View source for Scientology and Tradition (SHSBC 640915)

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

'''Date:''' 15 September 1964

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

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Thank you. All right, this is what date? Audience: Fifteenth, September 15th.

This is the 15th. What planet? Audience: Earth.

All right, very good. Fifteenth of September AD 14, planet Earth. Well, actually, I don’t really have anything to talk to you about.

I’ve been doing nothing much. There are several things which one could cover. One could talk some more about definitions and wonder why definitions are so something—or—other.

But, probably be a very good idea since Melbourne got itself into trouble with nothing but definitions. It’s been sitting down there at an inquiry giving incomprehensible words in a long stream, ARC breaking everybody in sight. Peculiar genius.

My orders have been not followed in that area even vaguely. They were told to give a mild little PE course, and that would be the extent of it. And they—of course, every time anybody asked them a question, why, they answered it.

Why, that’s silly. They weren’t being audited, they were being inquired. And the other thing was the earlier instruction to Peter was to go down and open up Sydney and make the main org headquarters in Sydney, and he didn’t do that.

So between these two actions, of course, they’ve gotten themselves into lots of trouble. Well, any PE can get itself in similar trouble, and so forth. They’re apparently for our—learning from the Melbourne mess, the similarities could happen along almost any line.

And those two areas of trouble would simply be: not following policy and giving words and data far over the heads of the recipients. And between those two things, why, they have made a mess. And I think that anybody could make a mess anywhere with those two things.

You have to understand something about policy. Policy is not something that I have dreamed up off the cuff. It might have been originally, and once in awhile I get real bright and solve something of the sort.

But policy is the general mean action, that is to say, the action which has been worked out, and which has been working and which has held true over a long period of time. SCIENTOLOGY AND 2  TRADITION Policies are very often worked out and then reworked, and then pushed into a new form, and batted back and forth, and eventually why they’ll settle down to becoming a fairly routine standard policy on the thing. In fact I don’t think a new policy has been invented in Scientology for several years.

And anyone here who really—who’s doing any supervision on staff, if they knew all the policies of the Central Organization that had been worked out over many, many years, frankly would never have to solve a single problem. They would just quote policy. It’s quite interesting—it’s quite interesting the fact that if I think it over very hard, on any problem that is offered me in an organization, if I think over what this thing is, and look at it real hard, and look over what policies that existed in this area, that I could uniformly and routinely give the answer by policy.

I would state what the policy was that covered that particular field. It’s quite interesting for an organization as young as this, and now I’m talking about more broad time spans than Standard Oil Company and Earth time, but organizations that are in this universe very seldom are as young as this planet, if you get the idea. I mean, there is a bigger time span involved and they nearly all of them go in this particular direction of well, they’ve got—they’ve worked out answers by experience over a long period of time, and everybody knows these things, and it makes communication possible between one point and another point, which is the main thing that it does by the way.

Policy is not the activity of forcing somebody to obey some archaic and moldy order. It’s not forcing people to obey orders; that isn’t the reason for policy. Policy is there to facilitate communication between two points.

In the absence of policy you don’t have communication between two points, because they’re not agreed on anything. Try to get communication between two points which are not in agreement, and of course you at once have trouble. And I point out the technology of A, R and C in support of that fact.

So if there is policy with regard with to how people are registered and if this is known and understood, it is (1) based on a considerable amount of experience on the part of Registrars and (2) the Letter Registrar, the Body Registrar who does the actual sign—ups, the D of T, the D of P, the Association Secretary and the HCO Secretary are all in agreement, don’t you see? So they stay in communication on this subject of registration. But the second you inject a brand—new, oddball policy into the thing, on which there has been no agreement previously and so forth, they tend to go out of agreement if this violates some policy in which they were in agreement.

And if—that is there’s a broader sweep to what I am talking about, by the way, than simply handling an organization. We’re talking about in actual fact, a civilization. And, a civilization has certain agreed upon customs and mores.

In other words, guides and standards of conduct. Certain things which they have agreed are normal. And it doesn’t much matter whether they are normal or abnormal or good or bad, just—this is all that matters—do they assist the general survival?

It’s the only real test of one of these things. It doesn’t matter whether you have a policy or morals, or customs, or any of these broadly agreed—upon things. Does it assist the general survival of the individual and of the majority of the group?

And is it agreed upon? And does it  SCIENTOLOGY AND 3  TRADITION facilitate communication having been agreed upon. There are actually three points involved there.

So, we get into a condition here where we have a certain number of policies or customs—I don’t care what you call them, or procedures or how do you go about it. You see there’s not much difference between how do you sign up a student and how do you get married. I mean, if you put them both on the basis of this is the expected routine.

When you go into a new area or new civilization the reason you feel strange, out of sorts with everybody, sort of half—ARC broke, and feel like you don’t belong is because you simply don’t know the customs or procedures on which they operate. How do you walk into a cafe? And when you walk into a cafe does the—are you supposed to stand there and wait till the manager or the maitre or waiter or somebody comes up and leads you to a seat?

Or are you supposed to blunder on in and sit down at the seat? Because if you violate it you will then be strange. Don’t you see?

So it’s because you don’t know these customs, which are these sequential doingnesses. What do you do after you’ve done that? See?

If you don’t know these cycles, why, then several things occur. One, you fall out of agreement with the people who are following these cycles. You’re no longer in agreement with these people or you don’t assume an agreement.

You feel strange, and so on. And you might even have a better solution to how things are going along but the truth of the matter is if it is too wildly out or too wildly different from what the other people are doing, why, then they wind up clobbering you. You see how this would happen.

And you wind up having them executed or something of this sort goes along like this. When a space opera society moves in a—on some kind of a wild, gumboot, down—in—the—barn, milking—the—cow sort of a society or something even wilder than that, something like Australia. You get an almost immediate—oh I can promise you my revenge against Australia is to give it a reputation.

That’s the only revenge I’m going to take. I’m just going to give it a reputation for being the most backward area on Earth. I could assure you it’ll go ramming down the ages that way too.

Someday you’ll have a cliché: “Oh well, it was a sort of an Australian society, you know?” They’re real clowns down there though—they’re real clowns. What they consider jurisprudence. The head of an inquiry, the judge, you see, announces the findings that he has determined upon, before he has heard the witnesses for the defense.

And two months before the end of the inquiry—he announces his findings, two months before the end of the inquiry and before he’s heard any of the witnesses for the defense. If he were to do that in England, why he would be up there—he would be up there on the bread lines right this minute, you know? Somebody would say to him, “Well, Sir Reginald Bard, we no longer have you in our midst.

You have been withdrawn from circulation. In fact, you are impeached.”  SCIENTOLOGY AND 4  TRADITION You know, it just isn’t done. But this is apparently quite the order of thing in Australia, you see?

All right? Well, there’s nothing wrong with that. He probably had his mind made up before it began, but I’m sure they wouldn’t find anything wrong with that either.

So anyhow, yeah that’s my only revenge against Australia. I’m going to make their name a byword. Anyway, the situation—of course, what we say and do is liable to much far better to become a byword than anything they say or do.

We have time on our side. So when you get into policy and you get into custom, you get into that type of thing, you’re basically facilitating agreement. That’s basically what you’re doing.

Now, if a society is so—now I’ll use a musical term, dissonant—it’s all clashed up. In other words, they got lots of crime, and they got corruption, and they got politics, and they got Andersons, and other crud. And they’ve gone totally Australian, you get the idea?

When they get this wild, they are no longer in actual fact, a civilization because it is—they’re not living under a cohesive custom system. They haven’t any agreed—upon anythings anymore, don’t you see? They’re way out.

So that you actually have: Bill is not in agreement with Joe and it doesn’t much matter where they are, there isn’t anything for them to agree upon, see? Like how do you get married? You see? “Well, I don’t know, there’s all kinds of methods of getting married today.

But, all kinds of methods of getting married and not getting married, and getting unmarried,” and so on. They’re terrifically variable. There’s no standard policy with regard to this thing in actual fact.

And you find it’s violated all over the place right now, so it obviously must not have been a workable policy with regard to it, don’t you see? There were a lot of things wrong with marriage as an institution or you wouldn’t have this many divorces, you see? Obviously that something is in error here someplace.

But then who marries? Well, does the church marry, or does the state marry or—and if the church marries should it then be able to divorce or—you get all kinds of wild things. You can’t answer any policies up with regard to this, you see.

You have no little textbook anyplace that says, “Marriage: Policies Regarding,” see—that everybody could agree upon as being a survival activity, see. Instead of that you have a bunch of mishmashes. In the first place the reason you have mishmashes is nobody understands what everybody else is all about anyhow.

And there’s a bunch of false technology around about the behavior of people and that they’re all animals somehow. And if you ring bells, why, they should slaver. Pavlovian experiments applied to dogs have now been applied mostly to people, don’t you see, through the various agencies.

And this idea of how they’re supposed to react and so forth has invalidated the fact that they’re entitled to have any policies at all. In other words, this whole parade that you see of animalistic psychology—it’s arisen since 1879—has invalidated the right of the individual, to have a custom. See?

He isn’t supposed to have any customs. He’s supposed to be a stimulus—response animal. And you push enough buttons, he’s supposed to react in some particular way, don’t you see?

So it’s all sort of a push—button society, you get the idea? You’re supposed to be able to put an ad on television that tells everybody to feel angry when they—when they think of  SCIENTOLOGY AND 5  TRADITION the other side getting in or “Eat Wheaties” or buy certain kinds of cars, and they’re supposed to be mad at Brand X and ... You see, there’s certain things that are supposed to happen here by stimulus response.

In other words, you haven’t got policy, you’ve got manipulation. And human beings and societies grossly object to manipulation. Particularly hidden manipulation whereby there’s supposed to be elements present which are pushing their buttons around, which they’re really not supposed to be aware of, and there’s some vast technology involved here, by which, if you push people’s buttons in the right way then they will behave in a certain way.

And they got it all figured out like dog training or something like this, you see. Well now, that itself violates the right to have the right way to do things, see. That’s a violation right there because they’re saying this individual is just a stimulus—response—pattern animal, and these patterns are somehow or another ingrained from some quarter that we don’t know anything about.

In other words, they’re sort of pressed on him like a suit or they’re you know—they’re—he’s put in a certain kind of a mold and you pull a lever and something like that, and it goes scrunch, and he’s supposed to walk out of there and after that why he walks pop—pop—gimp—ho, pop—pop—gimp—ho, see. This is all supposed to be—well, we’ve denied the individual the right to any sense at all. His policy, his custom, is no longer based on whether or not it forwards the survival of himself or his group, but just is based on the whim of some bird who wants to make a quick profit or sell Wheaties or something like this.

It’s all up to him, you see. So, when you speak of the dignity of man, actually, his right to decide for himself and amongst men as to what procedures and policies he’ll eventually evolve, you see. And you give him some kind of a hierarchy of buttonpushing.

You say you no longer have policy, you just have stimulus—response, see. Well, policy and custom and things like this are things of sense. They make sense.

And you’ll find in the final analysis of any civilization, even its most strange looking customs, as you see them a thousand years afterwards, would have made sense had you been living at that time. Because they had certain problems at that time they were having to walk around and having trouble with. And if you were aware of all of the problems they had, then their society and customs would make sense.

Take just a small matter of—well the way that—where we got the Ten Commandments—the Jewish Ten Commandments and so forth. Well, in their framework, the various things which they were fighting, they had no immediate and direct solution to it except customs. And they put together customs in order to follow these very definite problems.

Now, of course, policy gets to be very funny looking after the problem is gone and the custom continues to be followed. Then you get a very funny looking—funny looking hangover, see. You no longer have the problem but you still have the policy, see.

And, for instance, there’s been a tremendous number of termites in Washington, DC, let us say, you know. The government employees got out of work and they started eating up the floor as termites. And so that, these termites just ran over everything, you see.

Plenty of termites all  SCIENTOLOGY AND 6  TRADITION over the place, you know. And so people started developing policies as to how you handle this sort of situation. One policy had to do with the fact that—you see, I’m just dreaming up a ridiculous one here—there are lots of termites all over the place eating up all the woodwork, don’t you see, left and right, like they have in Australia all the time.

You get this continuous—you never know, they leave the shell, see. And you’re liable to lean against a pillar or step on a floor and it just goes poof and it goes into dust. It’s very funny living in a country that’s got a lot of termites in it.

Because the wood is solid today and tomorrow it’s not, see? So you get the custom that when you enter the front door you put your foot forward, tap lightly once before walking in. Well, somebody comes along—somebody comes along and kills all the termites in Australia and something like this happens, and you find everybody still opening front doors and giving one tap with the right foot on the floor, you see.

And after a while nobody can quite explain why they’re doing this, so they say, “Well, it’s impolite not to.” And of course, we’ve dismissed the whole thing now and we’ve thrown it all away as a good reason when we’ve said it was polite or impolite. So we now have a new method which is carrying on which had sense once, no longer has any sense, but we now have a sort of a bow and scrape as people go in front doors, see. No longer has any basis behind it.

When you get too much of this sort of thing you get a civilization which starts to look pretty silly. All of the problems which have long since gone away are still being solved by customs—and you get a very silly looking one. I remember there was one of these things: People do tend, you see, to carry over into the future after the problem is licked.

You can understand somebody getting out of an aircraft as I saw one time which was just in from the South Pacific, and a plane passed overhead flying rather low. And the bird—that’s not just the bird, but all twelve of these guys who had just climbed out of this aircraft—threw themselves wildly and flatly down on the concrete apron there, you see, to get low because it was obviously a Jap plane coming over, and the only trouble is they were in San Diego. And there were no—no Jap planes.

Well now, they had developed an immediate policy. That policy is when you see a low—lying aircraft—a low—flying aircraft, and so forth, duck until it’s identified. And that’s a good, safe, survival policy.

I remember one Dutch skipper right after the war, he’d gotten out of the South Pacific and he’d brought a Dutch corvette up through the Panama Canal. And for some reason or other, best known to the admirals, every time a ship left and entered a port during World War II, why, all the local flyers that needed practice on bombing runs were sent out to get low—flying runs on its bridge. And it was really very annoying because these things would bat you around on the bridge, and so forth, and you’re trying to negotiate the entrance to the harbor, don’t you see?

And these wild, screaming aircraft would come down and practically run their wheels on the top of your dodgers. These birds were really close, you know. And this Dutch skipper hadn’t run into any aircraft since he’d left the South Pacific and he’d left a shooting war.

So nobody inquired what ship this was that was entering one of these harbors. I  SCIENTOLOGY AND 7  TRADITION think it was Miami harbor. Nobody bothered to enquire what ship this was and they simply sent the usual squadron of aircraft out to practice bombing runs and this Dutch skipper just cut loose!

And he just filled the air full of lead. And Washington screamed and everybody howled and beat their chests at how horrible this was and nobody ever did a thing to him. Never—nobody did anything to that Dutch skipper.

He didn’t shoot down any aircraft but it wasn’t because he didn’t try. Now, his custom and policy was based upon the emergency of combat. And you just don’t let aircraft get that close to your ship!

That’s all. I don’t care what they got painted on their noses. And Japanese can use stars and bars just like anybody else can with a paintbrush, you know.

They’re awful good with paintbrushes. And somebody starts diving your bridge, you see, you cut loose. Well, that was his policy and of course the policy of Miami.

Oh well, “There’s a sort of a war going on someplace, and there’s some suckers have gone to attend it, but we’re the wise guys and we’ve got a good berth ashore,” you know? I say that with not any bitterness, just truth. The policies are completely out.

Policy of low—flying aircraft, policy of ships—dive—bomb the ships. Policy in the South Pacific for aircraft was never under God’s green earth go anywhere near a fighting vessel. Just fly wide, brother.

Don’t give him any opportunity. Because, see, he’s liable to mistake who you are. Do you see?

Policy Miami: they hadn’t found out the war was there. Somebody down there is going to find out there was a war, someday. And what was going to happen?

What was going to happen? Well, the best thing to do is take lowflying bombing runs on any ship that you see coming in and out of the harbor because the pilots need practice. We don’t know practice for what.

But they need practice, don’t you see? So the policy there was practice, and the policy in the South Pacific was fight. Well, look at the amount of traffic that’s developed.

Look at the amount of ARC which went up in smoke at this point. Boy, I remember the lines burning on this, actually, just for days! There wasn’t anybody who had gold lace from his cuff to his shoulder that wasn’t asking wild questions about what had happened down there, you see.

It went around the world. The Dutch were asked if they’d declared war on the United States, you know? All kinds of wild things.

Well, what was the result of this? You just had two customs clash. So, to avoid this clash and to maintain—I’m just bringing this point closer home here—to maintain communication and so forth, why, it’s a good thing to have customs.

Now, we in Scientology appear to be out of step and very often it may occur to you that we are out of step. Well, you’re never quite asked with what. And you’re only out of step with a new, Johnny—come—lately idea, that man is an animal that should have his buttons pressed and anybody teaching anything regarding freedom or freedom of speech or anything like that ought to be shot down in flames.

And this is a government ambition, and those organizations which tend to conduct themselves as governments such as the—well, as I say fascistic—type governments such as  SCIENTOLOGY AND 8  TRADITION the American Medical Association, the British Medical Association, the American Psychiatric Association, American Psychological Association, United States government and I don’t think the government of Victoria is a government, so we won’t include them. You have to have some semblance of government before you can call it one. Anyway, they have to have some customs.

These other blokes, are—they got a new technology—they got a new technology of control. It’s a brand—new technology of control. Now, you maybe think it isn’t a new technology.

But I was taught at Princeton, in their school of government and taught very well on a lot of these points. And there was a lot of good Joe’s there; they knew their business. And one of these things was: Law proceeds from the customs of the people.

And law which proceeds only from a central directive source and is evolved only by a central directive source, if it interrupts the custom of the people or seeks to change and alter those, will bring about a revolution. In other words, it can’t be done—it can’t be done. And here and there you might have somebody who was very smart—smart enough to see what problems the people are having and then give them some solutions to these problems that the people are having.

And that would be perfectly all right, you see? Because there wasn’t any custom there. But how about a new one that violates the existing custom?

That’s going to bring about dissonance, isn’t it? It’s going to bust apart these people as communication points. Well, if they no longer have customs in which they are in agreement, so that they can act in coordination with each other, they go into disagreement amongst themselves and with the government.

It was custom in the United States to drink. So they passed a law called Prohibition—the Volstead Act. I don’t know how many hundred thousands of murders and how many billion dollars of lost revenues and destroyed property later, they found out they couldn’t do it.

And they quit and repealed it. Well, that’s one of our most modern examples of the people have certain customs and somebody legislates against these customs and tries to alter them. And that will bring about every time a very nice, great, big, smoking, bunch of civil commotion.

It’s the finest way in the world to get civil commotion. That when you try to pass a law which is contrary to the customs of the people, you’ve got trouble. And when they were teaching future military governors this they laid that point in with an ax.

Now, you’re going to go into this area and you’re going to say that a bunch of new ideas are just fine. But you’re there to keep the peace. And this is how you keep the peace: You keep in effect the customs of the people.

That’s how you keep the peace. Now, if you want to not keep the peace, try to change or violate those customs. And you’re not going to keep the peace and you’re just going to have riots and commotion and upset all over, and you’re not going to be able to hold this civil body in any kind of control.

SCIENTOLOGY AND 9  TRADITION And they had a good military reason for it because civil bodies which are out of control back of the front lines, are embarrassing to the military. So their real point of military government was not how nice we should be to civil populaces at all but is how do we keep the roads open, how do we keep our supply lines open, how do we keep down the incidence of guerrilla warfare, how do we do these various things? And the military government went in to do that.

They were taught very hard how to keep the peace. And that was the biggest lesson that was laid in—is don’t change the customs of the people if you wish to keep the peace. Now, we look a little bit further, having a little bit more knowledge of the subject in Scientology, and we find out the reason why.

It lies in the area of agreement and disagreement. When you have an area—a community which is in agreement with one another, they are in agreement on the matter of customs. What is the expected cycle of behavior which is looked upon as the survival pattern for that area?

That expected cycle of behavior. What is it? You violate that you’ve told everybody, you’ve said, “Die!” You’ve said, “Don’t survive anymore.” You’ve told everybody, “What you are in communication with one another about is false.

The way you communicate from point A to point B is no longer the way you’re going communicate.” So of course, you’ve cut their comm lines, and what are you going to get? Do you understand why that’s a comm line? Because when A does action 1, 2 and 3 and B does action XYZ, those two actions don’t mesh.

So of course, there’s no communication. The communication is shattered between those two points. If X—if A does 1, 2, 3 and B over here now also does 1, 2, 3, you’ll find out they’re in good communication with each other.

That’s all a custom is for. And those that promote their survival, or are looked upon in the broad sense to promote the survival of the individual in the group. And that means that even dueling could become a custom, because of course, this makes tougher, rougher, better men who are more able to—this is the way it’s looked on—to protect the community at large, and is a natural selection system.

See, they’ve got it all worked out, see. So even that’s survival—not for the bad duelist but the community right away doesn’t want any bad duelists, so they don’t want them to survive, you see. So what’s the—what’s the score here, is custom is simply a method of bringing about communication.

And policy is just a method of bringing about agreement and communication—along certain matters which lead to a higher level of survival. And they lead to a higher level of survival if they’re good policies and they lead to a lower level of survival if they’re poor policies, and they lead to complete disaster if they’re bad policies. And you’re studying right now the ebb and flow of civilization.

Why is the Persian civilization no longer amongst us? Why do we no longer have an Egyptian civilization? And we don’t have.

Why do we no longer have a Roman civilization? The way it was once? ‘Course, the Roman would argue with this. He thinks he still is the center of the world.

But he hasn’t looked up lately. But what’s the whole picture here? We get the ebb and flow of civilizations on this basis.

And their customs could have become antiquated or could have become neglected. But it’s much more often, in fact  SCIENTOLOGY AND 10  TRADITION practically always the case, that the customs are neglected or smashed from some central source or from some exterior influence. And when the customs of the people are smashed by their own government or by an exterior force, such as barbarians or war with another nation with different customs.

When those customs are smashed that civilization is smashed. You don’t even have to defeat its armies if you can knock its customs in the head. The communist, unthinkingly, and incapable of expressing those thoughts, nevertheless is engaged upon that, on the planet today.

And he is using the media of psychology in order to accomplish this. But his psychology is the psychology of 1879. It is not the psychology of 1850 or 1800.

It’s a different breed of psychology. Now, we are not in conflict with the customs and philosophy of the planet or the universe. Quite the contrary.

It’s not a case of everybody is out of step but Jim. It’s a case of others want people badly out of step. And they’re getting them pretty badly out of step.

But if you can talk to and communicate with anybody on the subject of Scientology, he agrees with what you’d say. He agrees very rapidly with what you say, unless he misses a word. If he misses a word then he won’t agree with what you’ve said, but you are actually talking to him about things which have been with him as customs, far, far, far longer than any Johnny—come—lately psychology or mental science that has been foisted off on him in recent times.

You are talking to him about really traditional mental science. You’re talking to him straight out of the school of Aesculapius of Greece. You’re talking to him out of the Persian technology.

Really! If a Persian priest were to come along at this moment and start talking to you about this, that and the other thing and the human spirit, you’d be in very good communication with him. You’d actually be in rather poor communication with a vicar over here on the subject of the human spirit.

But you’d still get somewhere, but then he’s selling a pitch; he’s selling pie in the sky, see? He’s got a curve on the ball. And therefore he has violated the custom of philosophy which is: “Seek after truth.” Regardless of what you fall across, and regardless of what you find, still seek after truth.

Only truth will set you free. And that is one of the oldest principles of psychology. And one of the oldest principles of philosophy.

And has been consistently violated, more and more frequently, it’s getting more and more frequently violated, as it moves on up through the ages of Western civilization here. That is really getting mauled. Until we’re even told—we’re even told the other day by Washington that a government has a right to lie.

Why I think that’s very interesting. Now, all of a sudden a government virtue is telling lies. Truth?

I mean you can look up the references if you want to. They made a big point out of it. And you—nobody contested this.

A couple of columnists sort of said, “sneer.” But there wasn’t any row about this. Well, that just goes back to a more basic human trait which you usually find in a good survival civilization, which is tell the truth. That violates this custom of tell the truth.

Now, all of a sudden this government has a right—a right for God’s sakes—to lie. Well, there’s none of its people have the right to lie. See, the courts all enforce “don’t lie.” Everybody tells you not to lie.

You’re taught not to lie. George Washington and the cherry tree—don’t lie! And yet  SCIENTOLOGY AND 11  TRADITION the government can stand above everybody because it—you see it—I could say several things that marines say about its loftiness and pompousness.

It now, all of a sudden, mysteriously develops the right to lie. Well, there you have this philosophic idea: Seek after truth, know the truth, speak the truth as close as you can, as the traditional philosophic attitude. And that on the part of the people is mirrored simply on the fainter hue, as it usually is, “tell the truth.” There’s something valuable about truth.

See, truth has a value. And these people should tell the truth. Now, that is a customary attitude on the part of people.

And yet to give you the idea of how wild it gets we have a government which has more guns and bombs than any other government on Earth, right now, all of a sudden standing up and saying it has a right to lie. Well now, this is not traditional. This is very, very, very wide from any moral Code or standards or behavior patterns or anything of that character, you see.

Now, someplace, some places in Africa, there are some isolated tribes which hold as great virtues lying and stealing. They are very decadent tribes, they haven’t gotten very far, they also had as their greatest ambition “slaughter all your neighbors,” and so forth. They were very—they’d never gotten very far.

It doesn’t seem to me like it was a very good idea. It doesn’t—isn’t representative of what a high—level civilization finally becomes, you see. So they either were at one time or another a fairly high—level civilization that degenerated, or they had a policy or a custom in this direction which was sufficiently debased that it ever kept them from becoming anything.

Now, we’d have to look then into the depths of Africa, in another time, in another century, to find anything as decadent as a government has a right to lie. Now, what are they talking about when they talk about, “We don’t follow standard procedures with regard to modern psychology”? Well, that’s a laugh because there are none.

There just are none, that’s it. A subject which starts out and says, “We cannot define psyche, we don’t know what it is and we cannot define the word which we call ourselves.” I wouldn’t say was going to go very far. And it hasn’t gone very far.

It’s not up to ninety years yet and that’s just a breath—that’s just a breath in the breathing of eternity. And it’s a very faint pant in the breathing of eternity. Nothing.

This is very interesting, though. When they talk about traditional philosophy or when they talk about traditional ideas about man, they would either have to talk with the tongue in their cheek or they would have to say they don’t know. And they do both.

They do both. And they are not—they’re the ruddy, wild—eyed revolutionary, we’re not. And that’s why you so easily go into communication with the man in the street.

As long as you don’t use words which sound strange to him you’d find that he is in full agreement with what you are carrying forward: That man has certain rights and that you should be able to think your own thoughts and you should be able to give voice to your own thoughts and philosophies. And that you should have a right to ideas and sort of, people should be left alone on this particular subject, and so forth. SCIENTOLOGY AND 12  TRADITION Well, that’s woof and warp of Scientology, isn’t it?

You teach him the fact that man has a right to seek freedom, he has a right to be free. See, these are—these are very old ideas. Now, on top of a tremendous philosophic structure, a very, very large philosophic structure which we have inherited as the traditional philosophic structure—we have then added up a tremendous number of new answers which all of them, however, are directly in the Tradition of a—the traditional search of philosophy.

Our target is not to make an insane person more quiet. It would be to make an insane person sane. And that has been the target of mental healing—that has been the target of mental healing since the Stone Ages!

That hasn’t been the target of mental healing in the last half century. You speak to a modern psychiatrist and you voice this thought and he looks at you with his jaw dropped. “Where did you ever pick up such an outlandish thought?” Oh, you think I’m joking? Well, you go around and ask one of these jerks—jokes—fellows, one of these days, go around and ask this bird, “What are you trying to do with a patient?” And you will stand there in vain waiting for the answer “To make him sane!” You’re sort of flattening a process or something; you’re not—you won’t get that answer.

See? “To make him quiet.” “To make him more amenable.” “To find out what made him insane.” You’ll get all kinds of wild answers that will have nothing to do with the traditional goal of psychotherapy. That’s why, you see, you are looked upon as very, very dangerous people. Because you’re contrary to the new thought and the new thought is, “Man must be a slave, you must be able to push his buttons.

If you can learn anything about him whatsoever, you must use it to his disadvantage.” Of course, we go on a Tradition “if you learn anything about man that will help him, you help him with it.” Well, that Tradition is now being violated. “If you learn anything about man that you can manipulate him with you manipulate him.” Well, that’s not a Tradition that was ever in vogue, that’s brand—new, brassy new. You’re going to manipulate men, you’ve got to change their definitions and change their goals and enslave them and do this and do that. These fellows would argue with the idea that it’s a good thing for a people to be free.

Well, oddly enough that has never been an arguable point in the field of philosophy or really seriously over a long period of time in enlightened times of government. But yes, they recognize very well, that people would try to be free or people want to be free or they’d recognize these various points, see? Well now, they’ve developed a brand—new philosophy that people want to be slaves—that’s a switcheroo, isn’t it?

And they’re selling everybody on the idea that people really, really down deep are just a mass and what the person wants to do is cohese with this mass and be protected by the mass. And that is the new thought. The broader philosophic term for that is communism.

And it was practiced by a fellow by the name of, I think it was Lycurgus back in Sparta—and didn’t work then either. You never saw such an intellectual broken leg in your life as Sparta. If any clever fellow ever got into the borders of Sparta the complete lack of originality, thought, thinking and so forth, was sufficiently great to actually drive him back into the hands of the executioners waiting at the border.

It would drive him mad after a while. This total sameness, stary-eyed, hypnotic nowhere of the Spartan. Quite interesting.

SCIENTOLOGY AND 13  TRADITION Sparta had some other philosophies but they were not the philosophies given to them by the Gentleman I just mentioned. The Russians, being very close to Sparta geographically and so forth, got infected with this and it’s been running over the whole country and nobody’s ever been able to invent a sufficiently strong penicillin to get Lycurgus out of the Russian bloodstream. They found out the Spartan was very good at fighting battles.

And when you’re only interested in fighting battles and you’re not interested in your people, of course, you will adopt only a Spartan philosophy. Study up your Greek philosophy a little bit, you’ll find out the Spartan—the Spartan and the Communist, they’re practically indistinguishable. But there is one thing that distinguishes them; one thing that distinguishes them.

There’s a much, much bolder and much more degraded philosophy that has attended communism. And that’s got a total switcheroo and a big curve on it that—the Spartan didn’t even have that. Now, not to get involved on this situation—what has this got to do with you?

Well, it has to do with you to the degree—not because I say we should assume a traditional viewpoint—that if you carefully look over Greek philosophers, if you carefully look over the basic customs and belief of man over a long period of time—I’m now talking in terms of tens of thousands of years, as far back as you can reach—you’ll find out that you are echoing in Scientology his hopes and his aspirations. You’re echoing the things for which he has fought—the things which he has tried to attain in life. And if you very carefully study—not just a superficial glance—if you very carefully studied the utterances of the so—called man of science in the field of the mind today, you’ll find a very degraded 180 percent—180 degree vector to those old philosophies. “Man is just an animal.

If you find any buttons, push them. Man is the property of the state.” Oh, my God, I thought we got rid of slavery in the Dark Ages. But we didn’t, here it is again.

All of these various things—all of these various things like bad old apples that man has fought against for a long time have now rolled forward into present time and become virtues. But whatever they are called, they are not traditional philosophy and they’re not traditional mental science. And there we can smile like Cheshire cats because we’ve got it and they haven’t got it.

They are in violent conflict and disagreement with the basic philosophy of philosophy. They’re sort of like a chemist who hates his test tubes. They’re in wild disagreement of what are the purposes and uses of philosophy.

They say to enslave man. And you say to make man free. Well, they’ve always been to make man free.

Where’s this new one come from? So, what we have developed is not a new Tradition of philosophy. We are in that same Tradition.

But what we have developed is the technology that can attain it. And we have been very successful in doing this and that is what is new in Scientology but the basic idea and the goals of Scientology are not new. Their expression, their organization, these things could be looked upon as quite new but only the expression—only the organization.

But the basic thought, that is not new. SCIENTOLOGY AND 14  TRADITION In other words, your success is very solidly based, and your advance is very solidly based upon the idea that you are not in the least divergent from what the mean average of all great civilizations at all times have deified as the ideal and have sought to achieve. Your ideas are not one hair off what these fellows were trying to achieve back through the countless eons.

You’re right there, see, you’re right on that broad highway and it’s the other fellow who is calling you names that’s walking in the bramble bushes. He’s the fellow who is walking around in the briers; he’s the fellow who has lost his road. Why is the psychologist studying psychology?

Ah, well, if he could answer that question, if you could get—persuade an answer out of him, if he’s a very young student he might answer you glibly, right from the Tradition and custom of the race, from the people in the street. But if he’s been trained at any period of time he’ll no longer give you the first answer which might be, “Well, to help people.” He’d give you that. But after he’s been at it for a while, your seasoned practitioner, your well—trained person who is answering now with the answers of indoctrination will never give you that answer.

He just won’t give you that answer, that’s all, because it wouldn’t occur to him. It’s not there. Now, what are these—what are these fellows headed for?

They’re headed for oblivion. And I’d base that very solidly because every time any large group or organization in this universe has adopted policies which are antisurvival for the individual of the group as well as the group itself, that group has gone to dust. It has not survived because its customs are no good.

Let’s call the doctor, the psychiatrist, the psychologist, call them collectively a civilization just to compare them in this particular way. And we find out that they have antisurvival policies and customs, they’re very antisurvival. Why, the maddest news story I think I ever read in my life is how this drug was killing off everybody in the institution and those it didn’t kill off it turned purple and they were all having spasms but the doctor was saying, “But we’ve got to have it!

It’s the only thing that calms them down! But we’ve GOT to have this drug! And it’s very catastrophic that it’s killing them all off because we’ve got to have it and got to administer . . .” Whoa!

They should have had him in a cage! Even in an unenlightened period of philosophy such as Elizabethan times, they probably would have paraded such a bloke up and down the hay market—in a cage! “These pills are killing everybody but we’ve got to give them to them and it’s too bad they’re killing everybody because we’ve got to have these tran . . .” Why, you probably don’t believe me. Very often you think I’m extreme and that I don’t tell you the truth about such people—and all too often you go and collide with it on your own, and you find out there it sits.

Well, now how does this compare with the Tradition of the witch doctor or even the Egyptian doctor or the old Greek physician or the Aesculapians or—how would you reconcile that? Well, it can’t be reconciled. We’ve got to treat the patient.

Well, why are we treating this patient? Obviously the answer is missing, if we’ve got to keep treating the patient this way  SCIENTOLOGY AND 15  TRADITION although it kills him, then why we are treating the patient must then be out of agreement with what people normally assume you are treating patients for. Right?

The world at large assumes that we are treating patients for a certain reason. Well, this guy couldn’t possibly have any of that reason for why he’s treating patients. So therefore, his Tradition is out and he is out of Tradition.

And I would say that their days are—their days are not numbered because I am saying their days are numbered, but I’m just analyzing a general situation. And I wouldn’t buy any bonds in that company. I don’t think it has a sound management.

I think its philosophy of doing business is wrong. People who want to kill people will hire them. But I don’t think this has much future.

I think we have a group there which have antisurvival tendencies and customs and policies. And they’re not only antisurvival to those with whom they do business, but they are antisurvival to themselves. And so their days are numbered.

Just like the days of any civilization or activity or organization which has antisurvival policies. Their days are numbered. So you will live to—you will live yourself to see all that fade away as far as they’re concerned.

You’ll see another dawn. Oddly enough, whether you do anything about it or not. You don’t have to do anything about it at all, they would fade away.

You see? They don’t have to be fought. They’re going to blow themselves up—inevitable.

The germ of their own destruction is carried daily to their offices, daily through their conferences, daily through their chain of patients and daily homeward and daily to bed. So there isn’t any reason to get hot about that because they aren’t even a threat to you. You are on a much sounder tradition.

You’re taking the Tradition of “man has the desire to be free,” and “when you heal people, why, you make them better,” and when things are—”when somebody is sad you make him more cheerful again.” And I mean these are the—even the accepted thing, you see? That’s it, that’s custom. What do you do with a sick man?

What do you do with a despondent person? What do you do with these people? Well, you right away immediately will agree, “Why, make him well, cheer him up,” something like that.

Well, that’s in agreement with the populace as a whole. You don’t get a complicated answer like, “Well, what you do is put him in the hospital for a few days so you can charge his relatives and send them a bill.” You don’t get, “Institutionalize him for the good of the society.” You don’t get, as Rock—e—feller who didn’t go rocketing to president, ah—you don’t form up concentration camps for young people who might go wrong. You say, “Oh, he had that idea.” No, no, no, no they have those camps in New York.

Nobody ever heard about them. They’re concentration camps for youths who might go wrong. They haven’t done anything; they haven’t been charged with anything.

But they come from a family and environmental area which some psychologist has worked out produces a majority of criminals. And they do this by statistics, so if some fellow’s father has brown eyes and the wife has green eyes and the Rh factor of the two of them is winterpoof spaf and the family  SCIENTOLOGY AND 16  TRADITION income does not exceed five thousand dollars a month, why, the young man will become a criminal so he must be put in a concentration camp. Oooh, you think I’m joking.

Look, I’m pretty—I’m pretty good. I’m pretty witty. I can make up all kinds of jokes.

But you know I’m not good enough to make up the jokes those guys pull all the time. So you don’t think like that. So you’re not able to understand what they’re all about and they don’t think like the populace at large.

It isn’t that they don’t think like a Scientologist, it’s that they don’t think like the public at large. They’re trying to change the customs, you see, so therefore they aren’t understood either. And they don’t understand the public at large.

They haven’t any common ground with them at all. Now, these are all things that it’s interesting for you to know, but actually they’re quite important. Because you should recognize where we have made the breakthrough and where we have made progress.

We have made progress in how to accomplish goals which man has had as long as he has been man. And what he has considered good and what he has considered desirable in the field of philosophy, we have accomplished technically—and that is the breakthrough which we have made. We aren’t even too far out right now on the old witch doctor.

Because we’ve got the technology of communication. Because we’ve got the technology of putting together a session. Because we’ve got an Auditor’s Code.

Because—you see that’s all technical materials. Because we’ve gotten more technical materials, we can now take the old witch doctor’s red rocks or whatever he was using. Oh they’re wild.

You should read some of their treatments some time. They—girl’s having a hard time delivering a baby, and so forth; the witch doctor conies in with a—with a big swollen abdomen, goes through writhings and howls and screams and produces a great red stone out from underneath his smock. And puts it down and says, “There” and feels much better and right away the girl has her baby without any difficulty.

See, he did it without communication, but he did do it with duplication. They’ve got all kinds of symbolical magic. They did all kinds of things like this.

On the Amur river, the witch doctor of the—the shaman, along the Amur river still to this day uses these techniques. They’ve been used far longer by man than any other healing techniques and you find them today suddenly rearing their heads again, in clay table work. Only why are we more effective?

Well, it’s a traditional approach, so therefore, it seems traditional to the person who’s doing it. Buried back along the line he’s had plenty of witch doctors leaping and howling and producing stones from underneath the robe, don’t you see, and taking out a broken stick and then binding it all up and then showing suddenly magically as he does the unbindings the whole stick is whole again. Oh, you know, anybody you’re operating on has had plenty of this kind of treatment far earlier on the track than sawbones and setting bones and so forth.

It’s a higher level of healing because it’s a level by symbology. It’s symbolical healing. And it’s by mass symbols and the assignment of them.

Well, we can explain why it works. And because we can run a session and he couldn’t, we can make it work far more often than he could make it work, don’t you see? SCIENTOLOGY AND 17  TRADITION Well, what’s our improvement?

Our improvement is not on the idea that a witch doctor called upon to heal a leg should have the idea that he should heal the leg. You see, we’ve not improved on that idea and that’s a fairly marvelous idea. Now, the witch doctor should do his job.

And that the better witch doctor in the tribe got more patients than the worser ones, these are all standard—line ideas, see. That the proper thing for a witch doctor to do was to work for or with the patient and so forth. This was pretty good.

Of course, when I speak to somebody who speaks of the juju—type witch doctor of Africa, I don’t make much communication because those boys have long gone the same route that the tribes went down there, that say it’s good to lie and steal, see. Now, that’s a sort of a reverse black magic idea and they’re pretty Johnny—come—lately and they’re pretty—they’re pretty rare. They’ve gone into a witch doctoring which is squirrel witch doctoring, like psychology.

So there’s—but your Tradition is there. There’s the guy; guy’s got a broken leg. What do you do?

Well, witch doctor comes in. What’s the witch doctor’s idea? Heal the guy’s broken leg.

Elementary. Now, you’ve not varied that but the other healing professions which are in existence today have. So they’re in violation of man’s customs as they reach past the eons and I’d say their chances of survival were lousy.

As long as they had that idea and they didn’t abandon that idea until very recently, very short time ago, they started changing everybody’s customs on it. Not all parts of the world have these customs, or ideas. But they are general and they do go back much longer than other forms since then.

So what’s your approach? You just have got a better technology. See, your technology is better.

Wise man sits on a mountaintop and he utters wise things. And somebody comes up to him and asks him for advice because they’re having a bad time in life. And he sits up there on his mountaintop and he says, “Well, now son, go ye forth and the first virgin you see, walk around her three times and do not spit once.

And you will have good luck for three days and three nights.” Well now, what Tradition is going on there, regardless of the technology this fellow or wise man on the mountaintop is using. What Tradition? The guy came to him for advice, so he helped him.

That’s the Tradition. The Tradition includes that there should be wise men; the Tradition includes that if there are wise men you go to them for advice. You see?

These are traditional. Sounds—sounds sort of elementary, doesn’t it? It sounds so elementary that you’d say, “Well, of course!

Everybody knows that.” Well, everybody knew that but it is now to a large degree being violated by the usurping Johnny—come—lately technology, see. Lord knows what they’d do. And faced with the idea that there might be a wise man someplace they go mad!

They say, “Shoot him,” “Kill him!” That’s the right thing to do to somebody who was being a wise man. If somebody wants to go to somebody for advice, why, the thing to do is tell them, “They’re all quacks and frauds!” Why, that doesn’t seem traditional. The traditional—if there’s somebody who can give you advice, why, you go to them for advice.

You don’t make a commotion about it and then not give them any advice yourself or give them some advice  SCIENTOLOGY AND 18  TRADITION that’ll get you a bigger fee or something like this. This is not in the Tradition, don’t you see? And there’s never been any Tradition that there is orthodox advice on the subject in certain fields and there’s unorthodox advice on the subject.

If there was advice there was advice. You see what I mean? We have today, “orthodox science.” What the hell are we talking about?

The Dark Ages in religion? “Orthodox science?” You mean an experimental research field has an orthodox science? You mean there’s certain immutable unchangeable, never—to—be—varied principles in this field? Oh, bull!

How could there be an orthodox science? Why, in order to have an orthodox science which was totally orthodox, and against which all sciences were evaluated, legally, as to whether or not they were orthodox or not, you would have had to have produced some kind of an effect with this orthodox science. You know, you’d have to actually have gotten the whole universe wound up or done something like this, don’t you see?

Without any proof at all right now, we find the fools over there in Washington, in the Food and Drug Administration, we find these nuts, talking all the time about “not agreeing with orthodox science.” Craziest thing anybody ever heard of They say a principle will work or won’t work if it agrees or disagrees with orthodox science. Well, this would be all right if they’d laid out a textbook and said, “Orthodox science is written by a fellow named Black. And his textbook is available from the Library of Congress,” see. “And that’s what we consider orthodox science.” But no, they never define orthodox science.

So what’s the trick here, is that anything they want to do something to, they merely say, “It’s unorthodox.” Because there is no orthodoxy. Remember the gag I used to talk to you about? This fellow says, “You are doing wrong,” but you can’t find out what’s right.

You know, you can always be hung with the idea that you were doing wrong. Well, you’ve never—they have a hidden idea of what’s right. Well, the art critic is always at this.

Here is a field that isn’t wrapped up at all. The arts, wow! I mean the arts!

Well, what’s art? Well, wow! What’s art?

I mean, there—you’ve asked the wildest question that you could ever, ever project out into the firmament. What’s art? You can’t answer it.

You can make—you can make efforts to answer it. But supposing, supposing we made it law. This is art, and that isn’t art.

And then gave a prison penalty for somebody for not doing art. And then had no standard art of any kind for him to do like. I’d say people would get confused about that time and they’ve done just exactly that today in science.

They haven’t got a standard science. They went and knocked out laws of conservation of energy in the field of elementary physics. They must have because they all say they have.

Well, if those basic principles of finite physics have been knocked out how could they even have an orthodox science if they don’t have the basic physics? Well, then what is basic physics? Well, I don’t know.

I don’t think anybody else does today. They’ve proven several of its principles to be false but there’s nothing in its place. So right away the art critic comes along and you’ve just painted a painting.

And the art critic says, “Well, actually it’s quite poor.” Compared to what? You see? It’s a totally invalid criticism.

He could say, “Well, that line isn’t straight.” Well, great. The line isn’t straight,  SCIENTOLOGY AND 19  TRADITION that’s all right. But he would have a hard time trying to—trying to really lay it down and say this is this and that is that, don’t you see?

He’d have to tell you what’s art. He’d have to tell you what you should do like. And they usually get around it—say “That isn’t like Rubens.” You’re supposed to be doing a Rubenesque painting and it isn’t like Rubens.

Well, that’s a perfectly valid statement. If you’re supposed to be doing Rubenesque work and you don’t paint like Rubens, obviously. But supposing we make this remark to somebody without any comparison for a Rubens.

We don’t have any Rubens, you see. You say, “You’re not like Boojum.” And you say, “What the hell is Boojum?” “Hmph! You don’t know?” Well, it looks to me like somebody’s invented a way to punish those they wish to punish when they wish to punish them without any reason for punishment.

It looks to me like a control mechanism about nine miles wide that is not based on any fact. And that is in violation of the basic Tradition of law, science, adjudication, everything else. Find an excuse to punish people with which they can’t—and they can’t comply, so therefore you can punish anybody you want to punish anytime you want to punish them because there’s no way they can say they have complied because what they’re complying with doesn’t exist.

Do you see? And when I’ve given you that setup, I have, of course, given you the standard setup in any society which has no customs. There is no right conduct.

So therefore everybody can be berated because he is not conducting himself rightly. So it becomes a society of total criticism. It is no longer a society in which anyone can comply because there’s nothing you can comply with.

If there is no right conduct then how in the name of God can you do any right conduct? If there’s no bridge to walk across how can you walk across a bridge? Supposing there’s no bridge to walk across and everybody who doesn’t walk across the bridge is shot.

You’d say that’s unreasonable. No, it’s not unreasonable, it’s insane. And that’s how far society can go on the subject of customs.

It can go all the way out the bottom. In other words, they pretend there is a custom there when there isn’t any. They pretend that there is a reason when there is none.

They pretend that there is a one—two—three—four procedure and then will never tell you what it is. And yet punish you because you don’t comply with it. And that is the society which is gone!

It may be still around. Its spires may be brilliant against the afternoon sky. But the sun is setting and it is setting at a high velocity.

It’s interesting that the brassiness of the material wealth of the society is no test of its endurance. How long the society is to endure demonstrates that they very often have ceased to be vital societies at the time they were building their biggest statues. That was true of the Age of Pericles.

Greece had already gone by the boards when she had her greatest period of art. Quite interesting isn’t it? She’d lost her grip.

She was no more and yet most of the things we’ve inherited have come from that period right after she was a gone nation. That’s all—that’s all very germane to the point. So as long as you stay with the Tradition of. “When you say something you’re supposed to be sensible.” “When somebody’s sick you help them.” “When they are despondent you try to cheer them up.” “If you’re a  SCIENTOLOGY AND 20  TRADITION practitioner you try to help people.” “If you have technology you use it for the survival of the group.” “If you have knowledge and so forth you should use it to assist others.” These are the traditions which have built the great civilizations of this planet.

And the great civilizations of this universe are all operated on those traditions. Those are customs. They are proven to be survival characteristics.

There’s—doesn’t mean that there can’t be other ideas, that there can’t be other customs, but it does mean that those are customs. And then you follow this thought through a little bit further and you’ll see then that part of a custom has to do with its communication. Because a custom permits communication, then the communication of customs is itself quite a technology.

You follow? So it is where the custom has broken down in its communication that it is abandoned. The custom is not communicated anymore and even though it is still useful it is therefore not followed.

Now, the breakdown of the custom itself will cause a fall out of communication, you see. No longer get Joe saying, “How are you, Bill?” And it’s customary of course, for Bill to say, “Oh, I’m okay. How are you, Joe?” See, that’s very customary.

So, one, two, three, one, two, three, see. That’s customary. We no longer teach somebody who is moving up into this civilization that when people ask him how he is, why, he should tell them and ask them how they are.

See? We no longer communicate the mechanism of communication, see. We forget to communicate this mechanism of communication, we don’t teach people this anymore, we don’t make these customs available any more.

They aren’t there. They’re gone. Then we get a breakdown on the part of a civilization.

See, its customs are no longer taught to it. Somebody else is trying to teach him different customs or holding the survival value of these customs in question or invalidating customs or the nation or civilization is under a raid or something from some dissident source; some other organization or group is trying to cave it in. And so it’s trying to knock these things around or fix it so they won’t be communicated anymore.

Or new developments of one kind or another come along and sweep aside old customs for some reason or other. But that’s the lesser reason, oddly enough, although it’s announced by the sociologist as the primary reason. It isn’t.

It’s the—really that the custom’s no longer communicated. And a civilization breaks down on this basis: that the means of communication are not any longer taught in that society. So its customs, its policies, this sort of thing, they’re not taught.

So therefore the people inside that society can’t work together. You get very little—to use the old Chinese word—you get very little gung—ho. There no cooperation, see?

Well, where’s the no cooperation? Well, the people don’t know the customs on which they’re operating. Net result of that is decay, decline and vanishment of the group.

So therefore we come to the second part of what I told you about at the beginning of the lecture, which is teaching people Scientology. How could you be remiss? Well, teach them with words and terms which they do not understand.

Louse up the communication so it doesn’t communicate, in other words. Use terms which are not defined. Use various things which are undiscoverable.

SCIENTOLOGY AND 21  TRADITION Do a poor job of teaching them customs, in other words, and they’ll go to pieces. Everything will go to pieces on that effort. In fact your effort may be completely unsuccessful, but it may be just partially successful, and they haven’t learned their lessons well at all, at all, at all and they blow up in your face.

And this is why any practitioner setting himself up newly in a district—if he got a bad reputation or so forth—this is the real reason why he would get a bad reputation. It isn’t based on fact at all. I can demonstrate to you very definitely that it does not—has nothing to do really with behavior.

Behavior, conduct of practice have almost, nothing to do with it. It’s rather frightening, because customarily we believe that if we conduct a good and effective practice and do a good job and so forth, why, other things will of course, immediately follow in sequence. And that doesn’t happen to be—that doesn’t happen to be it.

If you are successful, and if you mean to stay there a long time, these give you a long—term survival. Being effective in how you handle a case is not primary in having a good reputation or repute in your immediate area. That’s interesting, isn’t it?

There’s something came ahead of that. It’s being comprehensible. When you teach somebody something, when you do something for somebody, why, put it in such a way and handle it in such a way and handle your little courses and teachings, in such a way as they are comprehensible.

Because if you’re truly comprehensible they’ll forgive you almost anything. Your primary course of human existence, then, is guided by whether or not they can comprehend. This must be the basic fundamental on which it is built.

So they understand you; why, this opens the door for your effectiveness to become apparent. But if they don’t understand you the door will close on all of your effectiveness. Do you see that?

So by all means, by all means, for heaven’s sakes, be effective! Because you can be comprehensible for quite a period of time but in the final analysis you’ve also got to deliver. You see, you’ve also got to deliver.

But delivery is not all—it isn’t of the same magnitude of comprehensibility. Doing the job is not of the same magnitude at all. Just a hole, a camouflaged—well, just a hole can exist in a society into which a certain class of activity will occur.

I mean, it’s only that they’ve got to have—they’ve got to have some doctors. They’ve got to have some doctors, you see, and the society’s got to have some doctors. And just the fact that there’s this terrific need will cause somebody to supply that demand.

And you get the modern medico. He isn’t going to—he isn’t going to do much for anybody, you understand. He’s going to make motions and so forth but it’s the fact there’s this terrific need for healing in the society which then brings about the fact that somebody steps into the breach.

It’s the need that creates the demand. So if that exists and he still goes on and does this and he’s ineffective at it, as long as there’s the need, why, there’ll be something filling that hole, see. So competence is not at the top rank there.

So we get it something on the order of comprehensibility, necessity—that is to say, the demand. There’s got to be a demand. You got to be comprehensible.

And then if you  SCIENTOLOGY AND 22  TRADITION want to keep at it any length of time at all and not have somebody shoot you down like we’re going to shoot them down—just by existing we will do that, not that we ever have to commit an overt on it—now, you’ve got to be effective. Now, you’ve got to be very effective. And of course, if you put effectiveness into these other two things you are—the demand exists, you are terrifically comprehensible as to exactly what you are doing, and you don’t let anybody get by with not comprehending you and so forth and then you do your job well and effectively, well, hell a General Sherman tank is a grasshopper compared to the way you would forge forward.

Do you see? But they’re in something of that order of importance. You can’t get along forever without being effective.

But you can get along a certain distance even without being effective. Now, if you did those things and so forth, why, the woof and the warp of future civilizations actually would depend upon you. It’s that important.

Because these things can exist, the Philosophic Tradition must be kept alive, these things must go forward. And you’ll find out that you would succeed to the degree that you followed along this line and the degree that you understood what you were doing and people understood what you were doing and understood you and then this demand would be there and then you, of course, are competent in operating; why, how could you miss. Thank you.

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