Group Dianetics - Part II (501109)
Date: 9 November 1950
Speaker: L. Ron Hubbard
GROUP DIANETICS-PART II Okay. All right. Let’s roll on this now, I’ll show you that there are comparable laws in operation. But the laws are of a different quality between these two things of thought and the material universe—call it the finite universe—after we get into arguments with physicists. It’s my belief that there is, for instance—looking it over it seems that there is a specific quantity of space, time, energy and matter. That looks fairly reasonable. One can’t talk of expanding universe, for instance, or contracting universe unless he’s talking about some sort of a constant, in terms of this, but we’ll call it the material universe and that’ll get over that snarl because it’s not important.
Now, we find out that the material universe has itself an evident set of laws of reality. In other words it exists. The things on which thought has an agreed reality, that’s a little bit different. Every time we get into this problem we find out that we are dealing with two things.
The second we try to deal with just a single idea here—of the fact that the finite universe, the material universe’s reality is the same as a thought reality—we get into trouble. And it won’t work out that way; it’s different. There’re two things but they’re just comparable.
Now, there is a reality here. There is a reality and the thing can be sensed, measured or experienced. In other words, electricity can be measured by its magnetic field, matter can have its mass measured, and gravitically you can get its weight. And there are other measurements such as taking two masses and putting them together and measuring the energy. We can measure these conversions. We can also measure space, and mechanically we can measure time. As a matter of fact there are quite some very reliable methods of measuring time.
There is the matter of the diminution of radioactive material in the finite universe as a measure of time. We can plot that out. Now, these are things which can be sensed, measured or experienced on a very, very definite level.
Because we can do it and we can observe it, doesn’t have to postulate that we’re just dreaming up the fact that we are doing it and observing it. Actually this thing is. Now, whether or not its color is as we see it, and some of its relationships are as we see them— that’s a little bit beside the point—every time we come into this thing we know something is there. And here is what gives science and gave science its enormous advantage is that somebody in the year 1600 with very crude tools, sensed, measured or experienced something about this and somebody else could come along independently in the year 1950 and sense, measure or experience the same thing and they both got the same answer. See, this thing has a consistency, a constancy about it, which is very, very easily measured. So it’s real. As far as being real is concerned, our concept of it, it’s real.
Now, we start boiling it down and looking it over, we find out that energy does certain things within itself— becomes matter, we look at it occupying space and we look at it with time. And we see there that these interrelationships are constant, that they will continue. And they have evidently been that way for an awful long time and they will continue to be that way for an awful long time.
We could consider this then as a reality which is cohesed and adhesed. Now, time has a certain cohesion, a certain adhesion; space the same way, there’s cohesion and adhesion in space; there is in energy very definite cohesions and adhesions; and in matter, matter couldn’t exist at all unless it were for cohesion. And one of the fundamental big question marks right now the physicists are asking themselves is not what blows the atom apart—we know that to a large degree—but what the hell holds it together? I’m serious.
All right. So we have here an affinity but we’d better call it a cohesion. An affinity. This would be the affinity of the material universe for itself.
Now, you take the material universe along the line of perception. Matter, for instance, has a certain perceptic quality about it. You take a light, light perceives something is there and bends around it. That light will actually bend and—there’re certain laws in other words, there are certain parts of matter that go to certain parts of matter. There are radio waves which affect certain things. There are all kinds of interrelationships. In other words, this thing is in communication with itself. That’s very obvious. So we have here a triangle of affinity, communication and reality. This, if studied a little bit further by a physicist would demonstrate a lot of interrelationships; it’s very interesting, it’s a fascinating thing. But we’re not studying physics. We’re studying thought. So we come over here and we find out that there are approximating laws over here. We find out that if all of us agree on something, it becomes a reality. It’s just as simple as that.
If we all agree on something it’s a reality. For instance if the whole United States were to agree that President Truman were not president, there would just suddenly—the rumor would go out that President Truman had resigned and he was no longer president. And everybody agreed that they had heard this. And yes, we all know this. Truman could be sitting right there in the White House but he would just no longer be president, that’s all. As far as sanity is concerned, he would be insane if he kept on saying he was president.
It gives you some sort of an idea of the depth and distance this sort of thing involves. But we have in our culture certain ideas on which we have agreed. Anybody who violates those or suddenly disagrees with them is liable to find himself in very bad shape with regard to the rest of us.
Now, there are many of them. That is a reality. So there is a definite reality to a culture. It isn’t something which is just, you might say, postulated by somebody. The thing has reality. It has a sufficient reality so that an agreement or a reality here in thought can mold the dickens out of this stuff.
Now, anytime you get anything which can exert the force that an agreement on reality can exert on this material universe, you certainly have to admit of its entity—it has an existence.
This reality of thought, in other words, does have an existence. Man has not sufficiently realized to what degree this thing goes on once we agree that such and so ought to be done. Supposing this gentleman says that a mountain should be moved. And nobody else takes it up one way or the other, they don’t agree or disagree with him. But a few days later a couple of other people, they say, “You know, I think that mountain ought to be moved too.” And then, you know, you get five, six hundred people and they say, “You know, that mountain ought to be moved.” Well, that mountains getting up to a point where it’s about half moved already. And we get several thousand people agreeing that this mountain is going to be moved. The mountain gets moved. And that is, within the limits of the ability of the people to carry the thing out. And of course, part of the reality of being able to carry it out is the tools they have dreamed up in order to move that mountain, the ideas they have gotten. In other words, the idea as a mass moves in against that mountain and something happens to the mountain. Or, the mountain being too resistant, something comes back and smashes against the idea. In other words, we have a turbulent area here.
Now, we say that obviously somebody can—nobody can travel, everybody said, nobody can travel at the speed of sound, it’s impossible. They will get up to the sound wall and then there’ll just be a dull crash and that’ll be the end of that.
Everybody agreed on this and nobody took a good crack at it. But then one day somebody had an idea and he thought on the subject and he said, “I think I could get up above the wall of sound.” He had just noticed that the tip ends of tractor propellers had been traveling way above the speed of sound for a long time and that they had not fallen off. Made new observation there and he decided that man could go faster than sound, so man has. And that’s the way the universe of thought keeps moving in. More and more and more, better ideas, better liaison, and so on.
Now, if everybody was just interested in doing things to perpetuate this by conquest of this, we wouldn’t get into any trouble. There wouldn’t be any wars. That’s a perfectly valid operation as long as we continue to do that.
Even the disagreements from man to man as to how this ought to be conquered would not set up very great turbulences. And if you’ve noticed, you can look around and find examples whereby there have been disagreements and the turbulences were not very large. But the second that some portion of this confuses some portion of itself as a part of this, a misidentification’s been made and you get chaos and disaster. That, that I’ve just said there, is the fact that thought conceives a body of thought as part of the material universe. And the first body of thought makes the attack and this comes back as a disruptive factor in this. In other words, you can say it actually comes back to the central portion of this and creates a turbulence.
Now, we have our reality here, the reality of ideas and agreements. And things are very, very real—things are real in proportion to the amount of agreement which we have upon them, as far as thought is concerned. They are real in proportion to the amount of agreement. There is a thought reality.
As far as affinity is concerned, here in thought, it is the cohesiveness of thought. When affinity is broken down, the thought itself is thrown into a turbulence. It’s disharmonic, in other words. But thought in turbulence against thought is not destructive until thought becomes turbulent about thought via the material universe.
In other words, as long as somebody says to me, “You know, I don’t like you very much.” And I say, “Well I really don’t like you very much either”—as long as we say that, why, there’s nothing much going to happen unless there has been a dislike route through here, the material universe. Well now, if the two of us had an engram which contained that, what’s the engram? It’s thought too forcibly impinged on the material universe. So this disagreement here would excite a turbulence which already existed and was held in place here in the material universe. The second that occurs you get trouble. But without the material universe as part of the equation at all, affinity would not even be broken.
If somebody said, “I don’t like you,” and you say, “I don’t like you,” that isn’t a real break of affinity. That doesn’t mean you’re going to cut his throat or anything like that. If you can actually have a disagreement here, you don’t have as high an intensity of affinity but there’s nothing much going to happen. But if this fellow says, “I don’t like you,” bang hits you in the jaw— which is force impinged upon that portion of you which is also native to the material universe—we start to get into trouble because a real turbulence has been set up.
Now, that should be fairly obvious what happens in the field of affinity. Affinity is practically unbreakable in thought until the material universe is entered in as the route by which the affinity is broken.
It works the same way with reality. You and I can disagree for a long time on the subject of some reality or other—we’ve some idea— but unless that has had a portion of the material universe in there as part of the broken disagreement, we won’t get into any trouble about it. The only thing we have ideas about, and the only thing we have realities about, actually, are concerned with this conquest of the material universe.
There’s a higher echelon up here someplace, I don’t know where it is, above this level of thought we’re operating in.
Now, as far as communication’s concerned, you’ve got to consider communication on a much broader basis than talk. That’s not all there is to communication. One’s ability—if one has thoughts—one’s ability to perceive the material universe via his various channels of perception— sight, sound, smell—that’s communication. And this person can stay in communication with the material universe, and it so happens that man has become sufficiently turbulent evidently so that he actually perceives man via the material universe. In other words, thought is not perceiving or communicating with thought, as thought, nearly as much as it evidently might. But it is a communicating—thought entity one communicates with thought entity two by perceiving this material universe aspect of thought entity two. In other words, we’ve entered in a material universe in here and we’re getting a route of perception.
This postulates such things as one studies in parapsychology. This postulates that they exist. One looks over some of the figures that have been arrived at in that field and he finds out, yes, there’s evidently and obviously something here. How well that can pick up I don’t know.
It’s very interesting, the other day Don Rogers postulated the idea that one could have a shut-off on telepathy. Well, one would not have a shut-off on telepathy so much as the necessity of entity one to communicate with entity two is being bypassed through the material universe over here so that entity one looks at the material universe plus entity two.
Because there’s turbulence in here, lots of it. There’s turbulence in each one of them as individuals. Well now, just how they communicate and so forth, once that turbulence has been removed, that’s something else. They can evidently perceive more. And we look out through man and we find out that there is more being perceived. It doesn’t seem to be part and parcel of electromagnetic waves or anything like that; there’s evidently a communication, a definite communication here. You get into the business of how does one person audit another person and we begin to see that there’s a lock-up over here in the thought universe.
Now, we have these two triangles; they are quite similar. Let’s look a little bit further into this problem now and find out what a group is. Here is a portion of thought which has conquered a certain portion of the material universe. In an orderly fashion we call that life. In other words, chemicals, minerals and so forth have been picked up by thought and converted.
Thought has the characteristic and quality of being able to convert, own and mobilize or motivate matter, through space, through time, and it converts energy. Thought, in other words, is a strange thing; it can pick up a few chemicals and so on and they become mobile.
Thought has done this (this is life, now) and we take a number of portions of thought—let’s take this life aspect—and are operative in the conquest of the material universe. And we find out that thought is the driving force there, and that when the material universe kicks back too hard and overcomes and drives out some portion of that thought, life is lowered, the ability to conquer is lowered. When the material universe kicks all the way back, such as a slate falling on a man’s head, thought is driven all the way out of the material portion of the entity. That’s death.
All right. Now we have to ask, and it’s a very fair question, does death mean that the individual life portion which was encased in or controlling the body, does it mean that that life force just ceases to exist? Well, if we’ve postulated that there is no such thing as thought and all is matter and material universe anyway, yeah, it’ll cease to exist.
However the evidence is not on the side of it ceasing to exist. It’s very interesting that the evidence is not in favor of, call it whatever you may, of spiritual mortality. The evidence appears to be in favor of, not an immortality—that would be an outrageous assumption of affinity—but it seems to be that thought does not necessarily cease to exist because the material case ceases to exist. And the more we look at this problem, we can just take religion and so on and set them all aside as unproven data and go look for more data. And the funny part of it is that after we’ve set religion aside and mysticism aside and thrown all the postulates away over here, we start looking for data over here and we begin to find out that there’s supportive evidence, evidence which religion had never dug up.
Now, some of the supportive evidences are fascinating. I won’t go into them at this particular time because they’re not good, solid, scientific material universe facts that can be sensed, measured or experienced. But like the two-dimensional worm that goes out and bumps into the pole—see, there can’t be a pole there because it would have to be three dimensions, if there were a pole, and the two-dimensional worm has an awful time every time he bumps into a pole—because there’s no pole there obviously: it says right there on his book.
We’re in this state the second that we start to look at this, and we find out that it is supportive for the group entity in another way. The group seems to have a life and body of its own. The group is not the collective individuality of the people which compose it. That would seem, offhand, would be the case. But when one can take a series of North Koreans—I listened to a general out in Hollywood and he said, “You know,” he said, “the boys got tired of shooting them when they were trying to surrender. And we finally took some and we put them in a prison camp and we trained them up, and they’re fighting on our side now and they’re doing a very good job.” So they’ve made a new group. Somebody rewelded a series of people together that were running on one series of group ideas and took them around, took these same individuals and they set them up, and now we have a new group. And they’re doing a similar thing, but doing exactly the reverse and they’re doing it very successfully.
We also look over the field of communism and atheism and—not that these things are comparable—I was thinking about the fact that I had swamped up, I had given a communist a fine release once. And the second that he got up to a point where he no longer had these terrible antipathies about money, he forgot about being a communist. And he was a human being and his general level of thought evidently was not wrapped around this ideology, but you could still have superimposed on him the idea that he was an aberrated communist. Now, you could make an unaberrated communist out of him, or you could make a democrat, or you could make a most anything.
It depended on the group with which he was fitting himself. And it depended upon—whether he accepted that group or not—on how closely it matched the central mission of thought, as to how much of the material universe that group was going to take over. In other words, how much constructive, creative conquest of the material universe was going to be done by that group. And if you could give him and convince him that we were going to do a better job of conquering the material universe, and if we are not worrying now about conquering other bodies of thought, you’d find that fellow in there pitching.
As long as we get down toward the center of the problem of conquering the material universe, you’ll find out almost anybody taken out of almost any group will join up with you. Because you’re getting down to the center of his motivation. This postulates something very interesting. This means that if you drop out of the equation the thought of Russia, the ideas of Russia, the fact that its mission is to conquer groups of people—but is to conquer the material universe and that that is its primary mission and that’s what it’s really doing, a lot of your turbulence would go by the boards as far as Russia’s concerned. And we would start agreeing with Russia.
If the United States at the same time, instead of considering these vast nebulous menaces that have assailed it (and which, by the way, many of them are quite real), started in trying to find out how man could conquer best the material universe and started concentrating on that, you’d see most of its problems going by the boards.
In other words, if any entity of a group in the world today set out on a sufficiently sentient, well-regulated and advertised—communication has to enter it—program of conquering the material universe, for mankind, not just for itself, people would leave it alone. There is safety.
If we look around at the various groups, we find out that there are all manner of aberrations which one fights against. But if one can demonstrate that he comes about as close to central mission as you can get, the antagonism folds up because one has approached the highest level of affinity he can approach. So we don’t really have to enter any of this field on the basis of knocking out group engrams. We would find that is fairly simple, actually. But the first step would be to take a good solid run at the material universe for the benefit of mankind—the conquest of space, time, matter, energy, for the use of thought as a whole—you would hold in abeyance most of the material which is inclined to flood in on you at the present time in the United States.
It requires, however, that your efforts be communicated and that you be free from an unreality about it. It must be quite real and you must get an agreement on the fact that it is an effort to do just that.
Now, this actually would obviate—Hitler has done this, Napoleon has done this, Alexander the Great, any of these people—they would have gotten a little bit better and gone a little bit further in the world than they did. For instance, there was nothing left of Alexander’s empire within two years after he was dead.
Napoleon succeeded in shortening the average Frenchman one inch. Great accomplishment. Now, that’s right. See, his fixation on the use of tall men as Grenadiers and in the Guards, and his fixation on getting Guards and Grenadiers killed off was such that he reduced the height of the French nation one inch.
Now, that’s a great accomplishment. Only I don’t think it’s a very great accomplishment. Here’s all this leadership, this administrative ability, all this say-so and savvy, all going to waste, boom, because of a complete paucity of understanding of what the group was actually trying to do.
Now, education along in this line is an interesting thing. Education carries with it, would have to carry with it, the fact that a man is a man. That the central mission and goal of men is not dissimilar to the world around. It would just have to be identified. It is a very strange thing that it has never been identified.
Working on it here during the last month, and I have been working with an incredulous eye on this problem. Yes, it’s been sensed, it’s been tossed, it’s been herded around, it’s been fooled with and so forth, but isolated and nailed down for what it is, no. And guys go off and have wild tangents and airs about this thing, and nations fight nations, and this group says, “Well, the way for us to get rich is to go over and raid them doggone Bavarians. Now, that’s the way for us to get rich.” And then they find themselves completely pauperized as far as manpower is concerned because beyond the Bavarians there were the Pomeranians and the Pomeranians were a savage race that wanted to kill Bavarians all the time and the Bavarians were holding up the Pomeranians from slaughtering the guys who killed the Bavarians. And so the reason why Russia couldn’t jump at the United States was because you had a German nation there that was opposed to Russia so we knock out the German nation, and now we’ve got to knock out Russia only there isn’t a German nation in there to help us knock out Russia. Only do we have to knock out Russia in the first place? And no, this isn’t the echelon of thought with which we should be dealing. Let’s just see if we can’t lick the world. And to hell with licking men.
Now, let’s go a little further on this and look over processing, the processing of a group. One has to discover first about a group—and you might say codify—what its primary goal was. Now, the second that he codifies this and looks it over he will then be able to start scouting up engrams. This is a parallel to human beings. One didn’t quite know what was wrong with human beings until he looked it over from the standpoint of human beings are trying to survive. Therefore he started to look for things that had tried to kill the humans. So, this is a very crude way to look at it actually; very blunt, very basic. All of a sudden we looked a little bit further and we found engrams. Now, we found out we could pick up engrams and then by empirical testing we found out that people started to get sane. There must have been some truth in the matter, been a reality there.
All right. Let’s look along the line of groups and we find out that groups are basically trying to survive. But we have to redefine this a little bit. They’re basically trying to survive despite the reaction and interaction of the material universe.
Hah! That right there changes the whole picture of the examination of history, of politics, and all the way down the line. The group is trying to survive against the interaction opposition of this material universe. Now, the second that we see this for what it is, we see the group is not trying to survive against the interaction and reaction of other groups.
They lead very close and very swiftly astray on this one. They look at another group and they are so poorly informed as to the actual identity of man as man that they see this other group as zetas or pinkas2 or something, but not men and not part of the universe of thought. You see, they go completely astray on this.
Now, life, you see, and bodies of life and so forth are more valuable to bodies of life than uncultivated matter. For instance, we couldn’t eat very well unless thought had already been in there combining with the material universe to create life forms. But you notice that every time that we get in and slug and knock apart some species of life form, there is usually a bad result. This is what we call the imbalance of nature. In Montgomery County they decide that they’re tired—that’s in Maryland—of losing their chickens to hawks. So they put out a bounty in the state legislature there that is going to award people fifty cents to a dollar for every hawk they kill. So the farmers go out and they bring in wagonloads of hawks. And now Montgomery County to this day—that was 20 years ago— Montgomery County is so overridden with rodents that they can’t raise corn.
It was all right to kill a few hawks, and it was all right to do these things within limits, there is no great penalty imposed, but the second you really start over the border on this stuff, boom! Trouble, lots of it.
Well, now, if you can get a whole community into serious trouble by killing hawks, think how serious it is and what serious trouble will result to a community that goes in for killing men. The European nations have been holding down the continent of Europe, That’s a big piece of material universe as far as this world is concerned, and it’s doing a pretty good job of it and they’ve given us a lot of things which we have used, needed in the past—as a matter of fact, our own birthplace.
Take Asia, The amount of culture which we’ve gotten from Asia is enormous. We look back and we start adding up these things, silk and this and that and so forth, and we look through this society, it’s just shot through with pieces of the material universe which have been conquered by Asia and given to us.
We look over in Asia right now and we find pieces of the material universe called guns have been given to Asia too. They’re having a good time over there right now.
Now, here’s our problem. We look over the goal of the group. Now, we know what the lowest-echelon goal is, the lowest common denominator goal, which is just this fact that thought is attempting to survive by a conquest of the material universe. Thought’s trying to survive in that way. And by the way, it’s interesting to note that there may be other methods by which thought survives. That thought may survive otherwise than in a conquest of the material universe. However, as being people who are ourselves composed partially of captured pieces of this material universe, we are of course very interested in going on capturing this thing and keeping it going; that’s the goal.
All right. Let’s look that over and see how a group gets a modified goal with relationship to this. The second we have spotted the exact goal of a group, we have spotted its center line of action. Now, anything that impinged and created pain to the group, not by killing its individual members, but just pain or turbulence along this center line of action, was an engram. And any mention of it and repetition of it was a lock. This would be pretty easy to spot. It’s your general rule.
Now, you look it over and let’s find out the United States, and let’s find out the central goal line of the United States. Actually we come closer perhaps than many another, and maybe we don’t, in an effort to conquer the world of the material universe for man.
We are certainly developing lots of tools and things at a tremendous rate that will accomplish this. The trouble is we’ve used too many of these tools against other men right now.
Now, wherever this has been interrupted, we have an engram. In other words, the Indians gave us a lot of engrams. Yeah, you probably aren’t aware of the fact that it was necessary for the white man to develop weapons with which to cope with the Indians; that when the white man first came to this country he didn’t have in his possession weapons as good as the Indians.
As a matter of fact, there’s a body of Norsemen that landed down here south of us and they spent a winter—they had to—and they were really cut to pieces by Indians because all they had was axes and you couldn’t do much to an Indian with an axe who had a stone tomahawk and a missile weapon, a very, very fine missile weapon—a bow and arrow—and who had two shields and who had a heck of a lot of stuff.
They were a very good armament and they were well skilled, their tactics were excellent and the white man couldn’t stand up against them. That was back around the twelfth century, something like that. We come on forward and we find out that the original boys with their blunderbusses and so forth, clear up around the sixteenth century, had just about at that moment been able to cope somewhat with the Indians, but not very well. These things were awfully hard, the arquebus and the musketoon and so on, they were awfully hard to load and they were awfully slow and after you fired one once and you tried to load it again, you were liable to get a flock of arrows. So we had a tough time. So somebody came along eventually and they invented the rifle. Well, this—a lot of accuracy and we still didn’t make any enormous inroad against the Indian. He was still terrific as far as we were concerned. We had to come up and a fellow by the name of Colt finally invented a revolving cylinder and we conquered the Indian.
We were sure going at it the wrong way. The first thing that newcomers would do when they came onto the continent was immediately assume that they were facing material universe—not thought plus material universe—they wouldn’t try to go into any communication with these people, they would form no affinity, and they would go in and they would try to grab or do something or other and immediately there would be a turbulence.
Well, the number of engrams that we laid down along the Indian line were excessive, but the American Indian finally went psychotic—you look over 1880, something like that. You’re starting to read about ghost dances and messiahs are appearing from anywhere and everywhere and there’s a big tide of thought through the Indian nations that all they had to do was kill all their dogs and the buffalo would come back. They went crazy by this time.
They had received so many engrams, the turbulence was such that they actually fell back, back, back, back. They had received enough engrams at first from the white man so they wouldn’t pick up the white man’s weapons and tools. And they wouldn’t adopt enough of his culture because it was no good, it was something that had hurt them. And so they backed up clear across the continent and they finally got out in the plains and by that time the cavalry had carbines—multishot carbines and we pretty well finished them off. That was the end of the Indians.
The last battle was I think in 1898. It took us a long time though, didn’t it. We could have had the whole continent and the relatively small Indian population as well if there had been affinity and communication there, but there wasn’t. Because the white man had the idea—this is transmitted to you as a datum, to give you some sort of an idea of what sort of thing happens: a letter from a lieutenant commanding a fort to the governor of Massachusetts was being answered by the governor of Massachusetts and he said, “My dear lieutenant, I think your latest idea of hunting them down with dogs is very splendid and hope you will expedite.” Now, that’s an interesting way to treat a race, isn’t it? Any affinity or communication there? None. And we had to wipe them out clear on down the line. It’s an interesting thing to follow that track of one race on this continent, to see how, if receipt of engrams inhibited it from reacting—group engrams, these were—prohibited it from incorporating another group’s ideas in its own group, it failed to do it and it failed. It failed utterly. This series of engrams eventually overwhelmed it.
Now, there are certain economic practices. There are certain sociological principles which exist in the world today which are very good and very workable and very, very fine—that is selected out of the drawer of ideas, these sociological and economic principles are excellent. But we can’t use them in the United States because we have engrams as a group against the people who invented them. There are certain German systems, by the way, a few of them—a lot of them are very bad, but some of these are very good. And certain Russian evolutions of sociological ideas which are pretty good, but we can’t take those up.
We find out that they’re coming in sub rosa anyhow, because we need them. But if one turns around and identifies them for what they were, you would find the whole group of the United States just throwing them by the boards. They would get rid of them instantly. And that is very far from sentient because the group as a thought unit taking over the material universe needs every single advanced idea that it can get in order to make itself work and in order to make its conquests work. So how do you run out these ideas? How do you run out these engrams? Well, man has kept the track wide open on how do you run out these engrams. For some peculiar reason he has been very, very fixated on the idea of writing history. He has often said and you will often read in historians’ works that there is some use for history. And they have advanced some of the most remarkable reasons as to why you needed history. They’ve tried to invent a science of history, they’ve tried to do this and that, so forth. But a very full record is kept by any race, even the Indian tried to keep a record with painting ideographs on the sides of his wigwams and so on. And he kept records of all of his historical treaties and all that sort of thing by the way he wove his wampum and so on.
Now, down here in Washington they have a big bureau of archives, it’s an awful lot of history. They teach it in school and they teach it everyplace.
Well, thank God for the history—you can actually go back along that historical line and you can look up and find out where an engram was received. Now, actually I’m afraid it’s awfully easy to run a group engram. It doesn’t have to be attacked, it just has to be brought into light. Because in the group itself it is seldom accompanied by material evidence, except as secondary consideration. In other words, by running this you’re not going to repair any cells directly. But by knocking it out you’re going to make it possible to repair whatever was done.
In other words, the repair’s important. In other words, you can go back along the track of history of anything, knowing well what its delineated course was, what its original goal was, sort that out against the history of what happened to it and all you’d have to do would be to widely communicate the whole process to the group. The group could look it over at that time and reevaluate.
You would find many individuals would become very hot about the situation, there’d be a lot of arguments, that the thing would boil up quite wildly and as long as communication line was kept open and it could be permitted to boil and whoever in the group continued to throw at the group this problem, let that communication line stay open; you would find the engram disappears.
This is fairly obvious. In other words, it’d just heat itself up and go on out. For instance, there’s a book by the name of Oliver Wiswell, by Kenneth Roberts, did a most signal piece of good in the United States. It ran an engram.
Why, you remember all of the controversy and the hammer and tongs about the thing? Well, I’ll tell you how I feel about Oliver Wiswell now and how I felt about it then. I just give you an idea. I think if you’d check around you’d find this rather general.
When Oliver Wiswell first came up, if anybody would stand up for them goddamn Tories he ought to be lynched himself. Why? Because I’d been taught in school that those Tories were pretty bad people and that so on and that was terrible. And Oliver Wiswell came out and was scattered around and people argued about it one way and they argued about it another way And a lot of statements were made this way and that. And you read the statements this way and that. And you voiced your own opinions this way and that and the first thing you know you lost interest in the damn thing. “To hell with the Tories.” You finally found that there was another side to the picture, so that we had an understanding in there, didn’t we? And group engrams depend then—the running of them—depends upon establishing the fact that there was another side to the picture; in other words, that there’s more data.
It is only the existence of this hidden data, which is to say, the other mans viewpoint—the existence of that hidden data, suppressed, that creates any kind of an engram at all. In other words, the thing isn’t known, everyone keeps running along on this data and you get an engram.
There’s an affinity with those other people. There was an affinity with them. The second that one begins to communicate about them, or even through the length of history with them, an affinity starts to build up. Well, you can’t have an affinity with something that was an enemy without all of a sudden having the whole force of thought straighten out and the affinity really establish itself. How do you feel about Tories in the United States now, you see?
We look over then the track of a Foundation, we try to find out what the Foundation is trying to do. We find the Foundation is operating here, right there [tapping on blackboard]. For the first time we have an organization which is dealing with the raw material!
It makes some very interesting group engrams, very interesting. Because here we pick it up on a raw material level and throw it back against the society and if we suddenly confuse the society toward which we’re driving Dianetics with the material universe, and consider them as our opponents in some degree, it’ll fail. And Dianetics has come a slight cropper wherever this has occurred.
Now, within the Foundations themselves there have been certain incidents. Not very good ones, some of them. Here was money, evidently; only there wasn’t. It was a matter of taking every resource and using every resource for its best possible benefit to further Dianetics. But no, people standing off, not recognizing this, out of another group, would look at it and say, “Ah, money!” So they would each try to do something to money, you see? There’d be a little crush there and all of a sudden the group, the Foundation, would go back against that, boom! And here would be a turbulence area. Those areas are still spinning. So it’s necessary to go back and review a history of the Foundation, only one just writes a history of the Foundation with a close, solid evaluation as to exactly what the Foundations are trying to do. He has to offer as much supportive evidence for the other side as for the Foundation.
As long as the thing is completely partisan for the Foundation only, the turbulence is missing. You see, the other part of the turbulence is missing, therefore there’s no understanding here, therefore there’s no communication here because there was no agreement here. You have to take the other side of the picture too.
The second that that is written out along that line, it’s going to make an awful lot of people mad. They’re going to look this thing over and they say, “Well, they didn’t have a right to do that. Certain people weren’t—” and so forth and yakety-yak, growl, growl, growl. Boy oh boy, oh rarr, oh rarr. Cleared atmosphere, cleared group. That’s the way you run a group engram.
Now, our main problem at this time, what really concerns us—not the Foundation, I’m just telling you this—but what concerns us is an international situation whereby you have a consistent attack on group to group, and hidden data.
We talk about the Iron Curtain, the amount that goes on behind that, and then we introduce these sly insidious talks about fourteen million in slave camps; Russia doing everything wrong, 1 percent of the Russian populace controlling 99 percent of the Russian populace, the rights of man completely violated, an ideology which is so insidious that no man dare look it in the face. He’d turn to stone, obviously.
A funny damn thing that the Russian nation has so much appeal that all it does is put a probe into China and the group that is China goes communistic, boom! That must be a very bad workable idea. Oh, yeah? It must be a pretty good idea. The second we start to look at it just to that degree, we begin to suspect that we don’t have all the data on the subject.
Well, we certainly better have all the data on the subject. If we don’t get all the data on the subject our rancor will continue to rise above this area of turbulence until we will consider, eventually, that Russia’s not one of us, as men. And how does a nation go about creating a war with another nation? The first step is to drop down a line of noncommunication. The next step is to try to convince the people of these nations that the other nation is composed of an alien thing, not people. The next step is to show that there are people coming under the heel of these things that are not people. That there are human beings to whom this is being done, therefore it is very dangerous. They set up a remote example. And then they say, “What would happen to you as a nation if you came under the heel of these things which are not people?” And by that time they’ve done it. And the group at that time is so far out of communication, and so convinced about this whole thing, that it will actually create the insanity and commit the insanity of war.
You want to look at the history of World War I, I’m afraid that the lesson of World War I didn’t come out soon enough; the soldiers are always learning this horrible thing, that they are fighting men. That is a hell of a thing. They do learn this, in almost every war.
If you want to examine the early letters of the war, you will find out that all the soldiers are fighting devils that are not men, and toward the end of the war you will find a bemused, amazed and somewhat ashamed attitude; they found out they were fighting men. And the second they found that out, their spirits and activity about the end of the thing started to cave in. Their enthusiasm for this indoor sport started to cave in the second they found out they were fighting men. You can follow the courses of wars all the way along the line and you find out this keeps taking place.
Just like in World War I, everybody found out that this Gott that everybody was worshiping was the same Gott, It destroyed, practically, as far as its enormous force in the world was concerned, the Christian religion in Europe.
It really crushed it, because people had told a lie. These things were devils and all of a sudden we find out that the members of the French nation worshiping the Christian Church were fighting the German nation which was worshiping the Christian Church, And the Germans told their troops that God was on their side, and the French told their troops that God was on their side. And after the soldiers got all through, as members of the group, the group idea suddenly shifted that somebody must have fed them a bunch of hogwash.
You’d be amazed at the amount of turbulence there was right after World War I on this very subject. And I don’t think Christianity has ever assumed the stature in Europe that it had before the war, since, because there was a big lie introduced into it. In other words, there was an unreality and it broke the affinity level with a group.
Now, that might— I’m not saying Christianity is through in Europe, it’s a long way from through—but no more can men talk about the divine right of kings. The knocking apart of kings and divine rights and so forth came as a consequence of some of this action.
Every time this course of action starts you’ll find at the other end of it a war. And that has started right now. Now, our problem is how do we break this concatenation of events? It’s very easy to break: one starts to open up a communication line. Communication lines exist right now, they exist through the United Nations. He opens them up nice and wide. Takes the US mind, the US official mind, off of propagandizing the American way of life to Europe, and tries to take the Russian mind off propagandizing the communist way of life, because they’re both selling something that doesn’t exist. That’s the trouble with propaganda.
Now, the second that you can start to accomplish this and start to sell the Russian group and people and their actual culture, activities and goals, and start to sell the US actual culture, activities and goals across each other, the engram and the series of engrams will start to be run on this subject, just with that action.
It will at least make it possible then to run the earlier engrams. There aren’t very many of them. It is at this moment with the greatest of effort, an enormously great effort that the United States and Russia, as governments, are able to whip up mutual antagonism, because there just aren’t enough engrams. And they’re doing a pretty good job of it. They are laying on locks onto some very slight engrams. You lay enough heavy locks onto enough light engrams, you’re going to get action sooner or later. But if you were looking this over casually and didn’t know the violence of these efforts that are being made, you’d go along all right. I mean, you could see that two groups could live in the world together. So to establish communication, you’ll automatically establish affinity. There’re several ways to do it. You start by getting some agreement with Russia on certain lines.
You can enter the problem from any one of the three and get these communication lines open and then publicize these small engrams, clear them up, get them talked over controversially and the thing will wipe apart. There won’t be a war. There can’t be a war under those circumstances. Interesting.
Russia, however, is imbedded into an enormously violent turbulence occasioned by a long and arduous rule. That turbulence entered into Russia oddly enough with Genghis Khan. You have to know a great deal about Genghis Khan and the machinations of the Tartars and the hordes that came through there, know how they treated people and so forth, to understand how much violence there is underlying these various political efforts and so forth, the confusions which have come in in Russia since that time. But you can run that one too. That’s got to be run in Russia. It has no effect upon us except that it makes Russia just a little less sane as a group. It makes her easier to shift.
All right. I’ve talked to you this morning about things that were in a large measure highly theoretical, I’ve tried to show you that they have an actual practical application in the world. These things all require refinements, any one of its tenets can be arguable, as far as you’re concerned. I mean, it’s not that I consider these tenets shaky—which I don’t. But I mean you are perfectly at liberty to argue with these tenets. That would be the difference between a cleared society and one which was staggering along under its engrams. You would not have the right to protest.
There are various things which happen in a group’s existence, I repeat, which become matter. The only way they can become matter is by the group itself suppressing their discussion. And let us look, then, for an engram in this group in the United States just on the grounds of suppression. What is the most suppressed thing in the United States? Happens to be sex. That’s very badly suppressed. And as you start processing people and looking over their lives, it’s an astonishing thing to find out that that is the major aberration which you’ll find along the line as you look along the person’s life. It’s the most suppressed thing. So something—one of the dynamics has gone out of general communication. Having gone out of general communication, a great deal of trouble can ensue. That is what happens in groups. There’s a group engram on the subject. People are more and more trying to run that engram. But they’re not going back to the source. All they’re going is back to—is they’re running the locks. They’re running late locks on the thing, and there’s got to be a lot of running on late locks. What they’d better do is somebody had better go back and write up the source of this aberration, how this suppression got into society.
The second that you start and throw into the group the real data of how the suppression got into the society, demonstrate how it came there, and then just let everybody roar and scream about it for a while, you would have the entire engram run out of the entire group of the United States in a matter of months. And if somebody doesn’t get on the ball and do it pretty soon, I will have to. But I’m awfully busy.