twenty years, something like that, there’s going to be a measurable increase in the amount of water which is melting on that South Pole. Of course there’s nothing up on the North Pole there to hold the ice. It keeps going out at one knot, or something like that, from the North Pole. It just keeps going out and getting down in the road of ships, and the road of my boys back down in the war, and so forth. You keep running into that stuff; it melts. But not the South Pole. It’s collecting it on these mountains, collected for a long time, and all of a sudden it’s all melting off, and it’s melting off much faster than it’s snowing back on again. So we’re going to get an increase in the bodies of the world. It will be in a matter of a few inches or a foot or so, at the outside. It would be, I think—somebody came along and said it would be a hundred and sixty-eight feet would be the rise—but I all of a sudden did a computation on this in my head on the amount of volume of water, and so forth, and I think the measurable increase would be somewhere in the neighborhood of about two or three millimeters. Anyway, the world got awfully upset—people who knew about the world going on “loose ends” like that, that it was going to swap ends. People got awfully upset, and nobody bothered to look over the general situation at all and find out that it’s so far from happening, that the ice was not stacking up on the South Pole, that actually it was getting in better and better and better shape with regard to this theory. And yet they could still publish such a thing and it would still get interest.

Now, man is very interested in the material universe. At the same time, he’s awfully interested in God. We go over into India and slog around for a while and we find out all about nirvana. There may be some of you who saw a similarity between theta and nirvana while I’ve been talking about it here. Certainly I’ve been exposed to nirvana, and a few times when I’ve gotten some bad rejection slips I have sought the beauties of nirvana. All one does is sort of merge with nirvana, and loses his own identity and that is the end of it.

Anyway, when we look over this theory there is an extremity. Groups have approximated this nirvana—the merging of the individual with God. Let’s merge the individual with the group so completely that we won’t be able to find him anymore! Individuals cause some of these governmental officials a lot of trouble, and I imagine they’d be pretty happy if the individual did merge and disappear, and leave them with nothing but a nice, easily run, manageable state. The manageable state. Yeah.

Male voice: Practical Yeah, practical.

Male voice: Practical Practical as hell! Oh, yeah.

Okay. So if we’re going to deal with the overall philosophic echelon of Dianetics, we have to look over these seven dynamics. And we have to consider them in their proper places.

Now, we get—second we start looking here at theta, and we look at the past regard of man for this thing, we find that there is an enormous amount of data kicking around about this that he thinks he has found.

Now, scientific proof is not the only kind of proof there is as far as man’s concerned. He figures that if he feels something strongly enough, well— everybody has gotten enough agreement on this subject—by golly, its so. He’s got that kind of proof that walks along with him through the generations. And for every race under the face of the sun, as many years and as many climes as I have ever been able to look, in books or on foot, he’s postulated this thing as part of the things which go to make up the all And he’s not only postulated it, but he goes to considerable trouble about this thing.

They tell me about Baal and so forth, and down the Aztecs, and he gets pretty excited about this thing. They tell me one time that there was a crusade and a lot of people in Europe went down and fought a lot of people in Asia Minor just because, as far as I can find out they— everybody in Asia Minor said that it was the God, the same God and so on, and looked like they had Christ—Jesus Christ was all in their books and everything; but the people up in Europe, they said that something or other. I never quite could figure out what this fight was about! Honestly! Then some crass and probably highly cynical individual came along and said it was because the crusaders wanted the wealth of Asia Minor. They’d heard about the wealth of Asia Minor; they want to go down and swamp it up.

Well, you know, I’ve known an awful lot of people in my time. I’ve known some cynics and some altruists and so forth, and the truth is probably way in between there someplace. Certainly somebody was excited about the sixth dynamic. But there seems to be a life outside of life — that is, a life outside of the individual. We consider a thought a force, and we can consider an energy that we call theta as something which is detachable, and individualizable in greater and greater chunks. The second we postulate something like this, all of a sudden groups become not only easier to understand but easier to handle, which is important. If we use this just as a postulate, and grant it as much reality as this, suddenly we can handle groups sufficiently so that this can go on and attack this far more successfully. Well now, that’s—we all of a sudden say we have to deal with this. I think the main trouble with this is people have been too strenuous about it, and they have sought to use the sixth dynamic too often. But haven’t they sought to use the individual too often, too? The individual is practically negated and dominated out of existence in some of these societies today. They’ve tried to use the individual to control this. They have said, “What’s important is the present generation; you don’t want all these future generations.” The second generation: “You don’t want all these future generations; what’s important is the individual.” They’ve used the group to smash out self. And the groups right now are trying to knock out man. You get the idea!

There’s interplay in this solution. The optimum solution would be that solution which did the maximum construction or creation along the maximum number of dynamics pertinent to the problem. In other words, if you got a solution which put all of these things forward simultaneously and benefited each one of them all the way along, that would be the absolute maximum solution—you can postulate an absolute, they don’t exist—but that would be the best solution you could possibly get for anything.

The test of anything is workability. You look this thing over and you find out when any solution has included more destruction for one of these than was absolutely necessary—the way you refined it down—the overall problem did not work out. But because of the complexities of problems, there is a natural—not a reactive—there’s a natural interplay of these interests. The individual says, “Well, what am I going to get out of this?” He has the right to ask the question. He’s involved with a group. “What does this group mean to me as an individual?” But if it’s a real group it has the right to ask him, “What do we get out of you, an individual, for the group?” In other words, these solutions are interactive, and as long as they are maintained in equilibrium they’re in pretty good shape. But the solutions of thought and life and so forth are contained in an adjudication of these things.

Now theta, here, is in violent conflict with this. And as a matter of fact, six and seven seem to be—when they are working as an interplay—seem to resolve a lot of our goals right here by regarding the interplay of six and seven. If that interplay can be done harmonically, without intradestruction or turmoil, there is a successful amalgamation. We get an optimum solution. But when theta goes in against MEST with a smash, and MEST comes back against theta with a smash, the two of them will get into areas of turmoil. That, basically, is what an engram is. It is where theta—life force, God—life force has smashed against matter.

Now, the whole problem here in groups, then, can be evidently much more easily resolved if we say that here on the first dynamic we had a little bit of theta chopped off and individualized. That on the second dynamic, here was a trust of the future, individualized. That on the group, here was another piece of theta individualized. And theta can’t be nailed down in one place unless there is MEST, you see; MEST is absolutely necessary to one of these things being in place. Here is a larger piece of theta which is mankind, and a much larger piece which is life itself Now actually, if you reversed the sixth and seventh dynamics you could say that MEST would be on the sixth dynamic; you would say, “Well, here’s a much larger piece’ and then all of a sudden say, “Well, there’s theta.” Well, this is very tricky, but it unfortunately doesn’t provide the factors and an arrangement of factors which resolves the problem. They’ve been trying to resolve this problem in just the fashion I’ve been more or less mentioning to you there, with a reversal of the sixth and seventh dynamic, for centuries—for thousands of years—and it hasn’t yielded any solution. Just by reversing and saying, “Well, let’s put theta on the sixth,” and so on, “Let’s not include MEST in, in the activities of theta. Let’s consider maybe there is an ‘overall’ that includes material universes everyplace,” and all that sort of thing—but he’s obviously got an executive officer, and that executive officer is theta that we’re considering here. If there is one. I mean, that’s beside the point.

Now, so we could mark these things down—we could mark down these dynamics along about in this line [drawing on blackboard]. You see? Here’s six of them. And here would be MEST, but MEST would actually be, if you included in now that you had to have this super, super, super echelon, this would be a different kind of theta, which would have to be a sort of a capital Theta which would include the material universe, and you’d get a—here’s an individual, a little tiny piece of theta, and here are the future generations which are included here as more or less a piece of theta in trust; here’s the group which is a bigger piece; man, a bigger piece; life, bigger, and here’s theta itself that we’re dealing with. And then here would be the big theta—would be the overall thing. This thing will resolve problems.

Right away we ask of a group, does it have a life, an entity, an individuality, and so forth? It has all of these things. It is not an organism which is composed of the bodies of man any more than a man, happily or accidentally, happens to be a collection of bits of rock and chemicals which just, well, one way or the other happens to have an analytical mind. I mean, it happens to have life. If you look at a group and say, “It’s just a collection of individuals,” it’s a bad mistake. The group is actually, actively, an entity.

Now, that entity has to have within it certain factors. There are certain things demanded of the individuals by that group, and certain things the individual has a right to demand of the group. For instance, a group will start to fall apart if it cannot demand of the people within it contributions to its life, that is, its contribution of effort. But strangely enough, the individuals in a group have the right to be able to contribute to that group. You refuse an individual the right to contribute to the group and you have pushed him back.

Set it up as an experiment. Somebody comes along and says to a group of people, “I would like to do something for you.” Oh, let’s take a church. Everybody is sitting in church, and this person is sitting there and he drops his dime in the collection box, and the person who is doing the collection reaches in, picks up the dime and hands it to him, but takes the dollar and all the rest of it from the other people along the line. A little child, for instance in Sunday School, so on. Contribution. The right to make a contribution to the group must not be denied to the individuals of that group. But that’s the only right the group has with regard to that, actually, is a demand—of course it has the right to demand, but I mean the only right it has in the modification of that contribution is the right of coordinating it, coordinating it so that it doesn’t overbalance the purposes of the group. We’ve got to have an interplay and an interaction between one and three.

Now the group must enhance the survival value of the first and second dynamics. The forecast of its survival can be made in these terms: that the group has a potentiality of survival more or less in the ratio to the amount it assists the individual, the future, man, life, theta and MEST. In other words, that dynamic can stay as the group itself, as an entity—stays unblunted, it can thrive and survive if it enhances the survival of all the others. But that’s true of any dynamic, that it will survive so long as it enhances the survival of all the rest of the other dynamics. Therefore, a group which considerably inhibits the survival of mankind will of course not in itself have the survival value, or actually be tolerated by the rest of mankind over a long period of time, up to the point when the fourth dynamic is able to finally knock that group flat. And the fourth dynamic will try to knock that group flat. You see? The group, then, has to enhance the survival of the individual. It has to guarantee futures, not only for the individual but for children and the rest of it. To be a true group, it would have to include, in some degree, all the rest of the dynamics. If it included all the rest of the dynamics you would say this is the most solid group imaginable.

You see, the family, as a small group, is a pretty stable unit; but a city-state, for reasons which I will give you shortly, is a more stable unit than a nation, within itself, inherently, except for the fact that it can’t protect itself so well from other larger groups. So it has a weakness. So the compromise in there, and possibly not the best solution at all, is a nation. The nation is providing for—at optimum—its providing for one, it’s providing for families, for children of the future, it’s providing for groups within itself—its great clusters of groups, but it has a life of its own—and that nation, if it provides for the future survival of all mankind, could not perish from the Earth. But that nation which threatens the survival of any section of mankind will, and inevitably has, perished from the face of the Earth.

When we dropped an atom bomb at Hiroshima, we forfeited our rights as a group on the fourth dynamic. Now, we actually, if you want to work it out philosophically, committed national suicide. That was five years ago.

We start working this thing out from the inevitability of that action, we find out that we have threatened the survival of mankind. Other men were working on this and other nations, but other nations didn’t drop the atom bomb. We did. So we have made a bigger thrust in the minds of other groups toward the cessation of survival of mankind than any organization ever has in the past, including Genghis Khan, Hitler, Napoleon, any of these people. In other words, we have made a deeper stab into the fourth dynamic, with that atom bomb, in the minds of the people of the groups of the world, than any other group or organization ever has. Boom! It can be us. The reason for this is it says immediately the sovereignty of nations ceases at this moment.

On what depends the sovereignty of nations? The right and ability to protect its populace is the sovereignty of a nation. To protect, to govern, to rule and to control its populace.

We go into international law, for instance, we look this thing over, we find out in international law a government’s a government so long as it’s got its government in action over a small number of people. By definition, for instance, Chiang Kai-shek’s government now in Formosa is not a government, because it doesn’t occupy any of its terrain or any of its people, and obviously, from everything I have been able to learn, doesn’t even occupy any of the minds of its own people. It’s sort of somebody standing out on the outside of the house and saying, “That’s my house,” but he can’t get in, and nobody will let him in, and he has no deed of title.

All right. There is the sovereignty of a nation.

What does an atom bomb do? There is no single weapon, no single defensive weapon, right now which can resist or face an atom bomb. There are none. I don’t care how calm the US government has been in making this business of the atom bomb, that you can live through an atomic war and all that sort of thing, trying to calm panic where it didn’t exist. The point is that a guided missile travels three thousand—it doesn’t matter how fast—three thousand miles an hour. I designed the navigation equipment on something about, oh, a few years ago, in an off moment. Somebody from one of these organizations that work on guided missiles wanted them. He wanted it for drones, he said, drone planes. That was perfectly all right, but I found out afterwards it was for guided missiles; for a guided missile that navigated at the rate of three thousand miles per hour, which would pinpoint its target in terms of latitude and longitude to the minute of are. Very interesting mechanism. It’s been in existence for some time. Anybody can fire one of these things from any part of the world and land it at Sixth and Main Streets, if that’s what he sets up on its dials. Isn’t that interesting?

What happens to the sovereignty of a nation when it cannot protect itself against those things which might close in upon its borders? The United States government today, in the face of the Russian possession of atom bombs, would not be able, for instance, to protect any community in the United States. You can’t intercept something going three thousand miles an hour. There are no radar screens. Jet planes don’t go this fast. You can’t pick up these things, spot them, cut them off. There are no force screens; that’s a happy dream on the part of science fiction writers like myself. Force screen, something it bounces off. These things don’t exist.

You see, defense and offense depends upon 50 percent offensive strength and 50 percent defensive strength. Now, that’s a balanced arm. A balanced army contains that, a balanced force of a nation contains that.

Once before in the history of man, at around fifteen hundred to thirteen hundred B.C., an unlimited missile weapon—came in upon mankind. An unlimited missile weapon. It walked in on him, he had no defense for it. In other words, all of a sudden here was 100 percent offensive strength and zero percentage defensive strength. He couldn’t defend himself against this weapon, and all Europe was in chaos for two hundred years. The nations there that existed, whatever they were and so forth, were so thoroughly mixed up that we don’t even have any records for the period to amount to anything. It will rather amaze you when I tell you what the weapon was against which there was no defense. It was a man on a horse with a sword.

There were no walls, no walled towns, that were able to stand up. In other words, it was cavalry. Unlimited offensive action of such an impact value that foot troops, or something like that that were standing around with a few crude knives or something like that, they couldn’t stop these things. And the cavalry came in off the steppes, horse and sword, and practically wiped things out for about two hundred years. There was chaos and there was no government possible.

The United States has worked itself up to a point now, with this guided missile weapon, where actually, sentiently, the second anybody starts really throwing around atom bombs no government is possible on a national scale. The groups will have to fall back to very small units. It’s an interesting philosophic observation. I’m sorry if it seems to contain any blood and guts. It is strictly a philosophic observation that here we have a violation of the fourth dynamic to this degree by a third dynamic with a guided missile weapon. And this is a philosophic observation, and I wouldn’t expect it to have any great application in the material universe. The point I’m making here is that it requires a balance of all seven, actually, for the thing to work easily and well.

Now, when we regard hard facts such as an unlimited missile weapon, when we regard the fact that a nation, a group on the face of the Earth, has threatened all mankind, we couldn’t really blind ourselves completely to the fact that the rest of the dynamics are going to sort of cave in, particularly on that nation. So what must a group do? And this is the only reason I’m talking about this—what must a group do? It must have within it the potentialities of supporting and assisting the other six dynamics. It must have within it the potentialities of that. In other words, must help the individuals; help the future; it must help groups (because there are always groups within groups); it must help man, who is not just another group, because man is not organized as a group—an entirely separate thing; he’s a species. Then, too, you must go into the remaining three dynamics of life—that group must assist life. Going out and planting corn, planting trees and planting rosebushes—that’s assisting life. And it must have something to do with theta. It must, in other words, be in concordance with theta, and evidently the dynamic toward theta. And on the seventh dynamic it must have as one of its goals the conquering of the troubles and upsets and so forth occasioned— I should state that better: It should have as one of its functions assisting of MEST; but it also happens to be the utilization of MEST in a harmonic fashion, rather than a destruction of MEST. It must create with MEST.

In other words, any time you want to find—let’s look over the problem now and see what we have gone over here—any time you want to find out what is lacking in a group, inspect the group carefully and patiently from the standpoint, one by one, of these dynamics. What does it offer the individual? Does it permit the individual to offer anything to it? Does it offer anything to the future? Does it permit the future to offer anything to it, by the way? In other words, is it providing for children to be able to contribute to it? Does it offer anything to groups or does it merely seek to destroy groups within itself? Does it offer anything to the groups surrounding it? Is it permitting those groups to contribute to it? And is it contributing to those groups? Do you understand? I’m talking now as one group sitting in the midst of many other groups not allied to it. It must have an interchange with these other groups. It must have a possibility of interchange in them, and then it must also have an interchange with the groups which are within it as a group. It must be able to contribute to and receive contributions from those groups within it.

The only way you could really knock a big group apart would be to set up a number of small groups within it and then fix it so the small groups couldn’t contribute to the big group. And then fix it so the big group wouldn’t contribute to the small groups. And because the essence of a group is thought, actually, the essence of the group is thought, there must be—it’s fairly easy to interrupt this sort of thing.

You know all this hocus-pocus they’re going into about minorities—the minority—minority rights, the minority individual, the crushed minority, so forth. Actually, that is one of the cruder operations. First you convince the minority it is a minority and then you convince it that it isn’t permitted to contribute to the big group, and then you convince it and the big group that the big group cannot contribute to it, and the big group of course is destroyed from within, boom! Because a small group which is not permitted to contribute to the big group will, as its reverse action, because it’s acting on dynamics—the dynamics interact regardless of direction; the dynamics will interact—if it can’t contribute to the group, it will turn against the group and it will destroy it. There is an interaction. In order to keep the thing balanced it had better be a creative interaction, because if there isn’t a creative interaction, then there’s going to be a destructive interaction. There is no question of there being a null, a complete, utter null. That’s like the theoretical zero there on the scale between right and wrong I was drawing you the other day. That’s a highly theoretical point. It is really less than hair-thin.

All right. In other words, the group could be estimated as to what it intended. It could be estimated as to its future, as to its size. Things could be estimated about a group by examining its relationships with the other dynamics. Does it assist them? How much does it assist them? How much does it destroy them? Of course, one must not overlook the fact that it is impossible to construct and create without at the same time to some slight degree actually destroying, because one has to convert. The conversion is a destruction of something.

Now, therefore, this group s future could be estimated. Any group s future could be estimated. That means that the Elks Club could be estimated, that a nation, the Polynesians—it means that a Boy Scout troop—any time you . . . [gap] . . . you can estimate the survival potentials of that group and its growth; because as it contributes to this dynamic—and this is true of most of the dynamics, all of them—as it contributes to the survival of the other groups it is granted more theta.

You might say that groups are on an allocation basis. A small group, it starts to contribute constructively, and the interplay is excellent on all the other dynamics, and it gets more and more and more things are going into alignment and there’s more and more theta present, until all of a sudden this group . . . [gap] . . . nothing could possibly interrupt its progress. Nothing. It is as inevitable as bulldozers. One doesn’t have to sit around and worry about it at all. He just sets it up and looks over the problem to see what this group has to contribute, and permits the group to be contributed to and he looks and sees how much it complements the other dynamics, and that group can be estimated. And if it does all of these things very well, it grows bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger. Actually, at the final end, unless something again reverted against it and the cycle of life is changed, the cycle of all these dynamics has changed . . . [gap] . . . this point, it would embrace pretty well all of mankind.

The only reasons why groups in the past have not reached out and embraced mankind was because they violated very flagrantly several of these dynamics. Every one of them did.

Now, this means this is so strong—the flagrance of the violation was so great that one looks it over and one finds out that the plane of interaction is such that one . . . [gap] . . . to support creatively these dynamics in just a halfway fashion, and that group would still go out and embrace all of mankind. In other words, you’d get the whole universe into it after a while.

There is the interesting point. A group is thought. A group is thought. You might say a group has a soul; a group is its own soul. It is a thought, it is a body. All right. Now, the body is its perpetuating or perpetuated ideas, its ethic, its customs, precedents, all of these various things; its perpetuating ideas, its understanding of its own goals—ideas again. That’s the body of the group.

Now, the heartbeat of the group are the ideas on which it sort of runs from day to day, the interplay as it resolves the major ideas and problems and thoughts, the heartbeat of the small ideas that go along in the midst of it. A group has a survival potential, then, which is theoretically infinite. The group’s size has to do with the size of its idea. The size of its idea. Not that it’s got a big idea that it’s going to do something or other. But I’m talking now about the fact that the idea is good, that the goals of this group are good, if the ideas which perpetuate those goals are good and all of that sort of thing and it’s following along the line set up on these seven dynamics, why, that group is a body. It’s a thought which has taken on an actual body. It exists as such. It exists as such to a theoretical point where you could, for instance, strip half of the individuals out of it, or put ten times as many individuals into it and so forth, and this thing still goes.

The finest groups in terms of morale, esprit, ideas, goals, futures, have been made in the past out of criminals, psychotics, aberrees beyond aberrees! The individual aberration state is only a minor influence upon the group, actually, because you have such a small part in each one. But the group influence upon the individual is tremendous; and man is so thoroughly evolved, he is so constructed, he exists to such a degree as a group person that he is lost, he doesn’t exist actually at all, unless he is part of that body of ideas. An exile from a group is actually tantamount to death to an individual. That is, an exile from all groups would be the most hideous thing that could happen to an individual.

We see this, by the way, when we go down to any prison. What’s the worst curse we throw against these people? We say they’re antisocial. We could say they’re against the third dynamic. They’re individuals, the third dynamic has kicked them out, they are not permitted to contribute, the third dynamic doesn’t contribute to them. They’re out, they’re dead, and they act like it, too.

Now, there you have the picture of groups. These are axioms on a philosophic echelon. I would not even begin to tell you that this whole subject has been thoroughly worked out, but these are evidently the basic tenets for this reason only—that when one uses them and uses this viewpoint, he sees so many things which he didn’t see before. He can predict so much information, and when he looks for it the information is found to be there. These that I’ve discussed with you here this morning, I’ve given you just a discussion of the basic laws, the basic fundamentals and postulates of the group, and actually I’ve given you a new basic and a new background for the evaluation of any dynamic of the seven.

That god which does not contribute to the society, and to which the society does not contribute, is very soon off of his pedestal Have you ever noticed that?

You take, then, thought. You can consider any thought as a godlet, you might say, or as a small devil. You can consider thought, pieces of thought, as ideas actually in their interaction. You can consider them the same way that the Greeks deified these thoughts. Venus was so-and-so— love. This was the thoughts of love, everything that had to do with love—they fixed up an anthropomorphic thing and set it on a pedestal; set it on a pedestal and that was Venus. That was a godlet. And then we say afterwards, well, they’re pagans and heathens to do such a thing. But I don’t think they were. Because they have just stated what is actually, as we look it over here, and the best I can see from where I am now in looking over this problem, is that they were—not that it was right to set up a statue and worship that, but they were absolutely right in their analogy that a thought and a body of ideas is, to some slight degree, an immortal entity and is an entity. And the overall immortal entity, of course, has been worshiped by man as one entity for an awful long time.

Now, if you look at the problem, not from a religious standpoint, but just from its philosophic standpoint, I think you can look around and spot the nonsurvival points, the bad points, the remissions and so forth, in any number of groups of which you know. And you can find out why these groups do bad things or good things to individuals, what the individual is worth to the group. We can get an estimate, a sentient estimate then of the survival value and the force of a group in the society.

The automatic fact, for instance, that communism is spreading all the way over Eurasia and into the rest of the world merely states that it is a body of perpetuating and perpetuated ideas which happen to be superior to any of those which have been advanced to those people in that place. This group fell back by a lack of, you might say, “God power.” It   didn’t   throw   into   the   breach   either   its   own   tenets—it   didn’t contribute itself to those people to an extent which the other group was. And we measure this up and we find out that we had a principle known as isolationism in 1938, 1939, 1941 . And all of a sudden we were engaged in a great and awful war. And now we’re trying belatedly, having liberated the hell out of those people, to contribute something to them. But we’re not permitting them to contribute anything to us, are we? We have tariffs, we have all sorts of reasons why they can’t contribute anything to us. Their books, music, their languages, why, God help us, in this United States there are very few people who speak anything like one of their languages in Europe. They teach it in our high schools, but I shudder to think of what a high-school student does with the Spanish language, which is right next door to him down here in Mexico, much less what he does to French and German. We have not permitted them to contribute very much to us.

Actually, we look over and we find out our arts, sciences and all the rest of it are massively from there. But then we look at any society and find out we’ve had this enormous interchange with it. We look around us and find out what we’ve taken from China, Japan, all the rest of these things. Groups are mutually interchanging all the time, and when that interchange is interrupted, watch out! And when any group suddenly rears back and out of some mistaken philosophy says, “Now we are in a position to smash all of another dynamic,” it is inevitable that that group will perish, or mankind itself will perish. It’s inevitable. There the die is cast, right now, between the United States and the rest of mankind. And the United States has been taught to think of itself as a benefactor of mankind. There are a lot of agents that are undoing that teaching in the world.

Actually we know what we consist of here in the United States, but do other people know? No, I’m afraid they don’t. And so, right here, after we look all this thing over, we wonder why there’s unrest, turmoil, why our taxes are going up, why things aren’t running quite right, why all these programs aren’t going right. Six weeks ago I didn’t have really any kind of an idea, but I looked at it—I knew basically what could be done, that something could be done about this, but I hadn’t ever crystallized that into a recognition of the fact that a group is a segment of theta, and the second one recognized that, he finds that any group then which offends against the higher echelon of theta, it’s going to twist over and it’s going to come back upon that group.

I thought the chances of the United States to get through this next one were very good. I saw suddenly nothing wrong with them really, up until about three weeks ago. I suddenly looked at these equations and I said, my God! every one of them is stacked—the cards are absolutely stacked all the way around here.

Now, it’s an odd thing that picking up engrams out of ideas is not—out of these ideas, out of groups—is not terribly hard. One only has to expose them to view. But that’s true of every engram, isn’t it? It just comes to view. And it’s easy to treat thought and bring a hidden thought to view, just in a body of thought. It’s hard to get thought out of MEST, but it’s easy to get and expose a thought within a body of thought, isn’t it? All one has to do is pick up the curtain slightly and show people what it was, and whooh! There is nothing easier than de-engramifying a group. It depends upon very excellent communication—fast communication within a group. Groups can be big in exact ratio to the amount and speed of communication and transportation existing.

Now, therefore, to actually go back over and look over a group and knock out the society’s aberrations and to heal scars that have passed before, it’s only necessary to pick up the curtain. Here one looks this over and finds, by the way, by actual test, that it’s excellent.

Now it’s—excellent chance of just clearing a group. One can clear a group. It’s not enough to clear a group, however, because a group consists of ideas. The group must be given more theta. The ideas have got to be better. The group must understand more closely what it is as a group. So one sort of sees that the interplay between theta and the group is very close.

Here sits a nation which has an atom bomb. But this nation happens to have within its borders the majority of communication technicians and communication facilities of mankind. And here it sits and talks about an iron curtain!

The breaking up of the engram and the clearing of engrams out of the social order, however, would have to be accomplished by, at the same time, offering the rest of the groups a greater contribution than have been given to them in the past—not in terms of MEST. One doesn’t contribute in terms of MEST. One contributes in terms of ideas, thought and life.

Now, the solution is actually very, very simple. One just gives the rest of the groups a far better idea than they have, and believe me, that’s awfully easy. You could take a bunch of boys over at Batten, Barton, Durstine and Osborn and sit them down for a single morning and whip up a better idea than communism or democracy. I swear it! It’s just that people aren’t permitted to think about these things. Democracy is an organizational plan. Communism is an ideological set of ideas. And here’s an organizational plan that’s trying to face a set of ideas. That’s nonsense! The second that thing is pointed out, all of a sudden we realize that we need an ideology. We’ve got to have a body of ideas, and they’ve got to be good ideas. And here we are, the best salesmen on Earth, stumped for an idea? Oh, nonsense!

All you have to have is much better ideas than are being sold to the rest of the world, and you communicate them faster. And with all the communication equipment you’ve got and the rest of it, you consolidate the thing, you make sure that there’s an inter-contribution to the rest of the dynamics on the whole subject, and actually, the world picture will collapse like that, in terms of all of this provoked war. But one of the first things we’d have to do is to get rid of the hot potato which we picked up at Los Alamogordos, get rid of that hot potato and include as part of our communications and so forth that “here it was and we really didn’t know it was there, officer, but there it is and here you are men; here you are France and Russia and Germany and so forth; here’s this thing. We don’t want this; this is dangerous. We’ll give it to the United Nations. Here you are, United Nations. Yeah, United Nations, we’ve given it all to the United Nations now, and as far as Hiroshima’s concerned, my God! we’re sorry!” We’d better go over and build them another Hiroshima, too. And I’m not kidding. And another Nagasaki!

Male voice: And a new Korea!

Right, right. We’ve got to knock these things back into shape again, only it isn’t going to take very long to do it. There is nothing travels with the instantaneousness of thought. It’s very, very fast. And the velocity of a thought is directly proportional to its ability to assist the dynamics. The velocity of it. If it’s got a large value to the survival of all the dynamics it has a terrific velocity.

People have talked about individuals to such an extent that they believe that there is such a thing as social inertia. Oh, nonsense! There is no such thing. A body of people are not hard to move in any particular direction. That’s one of the things by which people have sought to keep their groups stable. Don’t you recognize that as an idea with which groups were trying to hold themselves stable when they didn’t have anything else to offer? They said, “Groups are very hard to move.” You know, Newton’s laws of interaction definitely state that a body tends to remain in a state of inaction or persist in a state of constant motion unless influenced by outside forces. That’s inertia. And they said, “The inertia of the people is such they could not possibly accept anything like this.” That’s a survival mechanism and it’s a sort of a little engram, and the second we pick up the corner of it and go whoooh! — it’s just an idea—it’s gone. Actually, there isn’t a nation or a body on the face of the Earth that in the face of good ideas and fast communication couldn’t be changed whoooh! overnight. We’re playing with ideas. We’re playing with thin air. But the second that bigger and better ideas are entered into the thing, then the ideas which have to overcome them or face them have to be bigger and better. Communism came along and offered to the world a bigger and better idea than the world had up to that time—up to that time was a bigger and better idea. And the only thing you could possibly have done about that was to offer a bigger and better idea. And what does a nation of individuals ordinarily do when it confronts an idea, a revolutionary idea, springing up in its midst? It goes out and worries in terms of MEST. It thinks in terms of MEST, not in terms of theta. It says, “Shoot ’em!” It says, “Send them to Siberia,” which is a space preventer. It says this, it says that, but not in terms of theta.

Now, the second we get the ideas combated by ideas, then we’re all right. The only possible way, evidently, that communism could have been swept away was to have given to the world a much—as a group, some group in the world, some nation—just given a much better idea than communism, much more workable, that assisted the seven dynamics better. And the second it gave a better idea than communism, there wouldn’t have had to have been anybody shot. Communism would have folded up. It would have folded up just like that. Advertising campaigns are continually trying to build up these ideas. They do it in various ways, but all an advertising campaign needs to go is a better idea.

Female voice: New product!

That’s right. That’s the idea. When we’re talking in terms of ideas we’re talking about the product. What we’re talking about is the interchange through the society of these ideas and people start to get killed over something that can be changed practically overnight, if you have the communication. So it’s a very silly thing to fight a war, because all the war will do to the idea is confirm it by somebody. And how does it confirm it? By injuring enough people so that that idea gets mixed so thoroughly up with MEST that MEST kicks back and forces the idea now and it becomes an aberration. But as long as it’s kept in a fluid line, as long as it isn’t attacked particularly but just a better idea is furnished for it, the idea which comes up which is dangerous will go away and a better idea will come forward.

Now, I have talked to you rather overlong this morning because I wanted to cover the whole subject of groups at a flash so that we could have the short period here—a break—and then I wanted to talk to you about the Foundation as a group.

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