View source for The Aims and Goals of Dianetics and Scientology (UC 541230)

'''Series:''' UC

'''Date:''' 30 December 1954

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

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← [[Lecture_Index_UC|Back to Series]]

Alternate title: Something Can Be Done About It and Errors in Communication

Like to talk to you now about the aims and goals of Dianetics and Scientology. We haven't talked too much about this lately for the excellent reason that nearly everything I was doing was involved in the evolution of processes we could actually trust and count upon.

Lately we have originated a rather original sort of a clinic as such, here at the HASI. We have been having a tough run of preclears. That is to say, we've had some real, real good preclears. So we instituted a daily auditor's conference and so on, and we have been bringing the auditors in and looking the preclears over very carefully, and generally getting people swamped up, so on, that weren't before. And we talk to the auditors, and then they tell us all the boo-boos they made that day, and we straighten them all out. Well, we've straightened them out enough now, and things are going along well because these boys are pretty well trained.

But I am learning, now, that it's time we thought about some organizational goals. Because processing goals are getting very, very scarce. We can do what we set out to do and we can do it rather easily. Of course you get an exceedingly, terribly (well, a technical word)—loused up case—if you get one of these, he can puzzle you a little bit, but it's mainly a puzzle on just how are we going to get this fellow to talk with us for at least a short time so that we can go ahead and process him. In other words, how do we get him into a better two-way communication so we can go ahead and get something done?

Well, this points out to me that organizationally and individually, that we have quite a bit to think about in terms of goals. You cannot possibly sit still and inactive with this much dynamite lying around. It's just not safe to keep doors closed on it. You could very well say, "All right. Now,"—this is typical, typical investigator philosophy—"Well, now that I've solved it, (snore). No further responsibility." Typical.

Look at Edison: He had all this—gimmicks and gadgets, you know. Like we have, he's figured out a lot of things, you know, in various ways, and .. . You got any idea what electric signs say now? You got any idea at all? This man should definitely have laid out a program, what was going to do—at least what people should do with electricity. Look at the—have you seen any television programs lately? Huh? Well, that all happens, that complete chaos, because of no responsibility after an investigation was completed. Have you seen a movie lately?

Audience: Yes.

Gee. Have you talked to anybody lately? (laughter) Have you failed to get any answers lately?

Audience: Yes!

Well, you don't get any answers from somebody who's been sitting looking at TV for years.

Audience: No.

Not a single answer.

Audience: Right.

All right.

The number of things that we could do with Dianetics and Scientology today are very great. But it is up to us, not to some accident, to determine which way it's going to go. Otherwise, it's liable to take some channel or another which is antipathetic to the best interests of one and all.

Now, it almost, in the past, almost has gotten onto sets of rails where it had no business. Tell you a little story of Washington: The date was May 3rd, 1950. Publication date of Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health was May 9—actually announced May 15—it really came out May the 9th. Fellow came up to see me from the Navy Department and he says to me, he says, says he, "Ron, the Office of Naval Research would very much like to have you on its payroll."

And I said, "Well, that's fine, that's fine, Sir, but I'm busy."

And he says, "Well, Ron," he says, "heh-heh." You know the false comradery these characters can assume, you know, when they really got you pinned, the dagger's at your heart. They say, "Well, ah-ha, heh-heh-heh, that's all very well, Ron, but, heh-heh, we can call you back to active duty." He gave me a comm lag! And it was true, he could. He actually had it in his power to issue me a set of orders and put me on the job—not as a civilian consultant at ten thousand a month but as an officer at ten cents.

With a book deadline staring me in the teeth, just about, you see, to be published and everything going to go very, very well, very fine—ooh! Then I suddenly remembered that two or three years previously I had resigned, or had tried to. I'd sent in a resignation, and about six months later the Secretary of Navy's 57,000th assistant, I think it was, wrote me a letter saying the Secretary is very sorry, but we need all of you fine boys, you upstanding characters, we need you, and you should think of your country first and your welfare last. And therefore we don't want you to resign.

Well, this had all been gone through with. It's necessary, you see, that you write this letter of resignation and then you're supposed to make up your mind. They don't let you resign. So I all of a sudden remembered this, looked into my briefcase and fortunately I had all the papers. And I went down to the Navy Department, I saw a pal, a buddy, I went over and saw another buddy and I found out that it didn't have to go through my home district, New York, that I could get the Potomac River Naval Command—a vast fleet of one launch which they keep in the Potomac River to keep Washington from being invaded—and I went down there. They have an admiral in charge of that, and I got his signature on that, and I got the Bu Pers signature on that, and it came back—because the fellow said he'd see me next Thursday. Well, he saw me next Thursday there in Washington, and he said, "Well, have you made up your mind? Are you going to come to work for us at the Office of Naval Research?"

And I said, "No!" And he sort of did a comm lag waiting for the "Sir," you know, because he was gold lace from here … (laughter) But there wasn't any "Sir" there—perfectly legal now. I said, "No!"

And he says, "Well," he says, "Ron," he says, "you may be making a mistake," he says, "all I have to do is go down to the Bureau of Naval Personnel," he says, "and, you know, get your orders."

And I said, "Go right ahead. Go right ahead, Admiral." I said, "I've resigned."

"Oh you couldn't," he said, "it takes over six months."

And I said, "Well, we've been through all the red tape and there are the papers, and now wouldn't you like to know something about Dianetics?" I said, "I'd just as soon have you as one of the students here on this subject." And I didn't go in the Navy.

And the book was published on May the 9th, and I was able to keep forward on research and investigation. And fortunately organizations held together with—some people said it was mucilage but it was too thin for that. But somehow there was enough organization, there were enough people interested, there was enough to keep research going, to keep material being published and to bring us to where we are now. And that has been a considerable trick.

And this little story about the admiral is only one of the very few serious derailments which could have occurred: Finance, business, people getting tremendously interested in the profit involved in Dianetics and Scientology. The ninth dynamic: the buck. And any one of these things could have derailed the situation. At any one time almost anybody was willing to sit down—that is, not people who had any sense but people who had business acumen—were willing to sit down and say, "Now we have arrived at a point where we can make money out of this."

I don't know what you do with money. If somebody could just tell me what you do with a large pile of money and no human beings, I'd like to know. When they locked that gold up down there in Fort Knox, they said it was important. Well, it certainly isn't important now. How long has it been since you've seen a gold note or a gold coin? It's become completely unreal; it's no medium of exchange now and so it's worthless. It's a pile of metal.

We go down here to Kingman; there used to be miles—square miles of planes down there. Once upon a time when the enemy would look up at the sky and see no sky but see airplanes, those airplanes were important, weren't they? But sitting down there rotting in Kingman, Arizona, they're not important to anybody. We've forgotten they are even there. They are not in use. And when a thing gets out of use it becomes entirely unimportant.

Well, therefore, the first and foremost thing which we have to do is to keep something in use until it is in general use. Do you understand that? I mean, you—just the action of keeping it in use will eventually bring about general use. But if we don't use it, if we just have no program for its use whatsoever, it will simply be a forgotten piece of investigation.

Now, is there any reason why it shouldn't be forgotten? It's been fun. Well, let's look at the original reason why this material began to be assembled, and we discover that it came out of a physics laboratory. But the other physicists in that laboratory were not interested in applying anything they knew to any betterment of man. They had no idea that this was at all important. They went ahead and developed what was known so that it eventually could be announced by responsible officials of more than one government, that an entire continent can be wasted of life in one attack. That's a goal. Is it? I don't think it is.

Well now, it's a funny direction man is going when somebody could look over this formula of an atom bomb, hydrogen bomb, when somebody could patiently collect enough cobalt 12 to add to enough hydrogen bomb in order to kill all life for enormous distances, kill the trees and the grass and everything else. And somebody willing to write a check for three billion dollars so that that bomb could come into existence.

And outside of the good people who are the founding members of the HASI, the people who have been members of the foundations, the people who have attended these congresses and those students who have paid for training and those people who have paid for processing, there was no check for three billion dollars. It's been up to us, it has depended upon us, for the entire financing of a piece of research and investigation which should have cost ten billion dollars and which didn't; which actually has cost less than half a million. And which I think is a little more important than how to destroy life for hundreds of miles in all directions.

Now, the early research and investigation of Dianetics was financed by a typewriter. A lot of you remember Ole Doc Methuselah. (applause) Ole Doc thanks you. But once we had moved into a foundation status, it was you people and what you had and could spend with the Foundation which continued that research and investigation.

We won't go into whether or not the money was wisely or unwisely spent. As a matter of fact, it couldn't have been unwisely spent. The Ford Foundation to date, without the discovery of a single answer of any kind, has spent upwards of fifteen million dollars. And we have done the whole job for probably less than half a million. That's fascinating.

The most important of all this is that having won this much of an echelon, having won to a level where we do have the information, where we do have publications and where we have learned, now, how to train an auditor so that he can go on and get results ... That was quite as important, by the way, as learning what to do to a person. Learn how to train somebody to be able to do it. That was very important. Having learned these things, and obtaining these results, we find ourselves at this date and this time in possession of the only collection of information and formulas which resolve the difficulties of man. You think that isn't a responsibility?

Don't go to the University of Chicago and ask them what to do about the lame and the blind and the halt because they can't tell you. Don't go to the Atomic Energy Commission and ask them; they don't care. But there's a lot of people here on Earth and not all of them are bad people. This could be a very great civilization. It already is a fairly high-level civilization. It has been greater, it can be greater.

But where sits the responsibility? It doesn't sit on just my shoulders. Because one man working by himself, no matter how sincerely, while he might be able to dig up some answers, certainly could not even vaguely undertake the task of education and dissemination of an entire planet of people. Look at it for a moment and you will see that it's a big job. Yet, theoretically, that could be done. You could actually disseminate this information.

We could ask ourselves, "What could we tell them, what good would it do?" Well, have you ever seen an unhappy family that had in its midst one person who was disoriented, who was completely missing, let us say, on the third dynamic? Whether that person was insane or an invalid, or simply cross and unbearable and intolerant, the ability of that family to produce, to be happy, to fit itself into the society, is damaged thereby. Supposing we care nothing about the individual who is sick in that family and who is causing that upset. Supposing we care nothing about him. We still would care about the other members of that family, the kids that are growing up in an atmosphere of this character. We'd still care about that, wouldn't we?

And if we were able to place in people's hands just this datum, we would have won a tremendous gain—just this datum: Something can be done about it.

Do you know what state the society is in now? Do you know that a police officer going out here on a traffic run, pulling down cars and handing out people's tickets, completely lacks that datum. He hands out the tickets and he sees, year by year, speeding, wrecks, drunk driving continue. He keeps watching this and sees it goes on happening. Yet he hands out more and more tickets. He knows basically that this isn't doing anything about the situation, he's just trying to hold back the flood one way or the other. He thinks maybe he's helping it out a little bit but he knows he's not solving it. Do you know that that police officer (just consider him as a common citizen if you can), does not know that the person who is driving that car recklessly amongst traffic and causing casualties—does not know that that person in that car is incapable of following orders, laws or regulations. Just give you one thing he doesn't know. The people who have the wrecks are the people who cannot read the speed laws. And if they could read them, couldn't—just physiologically, mentally—could not obey them.

It's only ten percent of the cars out on the road. They're driven by people that, if you started these people into Opening Procedure of 8C and you said, "Go over and touch that wall," this person would look at you and—he'd know he was in session and everything, you know—he would look at you and he would say, "Oh, well, a chair is just as good."

And you say, "No, go over and touch the wall. Come on, let's go over and touch the wall," and you'd set him an example and so forth. He might touch another wall, he might just sit there, he might just object, he might try to throw you off in some other direction. He wouldn't touch that wall. He's psychotic.

And just because he can talk and answer up to his own name and lift a drink off the bar, we say, "He's a full citizen of this great land; he's perfectly sane."

We could go out and hire a bunch of psychiatrists—the psychiatrists come around and tap him with little hammers or something of the sort. And they tap him in the right arm, his left arm flies up (reverse for you). And they say, "Just like I am—sane."

Courts actually, in this land, call in mental experts, so called, to determine whether or not a criminal is insane. And let me tell you that a person who commits crimes on the second and third and fourth dynamic can never be considered sane. And a criminal, by committing willfully and knowingly harmful acts on the third and fourth dynamic, immediately has declared himself to be crazy. But they have to have, in this civilization, a mental expert to come in and find out whether or not his left arm flies up if they tap his right arm. They have to go out and discover and research whether or not somebody has some peculiarity which they can label insane.

In effort to combat this, they pass new laws. And then crime and accidents, unhappiness, marital disarrangements continue, so they pass new laws. And then other things go wrong in the society, and they pass new laws. And after a while they pass so many laws that not even a sane man can read them, much less obey them, because the people passing those laws, getting no answer, go into a somewhat psychotic state. They say, "Nobody's listening to us, anyhow."

In England, in the late part of the eighteenth century, they had some of the most remarkable laws you ever wanted to read. Every kind of a misdemeanor, any kind of a felony that you could name had after it as the penalty, "Hang him." No matter what it was, "Hang him." If you couldn't hang him, send him to America. That was worse.

So, as you pass new laws, the very people who can't read, who can't follow directions, who are antisocial, simply continue to disobey old and new laws. And by passing more and more laws, by more and more regulation, by more and more effort to control, by more and more suppression in the society, you eventually run a society out through the bottom. And it starts in just because there was 10 percent that couldn't read or follow directions.

Be a good thing to have a good civilization in this society. There'd be nothing wrong with this. It would be a real good thing. But the police officer who goes out there and stops cars now and hands them tickets does not know that anything can be done about it at all. The next thing he doesn't know is that there's any way to predict the behavior and ability of an individual.

It's fantastic, but let's start right down at the bottom. What does the society know? What doesn't it know? And it doesn't know that there is a way, actually, to predict, estimate, the behavior and ability of an individual.

In other words, when they start licensing drivers—just in one small field, or licensing citizens for that matter—when they start this, as these people come up for their little slips of paper, they just deal them out. And yet every tenth person in that line is a criminal. And what is a criminal? A criminal is one who exists for the first dynamic alone because it's not possible to exist for the first dynamic alone—not in a society like this.

We go down to the jailhouse and start looking at the people down at the jailhouse, we'll discover something remarkable: They're existing for the first dynamic alone. We go over to the insane asylum, we'll find something's quite remarkable about this insane asylum: The people in it are existing for the first dynamic alone. They may be stressing, dramatizing something on some other dynamic but they're existing for the first dynamic alone: "There isn't anybody else." And that's the common denominator to all of this kind of nonsense. People exist for themselves alone.

The psychiatrist, the psychologist who comes down the line with the statement that a baby lives in his own universe, he isn't aware of anybody else around, is, himself, confessing that he is incapable of observing his environment. Because a baby isn't existing for his own first dynamic. He isn't; watch him. Do you know that he is so little sold on the first dynamic that when you cease to give him good communication on the third, he gets sick?

Experiments have been tried where the parents left the children in the hospital for a few weeks, and the kids got sick. They always got sick. They felt that they were more or less being abandoned by their parents and the second they got that idea, they became very upset.

Now, I've watched lots of kids, and if you can give the kid the idea that his parent doesn't care for him, that he's abandoned—you could attribute this to the first dynamic if you were terribly centered on one yourself—but the kid wants communication. He can communicate. He becomes very diffident about communication after a very short time, but he still lives on communication. He hasn't yet learned how to set up an enormous number of circuits to communicate this way, inside of his skull, so that he won't need any external communication.

Take a little kitten, they walk up to you, they say "Hello"—always friendly. Little puppies, babies—same way. You really have to cuff a kid around to get him out of communication. It really takes some doing to get a kid out of communication. They're alert. They know. They start in usually on a pretty high fourth and then they find out after a while that somebody, (quote, unquote) "has all that nailed down." Nobody has the fourth dynamic nailed down; that's the trouble with it.

And so, here we are in a rather fantastic world. Here we sit with answers, and people don't even know these answers are possible. They haven't even thought they could possibly be possible. "What? Predict, before you gave a fellow a license, whether or not this individual was going to have accidents? Hah, that would be interesting"—new, novel idea.

So we get our line of dissemination outlined for us simply by examining the environment in which we find ourselves. And that is that we are trying to give people a tremendously valuable lot of data without acquainting them with the fact that such data can exist. That would be our first organizational error.

Our first error as individuals would be to cut in too high, to try to tell people too much. Those of us who have been here with Dianetics and Scientology a long time have learned a lot more, just as I have, than we knew a long time ago.

But here we have this problem of relaying information to a public that doesn't know an answer is possible. Now, how much lower can you get than that? Well, you can get that much lower that they don't know a problem exists.

A long time ago—I'll give you an idea of how society can go off—a long time ago in the United States, there was a great deal of child labor used in factories. They took children because they could pay them very small wages and worked the lives out of them.

And so a great many reformers sprung up and they passed child labor laws—laws to undo a wrong. And having passed these child labor laws, they never for a moment suspected that juvenile delinquency would someday occur as a result thereof. These laws were passed solely because people felt for and liked children. And yet today these same laws operate to create juvenile delinquents.

What do you think would happen to a man if you restrained him from working and from earning for twelve years? Do you think he'd work? Do you feel he'd have any responsibility for the society around him, if you restrained him, actually, for twelve years? Let's say, between the age of twenty-one and the age of thirty-three, he were actively restrained from participating in the work and construction of the society in which he lived, what would you wind up with at thirty-three? A bum, certainly. And yet the ages between twenty-one and thirty-three are not very impressionable years compared to those between ten and twenty-one, are they?

Well, we have to send kids to school, we have to do a lot of things. But kids are capable of doing a lot of things. Maybe we have a flood of labor, maybe we have to cut down our labor market, maybe a lot of interests here have to be consulted.

But this doesn't get around the fact that there is such a thing as juvenile delinquency and that the criminals of today in the society are the criminals in the juvenile band. These people, the active crimes committed on the highway out there, are kids who have been taught carefully that their services are not desired and that they do not belong. They have no vested interest in the society. They are prevented from working in the society and therefore and thereby they have no responsibility for it. And they get to be twenty-one, twenty-two, they know nobody's got a job for them, they know they can't work, they know that to have anything they can't earn—the answer is to steal.

Another thing: Short time ago we had a thing called—in the US—we had a thing called universal military training. I don't know why they called it that because I looked in vain for any South Africans drafted under that law, but they called it universal military training. And it put on the time track of every boy, along about the age of eighteen, the fact that he was going to be thrown into a barracks and told to cart a rifle around for a couple or three years. And he stopped. He didn't lay any future. He said, "What's the use?" And no more active or criminal act was ever perpetrated upon youth than conscription.

If they want soldiers, why don't they hire them? And that's an answer that no government ever has been able to digest. If you want somebody to serve in the armed forces, hire them! Make it worth their while. Don't make slaves and criminals out of them. That doesn't say that everybody drafted is going to wind up a criminal—only half of them will. When you think of the amount of life that has been interrupted for kids because of this nonsense, you could weep.

But, I've talked to boys, talked to young boys. They couldn't be permitted to work, you see, up to the time they were eighteen, so they couldn't make anything they had to have or they wanted. They had to depend on somebody or sponge on somebody in order to get this money to buy what they wanted. And then at eighteen somebody said, if they were foolish enough to stay in good physical condition—we've had some preclears, by the way, who didn't get well until after the selective service had passed them over—and here we have somebody at eighteen who is suddenly conscripted. Where do the girls go if all of the boys of their age are suddenly picked up and sent into never-never land to carry a rifle—squads east and west?

It's not that I'm against the military. I like the military. It's an interesting game, it's a good game, but it's a game you have to play because you want to play it. Not a game that you play because somebody drives you into it. Nothing is a game that you're driven into. So these kids aren't asked to play a game. They're told they've got to do time. And there's another nice barrier on the track.

Well, recently they've started to repeal this. Finally got the word someplace or another that they had an atom bomb, now, and they didn't need that much infantry. So they cut down on conscription.

Conscription is a great mechanism. One of the earliest boys who did any conscription was a fellow by the name of Napoleon, and his conscription was a wonderful thing. He conscripted, all right. And you had young farm boys going out and cutting off their right trigger finger with an axe on the chopping block so they wouldn't have to serve in little Nap's armies. And he was able, Napoleon was, by this great movement, to reduce the height of Frenchmen one inch—his total accomplishment and his monument to the future. Like to meet Napoleon today and ask him how proud he might feel for having reduced the height of Frenchmen one inch. But that's what all this legislation amounts to.

Now, it's not all wrong out there, by a long ways. There's a lot of it that is tremendously right. The engineer today has come into possession of technology which licks enormous numbers of problems. We ourselves can put into the shade and into yesterday such things as psychosomatic illness.

Man is learning how to build. He's learning how to communicate better. He's learning better means of transportation. He has himself a better world right before him—not just around the corner but right up there in plain sight. There's a terrific world.

What's he going to do with it? In 1932 my classmates had decided what he was going to do with it. He was going to blow it up, that's what he was going to do with it. By adding together enough protons and electrons in the right order, they could make a beautiful boom of the hopes and dreams of everybody. But none of the fellows who were doing that are in present time. What they're doing—we're just getting ready to play a good game, you see? And these guys, as their crowning glory, go out and blow up the playing field and burn up the goal posts. The little squirt who used to come in and grab your marbles so you couldn't play marbles with the rest of the boys, you know? He'd come in and grab them and run off, "Nyah, nyah, nyah." That's your nuclear physicist today. Some of these men are my friends; I know them.

And this is a magnificent thing, isn't it? You just get the world into a state of communication. You get the transportation real good. We come up with the answer, even, to psychosomatic illness. Man's getting to a point where his answers in the field of sanitation, his answers in the field of study—he's getting real good, you see? But before we get anyplace, somebody goes boom!

Well, maybe that's one of our organizational goals. It would be, if I thought anybody thought we ought to go in that direction. If anybody thought that we should to some degree make it our business to make sure that the people who handled the weapons which might blow up the playground should be made saner, that some of the people who have their hands on the rudders should get the word, we could have a pretty interesting game of that.

We've learned something in the last few months. I have finally decided, after a great deal of study of this, what a wrong step is. Finally found out completely what a wrong step is. It sounds like we almost have an absolute. Probably there are exceptions to this. But what could we do that's wrong? Actually, could you know that there was something to do that was wrong? Yes. That's to do nothing. That's wrong.

You start auditing a preclear and you discover it's the times when he stopped communicating that he went by the boards—just that: He stopped communicating. He decided he would no longer communicate in that direction or he would no longer communicate with that thing, and that preclear went by the boards. And you can go back in the lives of any one of the preclears you have and you will find out inevitably it's when he decided to do nothing and decided to stop communication that he went to pieces.

So we can tell you by exact clinical demonstration and experimentation that the wrong thing to do is nothing. And if we conceive ourselves even vaguely to be faced with a problem of a world destroyed in the anger of war before it ever has a chance to become really civilized, the wrong thing to do is nothing. We know that. The wrong thing to do is not communicate.

It's not a popular thing today to tell the public out there "Hey, what do you think about this atom bomb?" We conducted a little survey here a short time ago, an interesting survey: What are the reactions of people on the subject of atomic fission? And we found out that they covered up their eyes when atom bombs appeared on the screen, that they left the theater, they walked away, that they were busy doing nothing about it. They couldn't even vaguely face it.

And our governments have been setting up typical homes and dropping their bombs on those, just to impress the public with how gruesome this could be. And the public still didn't do anything about it and won't do anything about it because they don't think anything can be done about it.

But I'll tell you the wrong thing to do about it: Nothing. That's the wrong thing to do. And I'll tell you the wrong thing—wrong way to handle information on the subject: Don't communicate. That's the wrong way to handle it. We know that. We might not know the right way but we know the wrong way.

Now, let's look over this. Does it mean anything to you, to me and to ours, that a weapon exists in the world today of such force and violence that the continent of North America could be obliterated from Earth? Does that mean anything to us?

Audience: Yes.

Well, you know, I've tried to talk to people about that, in service stations and so forth, and it was a datum they couldn't grasp.

Very interesting conversation I had with one fellow. He was a salesman, he walked up to sell me something. And so I started asking him what he was going to do about the atom bomb, the hydrogen bomb. This was such a new thought that he was completely flabbergasted that he had anything to do with it. And he imparted the information to me that he didn't think he would be affected in any way by the hydrogen bomb or the atom bomb. And I said, "Well, what if the continent of North America, as was announced in the paper the other day, could be obliterated by atomic fission?"

"Well, somebody will think of something. We have weapons, we've been told, that counter this. We could obliterate Asia." This is an answer! But he says, "So, I don't think it would happen."

"Well," I said, "what would happen if it did happen?"

"Oh," he said, "you'd get along somehow."

And I said, "Well now, let's just see, if it were going to happen in the next ten or fifteen minutes, if it would influence you."

"Oh," he said, "I suppose it would—probably have trouble getting communication through to the home office. It's in New York," and so forth.

I said, "Well, let's look at the number of things you're trying to do right now. Let's see, are you paying for a car?"

The fellow says, "No, I bought it, that's my car out there."

"Oh." I said, "Oh good. All right. Now, an atomic destruction of North America would be the end of that car."

"Now," I said, "that suit you've got there, you like that suit?"

And he says, "Well, yes!" He says, "My wife likes it too. I mean, she picked it up."

I said, "Well, that would mean the end of that suit."

"Hmmm. Yeah, I suppose you could say that."

"Now," I said, "your kids—you're going to a lot of hard work … You got some kids?"

"Yes, yes."

"Well, you're going to a lot of hard work to keep them clothed and fed and give them an education and so forth, and you hope they grow up and amount to anything, you know, you hope so?"

"Oh, sure, sure."

"Well," I said, "well, that would be the end of that."

"Hmmmm." He was starting to get a little bit unhappy, but it hadn't come home to him yet.

So I said, "Well, let's see your wallet." He pulls out his wallet. I said, "Let's pull out some of your cards there." And he pulled out his Social Security card.

And I said, "Well, all the material you have in your hands at this moment, including that fifty-dollar bill, would all be destroyed."

And he looked at me, and he shoved the stuff back in his wallet and he pushed it very, very carefully into his pocket and put his hand on it and he said, "We've got to do something about atomic fission!"

Well, it becomes very interesting communicating. But it is possible: Think—think of being able to communicate something like this to a salesman who does nothing but outflow and who is stuck in that direction. It's an impossible task.

The public at large, I believe, the people throughout Earth do not believe that anything can be done about their problems. They've even gotten to a point where these problems are more precious than life. If anything's going to survive, it's got to be the problem. They believe that problems are the finest things to have around because they don't think anything else could adequately occupy their time. It must be this way, otherwise they wouldn't permit a problem of this magnitude to continue to exist in their vicinity.

The worst thing in the world that they could do would be to revolt against any existing regime. Revolution never carried anything with it—never carried anything with it but chaos and the return with more ardure of the same regime that the populace got rid of.

It's the unhappy history of every revolt that ever took place that I know of. They revolt against the King of France and they get Emperor Napoleon. They revolt against the duke and they get a Duke of Lemonade. They revolt against a civil service system called the government of Russia, and they get a civil service system called communism.

So revolution isn't the answer. The answer must lie somewhere in the field of evolution. But evolution cannot take place without better information and more data. And more importantly, this single thing: a hope that something can be done about it.

And if we could tell people today, we could demonstrate to individuals today that something actually could be done about it—I don't care what problem we're addressing, you say something could be done about it—if we could tell them this, and that we could do something about it, we would probably just be getting into the entering wedge of two-way communication on the subject of Dianetics and Scientology.

Well, I'll tell you the wrong thing to do with Dianetics and Scientology is not to communicate it and not to use it. We know that's wrong. What are the right ways to communicate it? Those we can work out but any way is better than no way.

Every once in a while a group of auditors may get very dissatisfied with me or the HASI. It has happened. I hear about these things very seldom, they usually fold up before I get a message about them. But, they get dissatisfied somewhere or another, they feel that somebody's being too punitive or is upsetting them in some direction or is doing something wrong in some direction. And I'm usually appalled by the fact that they don't know what we're doing. They don't know what I'm doing. They don't know what the organization is doing. They haven't bothered to find out. All they noticed was that somebody was communicating. And their dramatization was to stop it.

The only thing that is thoroughly against the law in this universe is to communicate. And the only thing you can do wrong is not to communicate. And between these two factors you get a very big game.

Another thing you can do wrong is to be there. Your parents ever slap you around? Ever say you got muddy shoes, you should comb your hair, why don't you brush your teeth, why don't you mind your manners, why don't you get to school in time? Your parents ever do this to you? Do you know what the crime was? You were there! That's the only crime.

And let's suppose that for a moment they didn't notice you were there and you started to communicate. You said, "Mama—Mama, can I have an apple?" Naaahh!—second crime, which is the first and only crime: to communicate. If you cried, don't. If you yelled, don't. Don't communicate.

Well, there's one thing that we will never learn. There are a lot of things we have learned, organizationally. But whatever the aims, whatever the goals of Dianetics, Scientology or the various organizations or people connected with them, there's one thing I know fairly sure that they will never completely learn: They will never learn to stop communicating. Because auditing with the modern processes we have demonstrates to an auditor, time after time, that the only thing wrong with his preclear is the fact that he stopped communicating.

And if we ever get taught any lesson by preclears, if we ever get taught any lesson by aberration, it will be that to stop communicating and to do nothing is wrong. We'll learn that. If we ever make one human being well, we'll learn that one.

Organizational policy would to a large degree dictate what we were communicating. And of course there are lots of ways we could communicate that are better than other ways. There are lots of ways we could communicate that are worse than other ways. A great many opinions could be expressed on how we should communicate and what we should communicate about. But let's not fall into the trap of punishing every time somebody communicates.

If they're communicating about Dianetics or Scientology, let them communicate. You don't have to answer, particularly, but let them communicate.

Organizationally, we conducted an experiment in August. We chopped off a lot of certificates. We put a lot of people out of communication. And I sat back to find out what was going to happen. Did anything get better?

Well, as a matter of fact, we couldn't put these people out of communication. They might not have written us for years but they really started writing us when we cut their certificates off.

One other direct result of this will be amusing to you: We stopped receiving complaints about auditors written by other auditors. Our mail used to be full of complaints from auditors about the horrible, how-bad-it-is-over-there other auditors. Nobody's complained about an auditor since.

A fellow whose name we won't mention, in Great Britain, wrote over a very scathing, damning report on an auditor who had been a member of the Advanced Clinical Unit. So we accommodated him, this auditor that had complained. Without further investigation we simply yanked the certificate of the person he was complaining about. And he almost went into a spin. He told people for weeks, "No, I didn't write anything about her." Practically in the next mail, we restored this person's certificate. But this particular how-bad-it-is-over-there has stopped. We don't receive our weekly condemnation, from that one auditor, of the auditors in Great Britain.

Now, this tells you, then, that there is better ways to communicate than some ways. But even entheta is better than no communication at all. We'd rather have an erroneous report than none. There are better ways to communicate.

But we found out that if we as an organization, started to rap the knuckles of every auditor who was trying to communicate sincerely on the subject of Scientology, that we might as well go out back and cut our own heads off with the axe. And we found that out. We're guided by that practice and principle.

But as far as auditors in the field are concerned, auditors scattered here and there across the world—and I do mean scattered across the world—I can sincerely tell you that I do not know of one of these auditors who isn't trying to do a good job of communication in his own framework and experience. They're all trying, one way or the other. Some of them think the only way they can communicate would be to shut off all that darn communication Ron does. There's very little of that, fortunately. Most everybody has learned that it's best to let that one run, and run another one, too. They can't stop that one anyhow. But these people are trying to do a job, they're trying to keep on communicating, they're trying to be there and they're trying to resolve some of the problems of man.

And our organizational policy today is to do what we can do to help these people in their job of communication, and to communicate all we can, ourselves. And if anybody finds these organizations hard to understand, it's just because he'd have a hard time understanding communication.

Thank you.

Thank you.

THE AIMS AND GOALS OF DIANETICS PAGE 2 UC-10 - 30.12.54

AND SCIENTOLOGY

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